Peace sells, but who’s buying? Anyone? Mandalorian, reasonable rates!

I mentioned this elsewhere, but I’m also surprised as a parent how much merchandise drives interest in the show instead of the other way around, like I’d always assumed. For my son it was getting tons and tons of stuff with Spider-man, which made him want to see a show with Spidey.

My wife is not happy unless baby Yoda does lots of cute shot on screen. She cares not one whit about the other stuff. Just baby Yoda. I take what I can get.

But I guess that doesn’t fit their storyline, so they ignore that bit of logic.

Unfortunately they are stuck with the stupid plot from the sequel films, so if they want to keep those films canon, they have to work with what they’ve got. Personally, I hate it; if I worked at Disney I’d concede those films blew it and make three new ones with a coherent plot this time. Maybe that’s harder than I’m making it out to be.

I suppose you could surmise that when the Rebel Alliance suddenly and unexpectedly won at the end of Return of the Jedi, within weeks the relatively small leadership, tactics and logistic core of the Alliance would have realized they now had a major problem on their hands. The Empire was huge, and full of mouths to feed and people who depended on the day to day operations under the Empire in order to simply survive. System X produces food, System Y produces droids, System Z has shipyards, etc… The Rebel Alliance would need to quickly form a new governing body (The New Republic) and spread itself very thin to attempt to give these systems their freedom and independence while also keeping them tied together into a trade and logistics federation that keeps the wheels turning on every planet so that the people who live there can have quality of life (food, housing, jobs, income, etc.).

I think we saw a small bit of this reflected in this episode with Coruscant. The wealthy people and aliens make comments at the party about how they can’t remember who’s in charge from day to day because for them not much has changed. The common people are out and about enjoying the freedoms life under the New Republic grants them, but they still need jobs and money, just like every other person on every other world in every other system, so the New Republic is tasked with keeping that going on top of figuring out what to do with all of the former Empire people along with decommissioning huge amounts of Empire ships and armaments…all that leaves a lot of very large gaps that can be exploited by people like Kane and Gideon (and eventually one would assume the Emperor and his First Order).

The Andor Lite bit was like if Andor and Westworld season 3 had an ugly baby. It seems like they had different directors.

I did like the taxi droid though.

I have a Baby Yoda keychain, and our xmas tree topper, which is a handmade Baby Yoda, lives behind my desk. He’s cuteAF. What ya gonna do, not love him to death? Not since the Yoda the Elder has there been such a crowning achievement of puppetry.

Today’s episode is easily the best of the season. Maybe not the whole thing, but there’s a sequence in the middle with by far the most emotional impact we’ve seen this season. The rest of the episode starts to move the plot forward too, without betraying its episodic nature.

It was only after I saw the credits roll that I realized Kelleran was Ahmed Best (of Jar Jar Binks fame). I believe that’s him getting redeemed in the eyes of the fandom, right there.

The Mandalorians vs. the dragon thing was a pretty interesting fight because it did a decent job establishing why they had to fight it the way they did. Much better than the first episode against the angry sea turtle where it wasn’t clear why everyone didn’t simply walk calmly back into the cave.

But overall yikes, is there truly no safer place they could all hang out than this beach that apparently serves as a sort of buffet for the local wildlife?

Seriously! These Mandalorians are idiots. They could at least build some defenses against these creatures, or post lookouts or something. Instead, a dragon flies away with a kid and they’re like “meh, he always gets away.”

Mandalorians doing their helmet ceremonies for their foundlings outside a monster lake feel like rednecks shooting their rifles into the air at the lake.

He previously played a live-action Jedi in Jedi Temple Challenge, a goofy kids adventure game show. His character’s Jedi name here was Kelleran Beq and it was the same in the game show, so apparently they kept that canon!

Other than that, Best has been doing voicework for various animated shows including Star Wars stuff like Clone Wars for years. The good Star Wars fans never blamed him for Binks.

In the paintings after the ep the various Mandalorians look cool but irl they are much less than the sum of their parts. It’s just looks goofy to see them all in various skittles colored armor fake fighting and shit. It sounds so cool on paper but in actuality I find it dorky as hell. A half dozen together are cool. Two to three dozen together just look silly. I don’t totally get why though.

And my god, this sect of Mandos comes across so amazingly stupid. Beach training getting kids eaten. How did they know the kid would be eaten befor they showed up and then waited til morning to rescue him? Was bird monster just holding the kid in her mouth all night? At least they brought up the logistical issues of never removing helmets but how does a larger group fucking eat? And how did Bo not already sit (alone) thru a meal or two?

I did wonder about the baby birds being left to die. Kinda silly solution but I dug it.

It’s the dumbest solution for a group of warriors. “Everyone split up, scatter, and eat alone!”

WTF. Hahahaha

Does it, though? We’re halfway through the season, and I honestly have no clue as to what the main story is supposed to be, other than “Mando and Starbuck hang out with other Mandoloreans.”

And really, that’s the best case scenario. The whole vibe of that camp makes me wonder when they’re going to come to Mando and say, “Now that you’re part of our community, we can let you know about our most holy plans. … So - should we put you down for suicide bombing the godless heathens at the provincial capital? Or would you prefer to remain here to administer the kool-aid to the foundlings if the heathens come for us?”

Though, come to think of it, a twist like that would give this meandering season some direction - Midsommar Mando!

Call it ninja syndrome.

A ninja is awesome. A few ninjas are pretty cool. But an army of ninjas? A bunch of pathetic jobbers.

That’s because if you have only one ninja, or Mandalorean, or whatever in your story it’s always standing up to a whole bunch of enemies holding its own. One person doing all that - it’s amazing! But the only reason you ever see an army of anything in media is if a large percentage of them are going to bite it in short order. So subconsciously we categorize anyone we see in a large group in a big fight scene as cannon fodder.

This is why a lot of media that tries to “raise the stakes” in the next installment by simply throwing more of [supposedly powerful enemy] at the hero ends up feeling underwhelming. Sure, the story can tell us that a single ninja is an unstoppable killing machine, so an army of them is an overwhelming threat. But if we see that Daredevil or Batman or whoever can mow through a dozen of them in short order, we realize they’re really just glorified mooks in black pajamas.

I don’t need to know how Mandolorians eat! In the OG trilogy Vader had a glass of water next to him in two scenes, we didn’t need to see a straw.

Maybe Grogu’s first word will be “dracarys”.

Yeah, I thought that was a pretty cool move. Good work whoever did the casting. Also feel similarly about when they cast Kelly Marie Tran as Raya in “Raya and the Last Dragon.”

In both cases, I think the weakness was in the writing of those characters, not the acting. So it was nice of Disney to try to give them a bit of a boost.

Agreed. And I had never heard of that kids show, and I consider myself a moderate SW fan (I’ve seen all the movies and most of the animated shows). Now more casuals like me will think of Best as the super cool Jedi who dual wields and saved Grogu.

I really enjoyed the episode even though yes, the covert chose a stupid planet on which to live. My head cannon is that it’s supposed to maybe be like Arrakis: a forge for their legendary toughness. Maybe that’s why there was all that stuff about the forge in the episode…