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Want to Dig Deeper Into the Mandalorian?

Want to Dig Deeper Into The Mandalorian? This Is the Way.

The Mandalorian:
More Than Just Star Wars

Disney+ | Star Wars: Visions

Disney+ | Tales of the Jedi

Disney+ | Star Wars: Andor

Season Two shows just how deeply this Disney+ series is woven into the Star Wars universe

by Dennis Burger
January 2, 2020

It’s difficult these days to have any meaningful discussion about Star Wars without obsessing over The Mandalorian. This lightning-in-a-bottle Disney+ series has the sort of universal appeal that none of the main saga films have enjoyed since The Empire Strikes Back. (And let’s not forget that TESB wasn’t so universally beloved until years after its initial release.)

There’s good reason for the series’ universal appeal, of course. As I said in my wrap up of the first season, The Mandalorian is a wonderful deconstruction of everything that made the original Star Wars such a smash hit. In breaking the galaxy far, far away down into its essential components (the gunslinger, the samurai, the strange-but-familiar environments, the wonderful sense of mystery, the thematic through-lines of honor, familial baggage, and redemption) and recombining them into a shape we’ve never quite seen before, the series continues to be both stimulating and comfortable, both innovative and grounded in the past.

One thing I said about the series’ first season no longer rings true after the second batch of episodes, though. In my Season One overview, I made an offhand comment about the show’s “tenuous connections to the larger mythology,” despite the fact that that season ended with the appearance of one of the most legendary Star Wars weapons of all time: The Darksaber.

In Season Two, the connections to the legendarium become much less tenuous, much more overt, and much more central to the underlying themes and meaning of The Mandalorian. And it’s that last point that’s most important, because the simple truth is that you don’t really need to know the history of Mandalorian culture or its various factions to follow the plot of this past season. That history simply helps in unpacking what it all means.

And I can say that pretty confidently, because I talk to so many of my friends who are absolutely gaga over “new” characters introduced in Season Two who aren’t new at all. Characters like Bo-Katan Kryze, played to perfection by Katee Sackhoff not only in this live-action series but also in three seasons of The Clone Wars and one particularly memorable episode of Star Wars: Rebels. I was worried, when rumors of Bo-Katan’s return started circulating on the internet, that she would feel shoehorned into this series, that her presence would feel like fan-service of the worst sort. Nothing could be further from the truth, though. To misquote Voltaire, if Bo-Katan hadn’t already existed, it would have been necessary to invent her for Season Two to make a lick of sense.

This season also features the return of Ahsoka Tano—perhaps the single most beloved character ever created by George Lucas, but one that many fans of The Mandalorian had never heard of or only knew secondhand thanks to hyper-nerds like myself. Again, though, due to the way showrunners Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni have woven her into this series, you don’t really need to know Ahsoka’s backstory to understand her mission in The Mandalorian. But I would argue that you do need to know where she has come from and where she’s going if you want to truly understand why she’s on that mission.

The point I’m trying to not-so-subtly make here is that you can go into The Mandalorian having only seen the original Star Wars films and not really feel like you’re missing anything essential in terms of plot. You may get the sense that there’s a larger story unfolding that you’re not privy to, but that’s always the case with any good Star Wars story. But if you haven’t watched The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels, you actually are missing out on a deeper level of understanding that’s just sitting there waiting for you to discover.

I’ll give you just one example, although I feel the need to throw out an obligatory spoiler warning here for those of you who are making your way through Season Two slowly in an effort to ameliorate some of the pain caused by the long wait for Season Three.

In the epic finale of this season, there’s a moment in which Din Djarin, the titular Mandalorian, offers the Darksaber to Bo-Katan after being informed of its cultural significance. This moment almost perfectly mirrors a scene from “Heroes of Mandalore,” the Season Four premiere episode of Star Wars: Rebels. There, a Mandalorian named Sabine Wren offers Bo-Katan the blade and Bo-Katan accepts it, although not without some hesitation. In the season finale of The Mandalorian, she rejects it outright. And I won’t get into all of her political reasoning for doing so, as the episode spells all of this out. My point here is that the mirroring of these two scenes adds an extra level of tension to the finale and quietly tells a tale we haven’t seen unfold in any form to date.

