The Mandalorian

[Corvinus85]

13 minutes ago, Vaughn said:

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Arquitens-class_command_cruiser

So a 750 crew starship with various weapons systems including on-board tie fighters and a crew of dark troopers isn't way more impressive than a filthy mill town on a dead planet? Agree to disagree. He also has the dark saber and a network of agents.

Sure it's not a joke, but it ain't no star destroyer. It can only hold about 6 TIEs. A squadron of X-wings could take it out.

[Vaughn]

I stand by my point that the kind of person who takes the gig on the dead forest slum town is probably not very talented, so I have no problem with Beihn's character being inept. That's the worst place D & G have visited yet.

[Veltigar]

14 hours ago, Toth said:

Well, yeah, absolutely fair criticisms.

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In regards to Ahsoka's fighting style in the original cartoon, I better just leave this one here:

 

 

Seems like she nerfed herself between this fight and the Kill Bill homage of the last episode.

14 hours ago, TrueMetis said:

 

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Though Mando going even more dadalorian was pretty great.

I was generally disappointment with Ahsoka in this anyway. She didn't say or do anything that required this to be Ahsoka, it could have been literally anyone. (Also I don't expect cartoon kind of fights, but the choreography on the fights was pretty meh)

The fight with the magistrate shows why force choke should be a lightside power. Would end so many fights so much easier and with less violence. Just instead of the total choke just cut off blood flow for a bit. Or she could have just thrown the magistrate into a wall, if the fights not gonna be entertaining it at least could have been funny.

Seriously was the actor not able to practice? Was she hurt? Everything about how the fights were done looks like they were trying to avoid showing her to much.

 

The bolded text is brilliant

As to the other points I quoted, 100% agreed. Especially the final paragraph. It reminded me a bit of a the fights with

Spoiler

Count Dooku in the prequels (less extreme of course). Like, we really want Christopher Lee but he's too old to really do anything so we'll try to compensate with all sorts of tricks and in the end, it just doesn't work.

 

13 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

As I was reading your (not surprising) criticisms, I kept thinking of Smeagol's line to Gollum from the movies "Leave now, and never come back!" 

Of course, I strongly disagree with almost all your critcisms.

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You not being a fan of the SW at large, or at least not being much aware of the animated shows, may be part of the problem. 

Ahsoka looked great, and from what I could tell online, most fans would agree. Rosario Dawson did a great job, nailing her mannerisms. I heard some fans complained about her horns being too short, considering how she looked last time we saw her in the animated shows, but I would say the team quickly realized how difficult it would be to have such a head gear for an action-centric character in live action. It translated as well as it could have.

It's true that considering how badass she was in some of the recent stuff we saw her, this is a step down. But her intro action scene was very much what I would have expected from someone who doesn't consider herself a Jedi anymore, but in reality still is. 

It's been mentioned here that she didn't want to kill the magistrate. Could she have used the Force to throw her, hold her, disarm her - yeah, sure, but at this point we don't even know if she killed the magistrate, so Ahsoka could have afforded her an honorable fight. And spear lady's master, as revealed, is Thrawn, who is quite skilled in hand-to-hand. (See video below) 

But to say the choreography was bad. oof, I find your lack of perception disturbing. 

Grogu is not a stupid name, but that is entirely subjective. But there is nothing wrong with doing some tie-ins with the prequels. After all, that is what Ahsoka is, too. Again, fans agree that Dave Filoni redeemed the prequels period with The Clone Wars. Plus, the kid is at least 50 years old, as established; that is before any OT-related stories.

Mando is not going on a treasure hunt, he is once again attempting to find a place for Grogu (I will keep mentioning the name ) This is what this episode was about, and next one, too, with the inevitable obstacles and swerves. However, based on episodes 3 & 4, it's quite possible that the show is slowly laying the groundwork for a larger story.

I agree with you about Biehn's character. That is all. 

 

Yes, let the hate flow through you @corvinus85 

Spoiler

As to your post, a few replies:

1. The fact that I haven't watched the cartoons really shouldn't figure into this. It shouldn't be a prerequisite to have seen stuff that is a decade older in a completely different medium to understand what is going on. Perhaps it is true that it could give me an extra layer of appreciation, but I'm not the type to be swayed by nostalgia either way. Seeing the videos posted here and elsewhere, it seems like I'd be more pissed off by inconsistent characterization and power levels than I was now coming fresh into it. 

