Thoughts on ‘The Jedi’

Welcome back to my commentary series on Season 2 of The Mandalorian; for this installment we’re breaking down Chapter 13 ‘The Jedi’, and I gotta say, while everybody was losing their minds this time around, I really wasn’t feeling it. Call it jumping the shark, but something just felt…off about this chapter, which is profoundly disappointing to me because there was such potential.

A few folks’ comments I saw praised Dave Filoni’s directing in this episode, saying ‘it was just like an episode of The Clone Wars come to life!’ But to be honest, several times this episode I almost found myself nodding off…too many long, lingering shots with nothing happening made it feel very poorly paced.

Right off the bat—literally, just 40 seconds in—we have our first view of live-action Ahsoka…and boy, was I underwhelmed.
I feel like the cold open where Ahsoka picks off mooks in the darkness had the potential to be a really visually-dynamic sequence, but what we get just struck me as humdrum instead of artistic.  Considering the murky setting and the lightsabers involved, I think this chapter’s opening could’ve been a great exercise in chiaroscuro as a Lucas-style “tone poem”: make the scene darker, use the lightsabers sparingly, with some mook POV shots as you hear (but can’t see) her getting closer, a snap-hiss and a scream in the distance, then see a dark shape zipping from place to place…in my mind’s eye the scene is way better than what Filoni gave us. The best parts of the sequence are early on, when Ahsoka is obscured or seen in silhouette (in a hood she has a great silhouette), and given the reputation of the character you’d think she would merit a better reveal than what we got: I wish she had been teased early and then been properly revealed later in the episode, but…nope.

Considering she’s essentially sniping mooks on foot, I felt like the insistence on using both lightsabers wasn’t the wisest. (On my rewatch I noted that part of the reason for my feeling of disequilibrium was the fact that Ahsoka’s lightsabers don’t sound—or look—like the lightsabers we’re used to; they sound more…jetpack-y?, and without color, the white blades just look like she’s swinging flourescent light tubes around.) Also, why are they white?
I don’t have anything against Rosario Dawson (she’s wonderful in Clerks II!), and maybe she’s playing Ahsoka more how she appears in Rebels (haven’t seen it) but I felt her delivery—especially in the opening—was very wooden. I remember Ahsoka as voiced by Ashley Eckstein seemed to have a lot of personality, but here not so much. The wooden delivery and the fact that she was unhooded and right out in the open added to my ‘meh’ reaction…

I’m sure others have said the same thing, but can we talk for a minute about why Ahsoka’s prosthetics look the same as they did in like, season two of The Clone Wars? It was so incongruous between what I expected to see (a live-action Ahsoka several decades older than the last time I saw her) and what we saw (a live-action Ahsoka with a middle-aged face and the same lekku and montrals she had when she was 16). Folks have said it was because a proper headpiece would be really heavy and awkward in fight scenes, but I don’t buy it. This show might be comparatively smaller budgeted, but this is Disney we’re talking about, and considering they’re probably banking pretty hard on using her (Marvel-synergistically) as a tentpole in more shows and/or movies, you’d think they could spend the time and money to do this character right. CGI might be expensive but there’s enough sitting and standing going on that she could’ve worn the proper prosthetics and had CG extensions for the fight scenes.

Going into this season, I was generally against Ahsoka showing up, believing that Filoni’s overreliance on a small group of characters through multiple time periods only serves to shrink the galaxy. As with Bo-Katan in ‘The Heiress’, I did not harbour especially fond feelings towards the character, and my grudging acceptance of her is mostly due to the presence of her comments in The Jedi Path and The Essential Guide to Warfare, which are excellent ‘primary sources’ I often refer to (the former being a key artifact in my New Republic Archeological Corps impression).

I liked the guy scanning the Razor Crest coming in to land…a nice reference to the Rebel sentry from Episode IV…I wonder if this guy’s scanner was cobbled together out of second-unit camera parts as well? (Thanks to the hard work of RPF member 3Dimpact, we know the original prop was built around a Minolta Auto-Spot 1 Degree Light Meter).

I couldn’t believe Mando lands and then just walks off into town with his landing ramp down…that’s like parking your car with the doors open and maybe the keys in the ignition?! Like, I find it really hard to believe. We couldn’t get a shot of him closing the ramp remotely as he walks away?

In my opinion, the design of the ‘town’ was another detriment to this episode…we never see anything beyond the gate, the single street where everything takes place, and the central courtyard of the “magistrate”—basically, only what’s in the very first shot.
With Mando’s entry to the town I got a bit of a The-Postman–meets-Ba-Sing-Se feeling from the place (both are always nice!), but we probably didn’t need to spend 10 seconds watching the gate close each time… a preponderance of slow shots like these made this episode drag.

I didn’t realize he’s getting up there in years, so I was glad to see Michael Biehn is still working, though I thought he was completely wasted here. I did like his outfit—it gave me a real Rahm Kota vibe. Since armored characters and their overrepresentation in costuming circles are something of a pet peeve, it was refreshing to see a conservatively-armored character: shoulder pauldrons (mismatched!), front and rear breastplate, and a gorget(?!)—what more do you need?

