Last night's Mandalorian could've easily been better but it wasn't so bad. It sort of made good on an interesting premise though, by the end, I felt a little like I was watching Power Rangers. I also think they reused some sets from Obi-Wan Kenobi which made me realise this season of The Mandalorian is at least not as bad as that.
We get a holographic meeting among Imperials and Moff Gideon strides back onto the show. I'm not sure if I've said it before but while I think Giancarlo Esposito is a great actor I think he's totally miscast as a Star Wars villain. The reason he worked so well in Breaking Bad was that he seemed like a normal guy and you only got a hint of the malevolence underneath when his face turned to stone. He's not cut out for grandstanding, delivering deliberately cliche villain dialogue (“We shall be rid of the Mandalorians once and for all!”). He looks like a cosplayer in that armour he wears.
We do get to see the live action Pellaeon, though, surprisingly played by an American actor, Xander Berkeley. Pellaeon was Thrawn's right hand man in the old Expanded Universe, in the Timothy Zahn books beginning with Heir to the Empire in 1991. This gives some credence to the rumour that the Ahsoka series will be at least in part an adaptation of Heir to the Empire, which could explain how Dave Filoni plans to get around the fact that he can't write.
Filoni co-wrote last night's episode with Jon Favreau. After the Imperial conference scene established some Imperial officers as cartoonish villains, we go back to Nevarro where Greef Karga presents Din with some liquor all the way from Coruscant which, judging from the time tables of travel between Coruscant and the Outer Rim established in a Dave Filoni episode earlier in this season, must have endured a voyage of at least an hour to reach Nevarro.
The vast assemblage of Mandalorians finally meet, many of them with hair sticking visibly out of their supposedly vacuum sealed helmets, including Bo-Katan's. The campaign to retake Mandalore from, they think, no-one, begins. It's more of a "rebuild" project. It'd been established before that there were no Mandalorians on Mandalore but almost immediately our heroes meet a whole bunch of them, a big group of Night Owls who ply the landscape on a big, slow moving hovership which is quickly destroyed for being too slow to escape a slow moving kaiju. The dialogue continually sounds off. One Mandalorian spots the monster "on the starboard bow" as though it's perched on the railing. Later, Moff Gideon tells his people to "activate" the TIE Interceptors and Bombers instead of "launch". I wanted to get a shot of them all powering up and then tumbling, pilotless, to the ground.
Although I do think it's better than Obi-Wan Kenobi, Din getting trapped on one side of a door really reminded me of that series. I'm looking forward to hearing Favreau's explanation for why Gideon would want to take Din alive. A trade for Grogu, perhaps? He doesn't actually seem interested in everyone's favourite green Mogwai right now, though (Gremlins creator Joe Dante accused The Mandalorian of ripping off Gizmo).
The best part of the episode once again involved Grogu being cute. Now he's piloting around an assassination droid like Krang from Ninja Turtles. It is cute but once again Grogu's actual maturity level is pretty hazy. He clearly understands "yes" and "no" but why can't he say "yes" and "no"? Well, it's cute.
Paz Vizsla's last stand against the Praetorian guards was pretty cool. A sense of him being a real badass was established when he was able to take down all the Dark Troopers, which made the Praetorians seem even more badass when they took Paz down. Retroactively enhancing the fight with Rey and Kylo in Last Jedi.
The Mandalorian is available on Disney+.
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