*SPOILERS* - The Mandalorian Thread - *SPOILERS*

Why is the Mandalorian a shining beacon of hope. Because it doesn't suck.

The main reason why Rise of Skywalker is a subpar because

1-There was not a coherent plan for the trilogy, or if there was a plan it was not followed.
2-There were too many cooks in the kitchen.
3-The character arcs were weak.

There was a campfire game some people I hung out with used to play that I loathed. One person tells a few paragraphs of a ghost story or something, then hands it off and another person tells a few paragraphs and so on and so forth. The "fun" is that the story goes off the rails and seems random. That is kind of what happened.

George Lucas had at least a vague plan for episodes 5 and 6 when he wrote the script for A New Hope. Same thing for 2 and 3 when he wrote Phantom. It's not necessary to write three scripts because you have to have some wiggle room (like marginalize Jar Jar Binks when it turns out audiences don't like him as much as George liked him).

To make the lack of planning worse, JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson were working at cross purposes. Episode 9 had to complete the trilogy but it also had to undo a lot of parts of episode 8 that took the original story off the rails. Half of episode 8 had to be unworked. For instance the Resistance was brought down from several thousand people to two dozen. You have to explain how the Resistance gained new recruits. No one liked the Rose/Finn romance plot even though it was a cornerstone of episode 8, so they had to write in how to sideline Rose. Other stuff had to be reworked, they had to have Luke's ghost complete the redemption arc he never did while alive. This takes up screen time.

If you undo, most of the events of episode 8, then you have to add some new events for a proper trilogy. In this case it was bringing back Palpatine back from the dead. This triumphant comeback would have been good cinema but it was done during the opening text crawl because they had to use Palpatine's limited screen time to explain what he was doing with Snoke, the character that was originally intended to be the villain when episode 7 was created but JJ Abrams killed anticlimatically in episode 8. Instead they filled screen time with questing for a mcguffin and the mcguffin leads to a mcguffin which leads to a mcguffin.

Originally they were going to kill a bunch of original trilogy characters, but test screenings really didn't like this, so they did some re-shoots to save them at the moment. Which makes their death experiences, and their friends worrying both anticlimatic and a waste of screen time.

There were some side plots that got ditched. Lando Calrissian was going to have a reveal that he has a long lost daughter but that got caught, but they didn't cut Lando's daughter out of the movie altogether so you have an odd scene originally meant to foreshadow the father/daughter reveal that doesn't match the main plot where you think "Is Lando hitting on this girl a third of his age?" The whole movie has half-plots that aren't finished.

There was a bunch of secret reveals that it was promised or implied we would get answers to in episode 9 that we did not.

There are a lot of logical plot holes and extremely unlikely contrivances to move the plot forward. "Oh no, we're stuck here. Oh wait, there is a perfectly functional ship out here in the middle of nowhere that we can use!"

Maybe it's to hide the plot holes or maybe it's because the movie has to put two movies worth of plot points into one, but the pace is really fast. There is no rest between action scenes. The movie is kind of a constant stream of action. That doesn't give audiences a chance to stop looking at the explosions and start worrying about the characters who were already underdeveloped and had weak to non-existant character arcs in the last movies.

But that's just my rambling take.

 

They didn't. The showed the Palpatine with a bunch of clone bodies of Snoke which kind of implies the emperor cloned himself and transferred his body into a clone, but Palpatine was also really burned and sustained by lots of futuristic medical equipment which implies his body was salvaged from the Death Star.

Note that in Return of the Jedi, the Death Star was vaporized which should have you know vaporized the emperor (if he survived his fall down the shaft to the power generator), but there was a scene in Rise of Skywalker where the physical frame of the second Death Star was revealed to be mostly intact in an ocean on Endor.

Funny thing is, Palaptine wanted Rey to kill him so he could possess her body. Then Rey killed him by deflecting Palpatine's force lightning back at him, but everything seems to be fine despite doing almost exactly what Palpatine asked.

A lot of Rise of Skywalker was edited out it has been speculated that if you delayed the rolling of the credits by one minute while Rey is looking over Luke and Leia's graves on Tatooine watching the twin sun set that you could briefly show Rey with yellow Sith eyes.

Even without that. The last Skywalker is dead and a member of Palpatine's blood line inherits the Skywalker name, legacy, ships, and lightsabers.

