transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:04] This territory has been an endless stream of mercenaries seeking reward and bringing destruction. They do not belong here. Those that live here come to seek peace. There will be no peace until they're gone.

Speaker 2:
[00:21] Then why do you help?

Speaker 1:
[00:23] I have never met a Mandalorian. I've only read the stories. If they are true, you will make quick work of it.

Speaker 3:
[00:37] Welcome to Now Playing Podcast Review of Star Wars The Mandalorian Season 1.

Speaker 2:
[00:42] I can bring you in warm or I can bring you in cold.

Speaker 3:
[00:46] Part of Now Playing's Star Wars Retrospective Series.

Speaker 2:
[00:50] The Empire improves every system it touches.

Speaker 3:
[00:55] Hosted by Justin.

Speaker 2:
[00:57] They all hate you because you are a legend.

Speaker 3:
[01:00] Stuart.

Speaker 2:
[01:01] A man of your skill should make short work of this.

Speaker 3:
[01:05] And Arnie.

Speaker 2:
[01:06] He said you were the best in the parsec.

Speaker 3:
[01:10] But be warned, this episode will contain detailed plot spoilers and mildly objectionable language.

Speaker 4:
[01:17] How do I know I can trust you?

Speaker 1:
[01:18] Because I'm your only hope.

Speaker 3:
[01:21] We hope you enjoy the show.

Speaker 5:
[01:23] Alright, we got a job to do, Mando, you're up.

Speaker 6:
[01:30] Today, we're discussing season one of The Mandalorian, starring Pedro Pascal, Carl Weathers, Werner Herzog, Omid Abtahi, Nick Nolte, Taika Watiti, Gina Carano, Giancarlo Esposito, Emily Swallow, created by Jon Favreau. This is the Now Playing co-host who just came back from the Twi'lek healing baths, Arnie.

Speaker 5:
[01:56] And Stuart.

Speaker 4:
[01:57] And this is the way, this is Justin.

Speaker 6:
[02:00] Oh my God, if I never hear this is the way again from a Star Wars fan.

Speaker 4:
[02:04] Hey, that's what we do.

Speaker 6:
[02:05] Yeah, I have a Boba Fett Bantha Skull tattoo. It's from basically knee to ankle on my left leg. And I got that back in 2005. And it was a deep cut to have this Mandalorian Bantha Skull death head. Do you have any idea how sick I am of people coming up saying, I like your tattoo, you love the Mandalorian TV show, don't you? Never watched it, thanks.

Speaker 5:
[02:31] Until now, maybe they'll finally be proven correct. You just haven't had the opportunity, which is hilarious to say to a Star Wars collector, but you just haven't had the time to watch the most popular Star Wars since, I don't know, Return of the Jedi.

Speaker 6:
[02:49] Technically, I think The Force Awakens and Rise of Skywalker outgrossed Return of the Jedi even adjusted for inflation. But yes, when The Mandalorian came out, it was November 2019. We were a scant eight months away from Rise of Skywalker. I was feeling pretty down on Star Wars as a franchise, but being the podcaster that I was, I felt obligated to watch The Mandalorian, tuned in week one, went into the home theater to watch it, treated it like a Star Wars movie premiere, turned off the lights, turned off the phones, watched the first episode, and went, that's okay. I then did it the second week and realized I wasn't taking to the episodic nature of the series. And so I'm like, I'm just not feeling fulfilled by The Mandalorian. It's not that I wasn't liking it. I certainly didn't hate it. I just wasn't enjoying the week to week experience. So I said, let me wait till all eight episodes are out. I'll binge it. And then COVID hit right after all eight episodes were out. And I binged other things.

Speaker 5:
[04:00] Yeah, I was about to say, that's your excuse, man.

Speaker 6:
[04:03] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[04:04] You should be watching three times in a row. That's when I started watching it and I'm not even the Star Wars guy.

Speaker 6:
[04:10] Well, then I was going to binge it right before season two started. And then season two snuck up on me. And then I was going to binge both one and two when two was done. And then I'm like, wait, the season finale of two was spoiled. Why should I even bother watching this? So no, I've never seen The Mandalorian until this week. This is the first time I've made it past episode two.

Speaker 5:
[04:32] And I always ask this question. Sometimes it's obvious to me. Sometimes it's not. I get why Obi-Wan would get his own show. Still don't understand why that show was called Andor. Some people deserve it. Some people I'm like, eh, okay. Explain to me the mystique of Boba Fett. As I recall, Boba Fett was a walk on in Empire Strikes Back that got promoted up to a onscreen kill in Return of the Jedi. He doesn't do much. And why Lucas felt the need to create this elaborate and quite frankly, bad backstory for him that I thought I understood. Oh, he's a clone, but he's not a clone. He's a Mandalorian. I really don't understand what is going on with Boba Fett.

Speaker 6:
[05:17] I think what made Boba Fett such a badass is that he was a mystery in Empire Strikes Back. And he stood toe to toe with Vader and he didn't cow toe to Vader. He's like asking Vader, what if Solo doesn't survive? He's worth a lot to me. Nobody spoke back to Vader. This guy was talking back to Vader. He had a cool looking ship. It was called Slave One. Disney has since redacted that name. But he was rumored to be a proto stormtrooper. They were saying like during the Clone Wars he fought, there was stuff that Lucas had said in interviews and things that made him sound to be like a total badass. And everybody wanted more of him in Return of the Jedi. And let's face it, he was kind of a doofus in Return of the Jedi. He got beaten up by a blind Han.

Speaker 5:
[06:11] I just remember he got dropped in a mouth and that was the end of him. There's millions and millions of other muppets and creatures on the screen. Why does it endure that we must know more and more about what I'm learning is a creed, not a race, not a clone?

Speaker 6:
[06:27] What's weird is it keeps changing. The Star Wars expanded universe before Attack of the Clones and it felt pretty safe giving Boba Fett a backstory. I mean, who's going to give Boba Fett a backstory when you're telling the story of Anakin Skywalker? Lucas is surely not going to get to Boba Fett, right? Oh, you mean he's a clone now? Okay, let's retcon this backstory we've written for him and now make it this. But then comes Lucas and Filoni with their Clone Wars series and now we're going to explore the entire history of the planet Mandalore and all the Mandalorians and it was a race, it was not a creed. And then it becomes this from Favreau and Filoni and now it's a creed instead of a race.

Speaker 4:
[07:19] We'll get into it as we get further into the seasons. It's both. What we've seen so far is a faction of Mando's and they're going to expand on that in other shows here on Disney Plus in the coming years that we'll be watching. So, I don't know how deep we want to get into that, but, yes, what we're dealing with here, yes, being a Mando is a way of life, and we'll continue to learn more about that as we go along.

Speaker 5:
[07:40] All I can say is, as someone that had watched all the movies, to hear that a show was coming out called The Mandalorian meant nothing to me. I had no association with that in Star Wars. I think you had to be in the club to know that that was Boba Fett.

Speaker 6:
[07:55] I was so deep in the club, I can't imagine not knowing that Boba Fett was a Mandalorian by the time this TV show comes around. But what got me excited for this TV show wasn't that it was about Mandalorians, to me that seems like fan service, but that it was coming from Jon Favreau, the guy who did Elf, the guy who did Iron Man. This gave me some hope to have a real sci-fi action creator behind this.

