Ready Mando One
What's more important, fan service or telling a good story?
This essay contains spoilers for Season 2 of “The Mandalorian”
There’s a difficult balance to be struck when you’re making a show like “The Mandalorian.” You have a rich universe to play in. The character archetypes and settings mostly write themselves. But you also have the chance to create some new and exciting things, to play with those tropes and turn in something novel.
Season 1 of “The Mandalorian” largely accomplished this. We were introduced to Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), a gruff bounty hunter with a heart of gold. All our titular Mandalorian ever wanted was to help support his struggling people. He didn’t concern himself with the galactic-scale conflicts that barely touched his backwater planet. Was the setup a riff on the great Lone Wolf and Cub series? Of course. Was it still effective? Absolutely.
“The Mandalorian” seemed less concerned with being a Star Wars show than it was with being a good bit of action cinema that took place in the Star Wars universe. There were some subtle moments of “Hey, look! It’s that thing from the movies!” but it wasn’t the show’s modus operandi. Din may have used the same docking bay as Han Solo and gone to the same cantina on Tatooine, but that wasn’t what it held up as its reason for existing. “The Mandalorian” was at its best when it’s about Din learning to be a dad or helping vulnerable people. That’s what good storytelling is.
Packing a metric ton of Remembering Some Star Wars Guys into a few episodes? Not so much. It was inevitable that the show’s second season would expand the scope of the action. There was bound to be some fan service.
It’s here that I’ll mention that I’m squarely in the demographic“The Mandalorian" targets: Adult Star Wars fans who grew up loving the franchise and are still big ol’ nerds. I know too much about Star Wars lore, both the old stuff that Disney threw out and the new stuff they created. I’ve seen the movies way too many times and yes, I have watched both Clone Wars and Rebels. I am a dweeb.
I was who Disney had in mind when Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) and Bo-Katan (Katee Sackhoff) showed up. I was who Disney had in mind when they had Boba Fett (Temura Morrison) claw his way out of the Sarlacc.
Did all of the fan service work on me? Not really.
Ahsoka’s episode mostly worked because it was, you know, good. It was a beautifully directed love letter to the westerns and samurai flicks that directly inspired the original Star Wars movies. Bo-Katan is a Mandalorian and the entire show is about Mandalorians. I have no problem with their inclusion.
But let’s talk about Boba Fett.
This is where I felt “The Mandalorian” start to veer off into Marvel territory. And really, it’s probably a miracle that it took this long for that to happen given that Disney owns both IPs.
Boba Fett’s prior live-action appearances included him being told “No disintegrations” by Darth Vader, loading Han Solo onto Slave I, and being whacked into the sarlacc. We never actually see him kick ass. The Boba Fett fascination actually came about because fans were so enamored with his action figure, which gave rise to a lot of books, comics and video games that said that Fett was actually a badass and not a failure.
He is the ultimate litmus test for fan service. Naturally, he returned in Season 2 as a raging force of destruction. It’s objectively cool, but again it feels like the show’s brain trust has veered more into making fanboys mark out than into creating something nice.
It feels like someone mashing action figures together. It feels like a Star Wars version of Ready Player One.
Ahsoka’s introduction worked because there was emotional weight, because she served as a means for a wonderful father-son moment between Din and Grogu. It wasn’t just because she had a cool sword fight at the end of the episode. That same quality doesn’t exist with Boba. He’s there to create a dopamine reaction because he’s a symbol that people recognize and love.
You’ve probably watched the Season 2 finale by now. Grogu gets a surprise visit from Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill, digitally de-aged into the uncanny valley) after our heroes raid Moff Gideon’s ship. Luke arrives in an X-Wing and singlehandedly takes down Gideon’s menacing droid army just before the big robots can mow down Mando and his friends. The great hero saves the day! Grogu’s going to be come a Jedi!
It’s a moment that’s played for grandeur, for wide-eyed wonder. All I felt was… Oh, I guess they’re shoving Luke into this to. It aimed for the exact same cheap shot of dopamine.
I get why he was there. The ball had been sent rolling on getting Grogu a Jedi teacher as far back as the Season 1 finale, and at this point in the timeline there aren’t exactly a lot of Jedi kicking around. But I prefer my popcorn entertainment to at least have something resembling a brain, and not just serve as extended commercials for merch and other media.
Why was Boba reintroduced? Not just for the dopamine hits, but to serve as proof-of-concept for his own show. The same goes for Ahsoka, and for the space cops who waylaid Din in this season’s second episode.
I can’t sit here and say that the entirety of Season 2 served as one big fan service dopamine hit, designed to tee up ten more dopamine hits, each with their own Lego sets and t-shirts. That’s only about 80 percent true. This is Disney and Star Wars we’re dealing with after all. That’s always going to be the primary motivator.
But I value that last 20 percent. It’s why I like Star Wars in the first place. Yes, it’s a childhood love that I’ve carried over into adulthood. But I like Star Wars because Star Wars is cool, because the characters are fun and interesting. I loved Season 1 because of its nuances, and to be fair Season 2 had some of those moments too.
The alien woman who was transporting her eggs to try to save her species? That was genuinely emotional, even if the show-runners made things weird by having Grogu eat some of the eggs. I was stunned by how much I smiled when two people in big frog costumes croaked in joy upon seeing each other.
When Mayfeld (Bill Burr) boiled over about the Imperial war machine? That was excellent.
“The Mandalorian” still has the capacity for these things. Hopefully we’ll see more of it in Season 3, which it seems will in part deal with the effort to retake Mandalore. What we’ll probably get is more Remembering Some Guys.
It’s Star Wars, after all. And yeah, I’ll probably still watch the damn thing.