I kind of enjoyed it but any actual thought about it certainly lowers my expectations for the rest of the season. The Mandalorian Watch sect is explicitly stupid with regards to ignoring an easy escape path that would have saved at least a few of their supposedly dwindling group. Is a droid with a new memory chip even the droid you remember? If you can immediately escape a giant ship with multiple guns trained in you why dogfight with a bunch of fighters and risk getting shot. Why do pirates ignore a known badass standing feet away when trying to pressure Creed.
Like I said, the vibes were ok even if on the lesser side vs other Mando eps. But I doubt it’s an ep I’ll ever go back to. I guess they felt they needed to have every secondary character this season pop up in ep 1 so they just sorta did a bunch of scenes with them but only barley tied them together.
Pirate Captain Swamp Thing looked really dumb. I know Star Wars is filled with goofy puppet aliens, but I think he looked especially Sid and Marty Kroft.
My wife had never really seen Pedro Pascal in anything before The Mandalorian. As we watched it, she commented that now that we’re into The Last of Us it slightly lessened his mystique. Obviously we’ve seen Din unmasked a couple times, but that’s still different from watching Joel and Ellie for an hour every week.
We actually watched that together when it first hit HBOMax!
I assume the combination of Pascal playing a very different character in WW84 and both of us wanting to forget that whole movie account for that experience not affecting her experience with The Mandalorian.
It’s much lighter fare than Andor, and I don’t think season 3 has done much more than setup and cameos so far… But even without doing much of importance, this opener is still obviously not directed by Robert Rodriguez. The Book of Boba Fett still throws this show into perspective. It’s not fine dining, but it’s also not McDonalds. It’s consistent comfort food. The creature design was fun in this episode, if you really want to highlight something.
The Cracker Barrell of Star Wars TV. I’d say without the regressive hate, but, eh, it’s Disney, so, 50/50 at best on that one, lol.
My gf and I enjoyed it a lot, but we’ve always dug the Mandolorian formula and it’s probably the only relatively lightweight fare we both like a lot, so the mutual enjoyment adds to itself in a very pleasant way for us. It’s absolutely got a lot of very dumb moments, but they lead to enough funny quips, heartwarming moments, gee-whiz cool stuff, etc., that I don’t really mind. I don’t need fiction to be smarter than me, just heartfelt and creative.
I don’t know if this first episode of season 3 in particular was a better than Lucas, but it was certainly no Book of Boba Fett. To me, it almost felt like an Obi-Wan episode. A little too much on the kiddie side, but not enough to be a full cartoon.
The comment was more of the show as a whole rather than the specific episode - which I won’t be critical of. It had a number of storylines to deal with from the last season, we got to see lasers go pew-pew and explosions go boom, got to ooh and ahh over baby yoda, there was a classic space battle among asteroids and even got a western-style quick draw shoot out in the street. I’m satisfied (even with the pirate leader being more Muppet Show Henson than Star Wars Oz).
That’s a great way of putting it. I quite enjoyed the Muppet-y characters this time. It also helps set the vibe, reminding us that this is not Andor flavor Star Wars. It’s lighthearted romp-of-the-week Star Wars.
The first episode of the season was … well, something. Certainly not among the best episodes of the series, and also not among the best-looking ones despite it being helmed by one of the standard directors.
I’m guessing the initial action set piece was supposed to kick off season 3 with a bang, but I found it somewhat unengaging, and it also made some of them look incompetent. It’s like it took them a minute or two to remember that they have jetpacks, and … did they think they’d be able to somehow restrain the beast with four people and some ropes? The pirate ambush action scene, while not bad, ended up feeling nonsensical when Mando simply escapes with the push of a button. It’s like resolution of Neo’s fight against the Smith clones in Matrix Reloaded.
Weird thing to happen: Greef Karga welcomes Mando on the plaza and absolutely and completely does not acknowledge the presence of Grogu in any way. Like, not even a glance.
I assume the pirate sequence escape was there for the benefit of the people that skipped Boba Fett. It was covered there that the Naboo fighter is a notably fast ship, and this was to demonstrate that for the rest of the audience. Perhaps a little clumsy, but I think I get why they did it.