The fact that Bo-Katan refuses to simply accept the Darksaber this time around, when we’ve seen her do so before under nearly identical circumstances, tells us something about the character that no amount of exposition could convey nearly as artfully. Namely, it tells us that she blames herself for the so-called Great Purge of Mandalore and the genocide of her people, an event we’ve only heard about in rumors and retellings.

I could go on and on, rambling about little nuggets of this sort you can glean from viewing The Mandalorian in the context of its animated forebears, and I’ve done so in private conversations with friends who love the live-action series but seem hesitant to watch “kids’ cartoons.” It honestly doesn’t help my case that The Clone Wars didn’t start off with a bang. Even as a devoted fan, I have to admit that the first season was childish and wildly uneven.

But by Season Two, The Clone Wars gets good. Really good. By Season Three, it’s honestly some of the best Star Wars ever made. And by Season Four it transforms into one of the best TV series of all time, subject matter be damned.

So, if you’ve tried getting into The Clone Wars and found it a tough pill to swallow, I recommend giving it another try—but this time around, skip the bulk of the first season. Watch “Rookies,” the fifth episode, then skip to the final four episodes in that first run: “Storm Over Ryloth,” “Innocents of Ryloth,” “Liberty on Ryloth,” and “Hostage Crisis.” Objectively, they’re nowhere near the quality of later seasons, but they’ll give you a good foundation for what’s to come, especially the second-season episodes that really lay the foundation for The Mandalorian, starting with Episode 12, “The Mandalore Plot.”

Likewise, Star Wars: Rebels gets off to a similarly uneven start, and I wish I could give you a similar cheat sheet for which episodes are skippable. But you’ll just have to trust me on this one: By the time you get to the end of Season Four, it becomes clear that there wasn’t a throwaway moment in the entire 75-episode run. It’s simply one hell of a slow burn.

All seven seasons of The Clone Wars and all four seasons of Rebels are available to stream on Disney+, and it’s worth noting that the streaming provider presents the former with all of the content that was censored by Cartoon Network in the original broadcasts. Don’t go in expecting anything overtly gratuitous or vulgar, but I often advise my friends with young children that the series explores the implications of war in a way pre-teens aren’t quite mature enough to digest. So take that for what it’s worth.

Of course, we can’t know for sure how much of an impact the events of The Clone Wars and Rebels will have on future seasons of The Mandalorian, especially given that there’s no clear and obvious path forward for the series. Taken as a whole, the first two seasons of this wildly popular live-action show have told the tale of a man whose sense of self was predicated on a moral code that he never questioned—until forced to do so. It’s the story of a man whose ideology begins to conflict with his principles, and whose entire notion of who he is and what he stands for has been torn to shreds as a result of his own empathy and moral awakening. By the end of Season Two, Din Djarin has succeeded in his quest and as a result is left with nearly nothing—no purpose, no culture, no tradition to fall back on and believe in. As such, where his journey goes from here is nearly anyone’s guess.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that however this story ends up blossoming, the seeds will have been planted in The Clone Wars and Rebels.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

O Rob! Part 2

Part 2—The Return of the Repressed

That the upstanding sitcom family man re-emerged as an insensitive, petulant loser seems like a fitting enough sign of the times

by Michael Gaughn

“O Rob!” Part 1

“Rob Petrie was a model of decency and tact because he felt firmly grounded in his world; Michael Scott lashes out blindly because he feels lonely and lost.”

As a possible way of life, the Liberal movement of the early 1960s barely survived the Great Society and was in any meaningful sense kaput by the early ‘70s. The eruption of political radicalism and the resulting right-wing backlash—which made it clear the Liberal dream was not just untenable but vanquished—swept the myths that fed both the Kennedy mystique and The Dick Van Dyke Show into the dustbin of history. But for many, that mythology represented America’s best possible face, and even people who found it repugnant acknowledged its allure.