2. As to this point:

"Ahsoka looked great, and from what I could tell online, most fans would agree. Rosario Dawson did a great job, nailing her mannerisms. I heard some fans complained about her horns being too short, considering how she looked last time we saw her in the animated shows, but I would say the team quickly realized how difficult it would be to have such a head gear for an action-centric character in live action. It translated as well as it could have"

I thought she looked jarringly out of place. My point is not that she didn't look like Ashoka from the cartoons. I couldn't give a shit about that, as I haven't seen the cartoons so the fact that she nailed mannerisms from a show I have never seen has no impact on my judgement.

My point was that I disliked the effects used to create her.  The rest of the cast looked like they were regular human beings/droids captured on digital film, why she looked like some character that walked away out of A Scanner Darkly. I think someone up thread remarked that it had something to do with the color palette and that might be the case. She looked more like a cartoon than a character out of a live-action film and I didn't care for that.

3. As to this point:

"It's true that considering how badass she was in some of the recent stuff we saw her, this is a step down. But her intro action scene was very much what I would have expected from someone who doesn't consider herself a Jedi anymore, but in reality still is. "

Even the intro action scene was weird. A lot of murder to my taste, with little context.

3. As to this point:

"It's been mentioned here that she didn't want to kill the magistrate. Could she have used the Force to throw her, hold her, disarm her - yeah, sure, but at this point we don't even know if she killed the magistrate, so Ahsoka could have afforded her an honorable fight. And spear lady's master, as revealed, is Thrawn, who is quite skilled in hand-to-hand. (See video below) "

The fact that your master is good in martial arts doesn't mean that you are any good at it. I once had a professor who was a black belt in karate. Semi-pro if memory serves me well. I didn't magically become a superb hand-to-hand fighter when studying under him. Spear lady was an engineer/supply chain monkey for Thrawn, hardly the profession that involved martial arts to the point that you'd be able to go toe to toe with a jedi.

Even if we accept the fact that Spear Lady was highly skilled  and in peak physical condition (a stretch as this was not established anywhere), Ashoka still should have mopped the floor with her. Jedi's are depicted as exceptionally physically gifted, with lightning-quick reflexes and Ashoka wasn't just some greenhorn if I can believe everything I read about Clone Wars. She went toe to toe with Maul, Vader and all those others.

If you want to make me take that fight serious than put some effort into laying some groundwork. For example, let Ashoka be wounded or gift Spear Lady an exoskeleton/performance-enhancing drugs or indeed make her a Sith Inquisitor as I read somewhere else in that thread (hell, why not make her into an alien in the first place? Than you can establish that that particular race has far greater power and stamina than regular humans).

4. "Grogu is not a stupid name, but that is entirely subjective"

Seems like a bit of a stretch now is it? The prevailing sentiment seems to be "It's a dumb name, but I'll be calling him Baby Yoda anyways. so it doesn't matter." It fits firmly into the pattern of lame names in Star Wars (Din Djarin or whatever for Mando?)

5. As to this point

"But there is nothing wrong with doing some tie-ins with the prequels. After all, that is what Ahsoka is, too. Again, fans agree that Dave Filoni redeemed the prequels period with The Clone Wars. Plus, the kid is at least 50 years old, as established; that is before any OT-related stories."
 

Is see we are dealing in absolutes... kind of makes me sad. I know people who have seen the cartoons and didn't much care for them. I know people who started them and gave up. And I know people like me who never really watched them. Does that means these people are all not fans? 

Not that it matters. Being a fan of something doesn't really give you any authority after all. Quite often it means given up your objectivity it seems, which is something I don't like. 

The fact is that the prequels are irredeemable. I can find enjoyment in there, because they make me laugh, but they certainly aren't good films. The fact that some guy made some cartoons which did a lot of the heavy lifting that should have been done in the prequels themselves doesn't redeem the movies. Does the fact that Palpatine was introduced in fucking Fortnight make it any less inexcusable that he wasn't properly re-introduced in TROS proper? 

