Mandalorian S2:E2 Chat (SPOILERS)
Episode 2 is out. Feel free to discuss.
Forum Discussion
@Lor_San_Teka
A few things. The first was that he seemed entirely too ready to kill the marshal in the bar. Cobb Vanth had told Mando that he had bought the armor from jawas. There was no reason to doubt his story. A man who buys armor is probably a man who's willing to sell armor. The entire show is built on the premise that Mando is a "good" bounty hunter. He tries not to kill when he doesn't need to do so, uses tactics that are less likely to cause collateral damage (no "nuke it from orbit" schemes), etc.
So he found a guy who bought some armor off of Jawas. No Jawas are going to kill a Mandalorian in full kit. So at worst, Vanth bought some armor off someone who bought the armor off someone who killed a Mandalorian, and din djarin doesn't even know if that would have been a fair fight.
So when they made Mando willing to kill Vanth just for owning scrap armor, I thought they betrayed a core part of the character they'd been building up for 8 full episodes. And why were they willing to trade away all this character development? What was the big payoff they get for destroying a season's work? Three seconds of tension before the dragon shows up.
I thought that was a horrible choice.
Now don't get me wrong, I can watch a lot of sci-fi with horrible choices and still enjoy them. But I tend to be much more forgiving on bad fight tactics or bad special effects than bad characterization. I'm not sure why, that's just how I roll.
So other things that I thought were genuinely bad, but they're mostly excusable. Feel free to read some gory details if you like:
In the end, the battle against the dragon didn't matter. Sure it mattered that the dragon died, but it didn't matter if it was hard or easy. It didn't matter who died. The battle has no longer lasting effects that need explaining. Nothing.
If they jumped right from setting the trap to finding the pearl in the carcass, neither the plot nor the characters would be affected in any way at all.
Contrast that with SW: Ep4. If you cut out the battle against the death star, there's a character - Biggs - who doesn't get killed, there's a change in attitude toward Han, who fled before the battle, that isn't explained, and (this is the biggest one) a change in Luke's relationship to both the Force and to Force-Ghost-Kenobi that isn't explained. Who Luke is and why he's willing to follow FGK's instructions to head for degobah are dramatically affected not just by the fact that the death star was destroyed, but by how that battle played out, by what happened while the death star was being destroyed.
I really don't want others to enjoy the show less because there were some things that I don't like about it.
In fact, I think that @Ltswb1 was right to say we need to think of this show more like Star Trek than Star Wars. In ST most of the things that happen in one episode don't affect the characters in any ongoing way. I like ST from seeing reruns as a kid in the 80s, so it tends to get grandfathered in because I liked it before my adult tastes developed.
But I don't consider ST:TOS "stellar". I just liked it without thinking about whether or not it is "good". Likable is different from good or bad.
So I see people raving about Mando & I can understand that towards the end of last season. They really had gotten to a great place. Like being trapped by a lava river. If it had been a river of sewage or something, you can understand how humans might not want to get in, but making it lava was important because that detail makes IG-11 the ONLY one who could save them from the trap. Sewage would have made people not want to get in. Lava made people **unable** to get in.
So at the end of season 1, how things happened mattered, which meant that everything that happened on screen mattered.
In episode 1 of season 2, you could cut out the entire 12 minutes or so of dragon fight and you get to exactly the same place. That's 12 full minutes that just don't matter.
I'm not saying that can't be fun, that those fights can't be fan service, but they don't matter. Not even a little bit.
I think that's less than stellar. I think they have the team & the budget to create fights that are fun to watch and also fights that matter to the characters at the same time.
I don't think this is a bad show by any means, but it's not what I saw at the end of season 1, and I think it has a bunch of room to get better. I hope it does. Or I hope I can just let my expectations slide & watch it as mindless special effects & stunts with a few fun moments of characterization thrown in for pacing.
But right now I'm feeling critical. I'm not enjoying what it is as much as I could, and the creative team is not producing the quality of show that it could be
So that's my verdict. It's good but not stellar. I'm personally a bit disappointed, though I know others with different expectations could easily be enjoying it & I in now way begrudge them that.
What was "less than stellar" about episode 1, iyo?
A few things. The first was that he seemed entirely too ready to kill the marshal in the bar. Cobb Vanth had told Mando that he had bought the armor from jawas. There was no reason to doubt his story. A man who buys armor is probably a man who's willing to sell armor. The entire show is built on the premise that Mando is a "good" bounty hunter. He tries not to kill when he doesn't need to do so, uses tactics that are less likely to cause collateral damage (no "nuke it from orbit" schemes), etc.
