f13.net

...gets a premiere date: Dec 29 2021

(https://i.imgur.com/zx1csYD.jpg)

Edit by Trippy: add Disney+ tag

damn it's feels good to be a gangsta

Want

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOJ1cw6mohw

I thought it was decent. Hit some nice scenes, and look forward to the rest.

My wife thought it was great, and is gushing over it.

The scene where boba crawls out of the sand in front of the sarlacc pit is word for word straight from Patton Oswalds infamous Parks and Rec speech, down to the pan down from the twin suns.

I’m pretty sure they did that on purpose too.

I mean, written by Favreau and directed by Rodriguez. I'm sure it was a deliberate nod. 

I also dug the Ray Harryhausen-esque monster.

Yeah.

I liked this a lot. My only concern so far is that for a guy who has done a lot of hard living in the company of a lot of tough guys, he seemed downright stupid in his first day as a crime lord. For one, seems pretty tough to replace Jabba with just yourself and one sidekick--I mean, if he didn't inherit some kind of organization from Bib Fortuna, he's really just a dude squatting in Jabba's old joint with a droid and a partner. When adding two Gamorrean thugs to your roster immediately doubles the size of your gang, you're maybe getting ahead of yourself by announcing you're the new crime lord. I get the "I rule from respect" and "let's show we're nice ordinary crime lord types by going for a stroll" but to get that flat-footed? I was hoping he'd have a few guys on the roof or otherwise show a bit of smarts.

Maybe he's actually kind of brain-damaged and that's going to be a subtext of the show, I dunno.

The problem is that he has been held up as the ultimate Bounty hunter for decades despite not... you know... actually doing anything to justify that. Now that he has to be doing something on screen at a regular basis its going to be hard to maintain that.

Or they could pull a roundabout and say that its just some shlub in Fetts spare armour, and the real Boba Fett will turn up after this guy is revealed as a total incompetent, And shoot one person to make everyone go "Clever girl."

The droid is voiced by Matt Berry though so that has to count for something.

The second episode is horrifically bad.

I'm kind of surprised. It's like dinner theater Lawrence of Arabia, right down to "there's a train and I have to teach the Space Arabs how to stop it and then tell the Space Turk Drug Dealers to leave the nice natives alone and then they will adopt me into their tribe and I will show off my new robes in delight." No twists, no irony, no subversion.

Plus in the present, Boba Fett continues to want to be a crime boss with exactly three people in his gang, two of them he acquired more or less by accident, without even the slightest hint of having a plan. I would like the guy to actually be canny after his long and complicated life, but...Maybe the show means us to see him as a dumb fucking thug who keeps getting pantsed by the equivalent of a blind man flicking his rocket pack on, I dunno, but I'm not seeing the signs of that being the idea.

I liked the "Dances with Banthas" episode, but I do question why so much of both episodes has been taken up by the "how he got to meet Mando" arc and we've seen so little of Boba the crime lord.

What little we've seen makes him out to be completely fucking stupid. Which just really doesn't work unless there's a Big Sekret Plan With a Twist or something. Maybe.

But Dances With Banthas was just offensive before we get to the politics by being fucking boring. We have all seen this a billion times. Dumb natives who don't know how to fight Big Machine Technology Things need a nice stranger to show them how to Kill the White Man/Ottoman Turk/Spice-Trading Alien. It doesn't feel anything like the Tusken Raiders we've seen in Star Wars, even--I mean, either let them be cruel motherfuckers who know exactly the fuck they're doing or give them some actually alien texture and complexity. We have had zero reason up to this point to see them as oppressed indigenes who are pissed about the alien outsiders with their mysterious machines (I mean, fuck, how long have non-Tuskens been on Tatooine? We first encounter the planet in The Phantom Menace and it doesn't exactly feel like the cities and ports are brand-shiny-new intrusions). Mostly I give Star Wars credit for having these weird cosmopolitan planets where even if there are "innocent natives" the situation is slightly more messy (say, the Mandolorian episode where he more or less re-enacts The Seven Samurai only it's just him, Gina Carano and Baby Yoda.)

I really don't expect a show cashing in on the popularity of an almost 40+ year old popular character who never had a speaking line in his original 2 movies to do anything beyond rehash some TV/Movie tropes with some pew-pew. White savior myth aside, none of the Star Wars mythos has been consistent enough to say this version of the Tuskens is any less accurate than another. Didn't they steal Anakin's momma in Attack of the Clones? Why?

Who the fuck knows? Simple answer is "Lucas had to have something to show Anakin's journey to the Dark Side, so why not have him slaughter some Tusken kids?"

Rehashing old movie plots worked magnificently for the Mandalorian so I think they are just going to ride that train as far as they can.

What you did there? See it I did.

*speaking of rehashing*

This show is fucking great.

Sorry you got old and bitter.

Sorry I want something slightly original and less stupid.

My son and I are still deciding on whether we're bored or not.  :awesome_for_real:

Show is not bad, but it's not great. I'm enjoying it. As boring as it is, the Tuskan stuff is kind of fun to watch still. Just feels like a time waster though.

I felt that way in episode 1. But in episode 2 I kind of settled into it and decided I preferred the tuskens over current day.

They need subtitles or an excuse for being able to speak English though. I'm bored of grunting and handwaving.

I liked Boba saying "we need a protocol droid". I mean, this much I really like about the Star Wars universe: there's a lot of languages and mostly folks only speak a few at best, and some people don't speak any but their own.

The Tuskens crafting their own gaffi sticks like jedi do their lightsabers was a solid nod though.

They fleshed out the Sand People more in season two of the Mandalorian.  They humanized them and made them more sympathetic in the episode where Mando teams up with them to kill the dragon thing.  So it seems this show is trying to just run with that/cash in on it, but doing it a lot worst.

This show is firmly 3.6 roentgen for me.  It has just enough entertainment value to keep me watching it every week, but significantly worst in every aspect of production compared to The Mandalorian.

I mean, I get it--Star Wars was built on an infrastructure of homage/ripping off. But you know, first off, the sprawling IP born from that now has some of its own world-building it can do (the krayt dragon hunt is a good example).

