commentary – Page 2 – Living History in the Star Wars Galaxy

Thoughts on ‘The Believer’

Welcome back to my commentary series on Season 2 of The Mandalorian; for this installment we’re breaking down Chapter 15 ‘The Believer’. Aside from the first episode, I haven’t been too especially fond of any of this season’s installments; after the on-rails themepark ride of ‘The Siege’, the poor direction of ‘The Jedi’, and the mindless action of ‘The Tragedy’, I had low hopes for the next episode. As we will see, having lowered expectations meant I was able to be pleasantly surprised.

The episode opens with a scruffy-looking Mayfeld on a New Republic prison work detail, where he’s busting up wrecked TIEs. Right off the bat, I’m onboard, because while Star Wars might refer to prisons from time to time, we almost never get to actually see people in prison, much less doing menial labor – it’s a nice bit of worldbuilding. (Off the top of my head, all I can think of is the Jedi Knight novella which saw Alphonso Obata incarcerated by the NR on Milagro, jackhammering a city glassed by orbital bombardment).

In this opening we see Boba has repainted his armor, and it looks…Not At All Star Wars-y. While one could easily make the argument that ‘Everything was new once’, seeing him with a refreshed paintjob and how weird it looks really underlines how key the ‘Used Universe’ look is to the Galaxy Far Far Away. If you, dear reader, have just finished assembling and painting your own Star Wars kit, don’t stop now! It may feel wrong to intentionally ‘mess up’ something you’ve spent a lot of time and effort on, but if you really want to do right by the aesthetic, you need to bite the bullet and do some weathering and aging to really sell the look.

Also, is this the first time we’ve seen a light-up identification doodad? I can guess what all the fancy propmakers and Batuu-bounders will be upgrading to this winter…

Thoughts on ‘The Tragedy’

Welcome back to my breakdown series on The Mandalorian Season Two. I’m about a week behind, but we’re looking at Chapter 14 ‘The Tragedy’ this time around.

Boba Fett (played by Temuera Morrison, nice continuity!) has somehow tracked our Lone Wolf and Cub to Tython. I really have to wonder…HOW? Last we saw Boba, he was watching the Titular Mandalorian swooping into the sunset on Tatooine. After walking back to Mos Eisley, they went sublight with Lady Gecko to Spidery Ice Planet, then to Fish Planet, took a detour back to Navarro, then to Dead Forest Planet before heading to Tython. We know the ship has been tracked since Navarro due to Gideon’s spy, but how would Boba be able to follow that convoluted-ass trail?

Anyway, Boba shows up and I’ll be damned if he isn’t packing around the longest gaderffii I’ve ever seen…over five feet by my calculations, so literally as long as his long-ass Tusken rifle! Also, as this hobby includes an element of approaching on-screen things through a realism-and-practicality lens, I have to ask: just how is that gaffi staying on his back? (Note that we never see Boba take it off his back, he just magically has it in his hands in a different shot.) His rifle has a sling, but the gaderffii just seems to hover on his back, which is silly and purely just for ‘cool points’, to give a ‘Hollywood swordsman’ silhouette.

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.

Thoughts on ‘The Siege’

Welcome back to my breakdown series on The Mandalorian Season Two. While I’m a bit behind schedule, this time we’re looking at Chapter 12 ‘The Siege’.

Right off the top I feel the need to point out that nothing in this episode resembled a siege. Once the plot kicked in, I actually started getting some serious Rebel Assault II vibes…but levels in that game were either ‘sneak around Imperial base, hide around corners, and point-and-click to shoot Stormies’ or vehicle-based ‘shooting gallery on rails’…so not exactly the most dynamic, compelling, or realistic tone for a TV show to take.

In defense of ‘close enough’

Let’s talk about fish-lady sweaters for a second.
When a Mon Calamari showed up in The Mandalorian Chapter 11 wearing an off-the-rack fisherman’s sweater, the community lost no time in memeifying it before hopping on Amazon to snatch up one or two for themselves. I find it encouraging that people are interested in costuming a common civilian for once (instead of the rare-in-universe but over-represented-in-cosplay Jedi/Sith/Mando/bounty hunter ‘player classes’)…but if I was looking to put together a GFFA dockworker impression, I definitely wouldn’t go out and buy the exact onscreen sweater—and not just because they’re probably now very scarce! Here’s why.

