Season three of The Mandalorian just dropped and I was super excited to get back to any Star Wars locale, but still awash in the awesomeness of Andor, I came away from the season three pilot extremely underwhelmed.
This is probably the point where I mention that the rest of this thing is spoilers, so avast ye and bugger off if you haven’t seen the episode.
The Good:
- Mando himself is a lot of fun, and it was good to see him again.
- Baby Yoda is always a goddamn treat. The first shot of him this season was so much fun I laughed out loud.
- I love me some Carl Weathers, even though I think I’d rather see him get a stew goin than play Greef Karga.
- Any nerd worth their pocket protector is at minimum a low-key Katee Sackhoff fan, though I want to like Bo-Katan more than I do in this show.
- The music is always fun, especially over the end credits with the colored storyboards.
- The sound effects are still cool.
- No sign of MAGA lunatic Gina Carano. Buh-bye!
The Bad:
- Muppets, man. Nothing takes me out of the suspension of disbelief faster than muppets. Well, except for these Vespa atrocities.
- The relative shittiness of the Mandalorian hitting power. Like, 100 Mandalorians can’t beat one overgrown iguana? Seriously? What would they have done if man-of-not-many-words Din Djarin hadn’t Luke Skywalkered in to save the day?
- The choice to have Mandalorians shoot lines into the beast. Huh? So you can get pulled off your feet easier? Maybe these dudes need a little basic Jiu Jitsu training.
- The mouth of that kid who had just been made a Mandalorian with the new helm. I mean, whatever, but he talked funny and it was distracting. Plus he had great hair and I was like “No, kid! That hair is too good to be a sweat trap under that helmet!” And also, if you ever remove your helmet to shake out your lustrous hair like in a Panteen commercial, the humorless Armorer won’t give you a second chance.
- The Armorer. I’m not saying it’s actor Emily Swallow’s fault, but I also don’t know that it isn’t. I tend to blame writing in situations like these, but I don’t give a rat’s ass about her rules and the weird armorcrafting fetishism, and that’s coming from someone who grinded innumerable hours in Star Wars Galaxies just to master armorsmith and get tapped to be Force Sensitive. Ya basic, Madam Armorer, and you have the personality of a bag of hay.
- The concept that to atone Din needs to bathe in the water of mines that were supposedly destroyed and the fact that they were is like, “oh well, those are the rules!” Fuck that. That smacks of all the worst parts of organized religion and intractable government, in that man has to abide by outdated dictums from on high instead of grasping the agency to change with the times. Also, aren’t rivers in mines a bad idea, in general? Isn’t that one of the great fears of miners, that they’ll crack an underwater lake and all drown to death?
- Also, that Mando wants to atone in the first place. Come on bruv! You let your son see your face, you didn’t blow up Alderaan for christ’s sake! Fuck atoning.
- Smaller muppets. Even smaller than the Salacious B. Crumb-looking tree muppets.
- The fact that this is fundamentally a child’s show. Andor was Star Wars by grown-ups for grown ups. Andor is what happens when human beings have the ability to grow and change, not adhere to an unbreakable creed from on high.
- A dearth of Ahsoka. (Dearth, not death) There was no Ahsoka in this episode and over the years, I’ve found that I’m more a fan of hers than almost any other Star Wars character.
- I need this robot! Uhhhh, okay. You can program another droid, hondo! There are droids everywhere. Hell, there are two little D-O lookin’ droids carrying Greef’s fucking cape. Train one of those dudes.
- Pirates from Galaxy Quest. Tell me this dude doesn’t look like General Sarris’ idiot cousin. They’re both horned, lizard-like and subscribe to the no-nose design of bad guys. And that dude on the left is the most sterilized bad-guy-for-kids bad guy I’ve ever seen. He’s like an action figure that talks if you pull his string. In all fairness, the character should have had a tag on him with a price and free shipping from Amazon.
- Grogu. Never gonna get used to that name. It’s like they mixed Gravy and Ragu. Baby Yoda deserved so much better. Usually I don’t beef about names, but I’ve given this one a long time to settle in and if the shirt don’t fit the shirt don’t fit.
- The pervasive sense of okayness. With Andor, I always felt on edge. I compared the vibe in Andor to the same way I’ve felt since the 2016 election, where something is very wrong with the world and we haven’t gotten back to feeling right. But with The Mandalorian, I’m like “eh, we’re fine.” Gunfight space duel outside a school? No problem. The Pirate King sent three – no, wait, make that six ships to kill us? Whatevs. The Pirate flagship has “target lock” on us? PFFFF Just hit the engines and we’ll fly right by a la reverse Goose. There’s zero tension. This is a show you watch while loudly chewing trail mix, not just because the crunch deafness won’t cause you to miss anything of importance, but also because chewing in tense situations is a sign of disrespect, and I feel like this show has slid closer to The Book of Boba Fett and the awful Obi-Wan Kenobi than risen to approach Andor.
Maybe that’s the biggest indictment of The Mandalorian at this point, that it’s just fine. Good-adjacent. Outside of Tim Olyphant’s Marshall Cobb Vanth, (who is technically on the Boba Fett show and might be a corpse) I can’t think of anyone not named Mando or Baby Yoda that I give a shit about on this show. The faceless Mandalorians are indiscernible from each other so it’s tough to connect there. I love Amy Sedaris but her droidsmith grates. So who does that leave? What story am I supposed to be invested in? Because being a sheriff on Nevarro seems waaaaaaaaay cooler to me than bathing in poison rivers to win back the approval of fanatics. That prime piece of land Din turned his nose up at sounds pretty damn amazing in a climate where two generations of Americans are struggling to own their own property. And isn’t the Bounty Hunter’s Guild located there?
Who else and what else are we supposed to care about? Hell, I’d gladly welcome a visit from Bill Burr’s Migs Mayfield just to spruce things up.
It’s only one episode and I shouldn’t get too up in arms about it, but over the years there’s been a glut of forgettable Star Wars fare and a scarcity of truly iconic, memorable fare. Before Boba Fett and Obi-Wan, Mando looked like the coolest kid on the block. Now, with Andor perched atop mount Lucas, The Mandalorian looks like kind of a middling effort, designed more to sell Baby Yodas than to tell a compelling story.
