"The Mandalorian" Season 2

 

Imagine if the Sequel Trilogy had had a sensible release schedule (i.e. one every three years, as was done with the Originals and even the Prequels) and in late 2020 we were still a year away from Episode IX, or perhaps even two years if Michael Arndt had been given the time he needed for his original Episode VII script. Instead the Sequel Trilogy is done, and increasingly feels like ancient history, and the fresh hot new Star Wars content we got was the second season of The Mandalorian, i.e. the one where they went completely the other way from the first season and inserted tonnes of shit we already knew.

I won't get ahead of myself. I was reasonably excited for the new season of The Mandalorian. Season one was solid, simple fun. It wasn't the most dramatically groundbreaking storytelling of all time, but it was well-acted, benefited from solid writing, and actually did push visual boundaries in its use of the Stagecraft virtual set technology, which allowed the show to take place in lavish sci-fi environments while looking considerably more real than any green screen could. As I said in my first impressions article, the biggest strength of the first season was probably the writing/production/directing talent behind it, with Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, and many of those with whom they worked, having backgrounds in family and/or children's entertainment, leading to a tone and style of storytelling more appropriate to Star Wars than a lot of what we got in the Sequels.

I was hoping for more of that in Season 2, and to its credit, Season 2 was never exactly any more complex than Season 1. Much of it still kept the storytelling straightforward and took as its strength existing genre plots in a Star Wars setting: slay the monster, infiltrate the base, survive in the wilderness, that kind of thing. At the same time, it had more of a narrative thread than the first season, with Din Djarin, the titular Mandalorian, seeking the Jedi, the "people" of his young charge The Child, aka "Baby Yoda", real name later revealed to be Grogu. This was presumably something that was easier to accomplish than in the first season which was, I believe, repurposed from a film script, which is why episodes four to six feel like isolated digressions from the main plot in that season.

But at the same time I felt that this through-line made parts of the season feel a little like Mando was on a never-ending video-game quest: go here to talk to this person, who sends you to talk to this person, who sends you on to this person. Mando talked to the cyclops guy who sent him after Cobb Vanth who didn't actually have any info for him but by coincidence he met the frog lady who sent him on to Bo Katan who sent him to Ahsoka who sent him to the planet Tython where Grogu was kidnapped which led him to hunting down Moff Gideon.

There's nothing wrong with this per se, but it does feel a little bit mundane. Go here, talk to this person, follow that lead to the next person, and so on. Behind it all, admittedly, you have Din's character driving the narrative, which is to say his desire to protect Grogu and his devotion to the Mandalorian creed and thus his duty to return Grogu to his people. But on the surface it feels a little bit strung-together, and at times there were episodes where I just didn't feel terribly invested in what was going on because I expected the latest encounter to just direct him to yet another stepping-stone. This was also not helped by the fact that several chapters (11, 12, 15 and 16) all involved Din and one or more allies attacking and/or infiltrating an Imperial base or ship. Some of the episodes melted into each other in my head.

The other issue is the amount of references this season had to other Star Wars media: we had appearances by a character from a novel I haven't read (Cobb Vanth is from the Aftermath novels, I believe), two characters from the Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons (Ahsoka and Bo Katan), and two from the main films themselves (Boba Fett and, of course, Luke with R2 in tow). I'm sure for many viewers, only Luke and maybe Boba Fett were familiar, and of course even I, Star Wars nerd that I am, don't go in for the novels and didn't actually know the Cobb Vanth character. Nonetheless, compared to the first season, this glut of appearances by existing characters had the same effect which such franchises often have of taking a supposedly large and busy world and making it feel small. I feel that Boba Fett didn't need to appear and that Ahsoka's use, while appropriate, would have made more sense had the show established (as both Clone Wars and Rebels repeatedly demonstrated) that Ahsoka is no longer a Jedi, having refused to rejoin the order after the Council's failure to support her when she was framed. I also thought it was strange that there was no role in Ahsoka's appearance for her main actor, or voice actor as the case may be, Ashley Eckstein, given that she has brought the character to life for so many years in both Clone Wars and Rebels. This seemed especially odd given Katee Sackhoff's live action casting as Bo Katan, having voiced her in the cartoons.

I felt like, given the story they were telling, at least the inclusion of Bo Katan and Luke made sense; as the last known legitimate ruler of Mandalore and the last of the Jedi respectively, they're the only characters who really qualify within the Star Wars universe for the roles for which they were needed. It does seem odd to think that, Rebels included, Bo Katan has now been deposed as ruler of Mandalore twice and has had to have the Darksaber given/restored to her by another Mandalorian (Sabine in Rebels' case). And I do honestly hope that this story plays into a third season of The Mandalorian, assuming that it is made. But if this is the case, I would actually like the show to explore the Mandalorian creed a little further, if their society, as seems to be the case, is turning into some kind of Galactic punching-bag that, despite their martial prowess, is constantly being conquered and victimised by other, more powerful, factions.