Thoughts on ‘The Heiress’

Welcome back to my breakdown of The Mandalorian Season 2 episodes, this time Chapter 11 ‘The Heiress’. I guess I should start disclaiming at the top:
YAR, HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. READERS, YE BE WARNED.
When I watched the episode the first time, I was definitely subconsciously picking up on the Apollo 13 reentry sequence vibes…that film is too imprinted on my brain for me to not notice, but I didn’t make the connection for the reason behind it – this chapter was directed by Ron Howard’s daughter. Well then, of course it makes sense she would pay homage to her father’s masterpiece! Some of my friends have also picked up on the Firefly/Serenity vibe of a falling-apart spaceship slowly shedding parts. Seeing as we’ll never get more Firefly, having Firefly stuff in other properties works fine for me.
As the ship is trying to set down on the landing pad, I noticed the sound of the Razor Crest’s engines ‘coughing’ and trying to turn over is the same as Anakin’s podracer in Episode I doing the same thing, which is some nice continuity.

In general, I really like the nautical feeling of this whole chapter. The synopsis was something like “Mando braves danger on the high seas” so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but when he arrived at what was essentially a seaport town, it started to make sense, and the latter half of the episode is essentially ‘Mando turns pirate!’ I love all the Mon Calamari and Quarren dock workers, with their waders and knit fisherman’s sweaters! It’s so refreshing to include a location so geared towards the ‘common’, especially as it creates a great opportunity for a ‘GFFA living historian’ to interpret some seaside skills (rope splicing? lobster pot baiting?) in an authentic manner.

Thoughts on ‘The Passenger’

Welcome back to my breakdown of The Mandalorian Season 2 episodes, this time Chapter 10 ‘The Passenger’. Overall, this was by far my least favorite episode of the series, and after a single rewatch to collect some more notes for this post, I can pretty confidently say that I won’t be casually watching it again. (My favorite episode, I think, has so far been S01E04 ‘Sanctuary’, which seems to be many folks’ least favorite.)
The episode opens with Titular Mando trucking along on a swoop toting Fett’s armor, when he is ambushed by some frontier trash/space pirates/bounty hunter types. I really liked that they use ye olde cable trap to knock him off the bike (see this old post where I apply some real-world maths and see just how much time you’d need to get such a trap set properly).

Among the ambushers is a guy whose face we never see, wearing a Rebel-pattern arm patch. This style first appeared on Hoth in Episode V, although it has since shown up on troops in ‘Rouge One’. I find it hard to believe that this guy was in the uniformed Alliance military, so it’s likely a case of double-dipping by the costume department I mentioned last episode. Similarly, the bald pirate wears a puffy R1 trooper vest.

Thoughts on ‘The Marshal’

Since The Mandalorian is the hottest thing in the galaxy right now, and with my queue of current projects winding down and no opportunities for public interpretive events in the foreseeable future, I want to share my thoughts on each episode shortly after each airs. Because…I have thoughts! These won’t be general reviews, but I’m going to try and focus on applying the topics of this blog (character design, material culture, issues of in-universe consistency, etc). Additionally, my research tends to uncover random details which enhance our knowledge of the galactic setting, but which aren’t always meaty enough to merit their own essays; I think Mandalorian episode writeups will be the perfect place to sprinkle these in.
I’ll be discussing topics in the order they appear, so let’s get started!

Since S01E06(‘The Prisoner’), the show seems to have a problem with its male Twi’leks. The size, shape, and angle of the head-tails is all wrong—they’re female-style(ish)—and I think it’s a side effect of the show’s relatively small budget. Since the usual male Twi’lek doesn’t wear a headband to hide the transition between actor and prosthetic, the look requires much more time in the makeup chair; the show’s makeup team have apparently decided it’s simply easier to pop a pair of female-style lekku and a headband on and call it good…but it looks hella weird:

This post from DIY the Galaxy gives a good overview of previous lekku depictions.

My worry for The Mandalorian Season 2

(Don’t worry folks, your regularly-scheduled Saturday post is still coming, but since everyone and their mother is watching DisneyPlus today, I had to get this out there and off my chest)

After first approaching it with caution, by the end of its first season, I was 90% on-board with The Mandalorian…all the way up until the last shot with that stupid ‘darksaber’ (Pete the Retailer agrees). Then earlier this year, I started seeing second season rumour-mill headlines that Lucasfilm was bringing in Temuera Morrison to play Boba Fett, while all signs were pointing towards Rosario Dawson (of all people) playing a live-action Ahsoka Tano. A few weeks later, a rumour that they were also looking for a live-action ‘Ezra Bridger’ (whose SWarsy naming-game I’ve always thought was amazingly weak) from Rebels. WHY?