Don’t forget a heaping helping of Mad Max: Fury Road

I generally love Star Wars but this series is not for me. I’m more hate watching it than watching it bc I like it.

Mando expanded the universe and minus a few connections to the original films, stuck to new people, new places, new political alliances. BoBF, if anything has made the world seem more claustrophobic. We’re more stuck on Tattooine than even Luke was, and all the new players are either right out of 80’s cop action shows or the show is hitting us over the head with the connections to RoTJ. Look! A rancor and it’s handler! Look! Tusken Raiders! Look! If you like Jabba, here are TWO hutts!

Even that I could forgive if the action scenes were kick ass, but forcing a character’s vehicle to crash into a vegetable stand and then have them sitting forlornly trapped by the produce? Why not just go full Scooby-Doo at that point and have him complain to Boba “I would’ve got away with it too, if it weren’t for these meddling kids!”

I haven’t caught up with Ep 5 yet, but in general the one consistent complaint I have with the SW universe is when they shrink it. I’ve never had an experience like the feeling I had sitting in the theater in 1977 with no clue what I was about to see and then being just dropped in the middle of this entire wide universe with so much going on. Sure, there’s some stuff that as an adult makes me facepalm, but we went from Tattooine to Hoth to Dagobah to Cloud City to Endor, and even when we revisited Tattooine, we were in a different place with different challenges.

When the prequels came, sure Jar Jar was a facepalmer, but we had Naboo and Coruscant, and it wasn’t until we were right back on Tattooine that it fell apart for me. Like the whole point of Luke growing up there was that it was this complete backwater dump no one paid attention to. But now it was retconned as the place Anikin grew up, so we suddenly were having a very similar experience. “Gee let’s hide this baby off on the family farm!” is not a very clever plan.

Rogue 1 treaded familiar ground with a fresh look and new people, and was one of my favorite SW films ever. Solo was such a mess of trying to explain the bloated history of every little thing we ever liked about SW that I couldn’t even get through it. Mando took me all over the universe to all sorts of new worlds or at least new corners of familiar planets, and even when Boba or baby Yoda showed up, it felt different. The season 2 finale is one of the most thrilling SW moments I’ve ever seen. BoBF has been going down the Solo route of trying to tell me more than I ever cared to know about Jabba’s palace, Mos Eisley, Rancors or those green guard guys.

I’m watching it bc the menfolk in the house want to keep up with the SWU, and bc we’re running low on shows to watch (Not enough Peacemaker yet!!!). But it’s been a slog, not something I look forward to. I’m hoping they can run out of old stuff to over-explain and just get into some new world building sooner rather than later.

Because series are stacked so tightly to minimize shooting and production costs, they need different directors managing each episode. One director would need more time overall to switch between episodes for what a director manages on a show.

This comment made me think about how “Way of the Househusband” took a badass character, made him have a change of heart, and then dug into the repercussions of that shift throughout the season. Not suggesting that Boba should shift THAT much or that the show should try to be a comedy. Just agreeing that what was missing from BoBF was a clear motivation for his actions that act as a shorthand for setting up conflicts through the series. You realize within the first episode of Mando that he’s crossing everyone to protect this child and that conflict continues to drive the story even here. With Boba it’s either a revenge plot against the Pikes or seizing power in the absence of Jabba, but then his apparent changes of heart don’t reconcile well with either of those motives.