Given how much Force use is tied to emotional state, it seems likely to me that there are some powers that are specifically “Dark” or “Light” side. I can pretty easily imagine that, if you want to summon up some Force Lightning, you have to focus on how much you hate the person you’re about to electrocute, and how much you want him to suffer. Which are inherently Dark Side emotions. Likewise, using the Force to calm a wild animal, or peacefully disperse an angry crowd, require the Force User to operate from a place of calm and serenity, which is inherently Light Side. But I think most powers would be inherently neutral, and could be used for either Light or Dark ends.
That’s definitely always been how I’ve viewed it.
I dunno. The big showdown made it clear that they’re equally good at deflecting blaster fire. Din’s armor is new and shiny since it’s all been recently forged for him. Fett’s armor is battered and worn because it’s seen so much service - The Armorer and Paz Vizsla aren’t nearly as shiny as Din.
So I didn’t really get the post credits scene. That was Cobb Vanth in the tank, yes? But who was the dreadlock guy seemingly out to do something nefarious with a bunsen burner?
It’s not shabby; it’s battle tested! And for armor, I think that’s pretty cool. Clear evidence that someone has tried to take out the wearer, and yet they survived. Very bad-ass.
That was the guy that turns patients into mods (cyborgs).
Exactly – he’s the guy to whom Fett took the dying Fennec, a few episodes ago.
Ah, right! Thanks, absolutely couldn’t place him. Somehow the mood seemed to inply something sinister to me…
They are both Beskar, Boba’s armor is painted specific colors like most other Mandalorians while Din’s is just metallic. The paintjob obviously takes a beating with use, but he just gave it a new coating during last season of the Mandalorian.
Yeah, the framing, with the cyberdoc facing away, then turning toward the camera and lighting up the laser scalpel, is pretty common cinematic shorthand for Something Bad About to Happen. You’d expect him to cackle evilly. But I think it was just supposed to be anticipatory. Next time we see Cobb Vanth, he’s going to be a badass cyborg! Possibly as a member of the Rangers of the New Republic. So, possibly, going from Marshal Raygun Givens to Ranger Captain FCoxxbb.
So while I overall enjoyed the series, I have to agree with those who say it was a bit of a mess, plot-wise. It seemed like they started out in many different directions, and then just were like, on second thought let’s not go there, 'tis a silly place. Boba builds up a strong bond with the Tusken, then they’re just killed off-screen. (It was referenced again, but to no real effect in the end.) The twins threaten Boba’s claim to Daimyo-hood, and then are just like, our home planet needs us. Din Djarin tries to reconnect with his Mandalorian roots, only to have them kick him out. The darksaber apparently can’t be wielded like any ordinary blade, but nothing comes of it—I’d at least have expected a moment of realization and inner piece allowing Din to work with the blade, rather than against it, and then wield it almost jedi-like, as hokey as that would’ve been, but in the final battle, he just seems to be doing sort of alright with it.
On the other hand, on some plotlines, it feels like we skipped a step or two. Boba gets a rancor—because it didn’t fit the twins’ hand luggage, or something—, and has a bit of a moment with it, and then we just see him riding it like he’s never done anything else in the final battle.
I also think they’ve somewhat painted themselves in a corner with Grogu. He’s not really a character so much as mostly a kind of cute relief, interspersed with moments of badass adorable. It’s hard to develop that character, in particular when it seems like he’s got a 100 years to go before he’s going to sprout his first chin hairs. The idea of a 50 year old infant is cute, but also means he can’t really become a truly participating character in any sort of time frame in which the others would still be alive. Seeing him train at his current developmental stage already threatened to collapse into just plain ridiculousness.
Well, maybe his species goes through a sort of pupation from which he can emerge at least Yoda-sized…? Perhaps after having eaten enough frogs and slugs and so on?
grogu reminds me of the baby smurf character from the smurfs … he’s there just to be cute and cuddly but is probably the most powerful one ever and writing-wise they just use his powers no one knows he’s aware of to get out of tight situations …
Nobody seems to have noticed that Grogu says something in this episode. I don’t know what he says (it sounds like “yeaa”) but it is in a gravelly alien voice, not infant cooing.
