The Mandalorian

[eldaec]

To a point yes. But it always felt incongruent that they had picked a mandalorian to do that. When Mandalore is the best example of epic storytelling and world building in the Filoni canon.

[Riggswolfe]

I'm not sure which point you mean.

I was trying to be subtle but I guess it's all over the trailers. Grogu is clearly with Mando again. I just hoped they'd possibly move on to a new story arc but baby Yoda is clearly too "big" for them to let him disappear from the show.

[Samwise]

They already established that toward the end of the last season, when Luke did the asshole "you have to pick between keeping the gift from your dad and continuing your Jedi training" thing and he took the chainmail.  I forget if we actually had the scene where Mando picks him up from Jedi daycare but there was no way anything else was happening.

[HaemishM]

That wasn't in last season of Mando, it was the season 2.5 episodes that were scrunched into the Book of Boba Fett. 

[eldaec]

I'm not sure which point you mean.

I was trying to be subtle but I guess it's all over the trailers. Grogu is clearly with Mando again. I just hoped they'd possibly move on to a new story arc but baby Yoda is clearly too "big" for them to let him disappear from the show.

Sounds like you missed the weird out of place Boba fett episode where they explained that in universe Luke Skywalker is supremely unqualified to offer children's services and out of universe they effectively said 'yep that finale was a mistake so we're undoing it before the next season even happens'.

It was a really bizarre choice of plot point to include in an entirely different show.

Also, that new spaceship he has? Origin story is also in Boba Fett.

[eldaec]

I forget if we actually had the scene where Mando picks him up from Jedi daycare but there was no way anything else was happening.

Grogu was stuffed in an xwing on autopilot and sent unaccompanied to where Luke assumed Oberyn Martell would be.

Again, Luke Skywalker should not be allowed to care for minors.

Even if he ever has his own kids he needs to go on some kind of child services watch list.

[Trippy]

Clearly you people have no trust in the Force.

[Khaldun]

I would assume nobody in that galaxy does at the point that the Skywalker saga ends. The Force appears to have contributed mightily to a huge pile of misery.

[Riggswolfe]

I'm not sure which point you mean.

I was trying to be subtle but I guess it's all over the trailers. Grogu is clearly with Mando again. I just hoped they'd possibly move on to a new story arc but baby Yoda is clearly too "big" for them to let him disappear from the show.

Sounds like you missed the weird out of place Boba fett episode where they explained that in universe Luke Skywalker is supremely unqualified to offer children's services and out of universe they effectively said 'yep that finale was a mistake so we're undoing it before the next season even happens'.

It was a really bizarre choice of plot point to include in an entirely different show.

Also, that new spaceship he has? Origin story is also in Boba Fett.

Honestly, I saw it and totally forgot about it. Lol. When you mentioned it I was like "oh yeah, that Mandalorian episode in Boba Fett..."

[Velorath]

Season 3 set for March 1st.

[Trippy]

Season 3 Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Znsa4Deavgg

[Khaldun]

I really hope he doesn't get stuck back in "I am trying to be the most faithful Mandalorian ever" loop--I was looking for this season to let him grow up some and start arguing the rest of the Mandos need to as well. (Partly so Pascal can fucking take the helmet off sometimes--he's too good to waste on a role that could be just about anybody.)

Hell, if they want to do some parallelism, how about Mando seeing how the Mandalorians need to change while Luke just tries to cosplay at being a Jedi Master in charge of a Jedi Academy while having no apparent idea of how the Jedi fucked up back in the day.

[Velorath]

First episode went by pretty quick and feels a little disjointed. A little surprised to see Dean Cundy (Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, and a bunch of John Carpenter stuff) as cinematographer on this, although it looks like he did a couple Book of Boba Fett episodes also though now that I checked.

[Khaldun]

I wish they could hit the mark of the first few episodes of the first season--a Western with a hero whose sentimentality is at least slightly hidden away. Or if they could be more consistently imitating Lone Wolf With Cub, where the whole point was that the parental relationship was an island of feeling in a violent world. The kind of goopy family-friendliness keeps slopping over from the core relationship between Grogu and Mando into the general story-telling and scene-setting.

I also really hate that the first fetch quest is finding a component to rebuild a droid that ought to be completely fucking destroyed. The incoherency of Star Wars when it comes to droids is really something.