You can’t aggressively repress a potent cultural force fraught with unresolved emotion without expecting it to return—usually in monstrous form. Faced with a society that felt beat up, disoriented, and cheated after a decade and a half of constant upheaval, the late ‘70s conjured up retro as consolation. An unconscious admission that the present wasn’t good enough and all that turmoil hadn’t added up to squat, retro gave us an excuse to get lost in a vague haze of nostalgia. But by reinventing history to suit the needs of the present instead of accepting it on its own terms, creating a false sense of security based on a lie, it kept yesterday alive in ways that could only trouble today.

Initially created to smooth over a massive cultural void, retro was too tempting a fiction to not be turned to political ends, with TV the primary vehicle for its dissemination. From the ‘70s through the early part of this century, we defined our political identity by way of the tube. Whether via sitcoms, dramas, news shows, pervasive political ads—even children’s shows and wrestling—it provided a way to feel politically at home.

That all got supercharged with the emergence—more accurately, eruption—of social media, which thrives on fostering the illusion of free expression, interaction, immediacy, and intimate contact when it’s really just another form of entertainment. The pivot was reality TV, programs that made us comfortable with figures who were every bit as fictional as the ones on sitcoms and dramas but who we agreed to accept, out of a gaping emotional need, as actual. Once social media was able to add the illusion of access to TV’s illusion of reality, the door was wide open for creating a world ruled by influencers—people we flock to to define us because we don’t just admit to but feed on their superiority. Once all that became commingled with politics, the genie unleashed became an even more malevolent force.

All of this was set in motion, incredibly, by the Petries. Just because the whole influence thing has become hopelessly fragmented (deliberately so) didn’t mean it couldn’t coalesce in ways as powerful as a groundbreaking situation comedy able to command the rapt attention of more than a third of the nation. With the nuclear family dead and interred and a manic individualism—the very definition of atomization—on the rise, the idea of rallying behind a married couple that represents a national ideal is no longer tenable, but we can—and do—define ourselves against thousands of influencers who, considered as a whole (and once you allow for the huge redundancy factor), hold the same kind of sway over society. All of that fragmentation just ensures that the ground never feels quite solid under our feet.

As for the political dimension—there’s no need to spell it out, but I’ve left enough breadcrumbs along the way for anyone with a keen enough interest to follow the trail. Kennedy’s obvious successor, ruling-by-charisma-wise, was Regan—but, a product of the movies, he was ultimately just a trial balloon. It would take a figure clearly born of TV to make this whole thing virulent.

Which brings us to probably the most salient recent example of mutation via repression. Like a classic doppelgänger from the uncanny, Michael Scott couldn’t be further removed from Rob Petrie. But, as the bumbling male lead of an influential TV series about work, he and Rob obviously spring from the same sitcom roots, which lends them an unsettling resemblance. A charismatic figure warped to fit the present, Michael is little more than the sum of his flaws, a social cripple we find endearing mainly because we share his plight.

His defining character trait—and the point where he veers most radically from Rob—is the whole “no filters” thing, which allows him to get away with saying and doing things that are undeniably hurtful and offensive just because he’s seen as a well-meaning, hopelessly insecure dope. Rob was a model of decency and tact because he felt firmly grounded in his world; Michael lashes out blindly because he feels lonely and lost.

“No filters” has of course become a kind of rallying cry, a pernicious phenomenon no one would have trouble finding multiplying examples of in the wider culture—and something that couldn’t be farther from the world of the Van Dyke show. Brutality as grace is the price we pay for stumbling forward clueless, believing something potent will go away just because we succeeded in temporarily sweeping it under the rug. By refusing to understand and assimilate the past, we leave it free to constantly judge the present and, not surprisingly, find it lacking.

It should be obvious none of the above is meant to be an exercise in nostalgia—if anything, it was a meditation on the price we pay for nostalgia. Adopting the comforting shells of the past without pondering their meaning, or relevance, to fill a sense of emptiness in the present has only lead to massive discontent. Huddling inside outmoded forms as if they’ll somehow protect us from a storm of our own making has left us vulnerable, isolated, frustrated, and angry.

