Midweek Update: Is This the Way?

[Note: This article contains spoilers about the first three seasons of The Mandalorian]

The Mandalorian wrapped up its frustrating third season today. While I always felt the show had some shortcomings, at least in its first two seasons it had settled into an easy watch of weekly adventures (a typical formula of Season 2 was that Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) wants something, but he has to do a favor for someone in order to get what he wants). It also had a fairly rewarding Season 2 finale (minus the Luke Skywalker stuff, which felt like empty fan service) when Din took off his helmet to show his face to Grogu. For whatever reason (e.g. Pascal’s availability, the ease of just keeping Mando in the helmet for stunt acting), the helmet went right back on in Mandalorian Season 2.5 (aka The Book of Boba Fett) and Grogu went back to Mando after realizing that training with Deepfake Luke Skywalker wasn’t appealing.

This brought us to an awkward Season 3, which starts on a weird note because the show never justified why Mando would need to redeem himself for taking off his helmet. Basically, when Mando took of his helmet in Season 2, that has character weight. It is removing a literal and figurative barrier between him and Grogu to show their bond and that Mando has discovered something—his love for Grogu—more important than the Mandalorian creed to never remove your helmet. If you’re going to smash the “undo” button on that, you should have a good reason.

The best reason Season 3 ever offered was, “Mandalore must be rebuilt, and to be rebuilt, it needs to be based upon a creed, and so Din will recommit himself to the Creed but also stick with Grogu.” This approach brought Bo-Katan Kryze (Katie Sackhoff), a character originally introduced in co-showrunner Dave Filoni’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series, into the mix and pursued a whole Mandalorian reunification project where Din and Bo worked to bring the Mandalorians together (there’s a rift between those who keep their helmets on and those who don’t) and repopulate Mandalore, but whoops, Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito) is out here trying to be Darth Vader 2.0 and he wants to rule the galaxy, so they have to stop him again.

On the one hand, the season finale was a pretty good collection of set pieces. Director Rick Famuyiwa made an impressive looking episode, and in a vacuum, the action scenes were neat. But emotionally, this show has no core because Filoni and co-showrunner Jon Favreau don’t want to hurt any character’s feelings. But good dramas don’t always shake out to where good characters always make good decisions and bad characters always make bad decisions. Even within the Star Wars mythos, Luke Skywalker is a good guy, but he abandons his training to try and help his friends only to walk right into a trap. It’s good drama because he makes a bad choice and you understand why he made it.

By comparison, The Mandalorian never wants to make anything emotionally complex. Any conflict between good characters is swiftly resolved and never lingered on. For example, a source of conflict between Bo-Katan and Din is that he ended up winning the Darksaber in combat but she wants it because Mandalorian mythology states that whomever holds the Darksaber will lead Mandalore, which is what she wants to do. Din tries to give it to her, but the saber can’t be given; it can only be won by combat. Presumably, this would be setting up some stakes where these two characters would have to fight. Instead, in the sixth episode of Season 3, “Guns for Hire”, Din explains that since Bo-Katan rescued him earlier that season, “beating the enemy that beat me”, the Darksaber now belongs to her, which is where he wanted it to go anyway. The conflict is resolved on a technicality.

All of Season 3 has this sense of moving characters around the board but never exploring what these decisions mean on a personal level. Even on a plot basis, the show felt disjoined, like “The Convert”, which largely focused on Dr. Pershing (Omid Abtahi) and how The New Republic’s amnesty program is recruiting bad actors like Elia Kane (Katy O’Brian) into their ranks. Taken on its own, this is kind of an interesting story, but it also feels like it’s from a completely different show (specifically, it resembles the personal/political machinations of Andor more than the “let’s fight a giant space monster” antics of The Mandalorian). Like Book of Boba Fett, the larger impetus seems to be on, “How do we make these plot threads do what we need them to do,” rather than “does this serve the characters we have?”

Again, I don’t want to build up the first two seasons of The Mandalorian as some groundbreaking, extraordinary television, but it at least had an identity. What Season 3 showed is that, yet again, Lucasfilm is willing to toss identity in a trashcan if it can chase a shiny new object (see also The Book of Boba Fett, Kenobi). As a viewer, it doesn’t feel like there’s much reason to invest unless you only want to see Star Wars-y things happening devoid of emotional stakes or character development. Over eight episodes of The Mandalorian Season 3, did anyone really change? Plot-wise, Mandalorians have Mandalore again, but for Din and Grogu, all that’s changed is that Din has formally adopted Grogu and they’re going to go off to be bounty hunters, which is basically right back where you were at the start of Season 2 except they don’t need to go looking for Jedi.