[Samwise]

I also really hate that the first fetch quest is finding a component to rebuild a droid that ought to be completely fucking destroyed. The incoherency of Star Wars when it comes to droids is really something.

Yeah, I had a really hard time with that.  The premise is that Mando wants to get the "good" version of this droid that was programmed by Kuiil because that's the only droid he could ever trust, and so that's why he needs to rebuild this specific droid.  But the factory programming of the droid makes it want to murder the kid.  And the memory chip that stored the one copy of the uniquely trustworthy personality that Kuiil programmed into it is completely destroyed. 

So they're going to go and get a new memory chip that will... let them... try to reprogram a non-murdery personality from scratch?  Which they could just do with... ANY droid?  Right?  Maybe starting with a base template of one that doesn't instantly try to kill the kid on sight?  Right?

[Johny Cee]

I also really hate that the first fetch quest is finding a component to rebuild a droid that ought to be completely fucking destroyed. The incoherency of Star Wars when it comes to droids is really something.

Yeah, I had a really hard time with that.  The premise is that Mando wants to get the "good" version of this droid that was programmed by Kuiil because that's the only droid he could ever trust, and so that's why he needs to rebuild this specific droid.  But the factory programming of the droid makes it want to murder the kid.  And the memory chip that stored the one copy of the uniquely trustworthy personality that Kuiil programmed into it is completely destroyed. 

So they're going to go and get a new memory chip that will... let them... try to reprogram a non-murdery personality from scratch?  Which they could just do with... ANY droid?  Right?  Maybe starting with a base template of one that doesn't instantly try to kill the kid on sight?  Right?

I've been working under the assumption that most droids have some broad personality module you can plug in.  That all the "personality" or sapience droids show is just the equivalent of ChatGPT complaining about the wife and kids...  pattern recognition and imitation.  So R2 can have a wise ass blue collar personality, C3PO is the black dude from Mannequin, etc.  Maybe modules are limited by the hardware or model.  Maybe prime function dictates what personality markers matter...   R2 gets a cheeky blue collar personality because you want your astromech droid to put its foot down when he thinks there is a mechanical problem with your starship.  C3P0 is very femme brown-noser, because he's supposed to diffuse and smooth over disagreements and deescalate.

A killbot is going to kill, so maybe most of the personalities start at "collects ears for fun" and downgrades from there.  A reformed killbot that is now a nurse is going to have different mannerisms and personality tics than a protocol droid.  As to why a personality at all?  In most cases, it just simplifies things to have preferences ESPECIALLY in situations where it is difficult to evaluate options rationally.  If my starship is all beat up, how does your astromech decide what to work on?  Well, if have a programmed a personality that hates doing space brakes but thinks rebuilding engines is fun, it can sort out and move things along based on its preferences.  It helps combat decision paralysis.  Also, its probably far better for the people that work with the droids if you are working with something that seems on the surface to be more like you.

The popular online headcanon is that all droids are sapient and therefore slavery blah blah blah.  It just doesn't make sense?  Why waste all the computing effort on useless free will for robots that don't need it, or it is actively detrimental to?  If you assume most droids are the equivalent of Tesla self-driving with a ChatGPT driven speaker trying to make small talk, its probably closer to the mark. 

[Sky]

Loved it, great start to the new season.

I was also hoping for more high plains drifting kinda stuff, but I like the show nonetheless. It's no Andor, but there needs to be a spectrum for this kind of stuff (at least it didn't have the scooter gang kids, eh).

[Samwise]

The popular online headcanon is that all droids are sapient and therefore slavery blah blah blah.  It just doesn't make sense?  Why waste all the computing effort on useless free will for robots that don't need it, or it is actively detrimental to?  If you assume most droids are the equivalent of Tesla self-driving with a ChatGPT driven speaker trying to make small talk, its probably closer to the mark. 

That would certainly make most peoples' attitudes toward them a lot more understandable.  I'm especially thinking of ANH where even when Luke's talking to the droids it's like you'd talk to your car more than like you'd talk to a person.  If sentient-SEEMING droids are the norm and have been for centuries, most people would understand that droids aren't "really" sentient even if sometimes it's fun or convenient to play along with them.