So he found a guy who bought some armor off of Jawas. No Jawas are going to kill a Mandalorian in full kit. So at worst, Vanth bought some armor off someone who bought the armor off someone who killed a Mandalorian, and din djarin doesn't even know if that would have been a fair fight.
So when they made Mando willing to kill Vanth just for owning scrap armor, I thought they betrayed a core part of the character they'd been building up for 8 full episodes. And why were they willing to trade away all this character development? What was the big payoff they get for destroying a season's work? Three seconds of tension before the dragon shows up.
I thought that was a horrible choice.
Now don't get me wrong, I can watch a lot of sci-fi with horrible choices and still enjoy them. But I tend to be much more forgiving on bad fight tactics or bad special effects than bad characterization. I'm not sure why, that's just how I roll.
So other things that I thought were genuinely bad, but they're mostly excusable. Feel free to read some gory details if you like:
Spoiler
We can start with not using the bomb-laden banthas as the trap from the beginning, because as soon as I saw banthas carrying those loads, that's what I thought their plan was going to be --- now that mistake fell into "tactics or whatever" mistakes that I find more forgivable. It distracts from enjoyment of course, but not nearly as much as making someone as conscientious as the Mandalorian into a stone cold killer of strangers for a three second payoff which doesn't even affect the plot. I mean, did Mando go on to try to poke holes in his Jawa story when he told it in full later? Or did he give signs that he disliked Vanth? That he didn't trust him in other ways? Was there some evidence that by first seeing him in Mandalorian armor that made for a rockier team up against the dragon?
All nope.
I mean, if he had stayed hostile to Vanth the entire episode, you could say that although he doesn't like killing unnecessarily, non-Mandalorians wearing Mandalorian armor is just that big a deal. But in this case, it was a big enough deal for him to seriously think about killing a local law-enforcement agent / town leader, but it wasn't important to think about ever again once 4 seconds had passed.
Next up we could talk about using unanchored line to pull on the dragon. Just look at the difference in mass between 3 humanoids & 1 Krayt dragon! If people are going to make a plan to face such a beast, I would prefer that they're not entirely stupid. Are you really telling me that in a galaxy with hyperdrives these people don't understand F=M*A? Or momentum = M*V? So I thought there was a bit of stupid tactics & a couple other minor flaws, but that's all forgivable in my opinion. Too many such things might take a movie or show out of "stellar" territory for me, but there weren't a huge number.
But there was that huge Freud-up with the Mando/Vanth stand off, and there was also one more significant thing: I know I'm probably in the minority on this, but I thought the dragon battle took way too long. There was never any doubt that the dragon would die & Mando would get the armor, so the only reason to have a long battle would be if the fight itself was important to Mando in some other way & I can't see that it was. There's no ongoing injury that makes him vulnerable for a few episodes or anything like that. The battle is over & it suddenly doesn't matter how the dragon was killed at all.
If the important part is that the dragon is killed & not how the dragon is killed, then don't spend 12 minutes on the fight in a 45 minute episode (or whatever number of minutes it was). The fight it self, how long it was how hard it was, how many tuskers or villagers got killed & which ones got killed, NONE of that mattered. So why show it?
IMO, if you're going to spend that long on a battle, it better advance character development. Give a scene to one of the villagers earlier where they have some significant moment with Mando, then make that villager one that dies because Mando's battle plan failed. Then Mando can make rash battle plans & get injured in a way that affects him later, or damages his whistling birds. Or make him feel grief at the loss of this person. Or if the significant moment was about offering Mando something that would be useful on his quest, now Mando has to complete the quest without this help because of the lack of good planning on his part in setting up the first attack on the dragon.
All those things (or any one of those things) would have made the battle worth watching, would have made it a useful part of the narrative, but none of them happened.
All nope.
I mean, if he had stayed hostile to Vanth the entire episode, you could say that although he doesn't like killing unnecessarily, non-Mandalorians wearing Mandalorian armor is just that big a deal. But in this case, it was a big enough deal for him to seriously think about killing a local law-enforcement agent / town leader, but it wasn't important to think about ever again once 4 seconds had passed.