This leads to the other issue I had with the second season of The Mandalorian, one which admittedly was carried over from the first: the lack of "fun". Star Wars is, in my opinion, at its best when it is driven by fun, likeable characters, with an undercurrent of spiritual or philosophical meaning. The perfect example is in The Empire Strikes Back, the two central plot lines of which encapsulate both sides of this: the bantering tension between Han and Leia on the one side, and the quasi-Buddhist and pantheist teachings of Yoda to Luke on the other. To me, this is what makes Star Wars work: it's fun, with something a little more serious and contemplative underneath.

The Mandalorian suffers, I think, from having these elements but not quite taking them far enough. Din Djarin is a very serious character who lives by a reasonably strict code of personal and cultural ethics, although admittedly this season did give him some lighter dialogue occasionally. Most of the characters he meets are pretty serious too, with pretty serious goals. That doesn't mean there weren't some lighter characters, like Cobb Vanth, or the Mythrol, or to an extent Cara Dune. But often these are just one or two characters, and there's not much room for lightness between them. I was disappointed that, for instance, Chapter 9 didn't have a third character for Din and Cobb to bounce off, as none of the town locals were afforded any substantial characterisation; someone like the Weequay bartender could have been used for this. Obviously Grogu offers a bit of this in a similar manner to one of the droid characters, but a bit more between characters who actually talk wouldn't have gone astray. In the same way I would have enjoyed a little more contemplation of the significance of the Mandalorian creed and its different interpretations, as represented by Din and Bo Katan respectively. This wouldn't mean a deep exploration of the fictional creeds themselves, but more of the idea of what a culture's code of ethics means in a broad and diverse reality. Admittedly we get a little bit of this in Mayfield's appearances in Chapter 15.

I do wonder, however, if all of these issues stem from, as is now apparent, the fact that Season 2 of The Mandalorian was a cross-promotional exercise in marketing upcoming Disney+ shows, including an Ahsoka show and a Boba Fett show that was literally announced in a post-credits scene in the manner of a Marvel film. I do feel that this probably interfered with the writing and obliged the show to set up certain things and include certain characters that weren't strictly necessary. And it's a bit disappointing that the show seems to have so briskly been forced down that path rather than being allowed to stand on its own. I was hoping that past examples of this not working in the case of, for instance, the recent DC Comics films, might have encouraged Lucasfilm to recognise that just because something works for Marvel doesn't mean it works all the time. The original season of The Mandalorian worked through decent marketing and a level of quality that sustained interest over eight weeks. Lucasfilm and Disney's need to market their new content through the existing, proved, brand of The Mandalorian belies a lack of confidence in the swathe of new products they are apparently intending to present on their service in the next couple of years. As above, I'm disappointed to see that the Ahsoka show in particular is going to be a live action one, and possibly continue the search for Thrawn (and thus the story of Rebels) in that medium rather than its, in my view, natural home in animation with the voice actors from the previous shows. Its setup in live action in The Mandalorian actually makes me less interested in it.

You may have noticed that in all this I've spoken very little about Din or Grogu, our two notional protagonists, in any depth, and this is because I feel like the season didn't quite give them the narrative they needed. We already knew from the first season that Din was protective of Grogu and wanted to do right by him. The Ahsoka episode implies that the bond that has developed between them is stronger than Grogu's existing connection to the Force, and this leads to a nice moment in the season finale in which Luke tells Din that Grogu wants his permission to leave, but these are some pretty sporadic moments when otherwise I felt like we were continually having our attention placed on that episode's guest characters. We see at the start of the season that Din has developed from the previous; for instance, he's lost his antipathy for droids. But he already intended to return Grogu to his people at the end of the first season, and at the end of this season that's what he does. It doesn't feel like he developed too much more past the previous season, or that his relationship with Grogu did either, beyond him becoming more aware of it. Pedro Pascal's performance is always strong as the stoic title character, although sometimes I felt like his dialogue was uncharacteristically chatty or wry, but this perhaps linked to his increased willingness in this season to remove his helmet, suggesting that he is outgrowing the strict form of the creed by which he was raised. I just would have liked to have seen these parts given greater focus.

