I think a big part of the trend to make 1/3 of a season and call it a season. In a “normal”, traditional 22-26 episode season we wouldn’t be bothered by character arcs not being resolved or even fully developed just i eoisodes in. I’m thinking of Buffy, for instance. I don’t know if you watched the series but I’m looking at how little story arc is resolved by 8 episodes into each season.
Maybe each 8-10 episode season should be counted as a continuation of the previous 8-10 episode season of the last show. We are watching The Book of Boba, Mando, and Ahsoka.
This whole Everything Sets Up What Comes Next treadmill to nowhere is sinking both Star Wars and Marvel. Just tell a freaking story please. It’s okay if something ends.
Big Buffy/Angel fan! And Firefly. (And having to enjoy the art in spite of the artist.)
Yes. I was going to leave it at that. You make a good point that it takes time to develop things.
But. They know how many episodes they are getting. They can plot it all out beforehand. If they had picked a main character and couldn’t tell that character’s story in eight hours, wtf are they doing? How did they get that job?
I have definitely watched six, eight, and ten episode shows that do exactly that. Jack Ryan did well with their episodes. I’m blanking on others but I know I have watched several that have done well in that many episodes. It should remove filler (didn’t Lost get hit hard for filler episodes?) things and focus on the main story they want to tell.
I agree!
lol - yes. It’s also a different medium and a different model but a funny comment!
I have no problem, and prefer when a show sets up the next series or movie or book or whatever. I have a problem when the thing they are giving me doesn’t have a complete story itself. That’s what I think happened with Ahsoka.
You looked at the original trilogy and thought “there are so many story lines I want to develop”?
The original Star Wars was a fluke of casting, Zeitgeist and cinematographic magic. There is nothing special about the plot, the characters or the universe.
The only thing the franchise has going for it is an affluent fan base with a high tolerance for abuse.
The spaghetti western vibe of the first few episodes of the mandalorian and book of boba reeled me back in, the later episodes were just lazy.
Andor and obi wan were terrible for me.
Ashoka was simply bad. Badly choreographed fights, nothing cinematicly interesting. Just endless lightsaber “fights” where everybody is just phoning it in. Magic space whales as a actual plot thing.
I quit after the magic space whales.
Ps. “Dogfights” with frontal shots of a guy with a mask might have looked cool in Battleship Galactica. If a serious part of your show is just that: you are not even trying. We fucking know what a Ceylon stormtrooper piloting a tie-wrap looks like: Show me something new.
Welp, I enjoyed it. I’ve never watched Rebels and I don’t know everything about Filoni’s SW stuff, and yet I liked it. It’s 35-45 minutes of escapism a week into a universe that I’ve been a fan of since I was a kid. That’s all I expected, and I was totally satisfied by it.
I truly don’t really understand what some of you are expecting from your space fantasy TV shows. The story was simple to follow for me, who again, never watched Rebels. Thrawn and Ezra disappeared across the galaxy some time ago. Old friends get back together to try to stop the bad guys from bringing Thrawn back to start a war. We venture to a far away galaxy, find Ezra, fight the bad guys, fail to prevent Thrawn from returning, but Ezra has snuck along. The rest of the heros are stuck in the far away galaxy. Now we anticipate the next part of this story in season 2. That isn’t a sufficient plot?
To each their own, of course, and nobody’s opinion is right or wrong, but I’m just saying that not everything can be terrible. And if it is, then maybe this isn’t the best genre for you? If I keep eating black licorice and every time I eat some I hate it, eventually I say to myself, maybe I just don’t like black licorice.
I think that “The Mandalorian” has set my expectations too high for Disney/Star Wars series. IMO, “Ahsoka” was just kind of meh and the ending seemed to be a let down. I don’t really care if it comes back for another season.
And “Andor”. The 1st season of Mando and Andor were as good as anything Star Wars since The Empire Strikes Back, IMO. And there’s a significant quality gap between those two and all the other Star Wars content on Disney +.
What’s fun is the entire subplot of the bad guy’s grand plan is completely unresolved and unexplained and the only hint assumes you remember a minor episode from a show that aired a decade ago (which I did not and only know because it was pointed out in a review of this episode). Now that’s storytelling. Tune in next week kids and don’t forget to drink your Ovaltine.