The answer isn’t to return to Rob and Laura’s world any more than it is to continue to obsessively, mechanically repeat our present mistakes. It could even be argued that our refusal to become unstuck from the past is the whole problem. But the past we continue to cling to bears practically no relation to the past as it actually happened but is more a kind of willy-nilly appropriation, a history’s greatest hits, a child’s form of succor. And no sane person could ever expect anything good to arise from a lie like that.

“O Rob!” Part 1

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtable, marketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

“Honey, I’m Home!”

To provide a little potted Freud for context: The Return of the Repressed comes from Sigmund, and the core concept is that things once comfortable and familiar that we repress for whatever reasons will inevitably return to haunt us because we’ve never resolved how we feel about them. This led to his concept of The Uncanny, which Freud called “unheimlich”—or “unhomelike”—because what once protected and nurtured us re-emerges transfigured into forms that now threaten us instead. Overly reduced, the womb becomes the tomb. The whole notion of homelike become unhomelike obviously has a particularly pungent and ironic meaning when applied to a domestic situation comedy—the domestic situation comedy—of the early ‘60s.

O Rob! Part 1

How the best sitcom ever helped pave the way for many of our current cultural ills

by Michael Gaughn

AT ITS HEIGHT, The Dick Van Dyke Show was seen by more than 17 million viewers a week. The most popular sitcom of this past year, Young Sheldon, averaged just over 9 million viewers. There were 52,600,000 TV households in 1963; there are more than twice that now. Roughly translated, about 33% of the people watching TV in 1963 tuned in to the Van Dyke show, while around 13% of viewers today watch Young Sheldon. (I admit I’ve thrown enough apples and oranges together here to make a fruit salad but

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the basic proportions are accurate enough.) And the programming on the only three networks available then added up to a tiny fraction of what virtually any TV viewer can access now.

In an age of rampant tribalism and the acute atomization of media, it’s easy to forget how dominant and influential a single TV series could be—especially when that series didn’t resemble anything else that had been on television and seemed like a harbinger of the medium’s future. There had been plenty of domestic comedies before Van Dyke but those husbands and wives were neither young or old but tended to exist in an ageless realm of staid maturity. And everyone tended to live in a non-specific middle-American everywhere. You knew the husbands had jobs but you rarely, if ever, saw them at work. The level of sophistication was decidedly low—everybody seemed to eat meat and potatoes, and if they went out at all, it was to the movies. Knowing references to current culture were taboo, considered likely to alienate the lowest common denominator.

Rob and Laura Petrie were young and hip-enough suburbanites living in the very real New Rochelle, NY with Rob taking the train or driving to his job in midtown Manhattan where he was the head writer of a comedy/variety show viewers readily identified with similar shows hosted by Sid Caesar, Red Skelton, and Milton Berle. The series was peppered with spot-on nods to Leonard Bernstein, bebop, Roger Corman films, Lenny Bruce-type comedians, Tennessee Williams, late-night talk shows, Ingmar Bergman, Albert Schweitzer, comedy albums, Off Off Broadway, underground film, and even the early days of audiophilia.

And at a time when nothing on TV was overtly political and definitely not specific, the Van Dyke show exhibited an obvious fascination with the Kennedy administration. In “Bank Book 6565696,” Rob yearns for a XKG-JFK-400 roadster. In “The Sam Pomerantz Scandals,” comedian Danny Brewster does a lengthy JFK impersonation. And Laura looks like a Jackie Kennedy clone when she goes to beg mercy from Alan Brady in “Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth.”

But it went deeper than that. The money for the pilot for the show that would become The Dick Van Dyke Show was put up by Peter Lawford—a has-been actor whose only fame at the time came from having married into the Kennedy fold. But Lawford was just the beard—the funds actually came from the Kennedys, and series creator Carl Reiner had to send his script to family head Joseph Kennedy for approval before the money could be released.

The series and the administration seemed fated to be intertwined. The first episode was shot on the day of Kennedy’s inauguration; and even though everyone on the show was in shock from the President’s assassination, Reiner decided to go ahead with filming “Happy Birthday and Too Many More,” just without the usual live audience. It’s likely coincidental, but the quality of the series, which crested during the 1963 season, fell off after the end of the Kennedy administration, as if it had lost its lifeline.