And 21st C. directors/writers can find some new shit to rip off. In the episode of Mandolorian where they have to get to the Imperial terminal on the giant mining transport, they're riffing off of "Sorcerer", which is a great movie. But it's just a riff--the episode has a lot of its own thing going on, and the source material is something kind of unfamiliar that deserves to be a bigger classic than it is. (It had the bad luck to come out the same summer as Star Wars...)

There's a few nice original touches in this episode--the hallucinogenic lizard, sort of crafting the gaffi sticks, etc. But if you haven't seen "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Dances With Wolves", maybe you wouldn't be aware of just how closely it follows the moves in those films, and in the case of Lawrence, right down to specific scenes, tropes, etc. I'm looking at people in the subreddits where they're talking about the episode and I'm thinking, "These are all people under 30 who've never seen either of those films". And the problem here is that those films are templates spread across our entire culture, very much unlike "Sorcerer"--they're cliches and kind of icky ones to boot.

There's no reason why they couldn't have made an episode explaining:

a) That the Tuskens have a reason for being stubborn and camping where the train can shoot at them--maybe it's a migration route for something they hunt, maybe it's the best sand-gourd area on the whole planet, whatever, something that makes them other than stupid natives who just fatalistically accept getting shot by drug lords when all they need to do is move 300 yards further away from the train route otherwise
b) That they know perfectly well how to ride speeder bikes and so on and they just plain refuse because it makes them dependent on the people who make them
c) That they make the plan and ask Boba to help because they know he's a bad-ass. (It would help if he then was in fact a bad-ass, which so far he's not doing that well.)

Now it is also just possible that Boba's whole confidence in asserting his control of Mos Espa is based on a convergence between the Tuskens in the past and the present--e.g., that he's going to pull a Paul Atreides and use desert power and he's just waiting for the Tusken penny to drop. If not, the stuff in the present-day frame isn't so much derivative as kind of dumb.

Incorrect. In ESB he said "As you wish," and "He's worth a lot to me." He says nothing in ROTJ.

He had a lot more lines in the animated bit in the Star Wars Holiday Special, which was his introduction. But he didn't do anything then bar try and trick the Rebels and run away after shooting once. The only reason people think he is a bad ass is that Vader says something like "Thats why they call you the best bounty hunter in the Galaxy." And no-one ever thinks Vader could be lying to flatter someone.

There really is nothing in the canonical films which could not have him just be an arrogant idiot who tells everyone how great he is.

Well, the whole setup of Boba in AotC is that he is Jango's selected progeny and has been directly trained by Jango as a Mandalorian, making him far superior to regular clones.  I think it is fair to say he was a badass.

I realize your point is about the original trilogy, but canon is canon.

So directly trained by a dude that got his head chopped off when Boba was still a kid...

Look, Jango did a pretty good job getting him to brush his teeth and eat his vegetables--a bounty hunter's got to start somewhere.

I mean we can all see they are going to mirror the dune plot right?

I'm still enjoying the hell out of it though.

I expect it to be less Dune and more old style Westerns or The Last Samurai or Lawrence of Arabia.

Interesting I'm thinking the sand people are going to be the reason he is able to hold/keep his throne.

Yes, that's about the most obvious bit of foreshadowing on the show.

Or when he comes back to Tatooine after his adventures with Mando, he discovers that the entire Tusken tribe was wiped out by the crime lords on Tatooine, thus his hard on for taking them on.

I *really* don't need them adding tiresome exposition for things like a & b. Sometimes Mando and this have too little dialog to such an extent that it prevents you connecting with characters. But I really don't want this kind of 'characters say things they each already know' bullshit.

c I just don't care either way.

I'm going to need a Danny Trejo action figure, plz.

It's not fucking exposition if it's done right. They had scenes explaining to you that they're a bunch of fucking ignorant savages who can't use machines unless Boba shows them, did you find that tiresome and turn it off? No, because you didn't see it as "exposition". But it was. That's what it was when you watched retard tusken fall off his bike three times. It just wasn't with words. You're so used to that scene that you don't find it "expositional" but that's the point--at the least you should find that even stupider than if they had a ten-second sequence of the Tuskens beating Boba around the head because he assumed they were technological retards. That's quicker, more unexpected, and more entertaining in a way. But no, you're happy with a filler set of repetitions showing you a trope that is like goddamn peanut butter and jelly or whatever and then you say 'please don't show me boring exposition'.

That means we also get a Stephen Root action figure.  Excellent.

Danny Fucking Trejo, locks just a-flowin'. Another fun episode, even with the Back to the Future 2 gang. Hoping Bountybacca comes back, awesome character design.

Mos Quadrophenia.

Still doing a shit job of showing how he is possibly supposed to be running a criminal empire with exactly 3 henchmen/soldiers/employees/anything.  Grats on doubling the size of his 'army' this episode by hiring 4 zoot suit teens, but lol.  The exuberance at having a pet Rancor and wanting to ride it was also sort of weird.  "Totally safe unless threatened."  Yeah.....

Again, still just entertaining enough (I do like seeing the world building and costume design) to keep me watching, but the writing is a mess.
I'm sure they'll bring him back to save Boba from himself since he's now Star Wars Ned Stark.  But if you want to know more, he actually has quite a bit of back story in the (canon) comics:
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Krrsantan

Including the fact he and Boba teamed up with each other under Jabba.  Kinda sad they didn't have some banter about that.

I am glad to see Black Krrsantan, at any rate--and they really nailed his comic-book look.

I was surprised he just walked away. Because he was the best looking character in this and the only one really able to emote anything.

And actually showed what a bad ass he is in his five minutes of screen time, Boba hasn't managed to do a tenth of that in what... four episodes? several movies?

Like I said, if that turns out to be the point of all this, that Boba Fett is actually pretty fucking bad at all the jobs he's set himself to, and that he only got hired in the past because he had some Mandalorian armor and maybe wrote an email to his old pal Shreev saying "hi i am jango's kid and i am not programmed for order 66 but i was still part of your clone door dash order could you get me a bounty hunter contract or two please"? I would actually love that, especially if it ended with him finally learning how to be more of a bad ass.