At least he didn’t say Maclunkey, I guess.
It hurts to say as a big fan of Sophie Thatcher from Yellowjackets but the part that really felt the most out of place to me was the Mods. They ride around in brand new fancy space vespas, they are covered in very expensive body mods, and somehow we are supposed to take them for street kids that can’t even afford water? This are tattooine trust fund kids playing at being a gang.
None of the economics of Tatooine make sense.
Seriously…people are smashing over water containers all the time like they’re vegetable carts.
Howdy folks. I haven’t participated in the thread yet, partly because I was consistently a week or two behind on watching the episodes and didn’t want to get too spoiled. But now that it’s over, I’m caught up and a little wired from the Super Bowl, I figure I’ll vent a little. I’m quite certain that my thoughts have well and truly been covered in the preceding 500 posts, so I’ll understand if you ignore this entirely. In fact, I’d probably recommend it.
TL;DR: Holy cow this show was terrible. Even by bad Star Wars movie standards it was cringe. Perhaps not quite as utterly insulting as the Sequel Trilogy, but this was downright amateurish. I know Robert Rodriguez made his bones creating campy horror flicks, but he’s made some respectable stuff. I can’t believe how utterly inept the overall production felt. In spite of a few enjoyable nuggets, Mando, Grogu, Cad Bane, Rancor, CGI Luke this was a bit of a trainwreck.
Let’s first talk about the things that I really enjoyed since that list is fairly short and manageable. Also because the good stuff came in the last couple episodes and that’s fresher in my memory.
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Mando: I’m an absolute sucker for Din Djarin’s charatcer. Just watching the way that Pedro Pascal moves in that armor is dripping with charisma. He’s just so utterly cool. And while his story arc in this crappy story is stupid, watching him was worthwhile and fun. His interactions with Grogu are adorable but shoehorning that into the middle of a fight sequence was just painful to watch. I also really enjoyed his scenes with Ahsoka.
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Ahsoka: While we’re on the topic, Rosario Dawson’s portrayal of Ahsoka is pretty excellent. I’m not completely sold on her being involved in Luke’s creation of the new Jedi School considering her original story. However, Dawson was a great bit of casting, and she really does a great job of bringing that character to life. We got a decent chunk of her in The Mandalorian and I was glad to see her back. She didn’t really have a lot to do in terms of story, she was really just an exposition device, but her rapport with Mando is rock solid.
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CGI Luke: Seems like they really made some improvements in the de-aging/deep fake technology they used to get him on screen. It’s probably been discussed in this thread already but apparently a fan produced an improved version of the climactic scene in Mandalorian and Lucasfilm/ILM was so impressed they hired the guy. Maybe that contributed to the dramatic improvement. It felt like we were back with RotJ Luke for a while. Excellent voice acting by Hammill and the character managed to almost completely avoid the Uncanny Valley effect. It seems like the folks at Disney are trying to fill in the gaps between RotJ and TFA to explain how Luke ended up the way he did. I’m not sure that’s how I really want Luke character to go, but if they aren’t going to decononize the sequels I suppose this is the least bad thing they could do to Luke. The inversion of the Luke-Yoda training sequences are a little fan-servicey but still enjoyable.
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Grogu: This one is a little more tepid than the first 3, but I still liked seeing Grogu. I understand the difficultly the Mandalorian braintrust would have carrying that story forward without Grogu. but I’m not sure having a force-baby around a bounty hunter is going to work in the long term. I would have left him with Luke and broke free from that story. It ended great; they should have left it alone. But, I still like the Mando-Grogu stuff even if watching the mid-battle reunion made us collectively dumber as a society. Grogu oscillating between being a disobedient, fussy baby and then being an individual with the agency to make the life choice that Luke offered is, shall we say, challenging to reconcile.
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Rancor: This was pretty awesome. If Boba is replacing Jabba of course he’d have a Rancor pet. And watching him rampage through the city was fun. I’m not exactly sure that Boba needed to be riding him, just having him as a protective pet would have probably worked. It’s pretty unclear if Rancors are sentient, that seemed a little all over the place. The Rancor fighting the Battle Droids was a solid spectacle.