Next up we could talk about using unanchored line to pull on the dragon. Just look at the difference in mass between 3 humanoids & 1 Krayt dragon! If people are going to make a plan to face such a beast, I would prefer that they're not entirely stupid. Are you really telling me that in a galaxy with hyperdrives these people don't understand F=M*A? Or momentum = M*V? So I thought there was a bit of stupid tactics & a couple other minor flaws, but that's all forgivable in my opinion. Too many such things might take a movie or show out of "stellar" territory for me, but there weren't a huge number.
But there was that huge Freud-up with the Mando/Vanth stand off, and there was also one more significant thing: I know I'm probably in the minority on this, but I thought the dragon battle took way too long. There was never any doubt that the dragon would die & Mando would get the armor, so the only reason to have a long battle would be if the fight itself was important to Mando in some other way & I can't see that it was. There's no ongoing injury that makes him vulnerable for a few episodes or anything like that. The battle is over & it suddenly doesn't matter how the dragon was killed at all.
If the important part is that the dragon is killed & not how the dragon is killed, then don't spend 12 minutes on the fight in a 45 minute episode (or whatever number of minutes it was). The fight it self, how long it was how hard it was, how many tuskers or villagers got killed & which ones got killed, NONE of that mattered. So why show it?
IMO, if you're going to spend that long on a battle, it better advance character development. Give a scene to one of the villagers earlier where they have some significant moment with Mando, then make that villager one that dies because Mando's battle plan failed. Then Mando can make rash battle plans & get injured in a way that affects him later, or damages his whistling birds. Or make him feel grief at the loss of this person. Or if the significant moment was about offering Mando something that would be useful on his quest, now Mando has to complete the quest without this help because of the lack of good planning on his part in setting up the first attack on the dragon.
All those things (or any one of those things) would have made the battle worth watching, would have made it a useful part of the narrative, but none of them happened.
In the end, the battle against the dragon didn't matter. Sure it mattered that the dragon died, but it didn't matter if it was hard or easy. It didn't matter who died. The battle has no longer lasting effects that need explaining. Nothing.
If they jumped right from setting the trap to finding the pearl in the carcass, neither the plot nor the characters would be affected in any way at all.
Contrast that with SW: Ep4. If you cut out the battle against the death star, there's a character - Biggs - who doesn't get killed, there's a change in attitude toward Han, who fled before the battle, that isn't explained, and (this is the biggest one) a change in Luke's relationship to both the Force and to Force-Ghost-Kenobi that isn't explained. Who Luke is and why he's willing to follow FGK's instructions to head for degobah are dramatically affected not just by the fact that the death star was destroyed, but by how that battle played out, by what happened while the death star was being destroyed.
I really don't want others to enjoy the show less because there were some things that I don't like about it.
In fact, I think that @Ltswb1 was right to say we need to think of this show more like Star Trek than Star Wars. In ST most of the things that happen in one episode don't affect the characters in any ongoing way. I like ST from seeing reruns as a kid in the 80s, so it tends to get grandfathered in because I liked it before my adult tastes developed.
But I don't consider ST:TOS "stellar". I just liked it without thinking about whether or not it is "good". Likable is different from good or bad.
So I see people raving about Mando & I can understand that towards the end of last season. They really had gotten to a great place. Like being trapped by a lava river. If it had been a river of sewage or something, you can understand how humans might not want to get in, but making it lava was important because that detail makes IG-11 the ONLY one who could save them from the trap. Sewage would have made people not want to get in. Lava made people **unable** to get in.
So at the end of season 1, how things happened mattered, which meant that everything that happened on screen mattered.
In episode 1 of season 2, you could cut out the entire 12 minutes or so of dragon fight and you get to exactly the same place. That's 12 full minutes that just don't matter.
I'm not saying that can't be fun, that those fights can't be fan service, but they don't matter. Not even a little bit.
I think that's less than stellar. I think they have the team & the budget to create fights that are fun to watch and also fights that matter to the characters at the same time.
I don't think this is a bad show by any means, but it's not what I saw at the end of season 1, and I think it has a bunch of room to get better. I hope it does. Or I hope I can just let my expectations slide & watch it as mindless special effects & stunts with a few fun moments of characterization thrown in for pacing.
But right now I'm feeling critical. I'm not enjoying what it is as much as I could, and the creative team is not producing the quality of show that it could be
So that's my verdict. It's good but not stellar. I'm personally a bit disappointed, though I know others with different expectations could easily be enjoying it & I in now way begrudge them that.