Except in the Mandalorian he seems actually competent.

Edit: Also, even if the overall point is that Fett is actually bad at this, then what's everyone else's excuse for either humoring him, or being so bad at killing him? Nobody tells him "hey, killing Bib Fortuna doesn't really make you a crime lord, and you don't seem to have the capability to provide any actual services", and even the people who try to kill him seem to be half-assing it. Just sending one Wookie in and hoping that will do the job?

The only narrative here that makes sense is that a dried up shithole like Tatooine only attracts the least competent crime lords.

That seems possible. I mean, he's not trying to muscle into a serious gangster planet. Maybe this is an audition. Or a Level 1 Crimelord planet and Fett's trying to do all the classes to unlock Jedi.


I got the vague feeling from the Mayor Mos Espa that people may in fact have a reason for humoring Fett. Maybe even that Fett's in on it. It's possible I suppose that it's about luring somebody in by making him look vulnerable and clownshoes, but that's a bit close to the Joker's "I don't have a plan" master plan, considering that Fett's seemed in real danger now multiple times.

Apparently the backstory on that Wookie is that he was once sent to Tatooine to kill Obi-Won Kenobi, and I think that story is canon. So we know he's at least a badass Wookie, if we accept that Kenobi was also a badass.

"Failed to kill Obi-Wan" is understandable, but also not the most impressive resume.

How about "survived a fight with Obi Wan"? cause he wasn't fucking around in that dessert.

Who would have thought Boba Fett was an incompetent naive idiot.

Stolen from Twitter: "boba fett developed a cult of badassness despite being a sight gag and dying like an intergalactic mr. bean in the original trilogy"

Back to the Future or Spy Kids?

So why exactly did he think his armor was in the sarlacc pit?

I just tuned into this thread. I tried the show on a whim after paying for a month of Disney+ on a whim, and I actually like it better than The Mandalorian. I don't really care that Boba is a bit shit, because the whole thing is very Star Warsy and continues to be a better production than any of the recent movies.

I don't know what I'm talking about, but it feels like Favreau etc might have wanted to do a Boba Fett story initially. I guess canon was "Boba died in the sarlacc pit", so they had to invent a non-Mandalorian Mandalorian. Perhaps because they did that so well, they got their Boba wish, but on the condition that they use Temuera Morrison, who's in his sixties and not up for parkour. He's Maori and they ran an indigenous people storyline, which I enjoyed. They're doing a good job with Tatooine and I have been entertained so far.

I mean, I keep watching. It's not bad TV,  just  a bit formulaic. I never feel surprised.

--Dave

Not sure why this would matter, they already proved with The Mandalorian that you can just leave the helmet on 99% of the time anyways.

Surprise seems like an important part of making something as potentially shopworn as Star Wars work. Either do something to characters nobody expects, subvert some tropes in a way that's surprising and actually fun, or do some plot work that offers its own pleasures.

I was re-reading an old comics arc that really got at this for me--the last arc of "Captain Britain and MI13". Short-run Marvel comic featuring a shit-ton of leftovers (which is a pretty good definition of Boba Fett, etc.) where Dracula plans to invade Great Britain from the Moon. Not going to spoil it but the whole thing is just fucking great because it shoots off every Chekov's gun from the actual series but also because it hoovers up old characters and does surprising things with them (that seem brilliant and logical once they're done) and because it just has this totally metal feel to it throughout (vampires plotting from the dark side of the Moon, because nobody worries about the sun there, etc.)

That's kind of what a series like this needs: one of those legs. Do something surprising to the characters that you've never seen before, subvert some tropes, or have a fucking genius plot where the clockwork unfolding of it is a source of pleasure in its own right. This feels like "we know you all like Boba Fett and hey don't you also love Ming-Na Wen from TV's Agents of SHIELD and hey look it's Tatooine and hey you have probably seen Lawrence of Arabia and we've heard dog that you like references to classic movies, so ENJOY". There doesn't feel like there's an idea here other than hey Temuera Morrison and Min-Na Wen were available for a pretty good price and we know a lot of people think Boba Fett is cool and we don't have another The Mandalorian ready just yet so let's shovel some content into the hungry hungry maw".

It's Boba Fett. From the minute the Mandolorian was announced, people thought it'd be about Boba Fett and they were in for it. That the show turned out to be really fucking good without Boba in it was a surprise to everyone, including the creators. This feels much more like a "quick, make a show with Boba Fett!" It's not as good but it has its moments.

One thing that struck me with this latest episode was when they were sending in the drone to recon Jabba's palace. Everything about that scene is utterly ridiculous, because the tech of the drone should be easily discoverable with our modern tech (motion sensors, heat sensors, etc.) There should have been some kind of counter measures on Jabba's palace for that sort of thing but there apparently weren't and yet we have sentient(?) droids who are both completely expendable but also have consciousness and emotions, but they can't add motion sensors to the entrances and air ducts/sewer grates? Star Wars as a universe, as a tech framework, political structure, none of it makes a lick of sense if you think two seconds about it.

With that in mind, I just have to sit back and hope they don't take this story and make something so ridiculous that we have another "Rise of Skywalker" on our hands.

I felt most of this should have been episode 1.

Maybe an episode doing tuskens as episode 1 followed by this as 2.

It was fine. Not amazing but fine.

If we were going into Boba, Mulan, Angrybacca, and the back to the future gang vs Pykes a few episodes earlier I'd be much more on the Fett train than I am.

Yes, we need more explanation and less suspension of disbelief in Star Wars. You know, midichlorians.

Show continues to be awesome, I even went back and watched the Mando episode where Ming Na gets shot na, and will be watching the Boba cameo Mando next, since it seems to be relevant after this episode.

Full disclosure, I've had a Mando vinyl on my vehicle since back when Lucas was not making Star Wars anything. So to have a second show about Mandalorians is a place I couldn't have dreamed of when I slapped that vinyl on there more than a dozen years ago.

My main disappointment is that Boba didn't go /more/ native in the desert and get a custom headpiece and maybe some more overt Tusken nods in his Mando suit.