The cartoons might have given more oxygen to the wider story and might even be called great in their own right (kind of doubtful of that, otherwise I would watch them, but let's commit to this line of reasoning for the sake of the argument), but they haven't made the prequels any less terrible.

To come back to the Mandalorian. Yes, I feel tieing it into the sequels was a mistake. Just like the fact that the shitquels focussed too much on the bloodlines of the OT, I feel like this decision made the universe smaller once more. And I don't care for that. It is supposed to be a galaxy far away, not "random hamlet where everyone knows everyone far away."

On top of that, there is the obvious quality issues which have been discussed at length. It would have been far more pleasant to focus on the Child's future and not its past.

6. As to this point

"Mando is not going on a treasure hunt, he is once again attempting to find a place for Grogu (I will keep mentioning the name ) This is what this episode was about, and next one, too, with the inevitable obstacles and swerves. However, based on episodes 3 & 4, it's quite possible that the show is slowly laying the groundwork for a larger story."

In practice it's a treasure hunt. It's always the same damn plot:

Mando: I need this from you

Rando character: Sure, but first help me with this unrelated, dangerous side quest.

And instead of thinking "should I be doing this? Am I not endangering the kid? What would happen to it if I perish on this random side quest?" Mando always goes "sure" and instead of being surprised that he gets fucked at the end of every weekly adventure, he just accepts the umpteenth side quest and falls for it every week. It robs the character of a lot of his agency and is just so lazy. They could switch it up a bit you know. Build some character.

 

13 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

As I was reading your (not surprising) criticisms, I kept thinking of Smeagol's line to Gollum from the movies "Leave now, and never come back!" 

Of course, I strongly disagree with almost all your critcisms.

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Grogu is not a stupid name, but that is entirely subjective. But there is nothing wrong with doing some tie-ins with the prequels. After all, that is what Ahsoka is, too. Again, fans agree that Dave Filoni redeemed the prequels period with The Clone Wars. Plus, the kid is at least 50 years old, as established; that is before any OT-related stories.

Mando is not going on a treasure hunt, he is once again attempting to find a place for Grogu (I will keep mentioning the name ) This is what this episode was about, and next one, too, with the inevitable obstacles and swerves. However, based on episodes 3 & 4, it's quite possible that the show is slowly laying the groundwork for a larger story.

I agree with you about Biehn's character. That is all. 

 

 

 

[Vaughn]

To those arguing that any random character could have had the same role in this episode as Ahsoka, I don't buy it.

1) She knows who Thrawn is, relevant to the future plot I think (otherwise it wouldn't have come up.)

2) She had specific advice about the Jedi temple - given how few Jedi are left at this time, this is rare information.

[Veltigar]

5 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

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Well, I personally love that this show is much more episodic than what we’re used to today. To say it’s pointless implies that it has to propel a season arc forward somehow, when I’ve no problem at all with stand alone episodes (plus, the show arc is the kid ... so I’m not sure where you want it to go if you don’t want to delve into his origin). I do agree it leans on the “OK I’ll tell you X but first you gotta help me Y” setup too heavily. I’d rather they just embraced the standalone format and didn’t even bother trying to tie it to something greater; just have Mando and Grogu living and surviving for another week.

 

The kid's future? Perhaps that is just part of my personality but that seems far more fascinating than needlessly coloring in boring background details. I really don't need to know everything about everyone who ever visited the Cantina if what I'm learning is not very interesting.

As to the fact that this show is more episodic than we're used to, I'm glad you like it but it gets on my nerve personally. I don't need a four season arc where everything follows out of clues like some cryptic puzzle, but I would like them to take their time to give us more story and character than what we're getting currently. It's basically the same damn plot every week and we don't get to build up any side characters. 

Like Spear lady in this episode. We just get dropped on us that she strips planets to build the Imperial Navy and that she started doing it because her people got killed during the Clone Wars... That's quite heavy now isn't it. Why did she start doing this? What does it make her feel that she basically treats the people of this planet like her own family was treated? Like, couldn't we explore her more in-depth?

