APPROACH THE SPOILERS WITH STEALTH OR THEY WILL CAUSE HARM. IT’S HAPPENED BEFORE.
I was halfway through writing a response to this week’s episode of The Mandalorian, about how both stories presented in “The Foundling” are about The Jedi Order and The Mandalorian covert protecting children, what children represent in these stories, and how both The Jedi Order and The Mandalorians are challenged to reestablish their identities after being decimated by The Empire…and then I said to myself: Freeman, take a breath.
I’d like to pause for a moment, set the analytical approach aside for one week, and declare how gobsmackingly, mouth-wateringly cool The Mandalorian is. Like an influencer cloyingly preaching mindfulness, I am encouraging myself to appreciate the abundance that The Mandalorian represents. Star Wars fans, our cups runneth over.
Let us gaze upon the wonders. Apollo Creed directed an episode of a Star Wars television show where a billion Boba Fetts use their jet packs battle Rodan in mid-air. If you told me in 1991, when I came home from Waldenbooks with a hardcover copy of Heir To The Empire, that someday I would watch a TV show that’s just basically ALL THE BOBA FETTS training a BABY YODA, I would have called you a liar.
If you told me when the prequel trilogy was completed in 2005, that someday the guy who plays Jar Jar Binks would show up on screen as a Jedi, and save a particularly special youngling from Order 66 by defeating clonetroopers with dual-wielded lightsabers, then fly a swoop bike through Coruscant, before blasting off in a Naboo Cruiser that’s the spitting image of the one flown by Anakin and Padme in Attack of the Clones? I would have wondered if you needed to adjust your medication.
This became canon!
Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica (this one not this one) got the symbol of the mythosaur on her pauldron!
This show is a heaping bowl of wish-fulfillment shaped like popcorn (or in my case of coffee, I watch this show in the morning). It’s beloved for its adorableness and Big Dad Energy by casual fans, but for We Who Are Insane For Star Wars? This series is all that and a bag of chips, it’s the whole enchilada, it’s the super-sized combo, it’s the sauce, it’s the gravy, it’s the salt and the paper, it’s the biggest bowl of chili with onions and melted cheese.
It can be hard to remember to appreciate this stuff. When you’re on Chapter 20 of a series it can feel less special than Chapter 1. That’s just human nature. Novelty is replaced by familiarity and, as the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. So, every once in a while, it’s worth reminding oneself that this much of a good thing is still a lot of good things.
It’s amazing to me, for example, that the kind of visual effects that it took ILM years to produce between each of the original films are now surpassed on a weekly basis. Coruscant took every ounce of processing power available when they went “From Puppets to Pixels” on computers that looked like this:
Now, over the last four weeks, we’ve seen incredible live-action sights of Star Wars, dogfights with TIE fighters and TIE bombers, the vast landscapes of Mandalore, cyclops scavenger droids, a race through Coruscant, on a scale that was once unavailable to feature films, let alone the small screen. What they’re able to how us for like ten bucks a month is…I believe the technical term is bonkers.
Ahmed Best’s appearance as Jedi Master Kelleran Beq is the perfect example of the ethos that drives The Mandalorian. I literally cheered when he appeared on screen (in a way that made me wish I’d watched it with an audience). To a casual Star Wars fan, this is the exciting story of Grogu’s escape. To a fan with a deeper knowledge of what goes on beyond the screen, this is a huge gift to Ahmed Best himself. He went from expecting to be the new Chewbacca, to being the man who played the most derided character in cinema, to a deep depression, to eventual re-engagement with the fans who love him. This triumphant entrance? That’s good karma. That’s some serious Light Side. That’s what makes The Mandalorian so special.
Star Wars has always been made up of the obsessions and obsessiveness of its makers, a delicate mishmash of the old fashioned and the cutting edge. With George Lucas, Star Wars was largely driven by the vision of a misanthropic introvert, a stubbornly independent filmmaker. Lucas was as interested in his own creative freedom as he was with what he actually created. It’s that tension that made the saga films such personal, memorable, and peculiar pop culture.
With The Mandalorian, we have a series that is obsessed with us. It’s a big smile of a story that invites audiences smile back. It shares Lucas’s relentless pursuit of freedom through technology, but where Lucas was carving out space to speak with his own voice, Favreau is using the space he’s been given to speak with the voice of the fan.
So, I’m sure next week I’ll get back to breaking down the various threads and themes of the series, but for this week, I just wanted to take a moment to say, this whole show is wild, and I’m having the most fun watching it, and I still kind of can’t believe it exists. I hope you’re having a wonderful time, too.
i'm enjoying Bo Katan's exploration of what it means to be Mandalorian. the mountain climb was by-the-numbers and some of it didn't make sense -- if stealth was really a priority then Paz should've left his three-foot arm-cannon at the covert. lastly, i love that the range of directors this season include Apollo Creed and the Minari guy.
I also like that- in keeping with the Star Wars tradition of planets having single biomes- the covert has chosen one whose biome is "Monsters".