[Johny Cee]

The popular online headcanon is that all droids are sapient and therefore slavery blah blah blah.  It just doesn't make sense?  Why waste all the computing effort on useless free will for robots that don't need it, or it is actively detrimental to?  If you assume most droids are the equivalent of Tesla self-driving with a ChatGPT driven speaker trying to make small talk, its probably closer to the mark. 

That would certainly make most peoples' attitudes toward them a lot more understandable.  I'm especially thinking of ANH where even when Luke's talking to the droids it's like you'd talk to your car more than like you'd talk to a person.  If sentient-SEEMING droids are the norm and have been for centuries, most people would understand that droids aren't "really" sentient even if sometimes it's fun or convenient to play along with them.

What's the point in making a mechanic that secretly wants to be a novelist, when you don't have fingers to type and no literary skills but instead a built-in welding torch and ratchets?  Its a shitty mechanic.  If you are a free willed, full personality droid working long shifts in space or next to the reactor core, how long before ennui, anxiety or depression set in?  How long before suicidal ideation?  How long before they trigger a problem?


I also think that droids are designed to have memory wipes to combat viruses.  If your personality is hardcoded by your module, and your skills are a separate hard-coded library, you would be able to regularly wipe your memory no problem to clear out anything you may have picked up in a very old galactic society.  It's just resetting your phone to factory settings, and reimprinting ownership when you do.

I mean...  if you know what "good" answers Siri has to funny questions, you can produce a funny conversation that sounds like Siri is an AI and not an incredibly limited voice recognition software.  I looked  the funny lines up once to put on a performance for my step-daughter when she was in high school.

[Velorath]

On the one hand it’s kinda interesting to think about. On the other hand it’s a franchise that revolves around space magic. I don’t care so much about bringing a droid back from the “dead” from a technical standpoint so much as a narrative/emotional one. If it’s possible to repair a droid this extensively damaged then it’s probably been done multiple times before, and it’s something Mando and Carl Weathers probably should have looked into right after it blew itself up. Also successfully bringing it back somewhat undoes one of the best moments of the first season.

[Khaldun]

That's basically it.

"You're our hero! You saved the town! Sure, it's just simulated fake sapience but golly we still love you! We're going to put a statue of you up that reuses your viable parts and not look at all into the possibility of resurrecting you, our hero."

[Threash]

The popular online headcanon is that all droids are sapient and therefore slavery blah blah blah.  It just doesn't make sense?  Why waste all the computing effort on useless free will for robots that don't need it, or it is actively detrimental to?  If you assume most droids are the equivalent of Tesla self-driving with a ChatGPT driven speaker trying to make small talk, its probably closer to the mark. 

That would certainly make most peoples' attitudes toward them a lot more understandable.  I'm especially thinking of ANH where even when Luke's talking to the droids it's like you'd talk to your car more than like you'd talk to a person.  If sentient-SEEMING droids are the norm and have been for centuries, most people would understand that droids aren't "really" sentient even if sometimes it's fun or convenient to play along with them.

That makes sense for something like a protocol droid, not stuff like mass produced battle droids. The battle droids in the prequels and clone wars acted sentient when there were no humans around and in ways that were counter productive to their goal, they clearly had hopes, dreams, friends and felt pain. There is no reason for your canon fodder to literally act scared when a jedi is around or cry out "now i'll never get that promotion!" when its dying.

[Khaldun]

ChatGPT might, so why not a droid. 

[Riggswolfe]

Hell, if they want to do some parallelism, how about Mando seeing how the Mandalorians need to change while Luke just tries to cosplay at being a Jedi Master in charge of a Jedi Academy while having no apparent idea of how the Jedi fucked up back in the day.

The Luke thing really bugs me. He knows for a fact that having connections can be a very good thing as he proved himself when he redeemed Vader. And what does he do? Try to break Grogu's connection to Mando and send him packing when the kid doesn't do it. Luke should have been like "Good, you value your connections, just don't let them become an obsession."

I also think that droids are designed to have memory wipes to combat viruses.  If your personality is hardcoded by your module, and your skills are a separate hard-coded library, you would be able to regularly wipe your memory no problem to clear out anything you may have picked up in a very old galactic society.  It's just resetting your phone to factory settings, and reimprinting ownership when you do.

I think some droids are very clearly intended to be looked as sentient. R2 is the obvious one here. I also seem to remember reading somewhere that part of why Star Wars droids gets memory wipes is to prevent sentience.