Imagine a two or three episode arc where Mando gets recruited by Biehn to come to his planet and get rid of a menace in the woods. Mando signs on cause he needs the money for a new ship. He meats the spear lady who is not a cartoon villain. She's certainly not good, but you can sort of see her point because of what she went through. Biehn supports her because he loves the woman she once was (like the butler in Sunset Boulevard) and they then build up to the reveal that the monster in the woods is Ashoka. 

It's not rocket science I would imagine. If you want to create a memorable villain you can do three things roughly speaking. Make them truly frightening, Make them alluring or best of all make them both. That's what Darth Vader was. Frightening, yet alluring due to his power and aesthetic coolness. None of the villains in Mando (not even the Moff) have lived up to that yet and seeing how little time they are given, it will probably be a long while for that happens.

2 hours ago, Rippounet said:

I think that was the point.

In this show it's "rule of cool" before anything else.
I'm not saying it's great all the time, but I'd say it's pretty clear from the start. At this point we all know we're seeing someone's StarWars roleplaying campaign, and the DM doesn't care about pulling things out of his ass if it feels cool.

They could have aimed for better, but avoided risks.
Given how unforgiving the fandom is, I won't blame them.

Derivative is hardly cool in my book, but I get your point and unfortunately I think you are right. Moviemaking by committee :'( 

5 hours ago, Toth said:

I interpreted Ahsoka's arguments twofold. The attachment is evil thing was her reiterating old Jedi dogma, which I think was a bad decision because I do think Ahsoka should be skeptical enough of the infallibility of their teachings after the shit they pulled with her and how she witnessed first-hand how the council's dickery pushed Anakin into the status of a pariah. Even after learning of Anakin's fall in Rebels, Ahsoka brings up his compassion for his friends as his best attribute, so I don't think she would make the connection that this was responsible for his fall.

On the other hand however I'm fairly certain that Ahsoka's thought process was mostly "You are obviously his dad now, I'll have you run circles until you realize that!" with the quest to Tython just being a means to an end. So maybe even the former stuff could have been just an excuse to not have Mando dump his kid to some stranger.

 

 I think the show heavily implied the former, which is strange, as I also feel like the latter was a far more effective and humane sort of reasoning imo.

5 hours ago, Toth said:

To the duel scene: I think we all would have had no problem with a more equal fight if the opponent was a Sith Inquisitor who has the reflexes and the Force powers to not get utterly crushed by a trained Jedi and Clone Wars veteran and not just some lady with a spear. This was just an egregious case of style having been more important to Filoni than common sense.

 

I agree

9 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Basically self proclaimed Jedi Master...but hey, let's not split hairs...

As to the greater point, I do agree that things need to progress from the timeline established by The Mandalorian and go forward from there...there rely wasn't three movies to shoehorn where they take this series into...just be organic about it.  If that means recasting Luke, Leia, and Han to tell a part of the tale, do it.  If Luke is going to have that Jedi School, do it.  Better yet, let's have Ezra Bridger and Asoka show up to teach some courses.  I am in favor of this. 

Definitely agree with this! They should think about what works for the show and not anything else.

[Veltigar]

37 minutes ago, Vaughn said:

I stand by my point that the kind of person who takes the gig on the dead forest slum town is probably not very talented, so I have no problem with Beihn's character being inept. That's the worst place D & G have visited yet.

He worked for a woman with enough money to own a spear out of complete beskar. She build the Imperial Navy.... That sort of makes her one of the most important dignitaries of the former Empire (and by extension rich as shit). She's also still at her old game (which makes sense, there is no better time to be an arms dealer than after the implosion of a big power. We have all seen Lord of War), so she should have cash enough to blow to hire the best.

12 minutes ago, Vaughn said:

To those arguing that any random character could have had the same role in this episode as Ahsoka, I don't buy it.

1) She knows who Thrawn is, relevant to the future plot I think (otherwise it wouldn't have come up.)

2) She had specific advice about the Jedi temple - given how few Jedi are left at this time, this is rare information.

In defense of the people arguing for that, I guess they want a random jedi character. That pretty much clears your arguments I think.

2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

I dunno, maybe it's just me, but I loved the episode. I think a lot of people have got a bee up their bum about this show, when really it's the most fun, light entertainment highlight of my week. Notice the words 'light entertainment' there, because thats exactly how I view it. 

