TV Review: The Mandalorian - Episodes 1-3

Boba Fett Sucks.  He shows up in Empire Strikes Back, let's Vader capture our heroes, takes Solo after Vader's done with him, and bolts.  He then shows up in Return of the Jedi randomly hanging around Jabba's Palace, where he gets knocked into the Sarlacc by a blind man randomly swinging a stick.  He does nothing cool or badass.  He's a specially dressed mook and that's it.  But that dress - his "Mandalorian" Armor, inspired Star Wars fans to imagine an awesome badass, which the old EU took and ran with, and the Star Wars universe could never put him to the side afterwards.

And so The Mandalorian exists, showcasing another bounty hunter who wears the same cool set of armor.  But cool looking armor isn't enough to make a TV Show or Film.  And while the show thankfully doesn't feature Fett himself, it very much envisions its protagonist somewhat in his mold, complete with being short of words.  As such, it's left very much to the setting and actions of everyone involved in order to set up the plot and characters, to go along with the action sequences featured in every episode.  Badly done, this could wind up in a show that's nothing more than empty action sequences.  Indeed, the first episode of The Mandalorian, and even the second somewhat, suggests the show might fall into that pile of emptiness.

The third episode however, does enough to suggest this show might be going interesting places.

NOTE: Spoilers after the Jump for the first three episodes, although if you've avoided all these spoilers on social media, you've basically been living in a hole the last two weeks and I'm very impressed.


Most old EU works focusing on Boba Fett featured large segments with another protagonist (for example, Dengar), someone more talkative and evocative for Fett's badass actions to be noted by, and to provide actual character development, considering Fett rarely got any.  The Mandalorian doesn't do this - while we have a few characters repeat at times (Carl Weathers' Greef Karga and Nick Nolte's Ugnaught), the story seems to be trying to actually make it about the development of the title character himself.

And well, the results through two episodes weren't particularly exciting in that regards, with the Mandalorian spending parts of each episode acting like a badass and other parts acting like a complete doof (seriously, he's supposed to be a badass bounty hunter only to have his ship stolen easily and then get stunned by a gaggle of Jawas....really?) but never really showing much character.  The third episode improves upon this a lot - with the Mandalorian's background and culture being revealed in his dealings with the Armorer and his fellow Mando, Heavy Infantry* and then the Mandalorian's own guilt at having only defeated the Mud Horn through the help of an "enemy who didn't know it was an enemy" and eventual turning back for Baby Yoda.  He has a personality now!  Well, sort of.  Hopefully the series will build upon that.

That's what the subtitles call that character at least.  

In a weird way the series reminds me a bit like Genndy Tartakovsky's original Clone Wars series, which first ran for 20 episodes of 5 minutes each before a few episodes of like 15 minutes to close it out.*  Like that series, the episodes of The Mandalorian are shorter than you'd expect, with action sequences and character movement being most of what is used to convey character, and the series relying quite a lot on background knowledge of Star Wars to make up for the rest.  It's certainly not up to Clone Wars' standard yet, with the action sequences for the first two episodes of the Mandalorian feeling a lot emptier - don't get me wrong, the sequences were a lot of fun and really well done for a TV show, but nothing about them stuck with you after they were done.  But again, the third episode's climactic action sequences - both the infiltration and the escape - were wonderful at establishing character beats and plot directions, in addition to having a bunch of fun easter eggs (hello jetpacks!).

*This series is sadly not on Disney+ but you can find it on Youtube and I highly recommend it.

So yeah, The Mandalorian as a show is a lot of fun so far, and shows signs of actually becoming interesting.  I'm not sure how high my hopes are raised for that, and to be fair, even if it fails in that regard, the rest of the show (action sequences, setting, and music) is fun enough to probably carry me through a whole season on their own, especially with episodes being a very comfortable 30-40 minutes long at most.  Add in the cuteness of Baby Yoda, to which I'm definitely NOT immune and yeah, this is worth keeping an eye on.  Is the show worth you subscribing to Disney Plus on its own however?  Not really sure yet, although at the current price, it might just be.  Here's hoping to more definitively answer that question with the next few episodes.