One other thing I would like to discuss with the season is its greater emphasis on having a relationship with the Original Trilogy. The first season clearly presented a Galaxy in the aftermath of the Empire, with Stormtroopers in dirty armour and Moff Gideon in command of only a small contingent of men. In this season we see more of this, perhaps leading towards the eventual rise of the First Order in the Sequels, and perhaps the experiments with Grogu are, as others have also discussed, intended to foreshadow the cloning techniques which will be used to create Snoke or resurrect Palpatine, i.e. trying to spin something out of two of my least favourite parts of the Sequels.

But we also hear characters talking about the destruction of the Death Stars as relatively contemporary events, and see a thirty-ish-year-old Luke Skywalker voiced by the (as of writing) sixty-nine-year-old Mark Hamill. Compared to the Sequels, which were set a plausible thirty years after Return of the Jedi, it feels very odd to see actors who were in some cases probably not even born when some or all of the Original Trilogy was first released playing characters discussing these events as if they're recent history. To me it makes the setting feel a little unnatural and awkward, and at times I found myself wishing that the show was set after The Rise of Skywalker rather than after Return of the Jedi. In addition, the inclusion of Prequel actors such as Temuera Morrison and Prequel-era spinoff characters such as Ahsoka and Bo Katan makes the show to me actually feel more distant from the Original Trilogy rather than closer, and creates a dissonance between what the setting of the show is meant to be and what it feels like it is in my gut, i.e. more like a continuation of Clone Wars and Rebels than something with a meaningful relationship to the Original Trilogy. Obviously this isn't some huge issue with the show, but it does feel odd.

I might as well talk a little bit more about Luke's appearance at this point. Yes, the CGI face on a stand-in's body is weird, but it's also strange, albeit unsurprising, to see how people have reacted to how Luke enters the action, effortlessly cutting down Dark Trooper droids to save the day. As audience members we're obviously meant to appreciate this, but it's dissonant to think that from Din's point of view he has no idea who Luke is — nor, apparently, do any of the other characters. And so the "cool" factor of seeing Luke in action, body double notwithstanding, is to me undermined by the fact that it doesn't service Din's story in any particular way. The comparisons people have made with the popular, but meaningless, scene of Vader killing the Rebels in Rogue One are a double-edged sword; a fan favourite character without any immediate relevance to the actual protagonist's narrative showing up to steal the limelight in a display of power, and I was actually disappointed that we didn't get to see Din and company using their limited effective resources (presumably the Beskar staff and the Darksaber) to defeat the Dark Troopers.

It's also worth noting that Luke's appearance here, hailed as some kind of "true" appearance of the character by certain commentators, potentially feeds exactly into how he was portrayed in The Last Jedi, as a "legend" whose raw power engendered both pride and fear. And while it does counterbalance Vader's Rogue One appearance, and the visual reference seems obvious, this is not, personally, how I see Luke: I don't see his character growth encapsulated by him cutting down droids with a lightsaber. Remember that Luke's defining character moment in Return of the Jedi was him throwing his lightsaber away rather than letting his destructive impulses control him. That doesn't mean he shouldn't fight; quite rightly, in this episode, he is using his power to defend the lives of people less powerful than himself. But it shouldn't be praised, as it seems to be by fanboys, as some kind of triumphalist display of might. This is why the received wisdom online that Vader massacring helpless men at the end of Rogue One is some kind of amazing scene is stupid because most of its advocates seem to just revel in the scene as a celebration of ruthless violence and not perceive Vader as evil or cruel (and, in fact, the scene in question seems to frame Vader as "cool" more than as terrifying or monstrous). Similarly, people seem to be glorying in Luke's destruction of the Dark Troopers simply as an impressive display of force rather than seeing it as something potentially sinister. I wonder if the episode would have been better served by presenting Luke's appearance as more a kind of defense; it all depends on how we're meant to interpret the scene. Ultimately this is just me being frustrated with Star Wars fans who seem to view the franchise through what I see as a warped, simplistic lens of "power levels" and action for its own sake. It isn't necessarily a problem with the episode itself, just how it's being interpreted.

So that was Season 2 of The Mandalorian. One more thing I should praise is Ludwig Göransson's score, which manages to be distinctive and memorable while almost never referencing anything by John Williams. It's watchable enough television — I appreciate that the episodes aren't too long — and it's quite strong as Star Wars spinoffs go, although my heart is definitely staying with Rebels for now. But it feels like too much of this season was dominated by the need to introduce supporting characters to get their own spinoffs, and not enough was carried by the central protagonists. I would have also liked to have both a bit more fun and a little more of a spiritual or philosophical exploration of the characters' beliefs. If a third season is in the works, and I think it is, I hope it is allowed to stand on its own a bit more, and maybe give more attention to our helmet-headed hero, and rely less on franchise references and cross-promotional marketing.