The most consistent thing I’ve taken away from Season 3 is the Mandalorian so far is “wow, this is a lot worse than the previous seasons.” And this is for a variety of reasons, one of which being that it’s poorly paced - Din’s seasonal defining character conflict is resolved with little fanfare in 3 episodes. It seems extremely undecided about what the focus of the show is; is it Bo-Katan’s struggle for power, the post-Rebellion problems that are ravaging the New Republic government, perhaps even a fun adventure tale with the titular Mandalorian and his adopted baby in tow? And the dialogue feels like it’s especially gone downhill.
The complaint that “Star Wars sucks now” is ubiquitous in online discourse, but it’s not one I actually want to make. I don’t long for a prelapsarian Star Wars past - while I think The Mandalorian Season 1 is definitely better than Season 3, that good part of the show is not exempt from the criticisms I want to make. Rather, I think the problems that debuted in the first season (and then intensified in Season 2) are happening now in Season 3 in a more concentrated and grotesque form.
At a basic level I think this show is incapable of being about itself. Initially its focus was on one lonely man forming a bond with a very special alien child, a personal story that was placed within a larger context of post-rebellion political turmoil and religious persecution (which, of course, is all being presented to the audience in a very simplified form). It’s now ballooned out to be about Government and Politics and War, most especially with the increasingly heavy use of Bo-Katan, a recurring tertiary Star Wars antagonist with tons of canonical baggage who nonetheless feels unmoored from her own history and whose loyalties and intentions seem completely inscrutable.
But the problem cannot be localised to just this weird loss of focus; this loss of focus was initially instigated by the various cameos that were spread across Season 2. Bo-Katan, as previously mentioned, but also Boba Fett, Ahsoka, and most egregiously, Luke Skywalker and R2D2. The Mandalorian, because of its initial success, and especially because it facilitated the creation of an entirely new line of Star Wars merchandise via baby yoda, became a launching pad for other Star Wars IP. Now it’s an advertisement for the Book of Boba Fett, for the Ahsoka show, and almost certainly a future series with Bo-Katan. Season 2 was so cameo-laden that the consequences of the Luke Skywalker deepfake cameo in the finale was undone in a different show, with season 3 being a “reset” in terms of story because the writers didn’t want to deal with the fallout of Din losing his identity and the baby being taken by Luke.
But I don’t think it is a reset, because this show is not about The Mandalorian anymore. All of Din’s conflicts are resolved - he got Grogu back in an episode of BoBF, he regained his status as a Mandalorian in S3E3, and Bo-Katan has seemingly dropped her massive beef with him over ownership of the Darksaber. Din has zero narrative purpose or motivation aside from being the title character. Favreau has openly admitted he has no planned ending for this show. It’s not about anything or anyone.
So instead I think this show is about Star Wars. Not anything in specific, just Star Wars. Din insists on bringing back IG-11 to help him go to Mandalore in a deranged attempt to evoke nostalgia from the audience for a character that died in Season 1 less than three years ago (a request that now does not matter because he already went into the mines of Mandalore with Bo-Katan lol). Luke’s scene in the hallway destroying those droids is meant to evoke nostalgia for Vader’s (decidedly vicious and brutal) hallway scene where he rips a bunch of rebels to pieces in a movie from 2016. Characters yelling “it’s a trap!” while the camera cuts to an Ackbar lookalike. Grogu doing force backflips because Yoda did them in the prequels.
This is an attempt to construct Star Wars as one cohesive historical “thing,” a particular tradition that exists only in the past - even if that past just happened a couple years ago. It flattens Star Wars into a singular brand, paradoxically traditional and timeless, and then projects that back onto The Mandalorian, until it’s nothing but signifiers, acting as a directory for nostalgia, tracing back to some original source material to remind you of simpler times. Remember how goofy the prequels were? Man, what a hoot!
And what gets produced in this process is kitsch. I’m using this word in a particular way, not merely meant to describe the show as mass-produced low-quality garbage with nothing original to say (although I am saying that), but also as a particular aesthetic perspective on Star Wars that the writers of the show are taking, one that I think is ultimately reactionary in nature. The Mandalorian reproduces Star Wars lovingly - the behind the scenes documentary for the making of Season 1 goes into detail about how particular the costuming was, the look of props, how all the Razor Crest’ nav technology needed to look and sound like, the insistence on using practical makeup for the aliens (including the baby) instead of CGI. These things are part of the visual essence of Star Wars. Which is not inherently a bad thing! You can do a lot of great original things in an established setting with pre-existing aesthetics, history, and visual languages, and the gritty Star Wars “look” is a great sandbox to play in. But what ends up happening is that this attention to detail becomes reverence. It becomes a form of worship, not merely paying homage to a beloved piece of fiction, but deifying it as being inherently beautiful, inherently worthy of being copied, implicitly arguing that there is an objective measure of what “an authentic piece of Star Wars” looks, sounds, and feels like.
And because the narrative arc of the Mandalorian became derailed by this cameo-fest in Season 2, the only real thing it has going for it is “feeling” like Star Wars. This is where the treacly comedic dialogue between Bo-Katan and her nervous droid as she guns down TIE fighters in S3E3 rises to the level of nauseating - what you are watching is a perfect reproduction of Star Wars’ affects and tone and nothing else. It’s like the visual equivalent of being able to hear the flow of a conversation without actually catching what’s being said. Nothing of any substance is being delivered, you are just seeing pure Star Wars form.
Which, I think, is where the term kitsch becomes useful. This eventually falls towards reactionary tendencies - not reactionary in its substance per se (although there is certainly a lot of very weird and disturbing politics in the show), but the tendency to revere these forms and these affects, to use them because you believe they have inherent value and recognisability to the audience, independent of what’s actually being delivered. Then it becomes a show about Star Wars for the sake of being about Star Wars; tradition for the sake of tradition. and what ultimately gets produced is this trite, bland show whose only consistent “positive” emotional elicitation you feel is rage at how bafflingly weird and offensive it’s become.
So a lot of this show’s storytelling devices don’t land for me, because those devices so often boil down to hey remember Star Wars? The humour in particular feels forced, unearned, and disconnected from any emotional vulnerability or conflict or pathos. The sole thing it has going for it is being whacky, almost slapstick in tone. When a show is about nothing its jokes are also about nothing. Or, well, they’re about Star Wars. Just Star Wars. Isn’t it funny when droids get nervous at impulsive human behaviour? Ha! Good one. Oh look it’s a Mon Calamari. Remember when the guy who looked like that said “it’s a trap!”? That’s funny right? Did you know baby yoda can do a backflip? Just like in the prequels! How about that shot of Coruscant that looked just like it did in The Clone Wars? Epic!
Hey do you remember Luke Skywalker? Do you really?
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