Speaker 4:
[08:24] I've been a fan of Jon Favreau for a long time. As far as an artist goes, he's all over the place. But I feel like it's mostly always quality. Like a few years ago, he came out with Chef, which is kind of his tour de force when it comes to an indie movie doing what he wants to do. So I feel like seeing Favreau in Star Wars is a good idea. I have faith that he can take this and do something great with it.

Speaker 6:
[08:47] And he'd been involved with Star Wars before. He was the voice of a Mandalorian leader in the Clone Wars cartoon for several episodes.

Speaker 5:
[08:57] I think the reason why he got the gig is one, he kicked off the MCU with Iron Man, Iron Man 2. And then really, I never saw Jungle Book or Lion King live action. But man, how can you not be wowed by the fact that what looks like clearly their own location in Africa ends up being, nope, they just shot it in a green screen room.

Speaker 6:
[09:18] He was spending lots of time at ILM working on this, dealing with a lot of effects. Specifically, he talks about the Lion King and how they were trying to make photoreal stuff and shoot actual outdoors and make CG creations match up. And while he was working on Lion King, the idea came to him that there should be a Western Star Wars and it should be a Mandalorian because Clint Eastwood was part of the original Boba Fett inspiration. He had this like half cape that was supposed to be like Eastwood's poncho from the Man With No Name trilogy. And the visor on Boba Fett was supposed to kind of be like Eastwood's squint and the wide hat brim. And so he went to Kathleen Kennedy and was like, I have this idea for a possible series for Star Wars about Mandalorians. And she's like, well, Dave Filoni is creating his own series about Mandalorians. Why don't you get with him and see what you two can come up with together? And so while Favreau is the created by, this is kind of the brainchild of Jon Favreau working with Dave Filoni. They did eight episodes of this. They did a really long making of series on Disney Plus. I don't know if either of you watched it. It was eight episodes and some ran like 50 minutes each.

Speaker 5:
[10:44] I got tired. Yeah. At a certain point, I'm like, I don't need that. It was good for some pull quotes. It helped me understand the director's perspective and some of the cast. But once it got into the technical, I tuned out.

Speaker 6:
[10:56] I watched all of them. My favorite moment is when Filoni and Favreau are having a conversation. Favreau is like, why don't we just have a dead one here? Filoni is like, you mean just like in Empire Strikes Back when C-3PO gets shot and nobody notices and we just see the parts of him while everybody else is walking away? And Favreau just looks at him and goes, that's too deep for me.

Speaker 5:
[11:20] Yeah, I did see that scene and I did enjoy that. It made me relate a little bit more to Favreau. Filoni helped me out. He created the Clone Wars cartoon series, right? That's his claim to fame. He's done a few of those Star Wars shows. I've suffered through that movie a few times now and it boy, has it never got any better, but that's what I would know him from.

Speaker 6:
[11:40] Well, you now do know he is the president and chief creative officer of Lucasfilm, right? Now that Kathleen Kennedy has stepped down, he is in charge of all of it.

Speaker 5:
[11:53] Oh, no, I had no idea. Okay, wow.

Speaker 4:
[11:55] And I want to give him a little bit more credit. Like he started off as an animator and worked his way up.

Speaker 5:
[12:00] He does name drop George a lot and the stuff that I saw certainly doesn't hurt your rise, right? Pro tip to those that want to get ahead, compliment your boss often. And maybe yes, when they step down and Kathleen Kennedy steps down, you get to be, no, I didn't realize, the king of it all. So all the movies, everything, toys, he has the final say.

Speaker 6:
[12:20] Yeah, he's the man.

Speaker 5:
[12:22] Oh, that's a big job.

Speaker 6:
[12:24] Yeah, to be honest, I preferred Kathleen Kennedy because this is the man who gave us Clone Wars and Rebels and later seasons of Mando.

Speaker 5:
[12:33] Yeah, Mandalorian. We're here to talk about it. I will forgive him for Clone Wars. It was never going to work for me. I just didn't like the animation style. I didn't care about the prequels. It just wasn't my entry point. As you guys know, I am not a Star Wars person. I was not drawn to like, Oh, there's a new show. This was the first one, right? That Disney Plus did that was live action.

Speaker 6:
[12:55] It was, I believe, launched with Disney Plus. Like Disney Plus and The Mandalorian both launched November 2019.

Speaker 5:
[13:03] Yes, I remember it being very hyped with Disney Plus. And it took me about a year, I think, to get Disney Plus. But I was intrigued. And yes, part of it is I am a proud pug owner. And when I heard that there was a Baby Yoda, and I saw this thing, I, like most of the world, had their heart melted and was like, Oh, that's my dog. The eyes, everything about it. I was like, I would love to see Baby Yoda. And so I always had it in my head that one day I would watch an episode. I remember being really impressed. We'll talk about it. Baby Yoda is not even a huge feature of that first episode. I was really impressed with the filmmaking. I was really impressed with, I think it's Filoni directing. Jon Favreau writing that introductory episode. And how close it felt to Sergio Leone and Spaghetti Westerns. Not to mention Samurai movies. I just got sucked in. I've seen every episode of The Mando since.

Speaker 4:
[13:58] Yeah, from a marketing standpoint, Baby Yoda was a stroke of genius. Seeing a cute little green guy with big ears is going to draw in people who do not care about Star Wars at all to see what this is. And coming into this, they were not promoting there was a Baby Yoda. If you watched this the first week, that was a surprise at the end of the episode.

Speaker 5:
[14:16] Oh, really?

Speaker 4:
[14:17] Yeah, they kept it under wraps.

Speaker 5:
[14:19] Oh, how clever.

Speaker 6:
[14:22] Lucasfilm kept this so tight under wraps, they didn't tell any of the marketing companies. And so when Baby Yoda was revealed, everybody wanted a Baby Yoda and they were scrambling, but they didn't want any possible leaks to get out anywhere. It was almost a year before a Baby Yoda action figure would hit shelves.

Speaker 5:
[14:45] I think that must have been when I jumped on the train then, because there was a high awareness, there was memes and things and I thought it was the Baby Yoda show. And I was like, well, it's cute, I'll give you that. And so I tuned in kind of like what people do for like an eagle nest cam or something like, I just want to see a few minutes of something cute to sort of soothe my nerves for a minute, and then I'll go back to my life. But no, I was really impressed that again, a Mandalorian wasn't this Yoda, that's what I assumed it was. It is this Boba Fett and I was drawn in. I did not know, I think even at that time, who Pedro Pascal was. But this is the beginning of his ascent to pop culture dominance as well.

Speaker 4:
[15:27] When we were talking about this show coming out and they said Pedro Pascal is the Mando, I had to think about who it was. As I looked him up, I was like, oh, he had a pretty cool role in Game of Thrones. So he's got some acting chops and he's somebody I enjoyed in that show. So great. Let's see what he can do here.

Speaker 6:
[15:41] Yeah, he goes back to our early days of now playing the Adjustment Bureau in 2011. He was in that, if you recall. The first time I paid any attention to him was Kingsman The Golden Circle. When this was coming out, I'm like, oh, the bad guy from Kingsman is in it. And I think that the next time I paid attention to him was Wonder Woman 1984. And that didn't do him any favors. But I believe this is the thing that put him on the path to A-list, followed up by The Last of Us and Fantastic Four.