Light entertainment can be deep and meaningful too. Cowboy Bebop comes to mind as a show that had that mix down perfectly for me. In any case, at least light entertainment can be more thoughtful about the world and stories it tells. Firefly was not the deepest show, but at least that developed characters, had more variations with plot, etc. 

It's something I come back to a lot, but writing, writing, writing is what most of these properties lack. Perhaps SW is emblematic of wider Hollywood that way. The shit for SW began when Lucas got more obsessed with the effects than anything else, even though you need to balance the two to create greatness.

[Werthead]

22 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Seems like everything Filoni has done, and now by extension Favreau, with Clone Wars, Rebels, and The Mandolorian has really managed to minimize and marginalize the effect of Luke being some sort of last hope...why should he have a shot at the child any more than any of the other Jedi that are, logically, still out there...?

I think that's a side-effect of two factors. The first is realism, even Star Wars' extremely loose definition of such. In a galaxy of tens of trillions of people, the fate of everything coming down to one guy and his small number of friends is a bit cheesy. Even the idea that ten thousand space wizards with magic powers could all be killed instantly by guys with guns on one guy's say-so is rather implausible in the extreme. Of course a few would survive, and of course that does absolutely nothing for the (presumably) millions of people with Force sensitivities who would emerge afterwards and be ready to take up arms against the Empire.

That doesn't minimise or mitigate Luke's importance in the slightest, but it does say the galaxy is much bigger and there can be many more people out there about whom stories can be told. The Last Jedi's strength was suggesting that those people don't all have to be related, and TRoS's biggest weakness was saying wait, no, they do.

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So why is one of thrawns assistants hanging out in a shitty dead-end town somewhere shaking people down for funnies?

I got the impression this was her isolated redoubt hideaway, out of the way to stay off the radar of anyone who might come after her. As others have said, she also seems to have factories working on weapons construction.

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Some of the random quests have made some vague sense or at least fit the setting. This one was just bullshit. And why does Bo Katan know Ashoka is going to be there given that it ain't gonna take her long to wipe that small town apart?

Bo-Katan and Ahsoka, after a rough start, have been friends and allies for almost 30 years by this point and fought alongside one another many times. Having each other's backs and knowing where to find one another makes sense in that context.

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Ahsoka needing any help is some serious bullshit too. As a teenager she took out most of a clone ship. As an adult she took on Vader. She beat maul. She is a jedi trained not in wampa caves and swamp running but as a full jedi. 

The townsfolk seem to have been held, to some extent, hostage against Ahsoka's behaviour. She needed a second set of eyes to ensure their safety whilst she's fighting the magistrate, whom she presumably at least suspected was a capable hand-to-hand fighter.

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so he’s probably older than the ~25ish years he’d need to be to have been born after the prequels

In Season 1 they explicitly said he was 50 years old, which means he was born around 41 BBY, nine years before The Phantom Menace and twenty-one before Revenge of the Sith. The aging thing is interesting: clearly he's still a kid or infant by Yoda's standards, but he's also a relatively functioning being who can feed himself and communicate (if not perfectly).

Spoiler

I must admit when Ahsoka started "talking to him" I was expecting him to reply, and if so he must have the voice of the guy who did Nibbler in Futurama.

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I dunno, maybe it's just me, but I loved the episode. I think a lot of people have got a bee up their bum about this show, when really it's the most fun, light entertainment highlight of my week. Notice the words 'light entertainment' there, because thats exactly how I view it. 

This doesn't happen very often, but I agree, and the absolutely massive disconnect between how the show is torn apart by some here and its wider critical reception, which is overwhelmingly positive, is quite remarkable. At least we can say the mixed response to the Star Trek shows is more in keeping with the wider reception.

The Mandalorian is very clearly meant to be a somewhat-minimalist take on the original Star Wars inspiration: lightly serialised matinee films of the 1930s, not to mention Westerns and samurai movies. It's not meant to be a multi-layered, complex The Wire in space or something. It's fulfilling what it's meant to be very well, with relatively few flaws (and lot of its flaws are tropes inherited from the wider Star Wars setting). It's not the best show on TV, even in SF or space opera, but it's a very enjoyable, diverting action show.