The ecological parts are what always annoy me so much I have to make a conscious effort to ignore them.  Like the fucking black melons.  They just grow... under the sand?  No photosynthesis, no nutrients, no water.  But somehow they grow and reproduce in such quantities and contain so much surplus water that the Tuskens are able to survive off of them.  Why would people run "moisture vaporators" on Tattooine when they could just farm these magic plants that create water out of absolutely nothing?

What the fuck do banthas eat with their giant human-like mouths and no forelimbs?  They sure didn't evolve to dig up black melons.  They look like herd animals, and there are references to bantha herders -- where's the fucking grass?

How are there so many large carnivores just hanging around that there's always one handy for an action scene no matter where you are?  What do they subsist on when there isn't a main character  randomly wandering into their den?  Real-life apex predators have territories of hundreds of square miles.

Etc.

I'm sorry for this, I really am.

Khaldun: "vampires plotting from the dark side of the Moon, because nobody worries about the sun there"
Me: so vampires are stupid? ... and dead?  Or very very surprised that "dark side of the moon" is an inaccurate phrase.  Should be "farside of the moon that gets as much light as the nearside so please, vampires and other photophobics, don't be fooled".

or is Earth's moon tidally locked to the sun in this universe?

Again, really sorry to derail

Maybe they live in a lunar RV that drives around the equator.  I'm not sure how fast exactly you'd need to drive to stay in perpetual night on the moon, but it has to be a lot easier than it'd be on Earth.

Well, keep in mind that in the first issue of Nova in Marvel Comics, way back in the 1970s, a spaceship "three times the size of Saturn" gets close to Earth and nobody even sees it. Astronomical knowledge is not a big thing with comics generally. But if I remember the Captain Britain/Dracula story correctly, Dracula's working with another vampire/sorceress character named Lillith who is continuously casting a spell to keep the vampires protected from the sun. So maybe they're just in a castle on the dark side of the moon to avoid getting fucked with by humans until they're ready to invade and seize the UK for their own, not because it's dark?

Though this makes me think of an old Alan Moore story in Swamp Thing where there are vampires at the bottom of a very deep lake where the sunlight is so weak that they can be continuously active and for the first time can actually reproduce...

They have half naked space orcs with axes running around.

Yeah. Star Wars makes so little sense in this respect that it almost makes sense, if you know what I mean.

Every time I see the Gamorreans I'm awestruck by how dumb it is that anyone would have them as guards instead of dudes with guns.

It was especially funny this episode when a bunch of dudes with guns jumped out after the orcs got taken out.  Clearly you can afford to hire guys with guns.  Are the axe guys purely for decoration?

That's fine, if the pigs with axes don't work there's always the Rancor pit trap door that everyone should have learned not to stand on after the first time someone got eaten.

The Hutts probably learned from the cautionary tale of Jean-Baptiste Emannuel Zorg giving guns to his space orcs.

Not asking for explanations and really don't give much of a shit. I'm just saying that you can't approach Star Wars as any sort of logical, consistent universe, because it fucking isn't. It's juvenile adventure where shit just happens because that's what the story says, try not to think about it too hard. Sometimes that works, and I think it mostly works here. Sometimes you get Rise of Skywalker, midichlorians and parkour Yoda having the entire Senate thrown at him.

to be fair though, parkour yoda sounds like it would be great

Actually I kind of love that scene.

It was the only redeeming feature of the prequels. Having said that, if they'd gone all Darth Jar Jar, I may have liked the prequels more.

Well that is definitely one way to massively improve this show.

Still waiting for someone to talk about an antagonist for this show before I even give this a shot.

The uh...pykes?

I actually think the Pykes are really well done. I thought they'd be tough to do in live action. But they look good.

Issue with this show right now is there have been 3 episodes of material spread over 5 weeks.

Wizard

Fallen Order reference plus an N1 plus Appa.

Yeah.

Best episode so far. Too bad it didn't actually have the main character of the show in it.  :why_so_serious: But nice to get an extra Mandolorian episode in my Boba Fett show.

I am 90% sure we are going to get Grogu in a Mandalorian helmet at some point judging by the shape of that gift he was carrying and that would just make this perfect.

I thought it was chainmail so he doesn't die 30 years from now from Kylo.

 Baby-sized mithril (er, I mean beskar) shirt.

Due to how small it is, I just assumed it was a replica of the round ball from Mando’s now destroyed ship.

It's beskar, it has to be armor.

That’s what I was thinking too.

Baby Yoda dark saber

Darth Yoda is the new big bad, rebuilding the Mandalore zealots into the Second Order.

That would be fun, but we see the full size darksaber after the forging scene.

--Dave

On todays episode of "every single character is cooler than the main character" we went ahead and threw the kitchen sink at you.

Well, I like that new series that replaces the Book of Boba Fett. Wish they would have done that since the first episode.

It seems like the story Favreau wanted to tell was the Lawrence of Tatooine flashbacks, and they realized that even with the gangster story wrapped around it, it just wasn't a big enough story. So they had to throw in a couple of Mandalorian season 2.5 episodes.

And it leads to tonal whiplash, the pieces just don't fit together.

--Dave

I don't think the pieces not fitting together would necessarily be a problem if the structure of the show accounted for it.

If they'd just concentrated on the tusken story, then the story of Boba taking the palace, then the Din story, and finally the pykes story it would have been workable. Its the flipping around that causes the problem.

Incidentally, if that kind of emotional abuse is really the core jedi training strategy, you see how Kylo Ren happened.

Also, live action Cad Bane was pretty great.

And Luke was WAY better than the last time.

Basically, "we have no plan at all", which, you know, has been kind of a problem for the entire IP for a while now.

It's a bit disappointing to see Luke perpetuating the same bullshit attachment philosophy of the old Jedi order, but we know how his school ends up so I guess it's not surprising.

As I'm just saying over in Discord, the Jedi just literally suck at everything they do. Every time they are given any sort of choice, they always make the worst one in adherence to some ill-defined dogma that makes no fucking sense.

While I love seeing Grogoo again, having one episode used to set up yet another series spinoff, continue a story from a completely different series about two completely different characters, fill in backstory for the last shitty series of movies and then meander around into maybe advancing the plot of the actual series we're here for is just... yeah, tonal whiplash is a good description.

