I thought the cast was fine - not very subtle, sure, but they were supposed to be playing broad archetypes. Burr especially had the bullying alpha-male asshole type down cold.
It also had this it of dialog:
Raz: He was an imperial sharpshooter.
Mando: That’s not saying much.
Mayfeld: I WASN’T A STORMTROOPER!
It’s also interesting to see that casual anti-Gungan racism is alive and well.
My wife had the exact same reaction. “Bunch of weirdos running around a spaceship” is a standard Who trope, after all.
I guess my canon-nerd radar went off on that scene. A flight of X-wings is reporting to a security beacon activation and they just kinda saunter into their attack? Sloppy formation, S-foils in cruise until the last second rather than weapons-hot, casual chit-chat. It’s like all combat professionalism went out the window as soon as the war was won.
If they had to attack something with anti-fighter defenses (including the original prison transport), they would have been in trouble.
It’s amusing that all the jokes since the series started have been that it’s Jar Jar under the helmet, and it turns out that Favreau anticipated that over a year ago when the episodes were filmed.
There was a bit of dialogue about this when the merc team was in a standoff with the New Republic officer on the bridge. Iirc, Bill Burr’s character said something to the effect that the beacon would call in a New Republic strike team to blow up the transport. The impression I got was that it’s not a distress beacon as in “Somebody please help me”, but as in “The prisoners have all escaped, I’m as good as dead already, just home in on this signal and blow everything up.”
It seems to me that’s the only way the standoff makes any sense. If it were a “help me” signal, the officer should have triggered it the moment he knew the ship had been boarded. Instead, he holds it as a threat against the merc team, but seems very reluctant to use it. That makes sense if and only if he knows he’s signing his own death warrant by triggering it.
On the other hand, why such a signal would be made as a small portable device instead of hardwired into the bridge controls, why the X-Wing pilots didn’t seem to know ahead of time what their target was (wouldn’t they have known they were being scrambled to take out a prison transport not a random space station?), and how Mando timed everything so precisely that the X-Wings would drop out of lightspeed just as he was leaving the station, and not, say, while he was still on the way there, or on board…
Remember, the X-wing commander said that the base was ‘launching a gunship’ or something similar as they approached. The best time to deal with that gunship was before it launched.
The New Republic clearly had a bad case of victory disease. That’s how they wound up letting the First Order get big enough to take them out in a mere 30 years. They really should have listened to Leia.
Decent enough episode, but it does seem (to me) like the famous actors having cameos thing is a bit distracting.
It does seem that the show is basically: Mando and Baby Yoda have adventures. Which is fine, but it’d be nice to have some sort of larger themes at play. There are 2 episodes left in the season - maybe the finale will hint towards a move to finding out Baby Yoda’s story.
Them casually blowing up the space station (which, to me, looked like it could easily have housed dozens of innocent people on it) bugged me a little.
I too wish it was a little less episodic. Is he even* trying *to fix the “they can track Baby Yoda anywhere” problem? Shouldn’t that be priority #1? He’s putting himself, Baby Yoda, and anyone else around him at risk until that’s solved.