All of this is supposed to lead to a crossover movie directed by Filoni that will tie together these New Republic Disney+ stories (so The Mandalorian, Book of Boba Fett, the upcoming Ahsoka, but not Andor, which is lead-up to the events of Rogue One), but to what end? Mandalorian Season 3 lays the foundations of how the First Order climbed out of the ashes of the Empire as well as explaining, “somehow Palpatine has returned.” Perhaps for people who care about lore, this is an exciting prospect, but I don’t see stories solely as plot engines. The story has to affect the characters to make it worth telling. Simply having a bunch of Mandalorians intone, “This is the way,” doesn’t paper over that.

What I’m Watching

This past weekend I finally watched 1961’s The Innocents, and it blew me away. In addition to the gorgeous cinematography, the film, Jack Clayton’s adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, perfectly slow-plays its audience. Outside of the creepy prologue, nothing really spooky happens until the end of the first act, and the film wisely keeps the children acting somewhat childlike (as opposed to deadpan Village of the Damned kids) so that you can’t be entirely certain if Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) is witnessing an actual haunting, or if it’s just in her head. The whole film builds to a chilling conclusion, and I feel like this is going to be in regular rotation for Spooky Season.

Elsewhere, I’m watching the final seasons of Succession and Barry and digging both. They both wrap up on May 28th, and I imagine there will be much to discuss about both series.

What I’m Reading

I’m in the middle of We Don’t Need Roads, and it’s a breezy and fascinating read about the making of the Back to the Future trilogy. For example, I knew that Michael J. Fox had replaced Eric Stoltz in the middle of filming, but I didn’t know that Fox had always been the first choice, and that Stoltz was let go because he was too serious for what the part required.

But I’m also eager to finish it up so I can dive into the new David Grann book, The Wager. Find me a nonfiction narrative about things going horribly wrong at sea, and I am in (I also highly recommend In the Heart of the Sea, but not the bad Ron Howard movie based on it).

What I’m Hearing

I’ve started listening to the latest Serial podcast, The Coldest Case in Laramie. I’m three episodes in, and I’ll say so far it’s avoiding the standard true-crime tropes and focusing more on the fallout of the central murder. True Crime used to be a genre I really went for, but I feel like it became too gamified with people thinking they could “solve it” and overlooking that real people really died, and this isn't a game for the victim’s loved ones. Coldest Case seems to be avoiding that pitfall so far since it seems like there’s already a prime suspect, and the question is why he wasn’t prosecuted back in 1985 or in 2016 when he was finally arrested.

What I’m Playing

I know I said I would start playing The Last of Us Part II, but that didn’t happen. Instead, I played my way through Maneater, which wasn’t great, but it was mindless and good enough for me to get the DLC, “Truth Quest”, which was pretty bad. It has these time trials (which aren’t a part of the main game) that feel tacked on, poorly conceived, and poorly executed. Basically, if you need your giant mutant shark to jump over things, maybe put some more work into the jump controls. Just a thought.

In happier news, I have been Hitman-pilled. I first approached IO Interactive’s series back in 2016, but I had trouble finding a groove with it. I thought of it like a puzzle, and if you go online for help with a puzzle, then you’ve defeated the purpose. Looking at Hitman, with its particular set of rules (who can notice your assassin, Agent 47, based on what he’s wearing and his particular movements and actions), I felt frustrated and eventually gave up.

But then I went back and saw I had Hitman 2 installed on my PS5 but with 0 trophies, which meant I had booted it up and quickly abandoned it. I decided to give it another go, and this time I had a lot more fun with it. Part of it was that I noticed the “Mission Stories”, that help guide you through the assassinations rather than leaving you to try and navigate the hit by your wits alone (they also guide you to various parts of the map so you can get a feel for the level). And then I gave myself permission to just get help online, and the YouTube channel MrFreeze2244 has been a boon with his walkthroughs.

The way I look at Hitman now is like LEGO: If you want to be creative and build something on your own, you are more than welcome to do so. I like following a set of instructions to unwind, and that’s what the walkthroughs provide. In any event, I’ll likely be playing this up until The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom comes out.