In early November, I tweeted the following.
Now that the second season of The Mandalorian has concluded, and brought with it the impending arrival of a gaggle of other Star Wars shows, I find myself left even colder than I was when I shared that remark. (This, by the way, is your spoiler warning. I will be discussing here the events of the show’s second season. If you want to be unspoiled, avoid this until you’ve seen the season.)
By noting that I’m apparently a much more casual fan than I thought, I should clarify that I really, truly wish I liked The Mandalorian a lot more than I do. I can watch most episodes and acknowledge that this show looks like it belongs in the Star Wars universe. (I will exclude the one episode this season wherein Mando, Moana’s father, and Mulan fought some bad guys on what appeared to be a hilly stretch of somewhere north of Los Angeles. That episode looked like it belonged in the 24 universe.) And the concept of Baby Yoda is really quite brilliant, not just from a merchandising and meme-ification standpoint.
But as I watched the CG Luke Skywalker plow through a series of very mean-looking robots and then take away Baby Yoda for his Jedi training, I felt both disappointed and unsurprised. It’s a bad scene, not only because the de-aged Luke Skywalker is enormously unconvincing. (But it sure is!) Where I guess I disagree with the critical consensus — which has mostly acknowledged the badness of this scene — is that I think it’s reflective of what makes the show on the whole so hollow.
What is The Mandalorian about? If someone had no idea what the show was, or its responses, or the various memes, or whatever, I could sum it up for them in a single sentence. “A masked man finds a baby version of Yoda, and brings him to Luke Skywalker for his training.” Strip away everything else on the show, and that is literally two seasons’ worth of story. There are episodic adventures, and they have all been in service of Mando handing Baby Yoda off to Luke. 16 episodes to get to the back half of that sentence.
“Ah, but Josh,” you will say, “The story is really about the emotional connection between Din Djarin and Grogu.” And this is where we part ways. Pedro Pascal is a talented actor brimming with charisma. Baby Yoda is very cute. And somehow, it was decided — either because his other acting priorities required it, or because This Is The Way — that Pascal should play a man whose face we almost never see.
Last year, midway through the first season, I wrote about how the show continues a long history of Star Wars indulging in the Kuleshov Effect, the psychological idea that we associate emotions with an emotionless image as long as there are connecting images presented in between. If a stone-faced man is shown, followed by food, we may believe he’s hungry. That kind of thing.
I tell you this because the whole emotional arc of this show is between a mostly expressionless alien that doesn’t speak and a masked man whose face we almost never see. If you are invested in the emotional relationship between Din Djarin and Grogu, I envy you. I do not share your opinion, because I feel so little connection between these two characters. The one bit of the final scene that worked was Mando taking his helmet off simply so Baby Yoda could see his protector’s face. It’s a good moment, because I can see Pedro Pascal’s goddamn face for once. (Technically, it’s the third time he showed his face, which only makes me wonder exactly how often he was on set when Mando doesn’t show his face. We already know he wasn’t there most of the first season. Curious about this one, too.)
I like the original Star Wars trilogy. I think two of the three sequels are enjoyable. I remain steadfast in my belief that the prequels are poorly written, overloaded with cartoonish CG as well as bad performances. I say these things to emphasize what I tweeted: I am a casual Star Wars fan. I must be, because the various announcement in the last two weeks — Obi-Wan Kenobi show with Hayden Christensen! A Boba Fett spin-off! Ahsoka Tano! — do absolutely nothing for me. I am so exhausted with this series encircling the Skywalker Saga. Every one of the movies tells me it’s in a galaxy far, far away, but that galaxy sure seems mighty small. What does the galaxy look like closer to now than a long time ago? What does it look like 150 years after? 150 years before?
I am arguably part of the problem. I watched every episode, and I will surely watch at least one episode of the new shows just to sample them. (I look forward, for one, to finding out how or why Hayden Christensen will return as Darth Vader since he’s Darth Vader now.) I hope they’re good. But I’ve grown weary of this series. And I have a feeling that, just as we now look back at Disney’s strategy to overstuff us with movies, a few years from now, we’ll wonder why they ever thought they should overstuff us with these shows.