The mandalorian [Spoilers]

[Imaculata]

Is there some reason why a trooper can't walk around within their compound with his helmet off? Mayfield clearly doesn't think so, and he's the ex-Imperial. And he knew there was no point in him putting his helmet back on, because he'd have to take it straight off again once he got to the terminal.

Do we ever see Stormtroopers take off their helmets? Why couldn't Mayfield carry his helmet with him, or go back to the truck to get it? It was contrived.

If you think that has yet to be established, then you really haven't paid any attention at all.

It has been established that he cares a little. Not that he cares for it that much. That message was pretty much a declaration of war, and it felt out of the blue.

And even if the main characters don't want to get involved with local politics, if you show the locals being oppressed, then at the very minimum one of the characters should consider taking the imperial base out, even if in the end they decide not to. That is how you give your characters depth. You set up complications and ethical dilemmas. It is kind of embarassing when they leave plot points scattered around the main narrative like debris on the moon

 

[Zardnaar]

Do we ever see Stormtroopers take off their helmets? Why couldn't Mayfield carry his helmet with him, or go back to the truck to get it? It was contrived.



It has been established that he cares a little. Not that he cares for it that much. That message was pretty much a declaration of war, and it felt out of the blue.

They've been playing up Grogu playing with the control stick ball for a while and the Ahsoka episode established some if it as well.

And they're both foundlings.

 

[Imaculata]

They've been playing up Grogu playing with the control stick ball for a while and the Ahsoka episode established some if it as well.

And they're both foundlings.

I agree that there is a connection between the two. However, is it enough motivation to have this declaration of war make sense? To me, it does not feel like Mando's love for the child has been established enough for this to work. Most of the season, Mando is rescuing the child, or stopping him from putting things in his mouth. We have not had a powerful bonding moment. I do not feel these stakes, and I also don't feel that Moff Gideon is a villain that is any credible threat. They could have used this episode to establish that threat. Instead we got a meaningless side quest, and are now barreling into the season finale with low stakes and a villain that has barely been set up.

So far our villain has blown up Mando's ship, and stolen the child with his elite robo-army. But he hasn't killed any characters, and we have barely learned anything about who he is. We rarely see him do anything particularly cruel, evil or clever. And I feel it is a bit too late to do that now.

 

[Zardnaar]

I agree that there is a connection between the two. However, is it enough motivation to have this declaration of war make sense? To me, it does not feel like Mando's love for for the child has been established enough for this to work. Most of the season, Mando is rescuing the child, or stopping him from putting things in his mouth. We have not had a powerful bonding moment. I do not feel these stakes, and I also don't feel that Moff Gideon is a villain that is any credible threat. They could have used this episode to establish that threat. Instead we got a meaningless side quest, and are now barreling into the season finale with low stakes and a villain that has barely been set up.

So far our villain has blown up Mando's ship, and stolen the child with his elite robo-army. But he hasn't killed any characters, and we have barely learned anything about who he is. We rarely see him do anything particularly cruel, evil or clever. And I feel it is a bit too late to do that now.

They've built Gideon up to be a mastermind type villain.

They might pull an Empire Strikes back in the finals. Darktroopers kill a jeibe, Mando gets smacked down, etc.

 

[Deset Gled]

I just want to throw out there that The Mandalorian is basically as good as it's going to get for Star Wars. As a long time fan, we've been through a lot. The original trilogy was great. The prequels... weren't. Almost all the books and other shows are wiped from the EU, with only bits and pieces surviving in a weird yet commercially viable mish mash. The Disney sequels and prequels are a bit of a mixed bag; most fans I know like at least one or two, but I haven't found anyone that thinks they are all good.

I'm not going to say that you have to like The Mandalorian to be a Star Wars fan, but I think most people will admit it's the most consistently good SW media we've gotten in years, maybe decades. It's not perfect, but it's pretty solid. And it appears to be the model that Disney is going to use for future projects. If you don't like it, that's your preference; but I doubt the next few years are likely to put out much content that you're going to love.

 

[Marandahir]

I just want to throw out there that The Mandalorian is basically as good as it's going to get for Star Wars. As a long time fan, we've been through a lot. The original trilogy was great. The prequels... weren't. Almost all the books and other shows are wiped from the EU, with only bits and pieces surviving in a weird yet commercially viable mish mash. The Disney sequels and prequels are a bit of a mixed bag; most fans I know like at least one or two, but I haven't found anyone that thinks they are all good.

I'm not going to say that you have to like The Mandalorian to be a Star Wars fan, but I think most people will admit it's the most consistently good SW media we've gotten in years, maybe decades. It's not perfect, but it's pretty solid. And it appears to be the model that Disney is going to use for future projects. If you don't like it, that's your preference; but I doubt the next few years are likely to put out much content that you're going to love.

To be fair, the next few years are going to put out at least 11 Star Wars film and streaming projects, so if you're not a Mando fan you might find something else fun that you do like, such as Visions, The Bad Batch, A Droid's Tale, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Acolyte, or Rogue Squadron.

