Posted on 12/01/2020 7:47:52 AM PST by Kaslin
This Star Wars property reaches out to us as a familiar friend who wants to talk about more than the times long past.
As many have pointed out, the Skywalker story and the galaxy of interconnected characters and legends amounts to the great modern myth of our time. Right now, however, being a Star Wars fan hurts.
Marvel will continue to gain on and outpace Star Wars in popularity with younger generations and make more money at the box office (remember those?), but it will never mean what Star Wars does to the Force faithful. That’s why Star Wars fans are, well, insufferable, in defense of how they remember feeling when they first fell in love with the Millennium Falcon.
I was at my brother’s wedding last weekend, a nice little COVID-conscious affair in the Carolinas with close family and friends. He said something to me in the room where we were getting dressed about his other groomsman, whom he had befriended in high school. My brother said he was making a conscious effort to structure that longstanding friendship on a new foundation, one built on something more than talking about the good ol’ days.
I can relate. It’s the lure of old haunts and friends from your formative years — you always have something you can talk and laugh about. It’s great fun. But steering those relationships toward matters of the present, or sharing your struggles with marriage, parenting, and finances, is a unique challenge. People change. Realizing that can be painful, so we hide from it by going back to what we know.
“The Mandalorian’s” 13th episode just dropped on Disney Plus, launching season two of this groundbreaking Star Wars live-action series into new but quite familiar territory. On the dreary planet of Corvus, the Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) completed the next step in his quest to reconnect The Child with the Jedi.
He found Ashoka Tano (Rosario Dawson), bringing to life a character that first debuted in “The Clone Wars” (2008) as the feisty padawan learner of Anakin Skywalker. Ashoka’s journey from Jedi to wanderer has become a staple of Star Wars fandom beyond the big screen since that time, and the lore about this character is something the deepest of Star Wars fans adore.
This episode, “The Jedi,” had me both searching for words and picking my jaw up off the floor. It’s a magnificent piece of Star Wars storytelling and imagery that for me, is the way you always imagine Star Wars in your head as a fan, but hardly ever see on screen.
Plenty of reviews point to the visual inspirations throughout this episode, but that’s not what interests me. It’s how “The Mandalorian” handles “fan service.” It’s how this particular Star Wars property reaches out to us as a familiar friend who wants to talk about more than the times long past.
“The Mandalorian” is enmeshed in the battle Star Wars (and any popular fiction franchise) has alway faced: What do the fans want? J.J. Abrams’ task with relaunching Star Wars from its slumber in 2015 with “Episode VII: The Force Awakens” wasn’t an easy one. It’s important to acknowledge and appreciate that. But what Abrams did could be summed up best by the emergence of Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca aboard the Millennium Falcon in a teaser for the film when Solo says, “Chewie, we’re home.”
We all came home at that moment. It was speaking directly to the fans. This is what you want, right? Yes and no.
Star Wars suffers greatly from its own success and legendary status. It’s a hostage of its most iconic moments and locations and feel-good moments. For Star Wars fans young and old, these moments are bound up with memories of seeing the films with their family or best friends, and of playing make-believe in their backyards till sundown.
It’s what Don Draper describes in his Carousel monologue about nostalgia: it “means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… It takes us to a place where we ache to go again.” Like I said, Star Wars hurts.
The theatrical releases of new Star Wars films have been mired in this pain of fans grasping for a rush of a feeling they’ll never truly feel again. “The Mandalorian” does something different. It takes Star Wars lore seriously, as seriously as fans have always taken it but only experienced in video games, books, and painfully long animated series. These things take both dedication and time to consume.
That’s not to say Star Wars hasn’t tried. I’ll go down fighting on the hill that Rian Johnson’s “Episode VIII: The Last Jedi” was as divisive as it was because A) Star Wars legacy fanbase is too attached to some of the norms of storytelling and cinematic beats within the franchise, and B) Johnson was too outwardly gleeful in undermining those norms.
“The Last Jedi” is a beautiful movie that tried to deepen Star Wars, but down to its “tastes like salt” line and Luke’s meta commentary on the politics of the prequels, something about it wasn’t quite right. To some, it came across as a hostile assault. So Disney brings back J.J, to give the fans “what they want.” I cannot begin to express how depressing of an effort that was in “Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker” (my review here).
The answer to fan service is within “The Mandalorian’s” 45-minute episodes, these bursts of weekly Star Wars fanaticism that are cleverly made to appeal to the faithful but welcome willing new converts. Always wondered why there was a dragon-like skeleton in the desert of Tatooine in “Episode IV: A New Hope”? Well, let’s bring the Krayt Dragon to life for an episode capturing a mini-quest from a wildly popular 2003 Star Wars video game.
But when approaching Star Wars like Abrams did, you get a small droid wandering the desert with a secret message being held for the “Resistance.” Feels like old times, right? Sure. And we all think we want that, until we realize the void cannot be filled by selfish gratification.
I’ve said many times and will say again, absent a show like “The Mandalorian” to take Star Wars fandom seriously, the only way to truly enjoy the films as you grow older is to watch them with younglings and listen to what they have to say about them. Let someone else be the lonely kid with big dreams stuck in a desert wasteland. If you’re reading this, you’re not Luke Skywalker anymore, but the kids in yourself certainly are Rey.