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Cad Bane: I managed to avoid most of the spoilers so when he appeared I was legitimately excited. I wouldn’t have thought that they’d be able to make his character not look absurd in live-action but on that point I’m glad I was wrong. His character has always been a little too derivative of Spaghetti Western characters, and this version really steered into it, but that’s not a complaint I can lodge against this show. That was well and truly baked into the canon already. This version seemed a bit more vicious than the version from Clone Wars and Rebels but overall it worked. My main complaint is that he’s just a bit too infallible in a fight for a guy without any real special abilities, but again it’s well established in the canon that he can go toe to toe with Jedi so that too isn’t really this show’s fault. Was glad they kept the excellent voice actor. If I were to lodge a complaint it would probably be that every single secondary character doesn’t need to be drawn from the existing properties…you are allowed to create new ones Lucasfilm.
And that’s pretty much it for the good stuff. Post to follow with as many complaints as I can squeeze in before bedtime. Trust that it won’t be complete, I don’t think there are enough pixels on the web to capture every gripe I have.
And now for the shit slinging. Let’s see if I can keep this a somewhat more concise since I’m sure it’s a horse that’s been well and truly beaten already.
Let’s make another list.
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Boba Fett: I hate to say it, but Temura Morrison sort of ruined this entire show. I liked him in the Prequel Trilogy and in general I’m happy when an actor gets recast. But he was the anchor around the neck of this show. His acting was at best wooden and the dude isn’t exactly a spry 60 year old. Watching him try to do fight choreography was comically bad. We’re supposed to believe this guy is some fearsome killer? Seriously? The underlying story defies logic too. Why exactly is the cutthroat guy who we say working for Vader & Jabba suddenly intent on being some idealistic governor? I can maybe buy him wanting to be a crime lord, but not a crime lord who’s whole-hearted opposed to violence and fear tactics. I get that his stint with the tropey noble savages is supposed to be some kind of come-to-jesus moment for him but I didn’t buy it. In the end, the charatcer arc doesn’t really matter since the dialogue, direction and acting that were expected to support it are so, so dismal.
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Fennec Shand: Take everything I said about Boba and double it for Shand. Ming-Na Wen is a capable actress but she was sleepwalking through this role. She seemed like the character that the director used to essentially say everything out loud just in case the audience had a collective head wound and needed to be spoon fed exposition. Her dialogue was amazing in its crudeness, like high school play…but not the senior class, the freshman and sophomores. She too is a 60 year old that we’re supposed to stomach as a galactic-level elite fighter. To say that her and Morrison’s choreography was hard to watch is an understatement. It was like watching old people fuck. Unlike Morrison she’s not reprising a role from a movie 20 years ago, so maybe they could have cast someone without arthritis? There’s no in-story reason why either of these characters are geriatric.
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The Fett Gotra: This is kind of broad, but what the fuck kind of crime organization is this? As far as anyone can tell its Boba, Shand, two Gamorreans, a Rancor trainer and a couple of hangers on. We’re to believe that Shand and Fett killed every single person loyal to Fortuna which defies credulity in the first place, and then they expect to rule Mos Espa and dominate its vassal crime families with a squad that can fit inside a Country Squire? Of course they later depend on the arrival of a bunch of merchants and farmers from Freetown to overcome the combination of the Pykes, Bane and the other crime families? I mean, we’re expected to swallow this Bantha fodder? Boba’s plan is exactly what? He’s expecting to collect tribute (protection) from all the businesses because he wears armor and is a good shot? While also being an all-around nice guy who doesn’t like to ruffle anyone’s feathers? All in all, I guess this complaint can be expanded to include the entire premise of the show. How drunk were they when they came up with this basic plot?
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The Book of Boba Fett: This probably should have been a huge red flag. It’s a fantastically stupid title that in the end has nothing at all to do with the story. What “book” are we talking about…did you simply want some alliteration? Let’s pray there’s no volume 2.
