No Spoilers this Time -- The Mandalorian 3x01 "The Apostate"
Actually, I will spoil things that led up to this point, but nothing new, okay?
Well, the new season opener of The Mandalorian was a nothingburger, some cute visuals aside. Weren't some of you scared Din Djarin was going to hook up with Bo Katan? Well, I guess it could still happen but that's not the vibe I get.
I... I'm actually frankly quite baffled by all the directions this episode seems to be pulling itself in.
The dialogue is frequently bad Marvel movie dialogue, or at worst bad CRPG dialogue. Honestly it sounds like the characters are playing a 2000's western RPG and mashing the "good" or "light path" dialogue option every time. One line that stands out to me in that regard is when Carl Wethers says something like "inform Captain Shard that Navarro is no longer friendly to pirates." I think Wethers was in agony at how he was being made to deliver that line... not that he's some great actor or something. Jeez, care to take a second pass at writing that line?
Mando's one liners should be pithy and have a bit of an edge to them... saying "that's using your head" when someone kills someone using a bust of Carl Wethers' head... probably not his style.
But honestly none of that bothers me that bad. You could say all that about seasons 1 and 2, and thankfully this season is supposed to have 100% less Gina Carano (stank bitch).
What bothers me is that nothing the Mandalorian does in this episode matters. Like, yeah, a first episode is supposed to set up a bunch of plot threads, not necessarily resolve any of them. I get that. I think the best example I know of was the first regular episode of Babylon 5, which successfully introduced like nine major characters and had most of them interact and set up about five major plot threads and a lot of worldbuilding while successfully introducing, developing and resolving its own separate A-plot—in the space of 45 minutes! God, it was incredible!
This was not that. This episode introduced basically three plot threads and failed to make any of them seem that important. I won't go into detail but of course the main thread is that Mando wants to atone for taking his helmet off at the imperial base in season 2.
Now, an intelligent writer, especially an intelligent writer working for the Mouse, who literally promulgate this type of writing in company memos, would set this up like this: Mando wants to atone for taking his helmet off to save Grogu, but he needs to realize that actually he was in the right when he did so, in time to save the day. This is called a need-versus-want plot, and it's a really easy macro for writing a satisfying story with character development without trying too hard.
But this was already fucked by stupid writing. Mando had felt himself to be in the right already, because obviously, he chose Grogu over the part of the code that said not to take his helmet off, which the narrative and everyone around him treated as being the right call. But then he unwisely let it slip that he did so when talking to The Armorer, in those two episodes that they accidentally released instead of the missing episodes of the Boba Fett show, last year. So she fought him and he escaped with his life and apparently feels awful about it, because he comes back at the top of this episode and saves her life from some kind of icthyosaur that she decided to stand in front of, only for her to rehash that entire conversation for people who didn't watch Book of Boba.
So the need-versus-want plot is already fucked up because the realization that he needs to have is a realization that he almost started with. Protecting the foundling is more important than not showing his face. When two parts of the Way come in conflict, you do have to choose, and from the narrative perspective he chose right and he knew it. And that means that there's no plot, since he's not authentically going to have that revelation a second time.
So instead he's just going to fulfill the want part of the plot, despite the fact that he should no longer want it, despite the fact that that character development literally already happened, and go to Mandalore to get baptized, despite that being the less satisfying of the two parts of that plotline. He's just going to do that because... I dunno, he wants to see his weird surrogate mommy figure again or something. It would help if he had any chemistry with the Armorer.
And he says he needs two things to do that. Well, he says he needs one thing, and then he goes a place to get somebody's... blessing, or something? Because he apparently needs that person to tell him where the mine is. Or something. What he says to that person is difficult to fit into this plot in any meaningful way, so I just kind of took it as a lie on his part.
But none of it follows. He just says he needs the one thing and doesn't say why or better, show that he needs it. And he clearly doesn't need the person's blessing and could probably find the mine on his own, so it just seems like they wanted to shoehorn that person into the episode for some dialogue that... just profoundly doesn't matter. Yes, Mando could do these profoundly out of character things that the person wants him to do, but why would he? I get that the writers want to show Mando being tempted, but it falls flat because they don't tempt him with anything he would actually go for, and we know this because earlier in the episode, Carl Wether also tried to tempt him and he remained steadfast then.
It's just all very intro-level fiction writing. Basic lessons are being ignored. First, you have to trust your audience, which is a big problem here because they essentially rehash a previous episode pretty thoroughly. But you also have to make the audience understand why the various parts of the plot need to happen, or else the feeling will be "and then this happened, and then this happened." And there's none of that connective tissue there. And thirdly, the protagonist needs to be genuinely threatened or obstructed at some point, and that just doesn't happen here. Nobody presents a real threat to him. Nobody tempts him with anything he wants, neither food nor the nations of the Earth... None of the obstacles seem powerful enough to stop him. We're left feeling like he could go to Mandalore today and just... doesn't, for some mundane reasons he doesn't really elaborate on that don't feel like they're going to make for an interesting plot. And all of this was made that much less interesting by the fact that most of the setup of this episode is Ctrl-C Ctrl-V'd from that episode of Book of Boba. So the net sum was absolutely fucking nothing. Nothing happened in this episode.
And see, I could have written this all so much better. I would have to start before they ruined both Mando's arc and Book of Boba with those two misplaced episodes, but even I, who can barely script an episode of television to save my life, could have handled the same thematic material so much better. Even if I was pinned down to the events of Book of Boba, I wouldn't have fucked it up this badly. I really wonder what amateur is doing the story. Or what asshole Disney exec is interfering with the poor amateur that's doing the story, as the case may be.