I don’t think it’s too bold to say that Reiner deliberately crafted the Van Dyke show to be a definitive expression of the late ‘50s/early ’60s Liberal agenda. Episodes like “That’s My Boy???,” “A Show of Hands,” and “A Vigilante Ripped My Sport Coat” are direct expressions of the movement—again, something new for series TV, where any kind of advocacy was strictly forbidden. Reiner only became overt with his leanings once the show’s popularity was established but that worldview, and those politics, were baked into Van Dyke from the beginning and permeated it so completely that there’s barely an aspect, overt or covert, they didn’t inflect.

Let me pause, lest anyone get their hackles up, and say this piece isn’t really about politics, let alone any particular political position. The form of liberalism Reiner was espousing pretty much died with the Great Society and continues to exist, if it exists at all, as little more than a historical artifact, not unlike the Know-Nothings and Abolitionists of the Antebellum period. Any resemblance between it and any current politicians and movements is almost purely coincidental.

By having the identity of the Van Dyke show spring so obviously from the New Frontier, Reiner unavoidably brought all its baggage in tow. It’s not to for one second diminish the genius of the series to say that it exhibits the smugness and elitism many, detractors and supporters alike, saw as that movement’s greatest flaw. Rob Petrie is college educated, lives in an affluent Northeastern suburb, and works in a glamorous industry in NYC—pretty much the perfect embodiment of the Liberal ideal, and a life practically no one actually lived but many aspired to.

The problem was that this somewhat utopian worldview could only work on TV—and only if you played by its rules. Its centerpiece was tolerance—but a kind of tolerance that was only feasible under a form of benign monarchy, laced with a heavy dollop of noblesse oblige, where Rob and Laura (as stand-ins for Jack and Jackie) were undeniably king and queen.

WATCHING DVD

Some might look askance at the idea of site called Cineluxe devoting an article—let alone a two-parter—to an old TV series. Two immediate rejoinders: TV always has been and always will be nothing but sitcoms and melodramas, so old really has nothing to do with it. And the Van Dyke show is one of the few pre-‘90s sitcoms that holds up well when viewed on a big screen.

The series was shot on 35mm by veteran cinematographer Robert De Grasse, who cut his teeth on RKO classics like Stage Door, the Rogers & Astaire Carefree, and the Robert Wise noir Born to Kill—which goes a long way toward explaining how a relatively low-budget 30-plus-episodes-a-year black & white sitcom looks so damn elegant. It’s not the last word in the filmic art, but it doesn’t look like it was shot in somebody’s closet either.

That it was all originally framed for 19-inch TVs—which means lots and lots of medium shots and closeups—isn’t as jarring as it could be, mainly because the material is so strong that you quickly shake off any twinges of claustrophobia. The big screen also tends to expose any dings, scratches, stains, or painted-over hinges in the sets—which are more beat up than they should have been—as well as continuity errors and shots saved in post by way of the optical printer.

The quality of the sound is all over the place, from season to season and sometimes from episode to episode within a season—and even with an episode. The last third of Season 3’s “Scratch My Car and Die,” for instance, sounds like they swapped out the boom mics for tin cans and string. Not that the audio for this series had to do much heavy lifting, but the too bland sound of the first two seasons tends to make the material feel flatter than it is and the actors more plastic than they are.

The release of the series currently streaming for free on practically any service you can think of is a pleasure to watch but looks like somebody went a little heavy with the edge enhancement. A new release done with a more delicate touch would be very much appreciated—and since it seems like the original 35mm sources are in decent enough shape, why not just do it in 4K next time?—although I’m not seeing where HDR would bring much to the party.

The series reinforces this constantly, almost obsessively. The most blatant example is “My Husband is the Best One,” where it’s driven home that Rob is by far the smartest, most talented, and attractive person in the show’s universe (when Laura tells him, “You’re the best one and you know it, and so do I,” Rob responds, “Right!”) and that everyone else, other than Laura and including TV star Alan Brady, are mere peons (“Petrie is truly the genius behind the genius. The swift satirical sword belongs to him. Brady merely wields it.”). This is revisited in a more explicitly political context in the two-part Season 5 episode where Rob runs for councilman, where he’s seen as superior to a far more qualified candidate just because he’s taller and more personable.