Speaker 5:
[16:17] Well, you know, also throw in there Narcos. Maybe you didn't watch it, but it was a great series. It was mostly the focus was Escobar. And when Escobar dropped out of the picture, so did I. But I remember him being the second banana. There were two cops that were always trying to get Escobar, and he was the one I paid less attention to. But certainly since then, the man seems inescapable. I think I saw him five or six times last year in various projects. And yeah, I've really come to see him as a star. It made me want to rewatch The Mandalorian and think, will I be able to see Pedro Pascal underneath that mask? Because that's him, right? That's not just him doing the voice work. He actually put on the helmet and the outfit and ran around.

Speaker 6:
[16:59] We'll revisit this when we get to season three. For season one, Pedro Pascal found it very important that he be doing the body acting. There were two other guys, one who did the gun work, because that was like his thing, and one who did the stunts. But Pedro Pascal was like, I want to be doing the body acting as well as the voice acting. There is one episode. I don't know which one. In season one, though, where he couldn't make it work. He had to shoot Wonder Woman 84. And he didn't record the dialogue till months later. And he said he felt very nervous about giving the whole rollover to another body actor, because that's what he thought he was doing. His instrument was his body for acting like this. Now, as I understand it, for season three, it's kind of like when you hear Robert Downey Jr. talk about Iron Man. He's like, the moment that helmet goes down, I'm in my trailer. You know, he never even pretends that if you're not seeing the Downey face, the Downey is on set. I think by season three, Pedro Pascal is so busy, they're lucky to get him to do the voiceover. And I think that's part of the reason why it's now a movie instead of a fourth season is he's so in demand. But for season one, when he was not Pedro Pascal, he was wanting to be in that suit every minute he could be.

Speaker 5:
[18:25] Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. When you start out a role and you're trying to prove yourself, you want to do it all. And yeah, when you hit the big time and there's so many offers and you've already been doing it a while, yeah, maybe you let the stuntman have a few episodes.

Speaker 6:
[18:39] And I love what he said. He wasn't a Star Wars fan. He's like, I thought I was playing Boba Fett. I saw the outfit. I just thought I was the new Boba Fett.

Speaker 5:
[18:47] See, this is what I'm saying. The common people don't know, they don't know. They don't even know what Mandalorian is. But let's find out. Arnie, why don't you give them the plot of these eight episodes? We could jump into it.

Speaker 6:
[19:00] It's five years after the fall of the Empire in Return of the Jedi, and we follow a Mandalorian with no name. What we find out in the final episode, his name is Din Djarin, played by Pedro Pascal. He is a ruthless, amoral bounty hunter that will take any job so long as it pays. So when his Bounty Hunter Guild Contact Grief Karga, played by Karl Weathers, gives him a job to find a 50-year-old, he takes it without a thought. He goes to the target planet where he meets an Ugnoth named Quill, voiced by Nick Nolte. Quill says lots of bounty hunters have come looking for this person, and so the Ugnoth helps our Mandalorian find the target, so hunters stop disturbing his world. And the Mandalorian gets his target, but finds it is a toddler of whatever species Yoda is, and while he may be 50 species age at different rates, so this one is still a very young child. And at this point, we don't know his name. Lucasfilm just calls him The Child, but you probably just know him as Baby Yoda, even though he is not related to Yoda by blood, so far as we know, Yoda did not have a baby mama. But this baby can use the force and levitates and is able to heal wounds. After a couple of complications, the Mandalorian takes the Child to a person known only to us as The Client and Imperial, played by Werner Herzog. Mando takes the payment, but is concerned what Imperials would want with a toddler. He goes back to the Client's compound, kills the Stormtroopers and takes the Child. He's surrounded trying to escape, but the underground collection of Mandalorians on the planet come to his aid. He flees with the Child to the planet Sorgan, where he meets an ex-Rebel shock trooper, Cara Dune, played by Gina Carano. The Mando thinks perhaps he and the Child can just stay on this planet. He finds a chippy there, but another bounty hunter comes and almost kills the Child. The Mando and the Child leave and go on the run, doing a couple side jobs along the way, like helping a dumb wannabe bounty hunter capture an elite mercenary named Fennec Shand, played by Ming-Na Wen, and helping an old friend do a jailbreak from a New Republic prison ship. Eventually, Carga contacts the Mando and offers a truce to help the Mando kill the Client. But it's a trap, and the Mando knows it, so he took with him Quill and Cara Dune. Carga was leading the Mando into the Client's clutches, but when Carga is wounded and the Child heals him, Carga truly joins the Mando to kill the Client. Quill takes the Child to safety of the Mando ship, the Razor Crest, but he's intercepted by Biker Scout Troopers who kill him and take the Child, and the Client is betrayed by his superior, Imperial Moff Gideon, played by Giancarlo Esposito. The Client is killed and the Mando, Carga and Dune are trapped in the Client's building. With the help of a bounty hunter droid, IG-11, voiced by Taika Watiti, that Quill reprogrammed to be the Child's nurse, the three escape into the sewers. IG-11 saves the Child from the Biker Scouts, then sacrifices himself to take out a number of Stormtroopers. Moff Gideon attacks the Mando, Dune and Karga in his TIE Fighter, but the Mando uses his jetpack to put bombs on the TIE Fighter as it flies. Karga crashes and the Mandalorian goes off to space with the Child. But we see Gideon survived the crash. He cuts himself out of his destroyed TIE Fighter with the Darksaber as credits roll.

Speaker 5:
[22:31] So Arnie, I know you've seen it, but Justin, I'm curious, how much of Clint Eastwood have you consumed? When you have this opening here, which is so straight out of a fistful of dollars, tough guy silently walking into a bar and causing trouble. The way that this goes down, did it feel like Star Wars or did it feel like you were watching a Western? Or both?

Speaker 4:
[22:55] I'm not the biggest Western fan, but I know enough that I could pull these references here. That was one of the things coming into the series that had me a little bit excited, because a lot of the talk was between Favreau and Filoni. They wanted to draw from some of the same inspirations that Lucas did back in the day, where he was pulling from Kurosawa and old Westerns and stuff like that. And that sounds exactly like what these guys are going to do here. Maybe a little bit more on the nose than Lucas ever did. But hey, they're setting a tone here. They're setting the idea that this is going to be a weekly serialized Western type of feel.

Speaker 5:
[23:31] Yeah, this guy is a man with no name. They'll call him the Mandalorian, but that's not his name. And again, he really does have the coolness of Clint Eastwood. Nothing fazes him. Even these guys that are bigger than him, that are roughing up this blue alien, they all go down. I particularly like using the grappling hook to pull the guy into the doorway so that it can chop him in half.

Speaker 6:
[23:53] Yeah. You immediately want to prove this guy is going to be our hero. And I think the rules for an action show are the same as the rules when you go to prison. Find the biggest guy in the yard, beat him up, and you get the respect of everyone. So that's what they're doing with the Mando here. Mando just kicks the shit out of these guys who were picking on this blue-skinned guy. And the blue-skinned guy is so relieved until he realizes he was the target all along.

Speaker 5:
[24:23] Exactly. See, he's no hero. That's, I think, the real twist is at the end of this, you think, oh, he saw someone being bullied and didn't like it. No, no, no. He's the biggest bully of all. I'm taking you in. There's money on you and I have the puck and you're coming with me. I could bring you in warm or I can bring you in cold.