Throughout the EU, we’ve heard plenty about how tough metals like beskar, phrik, and cortosis are, but when Ahsoka shows up to ambush Titular Mando, I finally realized how totally ridiculous ‘lightsaber-proof armor’ looks onscreen, especially when he’s blocking her strikes unarmed. As this show goes on (but especially throughout this first scene together), I couldn’t help but feel like we are just watching Jon Favreau play with Dave Filoni’s action figures…using character names really underlined the feeling for me. I can totally imagine kids in the backyard: “And so Boba (Faux-ba?) Fett is sent to kill Ahsoka Tano, and she tries to kill him with her lightsabers, but his armor’s lightsaber proof! And he’s all like ‘No, Bo-katan sent me!’”

And then we get to Baby Yoda…or as they want us to call him now…‘Grogu’. Have we seen Jedi read each others’ minds and communicate like this before (not like Vader picking up on Luke’s feelings to learn about Leia, but like, actually looking at each other and actively speaking telepathically?)? I rolled my eyes really hard when they ‘revealed’ that Baby Yoda was supposedly trained at the Temple and ‘hidden’. This kind of backstory only serves to shrink the universe and it raises the question that always arises whenever they try to shoehorn some new character into an old setting: “Well, if he was at the temple the whole time why didn’t we ever see or hear about him during the Prequels?” It would be much more interesting, simpler to explain, and universe-expanding if Baby Yoda was simply a random ‘feral’ Force-sensitive who had been found somewhere out in the galaxy and captured at some point – no need to complicate things.

Ahsoka refuses to train the Child because of his ‘attachment’ to the Mando – because she is still a remnant of the old Order and its dogma. I have lots of notes on this topic for a future discussion, but to summarize: Yoda, Obi-Wan, and Luke don’t have this aversion to attachments because they are of the ‘lineage’ of Qui-Gon Jinn’s training, who essentially rewrote the ‘platform’ of the surviving Jedi during the Dark Times; Ahsoka holds onto the old way because she hasn’t received training from Qui-Gon’s spirit (or from someone who did).

Ahsoka reveals that the ‘Magistrate’ is named…Morgan Elsbeth. What. Weak. Naming. Who wrote this???

I thought Ahsoka’s attack on the village gate was done much better than the opening; the shot of her zipping past was what we needed more of earlier. It was great to see her bifurcate the big gong – I always love demonstrations of lightsabers’ real power, which we usually don’t get enough of in live-action Star Wars; Qui-Gon’s melting through the Trade Federation door is about the only thing that comes to mind:

I was vaguely aware of it earlier but seeing them together behind the Magistrate made me realize how funny it is to see her assassin droids wearing clothing. General Grievous’ IG-100s had capes, but these guys are wearing like, actual garments on their bodies, which just seems kinda silly! There was a cool effect I noticed when the prisoners are being zapped in their little cages where you can see their bones, similar to Vader in Episode VI…a nice little detail that makes it look more painful than just sparking.

Magistrate and Ahsoka have their little fight, and the lady manages to knock Ahsoka’s longer lightsaber into the pool…and Ahsoka never moves to retrieve it. Like, girl, did you suddenly forget that Jedi can move things with their minds? Just yank the thing out of the water and keep going!
Biehn and Mando have a little showdown, he tries to draw a holdout blaster from behind his back and gets shot. Like I said, I love me some Michael Biehn in Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Tombstone, etc…I just felt like he was totally wasted here.
Ahsoka gets the lady disarmed and then holds her at saber-point to demand Where Is Grand Admiral Thrawn? The first time around watching this chapter I snorted really loud when she said it, and then rolled my eyes soooo hard. Listen, Ahsoka, since it’s 9 ABY, I can tell you where Thrawn is easily: he’s dying on the bridge of the Chimaera, stabbed in the back (artfully) by his Noghri bodyguard. Moving on.

And after that non-bombshell, we wipe to later with zero resolution on what happens to Magistrate Lady. The credits say this episode was directed by Dave Filoni, but I expected a Filoni episode to have a lot more…I dunno, energy? There were just sooo many long, lingering shots that made this episode just feel glacial.

It’s funny, with this place and Navarro last episode, how citizens will bust out their colorful clothing whenever it’s not cloudy or smoggy! At the end, the soundtrack goes full medieval with a flute-y interpretation of the show’s main theme. I’m always up for variations of known tunes, so it’s an interesting take, although I’m not sure the instrumentation fits the GFFA aesthetic, and feel it’s little heavy-handed in giving a ‘peasant’ atmosphere. I wonder if this was a late addition as the whole ‘Bardcore’ genre seems to have taken off only recently.
Anyway, Ahsoka sends the pair off to Tython to use Jedi Cerebro or something, so we’ll see where this leads…hopefully somewhere with less name-drops and cameos of established face characters, though after this episode I’ll be taking everything with a mountain of salt.

So there we go; a bit longer than usual, but this episode came with a lot of baggage. What did you think about Chapter 13? Did this episode jump the shark or does everything check out? Let me know what you thought in the comments below, and I’ll see you next episode!

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