The gunslinger with the red eyes was cool though.

I would have been happy with more Lawrence of Arabia with a dash of They Call Me Trinity thrown in for the series. The gunfighter scene was great. Much as I like the Mandalorian, it feels like it's shoehorned in, where I would have preferred more Boba Fett, with the Mndalorian in a separate season. I still find the switch from "you won the Darksaber... let me make some tiny elf armour... oh you took your helmet off... fuck off" to be a total joke of an episode, no matter how good the action was.

Both shows would benefit from being more like clone wars.

An anthology of 90ish minute arcs.

It was surprising how well he translated from cartoon form, they did tone down his hat a little.

Yeah, I wasn't a huge fan of this progression either.  Especially since that makes it look like a trap where they brought him in and attempting to duel him for the Darksaber, then exiled him only after they lost.  But why make the armor for him in the meantime if that was always going to be the case?  Why not force him to turn over his own beskar armor as well if he's no longer one of them?

My hope/prediction is that Grogu chooses the armor and that's the last we see of Deepfake Luke and his entire storyline.

All the direct translations in both shows have been remarkable. The pykes, the darksabre, Ahsoka, the wookie, Bo Katan's Gang. Cad Bane was probably the best yet.

Weirdly, the Mandalorian himself is the one I'm least sold on. That armour still looks too tinfoily - and I think they are still struggling to sell his character without showing his face. I was quite sad when he lost the spear, it was his most unique feature, and the few times he used it were the only times I've felt his character was being communicated through the action.

Given that Grogu was nowhere to be found in the continuity of the 7-9 films I would think this is how it is going to go. He and Mando will have some new purpose/crusade and Grogu will help him learn how to wield the Darksabre. 

Also I predict Boba Fett dies in the final episode in a way that kickstarts that new storyline.

At this point they might as well have left him the fucking Sarlacc, really, except for his role in the Mandalorian storyline.

Did he even play any specific role in the Mando storyline besides "another guy who knows how to fight"?  The whole episode with the armor and the krayt dragon was great but it would've been just as good if Boba himself had never shown up.

I think basically his role was "Easter Egg wow get excited". So...this series is almost a metafiction about what happens when an Easter Egg gets a show--the void at the heart of the Easter Egg grows quickly and leaves them exactly where they were before, a cameo, unless the people doing the show have An Idea.

Comic books have so many great examples of this. Want to make a comic book about Animal Man? Better have a Big Fucking Idea. If you do, brilliant: two + years of stories and lots of attention. Well done you. If you don't, it's like making a comic book with Detective Chimp, Nightmaster, Nightshade, Blue Devil, Ragman, Zauriel and Enchantress. It might run as long as Animal Man because the company wants it to, but nobody will remember it later because nobody has A Big Idea.

The Book of Boba Fett might as well be called A Funny Thing Happened to Me On the Way to the Mandalorian. It is so screamingly lacking in a Big Idea about its titular character; so obviously a case of "Disney needs content NOW".

The Mandalorian was a hit and then we saw like half a dozen spin-off shows and other projects announced last year for D+. Even what they're doing with Grogu in this last episode seems like they might be pivoting with the planned story a bit because Baby Yoda merch is a cash machine so maybe they blinked in regards to writing the character off the show for a while.

So much of this just seems reactionary to Mandalorian being the one unquestioned SW hit of the Disney era (and a lot of the rest of it just continues to be Filoni dragging in characters and plotlines from Clone Wars).

Yeah, pretty much that.  Disney is desperate to make money off of Star Wars but doesn't seem to have any idea how to manage the franchise based on everything they've done since the purchase.  Mando being a hit meant suddenly every fucking side character in the show was going to get a desperation spin off series.

If they really want to get long-time SW fans involved, "Darth JarJar and the Ewok Apprentice" would probably be a big hit.

Why would you sully the glory that is Darth Jar Jar with a fucking Ewok? A Jawa on the other hand... that or Roger Roger.

The first droid jedi would be pretty entertaining, if ridiculous.

If they are going to bring back every other thing, bring back HK-47 you cowards.

They are clearly fucking sentient, there is even droid racism. Even the damn battle droids are shown as having hopes, dreams, friends, goals, fear in clone wars.

"It's an energy field created by all living things".

If they had some guts, they'd come right at it: in the SW universe, the Jedi (or someone) have pegged sapient rights to whether you're part of the Force; if you aren't, it doesn't matter if you're intelligent or have feelings and hopes and aspirations.

SW's tech/world building is so weird in its way. Droids that are clearly sapient (with no measurable rights; not even the most good of the good guys with one exception so far worry too much if droids are enslaved etc.) but there are no, zero, zilch experiments with AI in anything bigger than a droid body. Why? I dunno. No discussion of AI per se, even AFTER the Separatists used droid armies. Why? I dunno. I get it--it's about science fantasy and not wanting to turn SW into too much of an extension of our own futurist narratives and anxieties. But then they should just lean harder into how weird the SW universe is, how different its rules are. That's another reason I hate too much use of familiar tropes--arguably SW needs to be stranger than it is, not more familiar.

Not quite no discussion of AI bigger than a droid.

Solo makes clear the Falcon's computer is as sentient as a droid, even before L3 merges with it.

I am surprised Filoni didn't take more of a run at this in clone wars though. Especially as he had entire arcs about droids.

There was a scene in clone wars where the heroes take over a ship controlled by battle droids and as they bust in the cabin both droids there immediately surrender, then the good guys ask who the captain is and the droid clearly marked as the captain points to the other guy who acts all hurt about it. Then the heroes slaughter both of them as they stand there with their hands up. I don't think Filoni was terribly concerned with any deeper questions about AI in SW.

The "personhood" of droids is a major unfired Chekhov's Gun in Star Wars. They get treated like people except when it's not convenient to the plot.

--Dave

(https://i.imgur.com/VObyZjy.png)

As soon as you start focusing on it two much, Owen and Luke buying R2 and 3P0 from Jawas starts to look like a slave auction.