Speaker 4:
[24:42] I would ask you guys if you recognize the actor playing this blue Mithral, but I think that's unfair because he's unrecognizable under this makeup. Do you guys know who that was?

Speaker 5:
[24:52] I read who it is. Horatio Sanz doesn't mean anything to me. I think he was on SNL.

Speaker 6:
[24:57] He was on SNL and did a number of movies and I don't think we're going to be seeing him anymore not only because his character is frozen in carbonite, but he got canceled due to a scandal with SNL after parties and an underage girl.

Speaker 4:
[25:10] Well, not before they shot some season two episodes with him. So, spoiler alert, he comes back.

Speaker 5:
[25:17] Oh, interesting. I don't remember it that way. Watching this again, it's almost like watching it for the first time. I didn't really remember the beats. I just remembered the feel, the vibe. And certainly that's what we're getting here. It's funny, it's amusing. But again, Mando is not to be played with. This guy tries jokes and they have a whole thing about getting him across the ice to the ship.

Speaker 6:
[25:40] Yeah, we get them traveled by Brian Posein. This thing is just a series full of cameos of comedians and geek favorites, I think would be how you'd mix them up. Brian Posein was on a nerd stand-up comic tour.

Speaker 4:
[25:57] It's funny to see Brian Posein here because he famously shit all over the prequels. He's one of these old school Star Wars guys. His whole act for a while was pissing off people who liked the prequels. So to see him here in Star Wars in a small role is just kind of like a fun little inside joke.

Speaker 5:
[26:15] Okay, so I should be paying attention to all these little care. I didn't recognize, particularly when they're under makeup. It's hard to see them. If you don't watch a lot of comedies, you won't recognize them.

Speaker 6:
[26:23] Well, no, that's Brian Posein's real beard. That's no makeup on Posein before he falls into the ice. Then there's an ice monster attacking and we get to see the Mandalorian also has a kick-ass gun, a pulse rifle, and this is a call back to. This entire series is full of what I've heard referred to as member berries where it's, hey, remember this? And they're going to bring some crap back from, hey, remember the cartoon in the holiday special that introduced Boba Fett? Remember he had this gun that looked like a you at the end? Well, that's the Mandalorian's gun now right from the holiday special.

Speaker 4:
[27:07] I think, yeah, some of that's member berries. I think also, it's kind of cool that we're in a place now where Star Wars has been around so long, they can be self-referential to something that it created all these years ago that most people have never seen. I mean, if you're going to be honest, most people have never seen the holiday special.

Speaker 5:
[27:23] And even those that have won't remember the gun. These things are going to wash right over me. I didn't even see that that gun was something to pay attention to. But when this guy finally winds up seeing all those previous victims in Carbadite, I love that he's next, right? Hit of a button and he's amongst them.

Speaker 6:
[27:40] It bothers me a little bit that the Mandalorian freezes his victims in Carbadite because that's supposed to be like a risky thing. It's supposed to be something you don't really do. That's why doing it to Han was a big deal. What if he doesn't survive? It's how you transport goods. It's like dry freezing. You don't really do it to people all the time. It felt a little bit like, oh god, you're devaluing by making all these references. It's no longer cool that Han got frozen in carbonite.

Speaker 4:
[28:12] Hey, I'm going to be with you on a lot of these references and stuff like that. But here, I think what bothers me more about the carbon freezing is the size. How does that fit in a ship? Like on Cloud City, that was like an entire room that they needed to do this. He's got like the little home version of it.

Speaker 5:
[28:28] Yeah, tech's gotten better since Empire Strikes Back.

Speaker 6:
[28:31] It has been seven years since Empire Strikes Back, maybe eight. And it's probably not a great time for tech development, as it's a galactic civil war and then a governmental reconstruction. I don't really think the Apple engineers are making great advancements in miniaturization of carbon freezing technology in this era.

Speaker 5:
[28:55] I mean, if you want to have those debates, I'mma leave you guys to it. To me, as someone that has warm memories of Empire Strikes Back, to see this Boba Fett hit a button and carbon freeze someone makes me go, Ah, that's right.

Speaker 4:
[29:08] And I think it's cool seeing everybody in different poses from being frozen really quickly. Like, to me, that's cool. That's toyetic. Matter of fact, when they made the ship, I believe it came with a whole bunch of different figures in the carbonite. To me, that's cool.

Speaker 6:
[29:21] Listen, I bought the Razorcrest toy. I had all those figures in carbonite in a box somewhere. I get why. Hey, you know, member berries, you dangle them out and people go, this reminds me of, I like being reminded of. And so it's working on that level.

Speaker 5:
[29:39] Boy, tough crowd. Yeah, I thought this would be an easy, fun one. You know who else is fun? He's not quite a memory berry. But I hadn't thought about Carl Weathers in probably about 40 years.

Speaker 6:
[29:49] You don't watch Arrested Development, huh?

Speaker 5:
[29:52] No, never seen it.

Speaker 6:
[29:53] He was great in a small role on Arrested Development. My wife and I quote Carl Weathers playing himself on the show all the time.

Speaker 4:
[30:02] Pimping Burger King.

Speaker 6:
[30:04] Where am I not going today? He kept buying airline tickets just to get bumped and get free miles and reimbursements. That's the last time I've seen Carl Weathers in anything. And I did love from the behind the scenes stuff. Apparently, they hired him to be an alien under all the makeup. And he's like, I knew you weren't going to do that. You don't pay for this face and not show it.

Speaker 5:
[30:29] I did see that interview. And yes, he definitely is, you know, like many actors. As someone that lived and worked in LA, it was fun to watch how people kind of remain frozen in time. He still thinks of himself as Action Jackson, even though it's 2019. But he's a lot of fun here.

Speaker 4:
[30:46] Yeah, he comes in as a big character, right? Like, I can't tell if he's somebody you can trust or you know, you shouldn't trust or what. He's playing it big, right? Mando walks in to this seedy cantina and here's Carl Weathers. Mando, come on in!

Speaker 5:
[31:00] Yeah, this is what you want. In a first episode, your job is to introduce all the characters. You tell the audience what they're going to get week after week. And so, yes, it's really important that when Mando finishes a job, this is the dude he goes to see. Although, interestingly enough, all the jobs that he has right now won't even pay for the fuel. So, Mando has to seek a crime boss, is the way that I hear it described. But I know him better as Werner Herzog, the German expressionist director that has made many hilariously morbid documentaries and German films.

Speaker 6:
[31:34] I can say I never expected to see Werner Herzog in a Star Wars project. Werner Herzog probably never expected to see Werner Herzog in a Star Wars project. Why is he here?

Speaker 5:
[31:45] Yes, he has a delightful presence. I kid you not. He makes these documentaries about the end of the world, but something about his affect, the way that he talks, his speech and all that, it just ends up being hilarious. I don't know what that is, but he can make the really morbid and twisted kind of funny. I guess that's what he's doing as a crime boss here.

Speaker 6:
[32:05] This was something Favreau said he wanted and they reached out to Herzog. Herzog's like, I've never seen a Star Wars. I don't like watching movies.

Speaker 5:
[32:15] I love it. He's never seen Star Wars.