The ultimate message of the Van Dyke show would seem to be that height and a kind of modest charm are the keys to ruling a benevolent society. There are constant references throughout the series to Rob and Laura’s attractiveness and a large number of episodes focus on how they’re pursued by almost everyone they come in contact with. Meanwhile, there are just as many reminders of the inferiority of everyone else in the cast—how Buddy is short and dumpy, Sally unattractive and old (Rose Marie was just two years older than Van Dyke), Mel a cringing marshmallow, Millie a snoop, a nag, and a lousy cook, Jerry an uncouth braggart, and Alan Brady a tyrannical, egotistical boor.

I could continue to cite examples—they’re legion—but you get the idea.

All of this fed from and helped reinforce the Camelot mystique, the myth, created largely via America’s popular-entertainment apparatus, of a young and vibrant couple that would lead the country into a prolonged and enlightened Golden Age. That all of course collapsed utterly after the assassination, with no one, inside or outside the Kennedy clan, able to assume the mantle—mainly because no one had a Jackie to go with their Jack. But the core of the idea—of the enthralling power of a mass-media-created political mythology—didn’t die; in fact, it was just getting on its feet and would ultimately lead to the rise of the cult of celebrity.

Part 2 suggests that while the values promoted by the Kennedy Administration and promulgated by the Van Dyke show were plowed under by the tumult of the ‘60s, they refused to rest in peace, and, mutated, rose again to permeate the current cultural landscape

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Rolling shows out slowly over time makes sense for some series—but not for all

by Dennis Burger
May 13, 2021

Throughout March and April, Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier dominated the pop-culture conversation. You might have noticed that we at Cineluxe weren’t part of that conversation but that doesn’t have much to do with the series itself. It’s a fine show—far from Marvel’s best work but also far from its worst. The series deals with a lot of big ideas, and although it doesn’t give them all the thorough examination they deserve, it’s still a solid continuation of the Captain America films just without the benefit of Steve Rogers, who hung up the shield at the end of Avengers: Endgame.

So, why the radio silence? Because a discussion of what did and didn’t work about The Falcon and the Winter Soldier would sort of miss the point. Anyone who tells you they could wrap their heads around the show before it was available to view in its entirety is lying. The biggest thing holding the series back was that it doesn’t hold up as weekly appointment television.

I’ve riffed in the past, about how Disney+ represented something of a revival of “water cooler” TV—how its weekly release schedule gave new shows some breathing room and gave audiences an opportunity to discuss new episodes one at a time in chat rooms, message boards, and around the dinner table.

That really worked to the advantage of the first two seasons of The Mandalorian, and it was practically baked into the premise of WandaVision. Of course, it wasn’t merely a creative decision to release those shows one episode at a time over the course of a couple of months, it was an act of necessity, given that neither’s season finale was finished cooking when the first episode hit the table.

Forget the reasons for this anti-binging release strategy, though. The fact is that it works—except when it doesn’t. And The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is the perfect example of how a “this is the way we do things” mentality and a dogged adherence to tradition (no matter how new that tradition may be) can hurt a property.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is, at the end of the day, a pretty good five-hour-plus movie. And given its length, it’s nice to have it broken up into six chapters so you can consume it at your own pace over the course of a night or two or an entire week—whichever fits your schedule. But given that it’s effectively one cinematic experience chopped into six roughly equal parts, doling it out over a month-and-a-half of real-world time reminded me of Bilbo Baggins’ famous quote from The Fellowship of the Ring: It feels thin . . . sort of stretched . . . like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.

When Disney+ launched, the weekly release schedules were part of its still-forming identity. At this point, though, its identity is pretty well established. It surpassed 100 million subscribers sometime last month. Soon enough, its subscriber base will eclipse Netflix (although I hesitate to predict when, since analysts keep moving the goalposts and Disney+ continues to defy their wildest expectations in terms of growth).

