I think the writers were being a little lazy by assuming everybody would know who these non-cinematic characters were. You’d think, of all people, an MCU alum like Favreau would know how to drop in these kinds of characters without alienating those who haven’t dived into the whole canon.
I’m not at all familiar with the new characters. I don’t feel left out or anything. I can’t really understand how I might be - their introductions were plenty informative of who they were, what their intentions/motivations were, just like any of the other new characters.
This to me is like someone saying they love horseradish and can’t understand how someone doesn’t. But okay.
Meanwhile my partner in the office and I today were trying to place Grogu’s age in human development and put him a speech and language delayed four year old. Which led to the thought that struck both of us a funny: Grogu in speech therapy at the Jedi school, after some progress eventually force choking the speech pathologist “My syntax correct you do not.”
Yeah I still think his cuteness going dark side would be more fun.
Well, underwritten characters are underwritten. Bo Katan showing up was a nice Easter egg for people familiar with the character, but absent that, “This is Bo Katan. She wants the Dark Saber so she can be leader of the Mandalorians,” is at least as much backstory and motivation as we got for any of the wholly original characters from the first season.
This is now live on Disney+, but turns out it doesn’t mention Luke at all.
To be clear, I don’t feel alienated nor upset that others enjoy the mandalorian cameos.
My central point is that character development was better in season one than season two. I attribute part of this to the shorthand of using characters that have backstory elsewhere. I concede that it could be entirely possible to use these characters and make them better developed within the mandalorian. It is also possible that the lack of character development is simply because this is season two and it was put together faster than season one.
Put another way, does anyone think the character development of the red-haired mandalorian and other-jedi were at the same level as the “I have spoken” guy and the “I must self destruct” droid in season one?
I just listened to the Adam Savage podcast episode about the Mandalorian, and he (or one of the guests or other hosts) had an interesting point in regards to this. They refer to some of the episodes as bottle episodes, or monster of the week, where the main story arc is not advanced very much. For example the episode with the Frog lady, and the ice spiders.
The bottle episodes are used to reveal aspects of the characters and their relationships, so that in later story heavy episodes, those things can go unsaid. The characters introduced from prior shows skip this step, because those character things were done in other shows. It doesn’t make the story hard to understand, but it does leave those characters a bit flat without the prior knowledge.
Why is that Jedi hiding out on a forest fire planet, and why doesn’t she want to help Grogu? Oh, she was Anakin’s apprentice, yeah, I get it now.
Disagree. Young RDJ and young Michael Douglas make my Uncanny Valley indicators twitch…but they quickly settle down, young Hamill sent them through the roof.
Just finished binging it over the weekend. Over all it was pretty good although I don’t put it quite as high as Rogue 1. Some thoughts:
- The show doesn’t lend real well to binging. The story-arc suffers from the very apparent episodic story telling.
- It was a little disappointing that one of the new and interesting things at the beginning of Season 1–the remnants of the Empire being run-down–is totally repudiated by the end. I wish they could have kept that early vibe.
- I didn’t have quite the same rapture as others of Luke’s entrance but it was cool and I had no problems with the uncanny valley. It was as good an ending to the season as possible.
- Rosario Dawson made a great Ahsoka. Maybe voicing the character helped prepare her for the role but she was easily the best, most comfortable actor in the series.
- The atmosphere of many scenes was really good but I thought they hurt the story at times. For example I thought it very un-Jedi-like that Ahsoka would give magistrate Elsbeth 24 hours to decide; this gave Elsbeth 24 more hours to torture innocent villagers.
- The ineptness of storm troopers was parody level.
- I was constantly struck by how much killing there was in a Disney show. Not a single swear (except for made-up ones) and no flesh but lots and lots of death.
Good thing Ahsoka dropped the tube top and mini-skirt.
Rosario Dawson didn’t voice the character in either of her previous incarnations, Ashley Eckstein did.
Rosario Dawson didn’t originally voice Ahsoka, that was Ashley Eckstein. You’re thinking of Katee Sackhoff voicing and then playing Bo-Katan Kryze.
Bah, you’re right. Dawson did Artemis on Wonder Woman. Sorry for the confusion. I can’t even claim it was late at night.
Well, it looks like we’ve seen the last of Cara Dune. I never found her character interesting so I won’t miss her at all.
I’m honestly surprised Disney stuck by her this long the mouse doesn’t normally have a lot of tolerance for their starts drawing negative media attention.
Man, I hope Baby Yoda never says anything bad on Twitter.
It would’ve negatively affected the ratings if they’d said anything sooner. I’m sure it was long in the planning, and would’ve been announced in due time, on the mysterious schedule they doggedly stick to for these kinds of things, but then she went wackadoo once more and they brought it forward.
Cancel culture: people getting themselves canceled because the have no culture. What posseses these people to hit “send”?
My God, how could she be so dumb? She threw away years of high profile acting work, millions of dollars, and plenty of goodwill, all for bullshit right wing memes?
Arrogance/privilege. I’ve no doubt she’s feeling terribly aggrieved and spouting on how much she’s the victim.
That sense of martyrdom is, apparently, a helluva drug.
On the one hand, I’m a bit squeamish about people being fired for speech unrelated to their jobs. On the other hand, she’s not Jane From Accounting, she’s a high-profile, public figure, and I understand Disney wanting to disassociate themselves from her.
I personally will miss Cara Dune. I liked her character. For one thing, Gina Carano was one of the vanishingly few female action heroes who actually looked like an action hero. I really liked her character arc - a disillusioned former idealist who has some of that idealism rekindled, and in turn helps rekindle lapsed idealism in other characters. She also brought a lot of raw physicality to a show that’s by necessity CGI-heavy, and I thought she provided a grounded counter-balance to a lot of the wonkier elements of the show. And she was the most direct tie back to the Rebellion-Empire conflict that has been the center of the franchise. I think she was actually a structurally really important element of the show.
All of that said, again, I understand why Disney decided to drop her. She made some truly awful public statements.
But…that Tweet that was apparently the last straw: I don’t understand how it was “anti-Semitic”. I mean, I guess you could construe it as a bass-ackwards minimization of the Holocaust. But I thought it was pretty clear she wasn’t intending to minimize the Holocaust and the suffering of Jews and other targeted groups under the Nazis. She was intending to emphasize the “suffering” of conservatives, Republicans, and Trump supporters in the contemporary United States. And of course that’s silly. Trumpers are somehow both the true majority in the U.S. who re-elected Trump in an historic landslide while simultaneously an oppressed and persecuted minority. And criticism and being outvoted is somehow the same as violent pogroms. Of course it’s an offensive comparison. But I don’t think it’s “anti-Semitic”.