Speaker 6:
[32:18] Yeah, he doesn't watch movies. He doesn't find that entertaining, but he had self-funded a film in 2019 and needed to make back some money and this would do it. So he took it as a paycheck gig.

Speaker 5:
[32:32] We've covered his work. He did the 1979 Nosferatu.

Speaker 6:
[32:36] I can't imagine we'd cover any of his documentaries, but we covered that.

Speaker 5:
[32:40] Yeah, he's made some amazing films. Again, that he would ever come to such a commercial project as this is really amazing.

Speaker 4:
[32:49] What I want to give them kudos for up until this point is starting to build this new post-Imperial Reign world, right? As Star Wars fans and casual viewers, we have to start to understand where we are in the timeline. And seeing stormtroopers in these dirty cracked old uniforms is a great visual way to kind of set you in a timeline. Like, okay, I kind of have some idea where we are and what's going on.

Speaker 5:
[33:11] In one of the later episodes, he just walks by and they just show it for a minute, but all those stormtrooper helmets on pikes, right? This is right after Return of the Jedi, and this New Republic is a joke. That's what I hear. They don't really have a good system in place. Yay, the Rebels won, but they also suck.

Speaker 6:
[33:30] This reminds me of the same problem I had with the expanded universe when it started, is that because it's Star Wars, they want it to be Rebels versus Imperials. But because we're in that period, right after the Rebels won, you're stuck with what they call the Imperial Remnant. And I don't know how dangerous a remnant can ever sound. That does not feel dangerous to me.

Speaker 5:
[33:57] See, I love World War II movies where it's like the Nazis, right after they were defeated, and they were just like the werewolves. They were these gangs or whatever that rove Germany. No, you can do really cool stuff with that. They always say, war movies are easy. Making the pieces the hard part, how do you hold it together after the battle has won, is a more interesting story than fighting a battle, blowing up a Death Star.

Speaker 4:
[34:21] Yeah, and to me, I think it's cooler and more intuitive for them to use the remnant of the Empire as some of the bad guys, rather than some new faction that just rose up in the last few years, or just have it be an all-fully lawless wasteland out there.

Speaker 6:
[34:39] I'll say this much. One of my big problems with the sequel movies is I never liked A New Empire Took Over. These stories in between with Imperial Remnant, I'm thinking to myself, maybe they can retcon and improve the sequels by giving us a better story of the Imperials re-rising to power that we never got in film. So that's actually something that gives me hope, is to see a new kind of story of galactic scale in these series we're going to be watching.

Speaker 5:
[35:16] Agreed. And I also just like the client kind of lays it out. He's the first one. It's been mentioned. Again, they say, Mando, hey Mando, everyone's fascinated when they see a Mando. You get the idea that Pascal is exotic, but the client is the one that actually speaks to, you know, he pays him in advance and Beskar steal. He's like, yeah, I know your people deserve this. I know that you guys more than anyone were wiped out and pillaged. And boy, we never thought of Boba Fett as being disadvantaged. But to think that there was a whole race of people that lost and that this is a grievance that Mandalorian is going to have makes him more interesting as he takes that steel and goes to the underground where I guess all the Mando's hang out and has it forged into a new shoulder pad.

Speaker 6:
[36:00] It is literally underground. I couldn't believe that it is quite literally underground where we have the Armorer and all these other Mandalorians hanging out.

Speaker 4:
[36:12] Yeah, and this is where we get to meet Jon Favreau in a little tiny role in this first season. He's the bigger Mando. It's not him in the uniform, but it's his voice playing Paz Vizsla. And he has a little row with our hero Mando. They fight a little bit.

Speaker 6:
[36:26] It's not him in the outfit. I kind of thought it was him in the outfit.

Speaker 4:
[36:31] But we see that he, being a Mando, might not be doing it properly, right? Like, there's an even more fanatical sect of them there that think that he's besmirking the name of Mandalorian by being out there taking these piddly jobs and not following the creed properly.

Speaker 5:
[36:45] That all this steel has got an imperial stamp on it means that it's blood money, right? And there's something ickey about using it. And again, the complications of that, to me, it's not Andor, and it doesn't need to be, but it gives it this nuance that I wasn't expecting from what I presumed to be a kid show. Anyway, we're going to have this Mandalorian fly off to where he knows he's got a tracker. He wasn't given a picture, but he can use the tracker to find this asset. It. They keep using it. We don't know what it is. And I love, now that you guys have put it in perspective, that the audience watching live would also not know what they were going for.

Speaker 6:
[37:25] Yeah, he says it's 50 years old, so you've got to think that it's going to be an old man, right? It's going to not be a child at 50 years old.

Speaker 5:
[37:36] Yeah. I wish I could have seen it that way. What I do see is, speaking of old men, Nick Nolte. I didn't even look at the credits, but I recognize that rasp. He's got a very distinctive voice. And when Mando lands on a planet that looks like Red Rock Canyon, this is the creature that he meets that helps him learn how to ride something called a berg, but basically looks like a dinosaur.

Speaker 6:
[37:58] A blurg? And we've covered them before. They were in the Ewok movie, Battle for Endor.

Speaker 5:
[38:06] Yeah, because we all want to remember that, yes.

Speaker 4:
[38:11] And Nick Nolte is playing in Uggnaught, which we have seen before too. They're the little guys who work on Cloud City running around. They're the kind of mechanics of Cloud City.

Speaker 5:
[38:21] Yeah, he mentions being a slave, who's bought his own freedom. He can finally be at peace. And I love the fact that he's going to help the Mandalorian in part because, well, I've never seen one before. But if his reputation holds true, you'll finally be the one to put a stop to all these annoying bounty hunters that are always coming here to get this asset and die.

Speaker 6:
[38:40] And so this Quill takes him off to find the target and ride the Blurg. And, you know, of course, if it's a Western, you've got to tame your horse.

Speaker 4:
[38:51] Yeah, we get a little montage of him trying to learn how to ride this bipedal dinosaur.

Speaker 5:
[38:56] Being done very efficiently. I mean, these episodes aren't much more than half an hour. They can be very economical in their storytelling. And of course, they use all the traditional Star Wars wipes and dissolves and what have you. So it really does feel of the same piece as the Lucas movies.

Speaker 6:
[39:12] Yeah, the editing, the wipes especially, really felt like they were trying to make this feel like Star Wars. What's shocking to me is that they don't go for a John Williams-like score because I feel like that's what really sells a Star Wars feel also. But they got Ludwig Gorins in here to do something totally different with like flutes and woodwind instruments.

Speaker 5:
[39:37] Well, he's doing what he always does. He just recently won an Oscar for Sinners and he worked on Black Panther and all of that. Yeah, tribal music, real thunderous, a lot of percussion. Oh yeah, this one feels like a theme, like an anthem. When you hear it coming, you know to run the other way. Mandalorian's a badass.

Speaker 4:
[39:55] The music here to me feels like a mix between Western and Japanese inspired at the same time. There's almost some of that flutiness going on there that feels of Japanese descent. But it also has that gritty, dirty Western style too.

Speaker 6:
[40:10] Well, that really fits given that the Man With No Name films were taking from Yojimbo and Seven Samurai and we're going to see some of these storylines retold here. But yeah, bringing those different influences and knowing that Lucas was looking at Westerns and looking at Kurosawa as inspiration for Star Wars. It does fit. I like the score of this. But in a movie that's trying to make you feel like you are soaking in original trilogy as much as Palmolive soap, then I am surprised that they didn't try to just find a fake John Williams.