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The Noble Savages: I mentioned this already, and I’m not really on some Pc gag here, but this trope is so, so tired. Setting aside the vaguely racist history associated with these types of stories, it really doesn’t make sense. Are we to believe that the worldly Boba Fett, who had spent his life tracking bounties across the galaxy as a child and adult, is somehow transformed into some moral paragon because these Tusken choose to enslave him instead of killing him? Looking past that, the scenes with Boba and the Tusken were actually not that bad cinematically. Probably because there was almost no talking. However the choice to tell that story in a series of dream sequences broke up the flow of the first several episodes terribly. These weren’t just flashes…we’d flash back and stay there for 2//3rds of an episode. At that point, just make these scenes their own episodes. Just bad storytelling.
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Sarlacc: So how exactly did Boba get separated from his armor here? Why would it protect him? Was the slow death that Jabba threatened complete bullshit? If not, then why were those Stormtroopers dead? Basically anyone with a blaster can get out of the pit? Honestly, they should have just left this some mystery that happened off-screen. Boba surviving the pit was always a stretch, but showing it was stupid. Maybe it could have worked as a bit of legend that increased Boba’s fearsomeness.
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Blaster-proof: We know that beskar is killer stuff and Mando shakes off a fair bit of fire in his show, but this took things to an obscene level. Krrsantan gets shot like 50 times and he’s wearing nothing but fur. Why exactly is he running around without a limp at the end of the episode? It was like lazy cosplay. Mando and Boba choose to fight by running into the middle of an intersection surrounded by bad guys and just soak up fire? They aren’t bathed head to toe in armor, there’s plenty of gaps, yet they never take a shot that really hurts them? And this is the best strategy that these guys can come up with? Even the stupid Mods and the Freetowners are smart enough to find cover. This problem was pervasive throughout the series, but the finale was basically unwatchable because of it. Of course when it was plot convenient Mando takes one to the leg and Boba takes one from Cad Bane. Fuck you Rodriguez.
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The Mods: I mean, what the fuck? Twee teenagers on Vespas are your trump card Boba? First off, they were WAY out of place on Tatooine. We’ve never seen anything shiny in this place and we’re supposed to buy that these people are some Robinhood gang? Or that the locals fear them? And the “mods” that they are named for are useful in a fight how? Whoever came up with that needs to be fired and never work again.
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Peli Motto: I get that some people seem to like Amy Sedaris. Personally, I could have used about 75% less of her on BoJack Horseman. But Peli Motto has consistently been the most unwatchable part of The Mandalorian. Her silly slapstick vibe is jarring and her ability to somehow thrive on Mos Espa as a one-woman repair shop is narratively dumb. Did we really need to increase her usage rate here in Boba? This is an example similar to the previous complaint about the Fett Gotra, why is she operating alone with just a few droids? Do these people not have friends, family or employees? It kills the suspension of disbelief and it makes the show feel small. Like Disney couldn’t spare the credits to hire a couple more actors. Overall, everything about this character grates.
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Darksaber: I’m willing to park this in the TBD bucket for now, but I can’t see what the point of this whole unable to wield gimmick is. I suppose maybe they are just setting this up as a plotline for the next season of Mando, but in this show it was just a head scratcher.
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The Tribe: I liked the scenes from Mandalorian about the covert and Mando’s weird beliefs, but it really felt shoehorned in here. Why are we seeing Mando fighting Paz and getting ejected from the covert in a Boba Fett episode? Shouldn’t this be in the regular series with a little more room for development? Can we maybe spend more than 5 minutes of screentime on this? And the Armorer makes a little ass mail shirt for Grogu from that giant spear? Seems like a shitty deal to me.
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Razor Crest: So the Razor Crest gets destroyed and he replaces it with a Podracer…I mean a Naboo Starfighter? Those ships are kind cool and having the equivalent of a drag racer will lead to some interesting dogfight scenes, but it’s not going to be very conducive to him being a bounty hunter. Or him living and sleeping on a ship. Are we just going to pretend that Mando doesn’t need to transport supplies or people anymore? Is Grogu just gonna sleep in his little jump seat? Where will they take a shit? Unless they directly address this in the coming season of Mandalorian I’m gonna say this is another example of atrocious writing from this group.
OK, I suppose that’s enough for now. I’m sure I’m not breaking any new ground here…I’m not sure if I’m relieved that Mando, Luke, Ahsoka and Grogu showed up to make this show tolerable or if I’m pissed off that their characters ended up getting some of the stink on them from this smelly pile of poodoo.
I thought it was fun.