The statue he was standing on that looked very Lord of the Rings-y also appeared in an episode of Clone Wars. It was a statue of a father who had two children (also statues) where the son represented the Dark Side and his Daughter the Light. In the distant past , the son murdered both the sister and the father. In that CW episode Ahsoka was mortally wounded and the daughter in the statue came to life and saved her.
To clarify, these were not the same statues but other statues on another planet back in the Star Wars galaxy but representing the same people.
Did I weep like a baby when Chopper’s little arms went flailing? I sure did. Did I spend most of the rest of the episode asking “why is s/he doing that thing?” I also did. So many questionable decisions, both by the characters and by Filoni et al. No Zeb. How can you have these people and not have Zeb? I would have given up 90% of the light saber battles to have had Zeb and Chopper charge Ezra and tackle him in a hug pile. Ok, that reminds me of one of the stupid details I just got hung up on. When Ezra came out in the storm trooper armor (which I did like and was a nice callback, along with him pretending to be one over the comms), WHY was he wearing the helmet except for The Drama of it all? And why did all the people aiming blasters at him lower their weapons when Hera did (they didn’t seem to be looking at her, following her lead)? They didn’t know him from a hole in the wall. JFC, it was so stupid.
My apologies. I’m nit picking, which I usually do with things I like. I like most things Star Wars. I can turn my brain off and enjoy it in the moment. Then I think about it, discuss it, read about it, and do question it.
The original Star Wars trilogy was a generic use of the hero’s journey. It was, and is, a lot of fun. Forty years later, I want more. I want a deeper look. I can understand that a new generation might not have learned the Hero’s Journey yet. They might not know Campbell or any of the other influences on Lucas’ works. The twelfth series isn’t the place to start over and rehash that. It’s to move forward based on what we have already seen.
Not for me because it’s obvious. As soon as I know someone is trapped in a place that takes something special to bring them back, I know that will happen. At the moment when Sabine made the choice to go with Baylan, I wanted it to mean more. Or I wanted it to have consequences. We see Sabine and Ahsoka not getting along. Fighting each other. They have barely made up and the last thing that Ahsoka tells Sabine is to destroy the globe to stop them. Sabine instead joins them. Ahsoka is fine with that?
There was no resolution to this show. It just had a bunch of things that happened, not a story. Refer back to my previous posts, and others, on why I think it was done poorly. So, yes, I want more than that in something I love. I want more than that for something I love. I want to be able to point to any Star Wars show and say it’s great. Not, “Well, you need to watch it to understand this good one over here.”
I’m glad you enjoyed it. I really am. I don’t have the investment that some have, having only watched Rebels and not Clone Wars. As Fair_Rarity said, though, this isn’t a new show with new people. These are characters we watched before and expect certain reactions at this point.
I’m going to go one step further on the stupidity of the scene with Ezra showing up toward the end in the shuttle. He has a New Republic escort as he approaches in a banged up shuttle. If they didn’t know who he was, why wasn’t he boarded? If they didn’t know who he was, why would they let him land on a general’s ship? Of course, see our previous discussion on what general even means in the Star Wars universe. Why is a general allowed to be in the front line to greet an apparently unknown vessel? The answer, of course, is drama but when drama takes a back seat to reality, or common sense, it becomes bad storytelling and frustrating from something that could be so much better.
Hell, you can even stay within the new Star Wars shows, and talk about Andor. One of the best-received of these shows, and they told three complete stories over the course of 12 episodes.
There were a lot of things I liked about the episode. The zombie troopers were brilliant. Morgan Elsbeth was a good villain. Ezra is just absolutely perfect and the little nods like using the coms to fool storm troopers were great. Chopper of course, even if it was just fan service. There were also a lot of things I hated. Baylan and Shin’s stories went nowhere, which is a bummer given that they were the most interesting part of the show in the early episodes and what happened with Ray (RIP). Thrawn instead of looking like a tactical genius looked like a guy who kept getting owned and then going “I meant to do that”. Ahsoka and Sabine are like lobotomized versions of their cartoon selves. Overall it was just ok… not as good as Andor or the better Mandalorian seasons, but better than the book of Boba.
That’s the worst part for me. Knowing that this was his last role, and we never really got much out of it. No matter how they play this with Season 2, I think “Season 2 with Ray instead of X” will be the new “Season 2 of Firefly.” We’ll spend years wondering about what could have been…
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