It's stuff like this droid discussion that makes me say "the Star Wars universe makes no consistent, logical sense in anything it does." Literally everything about the technology falls apart if you think about it as anything other than young adult level escapist fantasy.

I actually quite like this.

Because everyone, in every age, does shit your great grandkids are going to be morally horrified by.


And star wars does make no logical sense. But the good bits at least make thematic sense in the same way opera makes no fucking logical sense but the thematic structure carries you along.

Same can said of the Marvel movies.

Only difference is there have been fewer bad marvel movies. And it is the bad movies when nothing making sense gets noticed. Eternals and thor 2 looked ridiculous because the film didn't carry you along. But guardians of the galaxy is even less logical.

Imagine spending money on 7 episodes and only 2 of them are interesting.  :oh_i_see: :why_so_serious:

Thank fuck there was no more Luke.

A sadly predictable episode, not one surprise. Mulan Fennec Mary Sues the episode - what a waste of a character. I'm still not convinced that the Mandalorian/Grogu served any purpose in the whole series. I really wish that they'd focussed more on the sand people and Freetown throughout the series and actually sold us a proper western, rather than jump the rancor and give us a conclusion that felt like just another generic ending. Even the big bad went from big bad to mustache twirling

Sorry to interject but you only have Freetown plot because of Mando  :rimshot:

Whole thing really feels like a mess, like there was no real idea here.

But could it have involved Boba rather than Mando as part of the writing process?

Well, at least that's over.

--Dave

I'd say I'd be happy for Tatooine to never be used in another SW story again, but Obi-wan is coming up next, so...

The people who make and are in star wars really, really like sand (except for, well you know, one person).

I don't think Disney or even the creatives around Disney seem to think that there is a diminishing returns from making the same type of characters, in the same type of setting, over and over again.

Plainly not.

Hard to see why Luke wanted to get off Tatooine, at any rate: the place is practically the secret hub of the entire galaxy.

There sure is plenty in the vaginas around here.

The Ahsoka and Andor shows will likely be set in different places. And to be fair, I really do think SW under Disney is being post-show reflective of what works and doesn't.

The combination of the Skywalker family and Jabba being based there pretty much doomed the rest of the franchise to be centered around it.

There were some decent bits and some funny bits in this. Unfortunately, almost all of them came from the Mandolorian show and not this one. It felt like there was a ton of backstory on these characters that the writers seem to think I was supposed to know but didn't (like who the fuck the blue gunslinger was and why he and Boba hated each other). The Mods are just terrible. Ming Na Wen was pretty much wasted on this show. I never got any sense of what the entire thing was supposed to be about, because Boba's character had just about as much actual character outside of the Dances with Tuskens sequences as he did during Empire and ROTJ. The story was just an utter fucking train wreck.

What was the point of this show? It's like they ordered a 7 episode series but only had 3 episodes of content so they added some flashbacks and the first two episodes of Mando S3.

The droid fight was stupid.
1) The droids apparently were able to keep up with a speeder.
2) Everyone ran in a straight line
3) The droids had the accuracy of a storm trooper.
4) Apparently the droids can't shoot through dirt walls.
5) Why did we get a rancor if Boba Fett could have just gotten his ship and blasted them from above.

I'm so happy Luke wasn't on that Xwing. I literally groaned when I saw that.

Lots of shoulda woulda coulda crap with this, but I give up. This basically tells us what we already know and it's been obvious since for decades. Star Wars has no medium or long term plans. 

I honestly assumed in the first three episodes the flashbacks were going to be part of a tightly-plotted show where they all paid off in the last two episodes, sort of like The Witcher going back and forth in time until boom! all the pieces come together. But in the end this show is very nearly the literal opposite of tightly-plotted.

It's a show that has to do the thankless task of not only having to establish Fett as an actual character, but has to have him do a 180 from 3rd string original trilogy villain to anti-hero who cares about his people. Knowing how hard it was going to be to pull off this sort of character study, they enlisted none other than Robert Rodriguez to direct half the episodes.

Just started watching this with the wife. I think we are on Episode 4. Wife is not a SW fan so I have had to explain some things to her about the timing of the flashbacks and the Sandpeople and the Rancor. Show is a fun 40 minutes or so, but wtf is with the power rangers and their color coded speeder bikes that are perfectly level the entire time? Pretty jarring...

The Space Vespa Cyborgs Chase Bureaucrat in Landspeeder Through Mos Espa scene was maybe the worst thing in any SW since...I dunno, anything in a long time, and that's saying something. Like up there with I hate sand, if in a different register.

OK good... not just me then. I gave it a 4 Jar Jar's out of 5 for terribleness.

The Mods were just the most obviously jarring thing in the whole show. They stood out visually so goddamn bad - in a city/world full of browns and sand and dirty ass people covered in sand, here are these spotless cunts in primary colors faffing about on the shiniest bikes(?) ever with droid parts sticking out of their whatevers. They stuck out like sore thumbs in every single scene they were in. One of my RL buddies who just fucking hates Kathleen Kennedy blamed her, saying there were reports that she came on set and made them change/add a bunch of stuff. I don't know if I believe it - I'm sure there's plenty of blame to go around for this mess.

Think how good those things would look parked outside Dexter Jettster's American Graffiti diner on Coruscant.

It's not only that they looked bad but there was something profoundly stupid about them claiming they couldn't afford the waterseller's high prices when come the fuck on, they look like the closest thing Tatooine has to trust-fund kids. The Space Mods can afford ridiculous imported Space Vespas that no one else on Tatooine has and they can afford expensive cyborg alterations of their own bodies, but they're sitting around fucking with a waterseller (is there only one in Mos Espa?) because he charges too much?

I can believe *somebody* stepped in on the whole thing precisely because it feels like such a muddle. I honestly wonder if it was Star Wars Sopranos when the first story conference happened and then when they started filming it they started getting a lot of directives to make it family-friendly so it became Boba Fett and His Swell Pals.

I think you pretty much nailed it. I want to think that it was a totally different direction to the Mandalorian, because it's Boba - then he fucking disappears, the bloody Mandalorian, trust fund spy  kids, and the Jedi get dragged in, and it just goes to shit.

