Mandalorian S2:E2 Chat (SPOILERS)

It’s good for a TV show. Unfortunately, most expect it to live up to movie quality story arc every episode. I think Game of Thrones has spoiled us to that type of epic story telling. It’s a lot more enjoyable if your expectations are that of a serial TV show, similar to Star Trek. I will say, though, that the spiders/facehuggers were way too predictable. We’ve seen that reveal about 20 times in Alien movies.

A bit of a non-plot episode but if you think that in the first season there were a couple of these (The Prisoner) which added but didn't develop the story. I liked it and I didn't realise the spiders were from Rebels - yes! The best bit was baby yoda gobbling the egg in the last scene - made me chuckle.

On a side, note, there have been loads of characters which have been Twileks - I wonder if they are gearing us up to a Hera Syndulla reveal? The spiders were a nod to Rebels and she was certainly around - well if you consider the Ghost being there in Ep XI!

I'd like to see the Fett pair up with Mando too - a here's your gear you muppet - oh you cant wear it! Nevermind, there's hardly any Mandolorians around now anyway type of episode.

If Baby Yoda is so keen on those eggs, does that suggest that he comes from the same planet?

I found myself angry at The Child for the first time in the series. I really didn't appreciate him eating Gecko-Girl's progeny and found it heartbreaking rather than hilarious.

The Knobby White Spiders were appropriately terrifying.

I think my favotite part of the episode was when Gecko-Girl rigged the vocabulator of the old droid.

(Yes, I'm aware the subtitles called her Frog Woman, but let's be serious - she looked way more like a gecko.)

I love that it stayed true to pacing. I was scared there would be to much visually and action wise after a great first season. Loving that it is staying true to what made season 1 so great.

"Nauros;c-2189092" wrote:
Ok, I changed my mind about adding the Child here. He eats children, he can be shot at.

Technically the eggs weren't fertilized. They made it way too clear so we didn't hate the child

He did eat a baby spider...

@Lor_San_Teka

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:



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.

Hungry Baby Yoda is an evil bastard. Really.

This episode feels like a massive filler episode to me. The payoff of the episode will be coming next week.

The spiders were terrifying. But not as terrifying as Baby Yoda eyeing up the eggs.

@MasterSeedy thank you for a great reply