“The Mandalorian” continues to draw on Star Wars of days past as a resource guide, but that’s the extent of its loyalty to the nostalgia of fans. It’s forging new paths for fans to discuss, not looking in the rearview mirror. It’s recognizing that Star Wars is a big-enough universe for any kind of character or story to fit into it, so it’s creating new ones.
I’m proud of my brother for what he said to me about his long-running friendship and his effort to bolster it by recognizing adulthood not impending, but present. Friendships that last require more than an endless supply of “South Park’s” “Member Berries” and awkward laughs predicated on who you used to be. We want to know who we are right now, and why our minds still drift off to Tatooine when we’re supposed to be adulting.
“The Mandalorian” proved yet again that it understands this. You should be watching.
I’m a fan. Been one since ‘77. Not happy about what Lucas put out in the early 2000s. Liked 7 and 9. Like Rogue 1. Solo was ‘ok’
Like the mandalorian......so far.
The most interesting thing about the Mandalorian is how it is tying so many various Star Wars stories, characters and lore from different sources outside the 11 theatrical features into one cohesive tale.
I’m one of those fans that can avoid the rumors, the leaks, the casting decisions etc that would have ruined more than one episode for me. I can just sit back and go “Oh wow they put that in the show?”
I didn’t watch much of The Clone Wars animated show and don’t think I’ve seen one Rebels. It was a fluke that I caught the fact that Darth Maul was on one of those animated shows (Though I have no idea which one.) so apparently Sith can be cut and half and fall hundreds of feet without dying and in the case of Palpatine be blown up in a Death Star explosion after falling hundreds of feet as well.
So who knows what else may come next from the weaving of mediums of Star Wars stories.
Let's face it - The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978) was better than some of the later works.
It looks like Disney tried to use up all the crap in their warehouse, from medieval armor to anti-gravity rocket sleds.
Anyone else notice that the Mandalorian seems like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name in space armor?
The sequel trilogy was doomed the moment they decided to go for something that would artificially hit all the beats of the original trilogy and was closely tied to it plot wise but would also create an entirely new generation of main characters so that they could sell lots of plastic crap and create endless spin-offs for years to come. It ought to be a crime what the Disney-era films did to Luke, Leia, and Han. And then there’s the absurd abilities of the protagonist, the return of the Emperor, and so many more bad ideas. Just a total mess of a trilogy that makes the prequels look brilliant by comparison.
The Mandalorian, on the other hand, is great. This is the way.
One thing The Mandalorian taught me was that I need a bounty hunter robot. An IG-11 would suffice, but I’d really like to get an IG-88. This is the way!
I gotta hand it to the writers of the show ... they know their lore and are making a great series out of the smaller parts of Star Wars that needed some expanding.
How can he mention JJ Abrams a dozen times but never mentions Jon Favreau ONCE?
It’s Favreau whose brilliance is keeping The Mandalorian going hot. Not some failed big-screen directors.
As much as I despise a lot of what Disney does and represents - the last two mega-efforts in Star Wars land, the video game Jedi: Fallen Order and The Mandalorian give me hope.
LOL During the faceoff with Michael Beihn's character in the last episode I was actually whistling the Good, Bad and the Ugly theme.
“Rian Johnson’s “Episode VIII: The Last Jedi” was as divisive as it was because”
Why do people defend this horrible movie??? It completely wrecked the whole new trilogy. It was supposed to be a keystone episode. They made it into a frigging convoluted mess with no real plot and added a bunch of characters that weren’t needed. It didn’t set up anything for Episode IX.
If it was a standalone movie it might have been forgivable. It still would have been bad, but it wouldn’t have been a formal part of the saga.
Oh well, in the end it’s just another work of fiction. TLJ is the last movie I saw in a theater. I have no plans to go back after that lecture.
I’m torn. Before I invest in this I want more input. A director friend of mine hates this series. Says any show where you can’t see the hero’s face is dead in the water. Others have found it terribly boring. I don’t know.
I’ve been wanting to watch it, but refuse to pay for a, “Subscription,” to do it.
It’ll eventually come out on DVD.
I’m a patient man.
Right, huh?!
Although I did expect Mando to say - -”I’m you’re huckleberry...”
Indeed they are. And I have never understood the depth of devotion to these updated Buck Rogers serials.
Don't forget Dave Filoni!!!
It is no coincidence that the three greatest pieces of Star Wars Story telling (Clone Wars, Rebels, Mando) all came from those same minds.
THRAWN!
There always should have been a Star Wars movie trilogy with Grand Admiral Thrawn (Mitth’raw’nuruodo). The Mandalorian will eventually deliver a live action Thrawn. Best decision made by Disney concerning Star Wars in years - at least from the diehard fans’ perspective.
The Timothy Zahn “Heir to the Empire” series will always be the true Episodes 7,8,9 in my book. Lucas completely missed the boat by not doing them, and by the time the Disney Disaster came about Hamill, Fisher and Ford were too old to pull them off.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.