I really don't like that they tied the stupid scooter kids to one of the most badass characters in the current Star Wars era. I swear to god if they spin those kids into a show and tie that anchor around the wookiee's ankle....

Anyway, other than those kids I enjoyed the show. A bit too far in one direction or another as it went, but that's to be expected since it's a pretty wide audience.

Look, the genius thing about Marvel since Iron Man has been that they've fairly consciously tried to spread out the genre referents and to some extent have also encouraged some range of directorial style. That hasn't been totally consistent and some of the genre mapping they've done hasn't worked all that well. The first Thor, for example, was pseudo-Shakespearean done by a Shakespearean director and it was pretty wooden as a result.

Star Wars is really struggling to do anything that coherent. Everybody loved Rogue One because it didn't hesitate to go all in on the genre template and ended up being a pretty dark war movie as a result. Everybody's enjoying The Mandalorian because while it's doing pastiche (Lone Wolf and Cub most notably) it's doing it with some gusto and there's some tough stuff here and there (way back in Episode 1, Mando uses a door to cut someone in half, remember?)

This was a big test of "can Star Wars do underworld/gangster stuff" and wow, the answer is "not under the current management" in a big way. That might have been fine if that felt really planned--like the first episode opens and they go "hey you though Boba Fett was gonna go gangsta? actually no, he's had two life-changing experiences from being in a Sarlacc gut and living with Tuskens and he's actually here to be the new sheriff in town", e.g., if they decoyed us to think "Sopranos" when what they were really doing was "High Noon". But instead it feels more like the sequel trilogy: nobody has a plan, everybody's working at cross-purposes, and mostly the ostensible main character just seems like being in a Sarlacc and working with Tuskens caused him to become mentally disabled.

I agree. As goofy as it would have been to go full Last Samurai/Dances with Tuskens on the whole series, as least it would have been a story with some cohesion. By the time Boba finds out the Pykes killed the Tuskens, it's been like 4 episodes since we would have even cared, and everything in between has been an entirely other story that had only the most tenuous connection to the character, and even less to the main plot. I'm still trying to figure out who had the bright idea to do what was mostly 2 episodes of The Mandolorian inside this series. Rodriguez and Favreau cannot have had that idea from the get go. They have their moments of garbage, but not that bad.

Some serious studio fuckery happened. Favreau has more respect for the Canon, Rodriguez isn't this bad at story.

--Dave

There is nothing wrong with the story. The problem is execution.

I was thinking some about this and realizing that the Grogu/Luke stuff made me feel more sour and irritated even than the Boba Fett thing.

We know that the reborn Jedi Order is going to fail, so first off, if they're going to tell that story on-screen, they've got to find a way to fill it with some pathos, to recognize that they're telling us the story of a tragedy. They've locked themselves into that. But also I'm just stunned that Ahsoka is hanging around so passively and complacently. She's lived with the whole history of the Jedi's fall and the Empire's rise, as well as the Rebellion's entire history, so for her to have no opinion whatsoever about what the Jedi should be, and to let Luke just toodle around making beehives and re-enacting his time on Dagobah with Baby Yoda feels really wrong. She knows how the Order failed. We don't know if Luke is regularly chatting with the Force Ghosts or if he's gone off and researched the Jedi or what but he certainly knows less than she does.

The whole thing just felt wrong-footed in every way, like they were losing their sense of how to develop *both* shows.

I mean, I have a hard time in general believing that the original plan was to send Grogu off as the emotional finale of Season 2, and basically the culmination of the main story arc of the first two seasons, only to undo it in two episodes of a spin-off show.

I can absolutely believe that was the original plan, they were clearly setting up mando to go on a reclamation of Mandalore arc and end up as the eventual king or whatever. Then the fans let them know that no, fucking Grogu is the main draw of the show and you better bring his little ass back right this fucking minute and Disney very much agreed with the billions of dollars of Grogu merchandise money they were getting.

It did seem to me they're setting up Mando himself to take off the helmet and mostly keep it off unless he's in a fight, which is fine and kind of where I thought this would be going eventually. But I really wish we hadn't seen anything about what Luke is actually doing with Grogu--I would rather Mando made him a teeny-weeny chainmail shirt of +2 beskar and sent it via intergalactic Amazon.com and we never really saw Undead Luke and Totally Passive Ahsoka until they're ready to tell that story. Fine if Grogu just comes back in and saves Mando's bacon in Season 3 and then in his usual fashion doesn't really explain anything to Mando except that he's decided not to go Jedi.

I know Luke's going to fail, I just want him to fail while at least trying to do it better than the old-style Jedi did. Like, I would totally love him talking with Force Ghost Anakin about what the Jedi did wrong and having Force Yoda and Force Obi-Wan going "well, ok, actually, he's kind of right, you gotta try something different". Maybe whatever he does actually works until Leia and Han call him up about his nephew who has been caught doing spice and murdering sandpeople on his spring school trip and ask him to take Ben in and shape him up and he reluctantly agrees. But in that episode, Luke seems fucking hopeless as a teacher--he's like "hey all I know is running around a jungle and lifting rocks and having a little globe thing shoot at you so that's what we're doing".

It's very in keeping with Jedi tradition to only do things that were introduced in the original trilogy. 

I mean, when we saw the youngling Jedi in the prequels, they were doing that exact same "shooty globe while blindfolded" exercise.  If there was literally anything else in the Jedi curriculum I'm sure we'd have seen that instead.

I know, but Filoni at least seems to grok the idea that maybe the Jedi tradition was part of the reason the Jedi fell, though he's had to be somewhat subtle about how he let that float up as an idea. And of course The Last Jedi says it aggressively, which is maybe why the people in charge are so scared of that now. But I think they are misunderstanding why everybody thought Luke coming in and plowing through a bunch of Dark Troopers was so cool. It wasn't because they wanted more traditional Jedi stuff about attachment and younglings and padawans, it was because they finally got to see Luke as an ultra-powerful Jedi Master cutting loose, which is kind of what everybody always wanted him to get a chance to be.

