further thoughts on The Mandalorian

[swan_tower]

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.

Comments

[shadaras]

I feel like some people are just going "live action star wars!" and glossing over these flaws, but your summary seems more emotionally accurate than the ones I've seen pop up elsewhere. It's too bad, but... Star Wars is a big enough property that this doesn't ruin anything for me, at least.

[swan_tower]

If I want live-action Star Wars, I've got the movies. This is not scratching any itch for me that can't better be eased by waiting for the last of the sequel trilogy.

[mrissa]

The thing I keep thinking is: the beginning of a piece sets the tone, it tells you a lot about what its creator wants you to know about where it's going.

If the first 25% of the thing basically doesn't have women and that's NOT where it's going--in both a larger culture and a franchise with a history of too little too goddamn late for gender rep--it is at the very least a badly done beginning. And you're allowed to judge it on that. In fact you have to, that's what it's there for.

[swan_tower]

Yeah -- I remember saying a similar thing when I posted about the lack of women in The Name of the Wind. If it gets better in the second book, that's nice . . . but 700+ pages is more than enough time to include women, and failure to do so is in fact a statement on the series overall.

Because it would be SO EASY TO FIX. Take the alien who guides the Mandalorian in the first two eps, and replace Nick Nolte with a woman as the voice actor. Boom, done! Now the character with the second-largest amount of screen time and agency in the plot is female, and things no longer feel unbalanced. But you can watch the script pass by one opportunity after another to get women into the story, as if the two minutes with the Armorer had checked off that box and nobody needed to worry about it again. In this day and age, I feel like it takes willful blindness not to see the failure there.