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I think we all would have had no problem with a more equal fight if the opponent was a Sith Inquisitor who has the reflexes and the Force powers to not get utterly crushed by a trained Jedi and Clone Wars veteran and not just some lady with a spear. This was just an egregious case of style having been more important to Filoni than common sense.

Ahsoka uses the Jar'Kai lightsabre form (apparently inspired by early confrontations with Asajj Ventress) which has several notable weaknesses. The biggest is that Jar'Kai practitioners in duels tend to focus on using their weapons over the Force (using the Force on mooks at range is fine, but close-up-and-personal they prefer to defeat their enemies with bladecraft). They are also unable to bring all of their weight to bear behind offensive and defensive blows, rendering them vulnerable to enemies using one-handed weapons or more flexible weapons like the spear.

Obviously the real answer is they needed the fight to go on long enough to make the plot work, but there is some justification for it in prior canon.

[Poobah]

25 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Ahsoka uses the Jar'Kai lightsabre form (apparently inspired by early confrontations with Asajj Ventress) which has several notable weaknesses. The biggest is that Jar'Kai practitioners in duels tend to focus on using their weapons over the Force (using the Force on mooks at range is fine, but close-up-and-personal they prefer to defeat their enemies with bladecraft). They are also unable to bring all of their weight to bear behind offensive and defensive blows, rendering them vulnerable to enemies using one-handed weapons or more flexible weapons like the spear.

Obviously the real answer is they needed the fight to go on long enough to make the plot work, but there is some justification for it in prior canon.

One thing I've noticed looking back over Ahsoka fight highlights from Rebels and Clone Wars is how she frequently loses one of her sabres in fights then starts doing better once she isn't dual-wielding I know from a narrative standpoint it's just a construction to create tension in the fights but it's pretty funny as a pattern.

Spoiler

And yeah I 100% agree with Toth's comment that I wouldn't be complaining if spear lady were an inquisitor or some other kind of sith acolyte, but as a rando with slightly superior equipment it didn't really make a whole lot of sense.

 

[DaveSumm]

30 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Of course a few would survive, and of course that does absolutely nothing for the (presumably) millions of people with Force sensitivities who would emerge afterwards and be ready to take up arms against the Empire.

Which reminds me, it was interesting to me that Ahsoka mentioned that his skill should be “left to fade away”. Have we ever had an explicit mention of what happens to untrained force-sensitive people before? I remember being confused about it in The Phantom Menace, when the Jedi council refuse Anakin’s training. Surely any training is better than leaving him to be angry, emotional and very naturally talented? But this makes more sense; if it’s not nurtured, it will fade away.

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This doesn't happen very often, but I agree, and the absolutely massive disconnect between how the show is torn apart by some here and its wider critical reception, which is overwhelmingly positive, is quite remarkable. At least we can say the mixed response to the Star Trek shows is more in keeping with the wider reception.

Yea totally agree, I love the show. My SO does to and she doesn’t particularly care about Star Wars generally. It goes to show how cool the universe is, that all fans have wanted for a long while is something that depicts it and respects it without anything else earth shattering. The episodic films by their nature have to rock the boat in some fashion, and everyone just ends up pissed off about something. I love the relatively simple stories The Mandalorian is telling.

[Maltaran]

32 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

 The episodic films by their nature have to rock the boat in some fashion, and everyone just ends up pissed off about something. I love the relatively simple stories The Mandalorian is telling.

This is also why Rogue One is my favourite Star Wars film.

[Luzifer's right hand]

I agree with  Heartofice... that must mean that I am wrong.. right?

It is wonderful escapism. 

 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

3 hours ago, Heartofice said:

I dunno, maybe it's just me, but I loved the episode.

It definitely isn't just you.

For my part, I'm nit-picking mostly because I was expecting a little better given the players involved.

2 hours ago, Vaughn said:

I stand by my point that the kind of person who takes the gig on the dead forest slum town is probably not very talented, so I have no problem with Beihn's character being inept. That's the worst place D & G have visited yet.

I've been to places where the money is.  They are often not pretty or even desirable places to live.

2 hours ago, Vaughn said:

To those arguing that any random character could have had the same role in this episode as Ahsoka, I don't buy it.