To me, there's huge gulfs in feelings between an anthology of animated Star Wars shorts by anime studios, a long-form animated show about Clones without a purpose in the aftermath of the Clone Wars, a live action series about Artoo and Threepio and someone new having droid hijinks, a live-action miniseries about classic original trilogy characters played by prequel trilogy actors, a long-form live-action mystery thriller set hundreds of years before the prequels with a focus on the antecedents of the movie villains, and a live-action film about dogfighter starship pilots that could be set anywhere from the middle of the original film trilogy to sometime between the originals and the sequels to even during or after the sequel trilogy.

For folks interested in the potential of a Rogue Squadron film or the Visions shorts, check out this fan-made short film, TIE FIGHTER.

Or watch any Mobile Suit GUNDAM anime, really.

There's something for everybody coming up at Lucasfilm. And the great thing is that the only REQUIREMENT is that you watch the 9 episodes. Everything else is plug and play. They enhance one another and may resonate with each other, but as we've seen with Ahsoka's 3 series' appearances thus far (+ her voice in IX), you don't need to see the others to understand the depth of what happened before... It's like hearing from Obi-Wan about fighting in the Clone Wars with Anakin. He just tells Luke what Luke needs to hear right then, not everything that happened 32-19 years earlier. Rebels refers back to the end of The Clone Wars to tell how Rex and Ahsoka left each other, but it doesn't require you to have watched them previously.

Not sure how the Ahsoka-Rangers of the New Republic-Mandalorian crossovers will work though. Thus far, Ahsoka's appearance on Mando did not require knowing her past. But it's unclear if they're going to assume you've seen Mando as well when they get to these two new series.

 

[Imaculata]

They've built Gideon up to be a mastermind type villain.

They might pull an Empire Strikes back in the finals. Darktroopers kill a jeibe, Mando gets smacked down, etc.

I hope they do. It wouldn't undo the faults in the writing of the rest of the season, but it would close the season with real stakes and an unexpected ending. I want to see Moff Gideon lure Mando into a clever trap and make him lose almost everything. If he is a master mind, then I want to see him do something fiendishly clever.

 

[Zardnaar]

I hope they do. It wouldn't undo the faults in the writing of the rest of the season, but it would close the season with real stakes and an unexpected ending. I want to see Moff Gideon lure Mando into a clever trap and make him lose almost everything. If he is a master mind, then I want to see him do something fiendishly clever.

My theory is Star wars excels at long form story telling.

Ahsokas Character arc is 12 years and running, Lukes EU one lasted around 23 years.

The more villain of the week/new darksider/ new superweapon was mostly played out by the late 90s.

Theyre definitely building a new shared story universe which was what they basically pulled apart a few years back.

You can still use superweapons and dark siders imho you just have to be careful about it.

 

[pukunui]

Am I correct in thinking this episode was the first time anyone ever used the term "genetics" in Star Wars? They certainly are playing up the idea that everyone's genetic code is in a database somewhere and people are easily identified that way (those are what the "chain codes" the bounty hunters use to track their quarry are, right?) ... which is weird, because that's never been a "thing" in Star Wars before.

 

[Marandahir]

My theory is Star wars excels at long form story telling.

Ahsokas Character arc is 12 years and running, Lukes EU one lasted around 23 years.

The more villain of the week/new darksider/ new superweapon was mostly played out by the late 90s.

Theyre definitely building a new shared story universe which was what they basically pulled apart a few years back.

You can still use superweapons and dark siders imho you just have to be careful about it.

Agreed. They pulled apart the old shared universe, fyi, because there were too many narrative contradictions and too many story-mind contradictions. That is to say, the canon was messy without a story group deciding what sort of stories they wanted to tell and to make sure everyone was on the same page across the various publishing media.

More to the point, the canon was telling stories that were contradictory in their messaging. Star Wars can have depth of messaging, but it should sabotage its core themes with the ancillary material. There's a reason that Darth Bane and Darth Revan did not show up in the Mortis arc as Sith Force Ghosts; the very concept undermines the ideas of what the Dark Side is and the path to immortality. We see that in order to live forever, instead Palps has to drain the lives of others, or live on in degrading clone bodies, or transfer his consciousness to possess the body of another. He can't become a Force Ghost. Anakin became one ONLY because he was redeemed in the end.

Now, this has been a little nebulous in some spaces. George famously wanted no place for Jaxxon in the canon of Star Wars, but a green-furred rabbit-like humanoid alien species is not in and of itself a problem with Star Wars. And Jaxxon's silly antics seem to fit right in with Jar Jar Binks and C-3PO and their silliness. So the new canon has cautiously reintroduced him to the canon, to the point that he gets a relatively high profile story in this years The Empire Strikes Back From a Certain Point of View (previously he had only appeared in canon in the youth-oriented comic series Star Wars Adventures, and even then, only in special Annual issues).

There's room for a lot of what was Legends, and we can see it kind of like with Marvel's approach to Spider-Man - a lot of what you know from past films/comics/novels happened, just not necessarily in the same way or with the exact same details. The serial numbers are filed off. If it directly contradicts the new canon, it didn't happen (or the bits that contradict didn't happen, at least). But there's still value in the older stories, and Dave Filoni has delighted in reintroducing stories and characters from the old Legends. I wouldn't be surprised if Mara Jade was even a thing in Luke's life, only to have separated from him or died prior to his training of Ben et al as seen in The Rise of Kylo-Ren.