further thoughts on The Mandalorian

Yyyyyyyeah. I’m not going to bother watching any more, and I can’t find any particularly good reason to recommend that anybody else start.

It isn’t actively bad. The music (done by Ludwig Göransson, same guy who scored Black Panther) is great. But the second episode — of eight — had zero screen time with female characters, leaving us at a mere two minutes in over an hour of TV, and a quarter of the season. And furthermore, the pacing is glacial: the second ep, which is thirty-two minutes long, spent most of that time on a series of fight scenes. I can sum up the entirety of the meaningful plot by saying “he finds out that the bounty he’s been hired to bring back can use the Force, and then they leave the planet.” Everything else? It’s filler. Spectacle. Re-iteration of stuff we already know (like “there are other bounty hunters on the trail”) or else stuff that does absolutely nothing to forward the narrative. It just gives our nameless Clint Eastwood expy more reasons to be a badass and fight things. However well-executed the filler may be, at the end of the second episode I had even less interest and less reason to care than I did at the end of the first.