1) She knows who Thrawn is, relevant to the future plot I think (otherwise it wouldn't have come up.)

2) She had specific advice about the Jedi temple - given how few Jedi are left at this time, this is rare information.

Something that bothered me (not too much): did Tython exist in the Disney SW cannon before this?  It should be the location of the first Jedi temple but that isn't where Luke ended up when he was supposedly searching for the first Jedi temple.  

[Jaxom 1974]

New Theory: Before the end of the third season, it will be discovered that Thrawn is actually pulling Gideon's strings, as any overt connections to the future and episodes VII thru IX fade further and further away from The Mandalorian...

[Jace, Extat]

39 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

New Theory: Before the end of the third season, it will be discovered that Thrawn is actually pulling Gideon's strings, as any overt connections to the future and episodes VII thru IX fade further and further away from The Mandalorian...

Good...

Goooood.

[Kalbear]

6 hours ago, Werthead said:

I got the impression this was her isolated redoubt hideaway, out of the way to stay off the radar of anyone who might come after her. As others have said, she also seems to have factories working on weapons construction.

Maybe? But I still don't get why she'd have a walled city instead of what imps usually do, which is have their base with the people guarding the thing they cared about.

And that also doesn't explain why she doesn't, well, have imps with her. Or why she needs to hire random goons. 

6 hours ago, Werthead said:

Bo-Katan and Ahsoka, after a rough start, have been friends and allies for almost 30 years by this point and fought alongside one another many times. Having each other's backs and knowing where to find one another makes sense in that context.

Sorry, I wasn't clearer. Bo-Katan knows that Ahsoka is going to be on Corvus hunting for this magistrate at that exact moment, which given how slow the Razor Crest was flying and whatnot, was weeks before he actually, ya know, gets to her. Meaning at the time Bo-Katan is telling Din about this, Ahsoka is already there and dealing with it.

So Ahsoka is just...hanging out on Corvus for weeks waiting for...something? And Mando just happens to show up right at the right time. 

I was fine with Bo-Katan knowing that Ahsoka's on Corvus because she lives there or something, but her going on a mission there and then just hanging out took me out of the disbelief. 

6 hours ago, Werthead said:

The townsfolk seem to have been held, to some extent, hostage against Ahsoka's behaviour. She needed a second set of eyes to ensure their safety whilst she's fighting the magistrate, whom she presumably at least suspected was a capable hand-to-hand fighter. 

Meh. Ahsoka's gone up against a lot worse odds and come out on top before. Hell, she's done that when she didn't want to use her powers. She also didn't even need to fight the magistrate like she did - it would have been perfectly fine to throw her against the wall. It was Rule of Cool, and I get that, but it made Mando pretty redundant or Ahsoka look pretty weak. 

6 hours ago, Werthead said:

This doesn't happen very often, but I agree, and the absolutely massive disconnect between how the show is torn apart by some here and its wider critical reception, which is overwhelmingly positive, is quite remarkable. At least we can say the mixed response to the Star Trek shows is more in keeping with the wider reception.

The Mandalorian is very clearly meant to be a somewhat-minimalist take on the original Star Wars inspiration: lightly serialised matinee films of the 1930s, not to mention Westerns and samurai movies. It's not meant to be a multi-layered, complex The Wire in space or something. It's fulfilling what it's meant to be very well, with relatively few flaws (and lot of its flaws are tropes inherited from the wider Star Wars setting). It's not the best show on TV, even in SF or space opera, but it's a very enjoyable, diverting action show. 

I think that's really it. I am having a perfectly fine time watching it - just like I did Rebels and Clone Wars - and the highs are quite cool. But most of it is entirely forgettable as soon as I watch it. It's the equivalent of TV junk food. And that's fine! I do wish it was more, and I do wish it was better, but good junk food is good too. 

What it isn't, however, is quality TV. It's quite pretty, and occasionally cool as shit in the same way a Kung Fu movie can be, but it isn't much else. And Rebels and Clone Wars had a number of good characters here and there too and a lot of personal interaction; we don't get that here nearly as much, and for me the monotony of the single character with little plot driving is getting tiresome.