Speaker 5:
[40:51] Are you happy that they didn't?

Speaker 6:
[40:53] I like the score.

Speaker 5:
[40:54] Yeah, I mean, it's really good.

Speaker 6:
[40:56] I like any time this series actually tries to differentiate itself instead of just being callbacks and references.

Speaker 5:
[41:04] You guys probably pick up on hundreds of more callbacks than I'll ever see, but I'm not experiencing it that way. I hear that flute. Yeah, I'm thinking of the Leone movies. Do do do do do do.

Speaker 6:
[41:15] Yeah, of course, that's definitely what I think they were going for here. But they go and find a whole bunch of Nikto aliens at a compound. And here's what I feel like is another callback. You know, Boba Fett in Empire Strikes Back, the first time we see him is on the bridge of the Executor Super Star Destroyer, and he's there with a bunch of other bounty hunters. You get Forlom, the droid, Zuckus, the insect looking thing, IG-88, the other droid, the gangly droid, Basque, the Trandoshan, and Dengar. Four out of those six appear, I think, in the Mandalorian series here. And I do feel like again, more member berries. You like the scene with the bounty hunters. You had those toys when you were a kid. Let's put all these bounty hunters in here. Here's IG-11, who's just like IG-88.

Speaker 4:
[42:11] It is the Assassin's Series droids, right? It's not like they're rewriting the type of character that it was. IG-88 was a bounty hunter, why not see another one of them? I'm perfectly fine with them drawing inspiration in this type of way from older media.

Speaker 5:
[42:26] Yeah, and what do you do? I mean, I hear the grumbling that they're mining nostalgia, but how do you make Star Wars without doing that? How do you innovate without taking reference of Lucas?

Speaker 6:
[42:39] I suppose that it's so much that we're not just getting IG-11, but at the beginning of the next episode, we're going to have a Trandoshan.

Speaker 5:
[42:49] What are these things? I mean, you're deep in this, but I'm telling you, I didn't recognize half of this shit you're talking about.

Speaker 4:
[42:56] See, I'm fine with most of this. I'm saving my grievances for the member barriers for where I feel like it's over, over the top. Did we need to go back to the actual cantina in Mos Eisley?

Speaker 6:
[43:07] Oh my god, I'm going to have a shit fit when we get to that point.

Speaker 4:
[43:10] I know you are. I think you need to save some of the rage for that type of thing.

Speaker 5:
[43:14] Oh yeah, please. Yeah, let's finish this episode. Yes, it's plot important. We meet a robot whose primary design is to kill, and we've already had little flashes when Mandalorian was having his armor made that I don't like droids. There's something about them in the past in true Disney fashion. All our heroes have traumatic backstories. We'll have it teased throughout the episodes that he as a little boy, we see him as a human child being put in storm doors and a droid coming for him. Maybe even this model, I couldn't be sure about that.

Speaker 6:
[43:47] No, it's a super battle droid from The Clone Wars.

Speaker 5:
[43:50] Of course, of course. But he don't like droids and he's got to partner with one if he wants to get in through these big steel doors.

Speaker 4:
[43:56] This is a pretty good action scene for a TV show. I mean, pretty good shoot them up in the middle of a desert town and guys falling off a roof, coming out with a big gun and firing their pin down behind a column. I'm enjoying the action here.

Speaker 6:
[44:09] I haven't seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but I got to imagine this is what the end of Butch and Sundance kind of looks like from what I know of that movie. It's a good action scene and this episode is paced very well. We've gone through a lot of ground really quickly. And so when we get this shootout and the IG-11 just constantly like, I can't be taken hostage. I'm going to self-destruct. The Mandalorian don't do it yet.

Speaker 4:
[44:37] It's good humor. Good droid humor here.

Speaker 5:
[44:39] That's Tycho Watiti doing the voice.

Speaker 4:
[44:41] Yeah.

Speaker 6:
[44:42] He's going to direct one of these episodes later on. It's not all Filoni. This is Filoni's first live action directing ever though. And he's doing a pretty decent job of the action.

Speaker 5:
[44:51] Again, it's the strong filmmaking that kept me watching to episode two. Although we do get our fix. I've been waiting the whole episode. What's it going to look like when all these guys are dead and they blast it open the door and the droid is like, okay, I'm here to kill Mando. Dealing with his childhood trauma doesn't let that droid go forward with it and opens the crib, we get our first glimpse of the child.

Speaker 6:
[45:15] Baby Yoda, I had no idea this was coming. Again, I watched this episode the night it dropped and I was like, oh my God, that is unexpected. We've only seen, as far as I know, one other member of Yoda's species ever, and that was Yaddle, another Jedi on the Council there.

Speaker 4:
[45:36] Mm-hmm. A female. I mean, it's never too late to rate the story of where this came from. Our child could be a love child of Yoda and Yaddle from way back when, who knows? The timelines might line up, but that's not something we're going to learn anytime soon, and we haven't learned. But we all say baby Yoda, and I'm okay with it, even though we know that's not his name, we know it's not baby Yoda, because I think collectively everybody saw these big baby eyes and green ears, and everybody on their own said a baby Yoda. So it's just the perfect name for him.

Speaker 5:
[46:08] Again, it's the eyes more than anything. He's got pug eyes, and they just draw you in. It's almost evolutionary, right? These things can't do for themselves, but if they look at you, they'll make you do for them. That's how I feel as a pug owner. Of course, Mando falls for him, offers his finger, and is walking him back to his ship in the next episode.

Speaker 4:
[46:28] And we get our first credits, and I don't think we need to talk about the credits every time, but I think it is kind of cool what they do here. You know, part of Star Wars history, and being a fan of Star Wars, is just scouring over all the old concept art of Ralph MacQuarrie. To see them do these credits in that same style, almost the storyboards from making the episode, we get to see them over the credits, I think was sheer genius. I really enjoyed it live when they were doing them.

Speaker 6:
[46:54] Oh, I watched them every episode. I just enjoyed it. Yes, it looks like the MacQuarrie art. I had all of those art of Star Wars books in the 80s and 90s. They're still mining MacQuarrie's designs to this day. The Mandalorian himself looks like early concepts of the Boba Fett armor before you added the antenna on the side and things. And so, I do love this art at the end. It's like, I'm not buying any more Star Wars books. But if they had a book of this, I'd recommend it to fans.

Speaker 5:
[47:28] It was a wow moment. It was like, wow, they really tapped into the vein of Star Wars in a way that I hadn't felt since 1983. Forget the Ewok movies. Like Jedi was the last time that I felt. They are not only mining Star Wars nostalgia, they're mining the influences of Star Wars. The Samurai movies, the Spaghetti Westerns, the movie cereal stuff. They've really nailed it. I mean, I could see why the hype was real. But getting a good pilot is one thing, keeping up the quality is another. So let's continue on. We have our next episode, The Child with a new director, Rick Fumoyama. I don't really know.