The final episode was really poorly directed. What a terrible battle scene, really disjointed, stretched out, riddled with logical inconsistency. Even in the opening moments they are fighting all kinds of gunmen positioned on the roof, so they jetpack out and land in a killing field on the ground instead of taking high ground then staying mobile?? Even if they spent all their budget on CGI for the big animals and droids it doesn't excuse that kind of stupid script and direction.

This right here is the major contention within the fanbase. Because the general camps are "Star Wars is a sandbox where I get to roleplay like its dnd and my jedi can use force lightning" or "no this is straight good vs evil, the jedi and sith codes are core to the series actually working". Jedi aren't "supposed" to be related average joes who went to the force academy for a few months and did whatever they wanted on the weekends. Which has been a core issue the fanbase had since 70s and its been actively fought against at the expense of well good star wars stories. Our brains trying to add a "both sides" narrative doesn't add anything people actually care about no matter how much we try to shoehorn it in.

Ahsoka was only there to make sure Luke wasn't like his daddy, not because she gave any shits about the Jedi or how they ran their school.

I walked away from this episode feeling similarly.  All the reinforcements coming in and they all huddle behind the same cover rather than trying any sort of flanking?  And the huge droids missing everybody, all of them time?  Not a lot of tension there.

Droid armies generally seem pretty fucking shit which is kind of hard to explain considering that droid AI otherwise seems pretty sophisticated. It's enough to make you wonder if someone long-ago designer did something like was done with the Death Star design and embedded something in all droid AI that would make them crappy soldiers.

Wonder if IG-88 was jailbroken and that's why he was allowed to be able to shoot worth a damn.

Once the giant battle droid couldn't shut over a 4 foot mud wall I was like  :why_so_serious:

No, she was just in there to remind everyone she has a show coming out.  :why_so_serious:

That goes right back to Lucas. He deliberately wanted the Droid army in the Fandom Penance Phantom Menace to be shit, just becasue. I saw some of the "Making of" thingies and Lucas was there staring at a mock up of the Battle Droid and commenting about how they are utterly crap.

To be fair, he was referring to the cheap mass produced battle droids, I took his meaning to be 'these get used against helpless civilians'.

The same film showed there were also other droids that jedi were unable to stand their ground against.

Haha yeah I was just thinking of all the "stormtroopers can't aim" jokes when they have these war droids not being able to hit anyone in a closely packed group of people under little to no cover, with heavy weapons, from 50 foot range, during 20 minutes of continuous shooting.

Now this is true. I wonder if the Force is actually an energy field that causes permanent astigmatism in all sapients, including droids.

These were the same droids that a character said "Our Volunteer militias are no match for their battle hardened droids." or words to that effect. "... battle Hardened" does not equal "crap."

But hey, this is Lucas. By that stage he was operating Lucasarts like the infallible leader of a cult, and he never had a decent plot related thought in his life.

Semi binged this over the last week.  Takeaways...

-Somebody else, probably Kathleen Fucking Kennedy, absolutely meddled in this from start to finish.  No question at all.
-What the fuck is up with the Kitchenaid Appliance gang?
-At every turn, it felt like someone was asking the question 'now, what would a toddler enjoy?' and then added that to the scene
-Mos Espa is not that goddamn fancy, stop it.  People don't fucking live on this planet.
-Jennifer Beals has been scorching hot spanning five decades now.
-Temuera Morrison doesn't really pull it off in this.  Soft grampa.
-Pedro absolutely does
-A whole episode about pimping a Nabooian starfighter?  Okay....
-Everything instantly improves the moment Mando comes into the scene.
-They have almost managed to cross the uncanny valley with Luke.  The voiceover was odd, but visually, goddamn.
-Despite all the absurdities, I still fucking love Grogu.  
-Audio/Visual is outstanding.  Pretty amazed on that front.
-Don't do this again, no need.

Oh they will... you know damn well they will.

CGI Luke was interesting and a little unsettling.

Hated that stupid ending with Luke making Grogu choose... fuck off. If the jedi had beskar chainmail most of them would still be alive.

I was mildly annoyed by the choice given to Grogu, but honestly...it fits well with what Luke understood at the time.  We all know he was wrong, but he hadn't learned that lesson yet.

And by "don't do this again" I just mean the Boba Fett angle, Mando and Grogu are great.  Also, yeet Kathleen Kennedy into the sun and get her fingers off this shit.

Luke fucking up just lended credence to his fail in TLJ and a greater fuckup of the jedi writ large.

It makes his bitterness in TLJ feel way more real, for sure. I mean, he must be looking back and thinking "I thought I could train a whole new Jedi Order on my own, more or less? And I knew so fucking little that all I could manage was to re-enact my own pathetically limited training? And Ahsoka, who was actually trained BY the Jedi just sat there and watched me?" Considering how we know it ends with Ben Solo's group of bad guys and Snoke etc. killing everybody, that must feel especially humiliating to think back on. Only as an old man does he realize that he needed to rethink the whole damn thing from the ground up and only then does he realize that Ben and Yoda were of no fucking use whatsoever as ghost mentors at that point, precisely when they might have done something.

Yes! This adds so much to the overarching story and I am here for it.

The Mods were the worst fucking pun I have seen in a series . And somehow every speeder chase scene they were in seemed like they were travelling at about swift jogging pace.

I watched the whole show but it was pretty boring, interspersed with some exciting scenes. Mando was fun in it.

If they have the balls to tell it.

Honestly, if Hamill is up for it, they could do a good D+ show where he actually plays Old Man Luke after Kylo Ren and his Knights of Kylo Renning destroy his little Jedi Failure Camp and he realizes that he needs to understand the actual origins of the Jedi Order and how the Jedi became what they were by the time of Order 66--so send him on a six-episode tour of ancient Jedi and Sith sites where he realizes that the Jedi and Sith are only two out of many groups who've used the Force in some sort of disciplined way and he also realizes that he's out of time in his own life to effectively rethink how to do this--and that "bringing balance to the Force" means letting the Jedi and Sith alike disappear so that someone else can come along and think some new thoughts.

But that takes the people in charge recommitting to that aspect of TLJ and plainly they're terrified of it.

The closer these series comes to reinforcing the new trilogy the better. That way I can hop right off the star wars bus without feeling like I'm missing something.