At this point, you have to acknowledge that Disney+ is, if not the leader in streaming, at least a leader. Good leaders adapt, though. They have a good sense of what works and what doesn’t. And while the appointment-TV approach has certainly worked for most of the service’s properties so far, we now have at least one example of ever-Friday releases negatively impacting a show’s effectiveness.

There was literally no good creative reason to tease out The Falcon and the Winter Soldier over the course of six weeks. Six days, maybe? That could have worked. And the entertainment-industry headlines would have written themselves: “Disney+ Brings Back the Mini-Series with Special Falcon & Winter Soldier Event.”

Disney+ has broken nearly every rule of the streaming marketplace. Surely it can break this rule when it makes sense, even if the rule is its own.

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The first season of The Mandalorian is satisfying from start to finish, taking the franchise into intriguing new territory

by Dennis Burger
January 2, 2020

If you haven’t already seen Season One of The Mandalorian on Disney+, it stands to reason that you’re simply not interested. You may even be sick of hearing about it altogether, given that it’s the only thing in 2019 that managed to out-meme that crazy woman from Real Housewives yelling at a cat eating salad.

Here’s the thing, though: While much of the discussion about The Mandalorian has centered on its adorable baby-alien McGuffin or its ties to the larger Star Wars universe, or even on its everything-old-is-new-again weekly release schedule, there hasn’t been an awful lot of talk about whether the series is actually good. Not as a Star Wars TV series. Not as a lore drop about one of the franchise’s most beloved and mysterious factions. Not even as a small plank in the bridge between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, chronologically speaking. But as, you know, just a TV show, a thing that exists in and of itself, independent of the fanatical fanbase or larger mythology.

The last time I wrote about the series, five episodes into its eight-episode run, I withheld judgment on that matter. Now that we’re a few days past the first-season finale and I’ve had a chance to watch the season again from front to back, I wanted to step back and take off my Star Wars scholar hat and discuss the show on its own terms (not an easy task, since I once defeated the president of the Star Wars Fan Club in a trivia contest and still have the prize to prove it).

The Mandalorian is the love child of Jon Favreau, a name you definitely know, and Dave Filoni, who may be unfamiliar if you’re not a big Star Wars fan. In short, Filoni was half of the creative driving force behind The Clone Wars, one of the best TV series of the past 20 years, but also one of the most criminally underrated, likely due to the fact that it was animated.

That aside, though, there’s one massive difference between The Clone Wars and The Mandalorian: The former assumed you were deeply invested in Star Wars lore and wanted to know more; the latter seems more interested in disassembling the elements that made the original Star Wars trilogy such a cultural phenomenon and reassembling them into something new—something that both pays homage and reinvents.

You don’t have to know much about George Lucas’s space opera/fantasy to know that this means going back to the wells of both Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone, the former of which influenced the latter and both of which inspired Star Wars in very different ways. Since The Mandalorian isn’t about a larger civilization-spanning conflict, Favreau and Filoni leave other influences—like The Dam Busters and Tora! Tora! Tora!—on the table and bring in some new inspiration, namely Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s epic Japanese comic-book serial Lone Wolf and Cub and the film adaptations it spawned.

The beauty of Favreau and Filoni’s new pastiche is that you really don’t need to know any of that to enjoy it. Nor do you have to know that the show’s producers have eschewed CGI as much as possible by going back and developing new techniques for photographing and compositing spacecraft models that are very much inspired by the techniques of ILM circa 1976 to 1983. Without knowing any of that, you can just feel it. There’s this wonderful mix of the familiar and the foreign that drives this series.

And that’s true of everything, down to Ludwig Göransson’s incredible score, which may be my favorite thing about The Mandalorian. Instead of aping John Williams’ iconic themes, as so many other composers have done when playing around in ancillary Star Wars projects, Göransson gives us something new that isn’t really new at all. Squint at it from one direction and there’s an undeniable Eastern influence to the tones, textures, and overall structure of the music. Step back and look at it from another angle and it could just as easily have accompanied any of the misadventures of the Man with No Name.