Speaker 6:
[48:06] He's unfamiliar to me too. I looked him up. He's done quite a bit of television work and a few movies I haven't seen, but he's good in this. Again, I think all the directing on this is solid, no matter who's behind the camera. I don't feel like any director behind the camera brings an individualistic style. I do feel Favreau was on set with all of this. At least that's what it looks like from behind the scenes. And that Favreau, much like The Child will learn from The Bounty Hunter, Favreau might have been teaching Filoni and maybe some of these others. Bryce Dallas Howard had directed before, she wasn't a very experienced director. I think Favreau might have guided some hands.

Speaker 4:
[48:50] Yeah, it feels like they're following a style guide. I don't think any director is brought on to bring their own flavor.

Speaker 5:
[48:55] And that's the way television is made, right? It's the showrunner make sure that you don't do something of your own. Every now and then, you know, I guess Tarantino will direct an episode of CSI or something and they'll go with it. But for the most part, you want your show to feel the same week after a week. That's why you're tuning in. So yes, I guess that's the compliment I'll give. It will feel very consistent episode by episode as we go through the season. They're picking right up from where we left off. Mando is attacked. These are not Tusken Raiders?

Speaker 4:
[49:27] No, these are Trandoshan. The lizard species, Bossk was one of the original bounty hunters we saw on Vader's ship in Empire Strikes Back. And to me, I think it's cool to kind of see these guys. And I know both of you guys never made it through the Clone Wars, but they messed around with these guys a little bit there and showed how ruthless of hunters they are from their jungle planet. They are a ruthless, scary species, and to be attacked by three of them, I felt the danger here.

Speaker 6:
[49:51] I made it through quite a bit of Clone Wars. I'd say I saw three quarters of the episodes from the original run. I didn't ever watch that final season they put on Disney Plus, but I understand the benefit of seeing Bossk do something in live action. I know this isn't Bossk himself, but it's the Bossk alien species. And if you have Bossk and Boba Fett on the bridge together, you wanna see a Bossk stand in fight, a Boba Fett stand in in a TV show. It's a lot to cram into the first two episodes, but they look good and it's a good fight.

Speaker 4:
[50:28] And I'm glad it's OT alien design, right? Like that's one thing that I've complained about in the Star Wars television series in whole. Too much sequel era alien design. Here we're getting good old school designs.

Speaker 5:
[50:39] More interesting is the fact that afterwards, baby Yoda wants to help. And Mando has no idea what the Force is, has no idea how funny, right? That we could have had the whole trilogy, we assumed the whole universe was united by the Force. But this guy is like, why you keep trying to touch my wound and putting them in the crib and finally shutting the lid on it? It's good physical comedy, but it also tells you something important about what Mando doesn't know about what he's carrying.

Speaker 4:
[51:06] Very few people do. But the impetus of this episode is that Mando is ready to take his bounty back, but he finds his ship has been completely gutted by Jawas.

Speaker 5:
[51:18] And again, this is my memory of A New Hope, is like, that's what they do, right? They find stuff and they grab parkas and they have this, what is this thing called? Like a sand roller or something like that?

Speaker 6:
[51:29] Sand crawler, close.

Speaker 5:
[51:30] I'm loving this. As someone that does like Star Wars, but didn't love it like you guys, I'm loving seeing this stuff come back.

Speaker 6:
[51:39] I suppose my question is, is this a member berry? Because shouldn't Jawas be on Tatooine? Are Jawas everywhere with these huge sand crawlers? Did they populate multiple planets?

Speaker 5:
[51:55] Why can't the answer just be yes? Why does it have to be complicated? They're everywhere and they like to scavenge. And so yes, they're touring up his ship. And he can use all his fancy gadgets and get to the top and still be whacked on his ass.

Speaker 6:
[52:09] I guess it's also the sound effects. Every line of, let's call it dialogue, I don't know what else to call it, that the Jawas have is a sound effect lift from A New Hope. When they shoot the Mandalorian, is exactly what the Jawa said when he shot R2. Of course, you got to throw in a new teeny or two, but it just feels like a lot of A New Hope and not a lot of originality.

Speaker 5:
[52:39] You actually know syllable by syllable what the sounds of the Jawas make in every scene. Maybe you don't want New Star Wars. Maybe you're served very well by the Star Wars you have then.

Speaker 6:
[52:49] Very likely.

Speaker 5:
[52:51] Yeah, I'm hearing that.

Speaker 4:
[52:53] And I'm enjoying it as a TV show. If I remind myself, I'm not sitting here watching the latest new Star Wars trilogy movie. This is a week to week TV show. That's how I took it in. You know, this is the first episode I saw this week, and I'm not going to see another one till next week. So, you take it for what they're putting in front of you. And yeah, it's fun to see Jawas. Like Stuart, not being a super fan. Easy to remember. Oh, everybody remembers these little guys who stole R2 and C3PO and then sold them off to Luke.

Speaker 5:
[53:21] Yeah, I remember their names. I remember Jawas. I know what that is. And so, maybe this show is more for me than for a hardcore person. Someone that has nostalgic love for the 80s movies and hasn't watched them for a long time and won't feel like they're just watching repurposed scenes from those films. I mean, Nick Nolte wasn't there, and certainly, he's the one that's trying to negotiate this deal when it all goes bad. He's brought in to try to figure out what these Jawas want and to keep Mando from frying them with his flamethrower arm piece. And it turns out they want an egg.

Speaker 6:
[53:55] And this is where I stopped watching the first time around, is this side quest for an egg. I think I was spoiled by Lost and other TV shows that had series arcs, and I just wasn't ready to go back to like the Star Trek The Next Generation. Each episode is going to be its own little story kind of thing. So that this one was the Mando versus the Jawas and going on a side quest for an egg that didn't propel the overall narrative, frustrated me when I first watched it. It's a fun episode. I love seeing the inside of a sand crawler. I love spending time with the Jawas. I love Mando using his grappling hook to climb up the side of a sand crawler like he's Batman 1966 and Jawas are coming out the window like cameos. But I wanted this to form a four-hour movie out of Mandalorian. And this is very much an episodic TV series.

Speaker 5:
[54:57] Very much underlying that. Yes, you could have missed last week and caught up just fine this week.

Speaker 4:
[55:03] To a degree. I mean, that's what the series is going to be, right? Like there's side quests every week, but also building one underlying through story.

Speaker 5:
[55:12] And I think you're always learning something about Mando. In each one, I feel like I got a little bit more. Keep in mind, again, I thought a Mandalorian was a Yoda, so like it never even occurred to me that I should care about Boba Fett. Here, I think he has a line that weapons are my religion. That helps me understand his culture a little bit more. And of course, he's going to face off with a Mudhorn, which I assume is new.

Speaker 6:
[55:35] It is new, yes, completely new. And I like this fight.

Speaker 4:
[55:39] It's fun, but the purpose of this scene is to finally show us a little bit more about the child that we don't know anything about. As a viewer, I think we can all assume, ah, a Yoda type thing probably has the force, and he's going to use it. This little guy uses the force to save Mando from a charging Mudhorn just at the last second and lifts this giant rhinoceros up and saves the day.

Speaker 5:
[56:00] Mando, I love the fact that he was going to fight it anyway. All he had left was a knife, but he was still going to stand his ground and try to take on a charging rhino with a tiny blade at that. And of course, once he's floating in the air, he's easy pickings. And it creates another mystery. It happened earlier and he didn't see it. But now he knows there's something weird about this child. I don't know why it's like fainting and why this happened. And Nick Nolte doesn't know either. But I wonder what I'm delivering to the client now. I have a curiosity about what they're going to do. And that's the code, right? You're not supposed to ask, what is this package for? What are you going to do with it? But who wouldn't want to know after watching a fight like that?