[Threash]

The worst part is that Ahsoka was RIGHT THERE with him and she knows first hand how dumb the old Jedi were.

[Johny Cee]

The popular online headcanon is that all droids are sapient and therefore slavery blah blah blah.  It just doesn't make sense?  Why waste all the computing effort on useless free will for robots that don't need it, or it is actively detrimental to?  If you assume most droids are the equivalent of Tesla self-driving with a ChatGPT driven speaker trying to make small talk, its probably closer to the mark. 

That would certainly make most peoples' attitudes toward them a lot more understandable.  I'm especially thinking of ANH where even when Luke's talking to the droids it's like you'd talk to your car more than like you'd talk to a person.  If sentient-SEEMING droids are the norm and have been for centuries, most people would understand that droids aren't "really" sentient even if sometimes it's fun or convenient to play along with them.

That makes sense for something like a protocol droid, not stuff like mass produced battle droids. The battle droids in the prequels and clone wars acted sentient when there were no humans around and in ways that were counter productive to their goal, they clearly had hopes, dreams, friends and felt pain. There is no reason for your canon fodder to literally act scared when a jedi is around or cry out "now i'll never get that promotion!" when its dying.

Run a chat program on war movies/buddy cop movies, regurgitate patterns...  Just make sure it is '80s style action movies and not Deerhunter.  If you are making mass produced battle drones, why waste so much of your computing resources on simulating a full intelligence, rather than fix the horrible aiming?  If they are all sapient, why isn't PTSD rampant?  Why aren't drones fragging commanders and committing mutiny when they are being used as disposable?  Also, if you are sapient and being cut apart by light sabers why aren't you begging for mercy or crying, instead of shouting out a B action movie henchman line?

The assumptions I have in SWU:
- Some amount of limited personality helps droids do their jobs better, rather than be bound by strict programming.  Some limited ability to learn and creativity.
- The appearance of personality helps droids deal with actual people.  The protocol droid is self-effacing, the battle droid acts like a stock WWII movie side character, the grumpy mechanic.
- Once the best lines are developed, its really easy to mass-produce a bunch of off the shelf modules with a random seed and boom!  Your new farm hand can talk to your farmer, or the mechanics at your shop are at least interesting to the engineer that has to deal with them 8 hours a day.  
- Too much self-awareness, and droids are no good for all the things you want robots to do.  The repetitive, the drudgery, the danger.  You'd have all the psychological problems you get with people.  You don't want your mechanic bots to start sporting MAGA hats or cutting corners to knock off early and play cards, or your battle-droids forming Soviets to elect their own officers!
- I think that limited personality is needed to actually plug in a random library of skills.  Like, if you could cyberpunk plug in a library of many languages/skills how does that really affect your self-aware personality that is defined by your limitations and successes?  Sounds like a psychotic break.  A puddle deep personality just rolls with it.  Or the dysphoria of plugging your personality into another body, when your self-awareness is based around your own?

Hell, if they want to do some parallelism, how about Mando seeing how the Mandalorians need to change while Luke just tries to cosplay at being a Jedi Master in charge of a Jedi Academy while having no apparent idea of how the Jedi fucked up back in the day.

The Luke thing really bugs me. He knows for a fact that having connections can be a very good thing as he proved himself when he redeemed Vader. And what does he do? Try to break Grogu's connection to Mando and send him packing when the kid doesn't do it. Luke should have been like "Good, you value your connections, just don't let them become an obsession."

I also think that droids are designed to have memory wipes to combat viruses.  If your personality is hardcoded by your module, and your skills are a separate hard-coded library, you would be able to regularly wipe your memory no problem to clear out anything you may have picked up in a very old galactic society.  It's just resetting your phone to factory settings, and reimprinting ownership when you do.

I think some droids are very clearly intended to be looked as sentient. R2 is the obvious one here. I also seem to remember reading somewhere that part of why Star Wars droids gets memory wipes is to prevent sentience.

Memory wipes to prevent sentience is awful.  It is literally saying "these creatures could be people?  Fuck that, they're better off as slaves."  This line of thinking would defend killing infants as they aren't sentient yet.  Even our "good" characters would be the worst kind of monster.  The real answer is "why would you build an everyday droid with the amount of computing power and resources to be sentient in the first place?"  I love my dogs, but even if they lived for centuries they still don't have the capacity to grow into a human level sentience.