 

I enjoyed the movie but yeah, pretty much what @Scalenex wrote. (Except I see some of those points positively instead of negatively).

As for the Mandalorian: I like the show but the hype (just like the hate for the sequel trilogy movies) is way out of proportion IMO.

 

Easy. The first 30 seconds explain it.

 

So lets stop raining unconditional love on the Mandalorian.

This is not as bad as the Holdo Maneuver but I really dislike bounty pods that allow for unerring tracking. Bounty pods are so powerful, you wonder why people didn't use them sooner. They are so efficient, it would make bounty hunters obsolete. If we had this in the real world, there would be no bounty hunters. The police could use a tracking pod and catch bail jumpers every time.

Why didn't the Empire villains just give 100 Storm troopers a couple pods to track baby Yoda rather than hire sleazy bounty hunters one at a time. Along those lines, the New Republic can catch anyone they want with their own soldiers/police. They don't need bounty hunters either.

The reason Old West bounty hunter stories are typically interesting is that you see several scenes of the hunter talking to people, bribing or intimidating people who know things, following tracks, etc. That is kind of missing from The Mandalorian.

Imagine how much shorter and less exciting Taken would be if Liam Neeson could track his daughter unerringly.

On the other hand, if bounty hunters had to rely 100% on mundane investigation it would be almost impossible to catch anyone. There are millions of planets their quarry could hide on.

What do you guys think of bounty pods. In my opinion, they are the biggest flaw in The Mandalorian. My other misgivings about the show are mostly cosmetic and minor.

 

I disagree. I think bounty pods are actually way worse.

And the way the Mandalorian acts about them is a major plot hole.

He knows how well they work, as he uses them.
How could he possibly think he would be safe on that remote planet?

 

My understanding is that the bounty pods requires the holder to first, guess the correct planet the target is on. It doesn't seem to work across planets as well. That's sort of vague though.

 

Yeah they don't really explain them. They basically work as good or bad as the plot requires. Par for the course in Star Wars, almost everything works like that.

But yeah that was a bit annoying to me as well. With that kind of technology readily available to everyone (so it seems) a lot of possible plot points become a joke.

 

The number two thing that bothers me is the "Never remove your helmet or you're not a Mandalorian thing." It's a good idea with bad implementation.

I get it that they wanted to save the face reveal till late in the season, but they could still have the late season reveal and make the rule a little more realistic.

First off, it would make sense that a Mandalorian could reveal his face to other Mandalorians. Along those lines, Once Mando is officially made a family with Baby Yoda at the end of season 1, he should be able to reveal his face to his foundling. Given that he has to take his helmet off to eat, the rule is a little too absolute.


Second off, given how severe the helmet rule is, the helmet is not very secure. When Mando saved the backwater planet and the beautiful widow fell in love with Mando and wanted him to stay, but he wouldn't. It perfectly fit an old Western trope where they try to convince the lone wandering gunslinger to stay, but she was able to remove his helmet pretty easily before Mando physically stopped her.

Going back to Batman Beyond (Batman 40 years in the future from now, whichever year "now" is). Terry McGuiness is a good Batman but he's not as good as Bruce Wayne Batman in his prime. Terry gets knocked unconscious a lot despite his cool armor. Mando gets knocked unconscious a fair bit or at least stunned.

Batman's mask is locked meaning it's pretty hard to remove the mask unless you have insider knowledge of how Bruce Wayne's tech works. Batman Beyond is captured more than a few times, but when he is, normally the bad guys cannot get his mask off. Despite Star Wars level futuristic tech, Mandalorian armor seems to lack any high tech security mechanisms preventing enemies from unmasking stunned Mandalorian Warriors. Mando's suit doesn't even seem to be latched.

 

Yeah that helmet thing struck me as a bit silly, too.

Also: I know it is typical for Star Wars to not explain all the stuff they show, even when it contradicts (or seems to contradict) previously established things, but I would have liked at least a short explanation why those Mandalorians act so very different compared to the others we have seen in Rebels or The Clone Wars.

That applies to helmet thing in particular. Sure, Mandalorians have a thing about their battle armor and their helmets, that's true for the others as well, but they all take them off, just like everyone else.
Well, except Boba Fett (who wears the helmet out of combat) but he was retconned at some point to not be a Mandalorian.... although... now we learned that Mandalorian is not a species so that might change again...