Are we there yet? Are we at the point where we, as a citizenry, can acknowledge that The Mandalorian is pretty bad now… and that it wasn’t ever, actually, particularly good?
My own stance on the series has been: it was good, not great, weekly Star Wars. It was amiable enough to begin with, and suggested that it might leave behind its new town / new problem action serial framework after a season or two, and evolve into something really special. After this miserable third season, though, I’m calling it: the show peaked with the delightful second-season premiere, and has slid steadily downhill ever since.
Like everything else in the Disney+ hegemony (lookin’ at you, Obi-Wan Kenobi), The Mandalorian also suffers greatly in the post-Andor world. Their best episode this season was good because it reminded the audience of Andor, albeit at grade-school level scripting and production design. Or, as everyone’s been saying since the moment Andor debuted: “they could have been doing this the whole time?!” Like the shitty projection on Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania following on Avatar: The Way of Water, the back-to-back comparison makes the latter’s slapdashery feel more and more like fraud.
And here’s a dirty secret that’s sure to earn me some boos: it might well turn out that your patience for The Mandalorian is directly connected to how long you continue to find Baby Yoda, a.k.a. Yolo, an infinitely renewable source of adorability. Like everyone else on the planet, I was pretty taken with the little pup when he turned up in the first episode of The Mandalorian. However, unlike most, it seems… I got over it? Pretty quickly? I dunno man: I like gags that vary, over time. I like stories that develop, rather than staying in the same place. This is becoming the fulcrum of my entire relationship with Star Wars.
Sidebar: it is becoming pretty clear, between the ass-backwardness of The Book of Boba Fett and the absolute sidelining of Yolo in this season of The Mandalorian, that the Favs/Filoni braintrust definitely thought they could write Yolo out of the show at the end of Season 2, and were taken wildly aback by the reaction to the character once the first season had debuted. (These series, mind you, are shot several years in advance.) So, like all leaders without the courage of their convictions, they panicked. Season 3 of Mando absolutely plays like a season that was not intended to have Yolo in it (and underlines my running theory that BOBF episodes 5 and 6 were intended for the tail end of season 3 of Mando, not a separate series). I think the producers hastily reverse-engineered this whole season, to bring back the most lucrative single visual ident in Star Wars since Darth Vader’s mask. God, it sucks.
The good news is, the animated Star Wars universe continues to handily hand the live-action universe its ass. The Bad Batch’s season 2 suffered a bit of post-Andor fatigue itself, but adapted to the times more sure-footedly. (Again, these series are made in advance; what I am describing is more luck than fate.) Then Visions season 2 rolled into town and once again cannily captured pretty much everything my imagination has been telling me about Star Wars since I was racing the Millennium Falcon around St. Leonard’s Avenue when I was eight years old. The shorts in season 2 can, and should, be nominated for Academy Awards. (Wouldn’t that be fun!)
The woke agenda
Elsewhere in Disney world (lower-case w), my lifelong interest in childrens’ entertainment has me absolutely howling last month at the shitstorm Bob Iger is sailing himself into in articles like this, where he really does seem to be trying to refuse to answer what has already become a fundamental problem for the company: how do you maintain the delusion for your shareholders that your decisions are merely “entertainment-driven” and apolitical, when the fundamental nature of what is and is not considered appropriate for children has become one of, if not the, leading political dividers of our time? It’s going to be like trying to satisfy two completely separate definitions of reality, like presenting a view of the world that is acceptable to flat-earthers and sane people.
Actually, it’s going to be exactly like that. Like it or not (and old, tired me, definitely does not), we are at an inflection point in the so-called “culture wars,” and like the pedophile-obsessed weirdos that they are, the rightward side of the argument have settled on the perfect fulcrum for their entire assault: children. And if they can’t entirely sell their delusions of pizza parlour child slavery rings (while not entirely backing away from those notions, either), they can sure as hell sell the “pedophilia lite™️” version, where educators are weird perverts for daring to suggest that adolescents might have sexual identities of their own. This was, unfortunately, always coming, being that it’s a cyclical notion in the history of the human race. But it is definitely on the table for the next 18 horrid months of all of our lives.
(Not for the first time am I left thinking, boy it would be a lot better for the rest of us if we just put America on the moon.)
Another theory
Ok, back to The Mandalorian. (Sorry!) The episodes this season were so poorly conceived and written, and in exactly the same fashion as the Boba Fett season (i.e., not even film student level, rough draft mistakes), that I cooked this one up, and once again, it’s built on the fact that the seasons of the Favreauverse are shot a year or more in advance. So here goes:
Three years ago, with one (1) successful season of The Mandalorian behind him and a second completing production, Jon Favreau decided that minting that fucking video wall into existence or creating Zombie Luke Skywalker wasn’t achievement enough for him, and that he wanted to be considered a true digital disruptor, on the level of George Lucas. So, he quietly purchased an A.I. startup, likely not chatGPT but something in the same vein, and had it write The Book of Boba Fett and The Mandalorian’s third season for him.
I know, I know, “this was made by a computer” is (once again, because the joke is not new) about to become the headline for pretty much every negative review of a film or TV show for the next five years. But when I hit on the digital disruptor angle for Favs (a man who, second only to Robert Zemeckis, has thrown an entire career that used to be fairly practically-minded down a rabbit hole of “what can we do digitally?”), coupled with — again — what I consider fairly easy and obvious errors of craft in the two recent seasons’ writing, it lined up in that fun red string sort of way that I like. So, here we are.
Why didn’t this come out publically? Well, Favreau was fully intending to tell everyone after The Book of Boba Fett was a big hit… and then it wasn’t. People cracked the fact that it was terribly written almost immediately, which takes all the shine off the “digital disruptor” idea, doesn’t it? And because Favs owned the A.I. company in question, coming clean became a financial proposition. So he’s quietly buried his stake in that technology and let these two misbegotten seasons of television slip past, and I betcha he’s out on the picket lines right now, with a fresh insight into how useful actual writers actually are.
ITEMS!:
- Speaking of actual writers: Andrea Long Chu, who’s put a couple over the far wall in the last few months alone, just won a Pulitzer. As recently as last month she nailed it once again with this exorbitant assessment of the legacy of The Phantom of the Opera — and I definitely got the whole thing wrong by googling “when is Love Never Dies coming to Toronto,” immediately after I read it.
- In case you haven’t been following whatever scraps of social posts I still create, I’ve restarted Blogging the Next Generation to cover Star Trek: Picard. New posts on Thursdays, running through the end of the year.