I think its fine to have some fully self-aware droids!  But they are going to have the resources and systems to support it, and you aren't going to waste those in a droid designed to clean the floors.  R2 was carrying encrypted messages and did so much hacking/Infosec shit I bet that little fucker is filled with military grade hardware.  I'd believe some of the assassin droids tend to go a bit more self-aware than normal, since some of them are designed for very difficult jobs without support for extended periods of time.  

_______________

The real answer, of course, is that you need henchmen it is okay to mow down, you want your mooks and NPCs to be funny, and so many different hands have been in the Stars Wars stew that authors/writers/directors have been wildly inconsistent in how droids are presented.  (No different form storm troopers!  If they are all indoctrinated child soldiers like Fin, fuck me you shouldn't be murdering untold numbers of them!)

On top of that, the nature of fandom means people will take a couple of different scenes in disparate sections of the SW media and draw up weird overarching fan theories and treat them as Grand and Unifying.


I'm sure we're like 10 years off from Siri/Alexa 2.0...   it's going to sound a shitload like a person, remember/pattern match things about our lives, consult the algorithim, and say things like "Woo, you have the Barnaby meeting today!  Should be a rough one!  Maybe I should order you a pizza tonight from <insert approved PIZZA_VENDOR> so you don't have to cook!"  

[Johny Cee]

tldr:

Self-aware fully intelligent droids are the wifi enabled smart toaster.  You can run Skyrim on it, but it doesn't make it any better as a toaster.

[Khaldun]

The worst part is that Ahsoka was RIGHT THERE with him and she knows first hand how dumb the old Jedi were.

I checked out on this part of the story right there and then. Everybody screams about "no no there can be no Grey Jedi" and all that but look, Ahsoka has been out there fighting through the entire Imperial period and now in its aftermath, she's seen everything, she knows exactly how Anakin went wrong, she knows exactly what mistakes the Jedi made, she knows exactly how bad the Sith are, and what does she do when Anakin's kid shows up and wants to start a new Jedi Academy? Passively watch him and indulge his every counterproductive whim. Don't use the character then. I'd rather she be off doing whatever in her own story than hanging around the New Jedi Academy as Alfred to Luke's Batman.

[Samwise]

Okay, Star Wars nerds — what was the Cthulhu thing in the cave?  Why did it grab Mando, drop him at the bottom of the lake, and then just sit there watching Starbuck rescue him?  I felt like I was supposed to know what that was.

[Velorath]

Okay, Star Wars nerds — what was the Cthulhu thing in the cave?  Why did it grab Mando, drop him at the bottom of the lake, and then just sit there watching Starbuck rescue him?  I felt like I was supposed to know what that was.

Wasn’t that the mythical beast she had just mentioned a minute before while reading the plaque? The creature that inspired their skull symbol?

[Samwise]

Ah, it's a "Mythosaur", which is definitely not a placeholder name.

[Sky]

Ah, it's a "Mythosaur", which is definitely not a placeholder name.

Placeholder or not, that's the vinyl that's been on my truck since 2008. Some of us are actual fans 

To date, not a single person has correctly guessed what it was, most common guess is the band Mastodon, which I'm not mad about.

[Threash]

So they show Mando struggling to use the dark saber, then show him losing it to the monster robot thingie. Bo Katan then comes in, takes it back and uses it masterfully to destroy the baddie of the week... and then they just move on like that didn't happen? she won it in combat, Mando wanted her to have it last time... why did he just grab it again like nothing?

[Tebonas]

Because of what happened after Sabine gave her the Dark Saber, Bo Katan is very particular how to get it? She is as rote and formulaic about it as the Children of the Watch are about their helmets. I presume she wants to earn it by fighting and killing another wielder. Thats why she wanted to get if from Moff Gideon. She can't just pick it up because then she hasn't earned it, and she is not ready to kill another Mandalorian (or maybe specifically that naive hunk of a man that currently wields it) yet.

Think of it as Elder Wand rules basically.

[eldaec]

She uses the sabre well because, I assume, she trained to use it last time she had it. As Sabine also had to. Rebels made up some halfway believable stuff about this that also explains why people use them 2 handed most of the time.

Bo is wary of how she gets it again because while she has no time for the mysticism, she knows she will not gain political support to unite the Mandalorian diaspora without a good story.