As with Williams, Göransson also sprinkles in the flavor of Holst and the spice of Stravinsky from time to time, but—at the risk of sounding repetitive—it’s the way he combines these influences, along with his own unique aesthetic, that results in something new and compelling that still feels familiar, even if you can’t quite put your finger on exactly why.

I hinted above that The Mandalorian doesn’t attempt to bite off more than it can chew, namely in the way that it doesn’t attempt to mash up every classic work of cinema or serial that inspired the original Star Wars, and that’s as true thematically as it is narratively and stylistically. There really isn’t much here by way of spiritual rumination. The mystical is treated as a mystery and doesn’t play heavily into the meaning of the series.

Then again, it can take a while to really figure out what fundamental ideas the show is attempting to play around with, in large part due to its very episodic structure. In crafting this season, Favreau and Filoni seem intent upon letting the writers and directors of each 33- to 49-minute episode create their own little narratives, reminiscent in ways of David Carradine’s Kung Fu from the mid-1970s, and it isn’t until the very end that one episode really connects to the next and a larger story arc begins to congeal.

Taken as a whole, it’s not difficult to see a very simple thematic through-line woven into this collection of eight largely disconnected episodes: A tale of principles, honor, cultural (or familial) baggage, and redemption—all themes that resonate within the larger Star Wars mythology but that work just fine on their own.

Technically speaking, The Mandalorian is beautifully shot, and honestly looks even more cinematic than its $15-million-per-episode budget would lead you to suspect. There has been some controversy over the fact that the show doesn’t make use of the expanded dynamic range or larger color gamut afforded by its Dolby Vision (or HDR10, depending on your device) presentation. Gleaming specular highlights are nowhere to be found, and the lower end of the value scale can be a bit flat. I’m guessing this was largely an aesthetic choice, as it does give the show a somewhat “classic” look, especially in comparison to other contemporary series that do make more obvious use of HDR.

I hesitate to accuse Disney+ of being dishonest in presenting The Mandalorian’s non-HDR cinematography in an HDR container, though, and that mostly boils down to a little-discussed advantage of our new home video standards in the era of higher-efficiency, lower-bitrate streaming: The minimization of video artifacts.

On a lark, I disabled the HDR capabilities of my Roku Ultra and spot-checked an early episode, just to see what differences might pop up. In terms of color purity, shadow detail, overall brightness, and so forth, any differences were hard to spot. But without the benefit of 10- (or 12-) bit color, large expanses of clear, pale sky were occasionally rendered like sun-bleached sticks of Fruit Stripe gum, with blatant banding stretching from one side of the screen to the other. Say what you

will about the series’ overall flatcolor palette and lack of value extremes, but simply packing it in a Dolby Vision box does keep visual distractions of that sort to a bare minimum.

As for the audio, you’ll definitely want to enjoy The Mandalorian on the best sound system you have access to. One evening, whilst hanging out at a friend’s house, someone floated the idea of watching the most recent episode, which I agreed to despite having just watched it the evening prior. I found it a lackluster experience mostly due to my buddy’s inexpensive soundbar. And it wasn’t really the explosions or gunfire that left me wanting more (although the sound mix does them justice), it was the presentation of Göransson’s aforementioned score. There’s a dynamic drive to his musical accompaniment, as well as a rich blend of timbres and textures, that simply demands to be heard by way of a well-calibrated, well-installed, full-range surround sound system.

But should you give it a chance to shine in your home theater or media room even if you care little for George Lucas’s galaxy far, far away? I daresay yes. At its heart, The Mandalorian is a delightful bushidō/gunslinger mashup that nods at fans quite frequently, but also quite slyly, such that you’re likely to be completely unaware of any allusions or references you’ll almost certainly miss if you’re not a franchise devotee, at least once you get past the first ten minutes of the first episode (the only place where blatant fan service really rears its ugly head).

Taken as a whole, it definitely does stand on its own, despite its tenuous connections to the larger mythology, despite its heavy nods to works of classic cinema and television, and (perhaps most importantly) despite the fact that everyone else on your Facebook newsfeed won’t stop memeing the hell out of the series’ most heartfelt moments or most quotable dialogue.

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