I also really dislike the Quest of the Week format that they're doing. Which again is taken almost verbatim from Avatar, at least early on, but it gets pretty old pretty fast. They have the opportunity to really do serialized shows now, and they're just...not. At least not here.

 

[ithanos]

So Grogu was only around 9-10yrs old during The Phantom Menace? No wonder we missed him in those temple scenes, he would've been just a tennis ball. Many Masters now makes sense - each one giving up after accidentally kicking him away, Concentraaate!

[RumHam]

19 minutes ago, ithanos said:

So Grogu was only around 9-10yrs old during The Phantom Menace? No wonder we missed him in those temple scenes, he would've been just a tennis ball. Many Masters now makes sense - each one giving up after accidentally kicking him away, Concentraaate!

Someone did edit him into RoTS. 

Everyone hated the special editions of the OT, but I wish they would revise the prequels officially in a similar way and try to make them suck less and connect to The Clone Wars and other subsequent stuff better. 

32 minutes ago, Kalbear Total Landscaping said:

Maybe? But I still don't get why she'd have a walled city instead of what imps usually do, which is have their base with the people guarding the thing they cared about.

And that also doesn't explain why she doesn't, well, have imps with her. Or why she needs to hire random goons. 

Seems the likely explanation is that she's not part of the imperial remnant. I'm not sure Thrawn was all that loyal to the empire, maybe just using them as a means to an end. 

[Kalbear]

3 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Seems the likely explanation is that she's not part of the imperial remnant. I'm not sure Thrawn was all that loyal to the empire, maybe just using them as a means to an end. 

Grand Admiral Thrawn is...not all that loyal to the Empire? And one of the people responsible for building the entire Empire army is...also not that loyal to the Empire?

I guess they could go that way, but that seems pretty ludicrous given Thrawn's previous backstory both in the books and in Rebels. 

[Caligula_K3]

I don't know that I'm expecting The Wire from this. I'm hoping for the show to do something at all interesting characterwise or plotwise, which isn't a high bar to get over. The best of the old cheesy adventure shows from the 90s and 2000s had characters you loved to root for and villains you loved to hate. This show has Baby Yoda.

But yeah, count me in on those disappointed by this last episode. The action was quite cool. I did love the opening fight and how it was shot like a horror film, and the final sword fight was fine, even if I was silently screaming at Ahsoka to just like force push her adversary or rip the staff out of her hand. But as an adventure serial show, it's still really hindered by the fact that the show refuses to try to get you to care about any characters except in the most cursory way. It also suffers from its plot structure; even an episode that seems central to the plot like this one ends up turning into another sidequest ("I won't train baby Yoda for reasons, but maybe another random Jedi could if you go to some random planet" is not a great plot hook). I'm sure if I'd watched Clone Wars and Rebels I'd have gotten more out of Ahsoka's appearance, but as it stands...

Also, I know this silliness is more the prequels' fault, but about Baby Yoda: he can't be trained as a Jedi because he's attached to the Mandalorian and has fear inside him. But, despite the fact that he's 50 years old and has been through a lot, Baby Yoda seems to be at the development stage of a toddler, or maybe a 4-5 year old. Just about every 4-5 year old (or two year old) has attachments and feels fear. How is it possible for anybody to become a Jedi? Do they swipe babies at birth?

 

[Jace, Extat]

6 minutes ago, Kalbear Total Landscaping said:

Grand Admiral Thrawn is...not all that loyal to the Empire? And one of the people responsible for building the entire Empire army is...also not that loyal to the Empire?

I guess they could go that way, but that seems pretty ludicrous given Thrawn's previous backstory both in the books and in Rebels. 

Thrawn forcibly recruits the Imperial remnants into his coalition in his first appearance. He seems comfortable doing his own thing. One could easily imagine him making sure there was no one around who could pull rank on him before making his move. Also, Thrawn has a lot in common with Winston Duarte. I expect you to understand this means he will not act until he expects to win.

Meanwhile, this lady setting up a shadow despotate in order to keep making weapons without drawing direct Rebellion (I called their illegal government what I called it) or Imperial Remnant attention makes a lot of galactic political sense. Why would Thrawn want people thinking a big Imperial rearmament was underway before he was ready to deploy said arms? Makes no sense, playa.