Speaker 6:
[56:43] I do think Quill has some knowledge about the Force. He's not completely shocked. It's like he's heard some rumors of Jedi, but he never met a Jedi.

Speaker 4:
[56:55] That's a plot line throughout all of Star Wars that's always kind of bothered me. Especially after the prequels, we watched all these movies where Jedi were running around all over the galaxy doing magic on defeating armies, and then just a mere 20 years later Han Solo is out here talking about it's a myth. The Force doesn't exist. What? You have TV, you have recording devices, people have seen this, but that's just a small problem I have with Star Wars in general, and it's not gonna taint my viewing of what we're doing here.

Speaker 5:
[57:22] I don't know. The more that I live, the more that I realize things that I thought everyone knew get forgotten. It's not hard to imagine. Important battle, important things, things we all thought we knew go away with a few generations. 20 years is a really long time for knowledge to stay in the public conscience. Anyway, the Jawas get their egg, Mando goes on his way and goes to the third episode.

Speaker 4:
[57:45] And Mando, you know, he's gonna follow his code. He is still a bounty hunter and follows his code. So he takes the child to Werner Herzog, his client, and turns them over and takes away his ice cream maker bucket full of Beskar credits.

Speaker 6:
[57:59] Yes, I can't believe they brought in the ice cream maker from Empire Strikes Back. The exact same model of ice cream maker that they used in Empire Strikes Back, Wilrohood. Now we see it open and we know what Wilrohood was so anxious to save. Beskar!

Speaker 4:
[58:17] Yeah, it's a good use of member berries, right? Picking an old prop that became a meme and giving it a real-world purpose.

Speaker 6:
[58:24] No, this is great because this I consider an Easter egg. It's not something everybody knows and hey, remember that? This is deep cut. I like that.

Speaker 5:
[58:35] Yeah, case in point, I have no idea. There was ice cream in Empire Strikes Back?

Speaker 6:
[58:40] During the evacuation of Cloud City, there's one guy running and he's carrying a Sears brand ice cream maker or something. It's very clearly a retail ice cream machine that he was running away with and it's become this joke for years that this man had to have his ice cream when he's evacuating the planet. So here, it's the exact same one that Werner Herzog is giving to the Mando with all his Beskar in it.

Speaker 5:
[59:08] The art director was trying to save a few bucks, ran off to Sears and everyone grills him for it now. Anyway, Mando, he gets a new suit. He thinks this will make him feel better. We all do this, right? We do something for the money. Maybe we don't like the ethics of it, but we'll buy ourselves something and maybe that will make us feel better. He needed it, right? After that mudhorn, he needed a new suit. It's brand spanking new when he comes waltzing back to Girl Weathers, and he looks great.

Speaker 6:
[59:36] I couldn't believe he got it so quick because they came out with the Mandalorian action figure right when the series came out and it was in his brown armor and everything. It was a year before his Beskar armor suit came out, and I'm like, I thought that was going to be like the season finale as he upgrades his armor based just upon the toys. Like, he gets it in episode three? Damn, why do we even bother with that first figure?

Speaker 4:
[60:02] I'm right there with you, Arnie. In my memory, he slowly built up his armor over the course of the season and ended up with that full Beskar get up. But yeah, I was surprised on this rewatch to be like, really, that original uniform only lasted an episode and a half and he's been in the Beskar ever since?

Speaker 5:
[60:18] And I get that Mando's are career driven. They are bounty hunters by code, by creed. And so maybe they don't party. They don't kick it and relax and hang out with Carl Weathers at the bar. But there's something about the way that Pascal is like, I want another job, tells you he's feeling bad about the job he just did. And that's why Carl Weathers is kind of like, well, you know, you could turn in Werner Herzog if you want to, but it's New Republic. They won't do anything.

Speaker 4:
[60:46] Yeah, he wants to run away from what he's just done because he hasn't fully come to groups with it. But you can tell that he's thinking about it already. He's not comfortable with having left a child with this Imperial remnant.

Speaker 6:
[60:57] And why is that? Is it because the child is magical? Is it because it's a child?

Speaker 5:
[61:02] Because we've had ten flashbacks where he thinks about his own childhood being exploited, and he would never want to participate in the harm of a child, like what was done to him. Foundlings. I mean, it's said when this stuff gets melted down, he gives the access to the armorer and says, give it to the foundlings. He has a love and charity for his kind, which the way I understand it is human children, not clones, that were orphaned and came into this bounty hunter order.

Speaker 4:
[61:30] The armorer here is kind of his conscience, his guide, his morality core. She's the one who keeps leading him without telling him what to do, and she's the one who brings up, hey, foundlings are part of our heritage.

Speaker 5:
[61:44] Yeah, no, it's very clearly that he's got a soft spot for wounded children, and to sell out 50 years old every beginning, it would have helped if it looked like Pedro Pascal or something, but it looks like a cute little infant, a newborn, and who could sell that to a man that you know has imperial ties and is going to do something awful, had a doctor in the wing waiting to do some kind of experiment. When he uses heat vision to look through walls and sees they're going to extract something from him, that's it. He's going to be a good guy. He's made his choice.

Speaker 6:
[62:17] And this is very much in that man with no name, Clint Eastwood kind of fashion, where he's immoral but with a conscience and he eventually comes around, you know, like Han Solo.

Speaker 5:
[62:30] A child usually gets killed in a village or a woman or something like that. Yes, he sees an injustice that he can't look away from. And Leone usually teases a childhood trauma that might influence that decision to be sentimental. It's a characteristic of a badass, but we need that in order to fully embrace him, I think. If this guy were killing all the time and could walk away being okay with killing or having maybe Yoda killed, we wouldn't like him. So yeah, it's great fun to see him come in there, and they're only stormtroopers after all. We can't really see him kill kill. But yes, he takes all of these guys out. He even has something that got installed called whistling birds. We get to see that work.

Speaker 6:
[63:11] I couldn't believe he used them so soon. He gets them from the armor. She's like, here's the whistling birds. Use them sparingly. They're very rare. When I am in a video game and I pick up that super rare weapon, I'm holding on to that thing for the boss battle, not in the very next fight using the whistling bird.

Speaker 5:
[63:30] Well, then yes. I mean, come on, he's a kid on Christmas morning. Yes. Do that later. No, no, I'm going to use my new toy now. Absolutely. We're playing right now.

Speaker 4:
[63:41] This is to be his MO. Later on, he gets a jet pack and she's like, after much training, you can use it. He's like, yep, put that bad boy on. I'm flying.

Speaker 5:
[63:48] Yes, exactly. I'm fully trained and I'm going up right now. Yeah. His impulsivity is part of his character and it humanizes him. And yeah, it looks badass. It makes you realize Mando's tough, but he's not tough enough to defeat the whole town. I love that moment where they cut back to the bar and everyone gets the same beep, right? All of a sudden, they all get the red beeping alert and you know what they're going to go for and he's not going to get away.

Speaker 6:
[64:14] Yeah, they're going to go after John Wick. Is this with the end of John Wick 2?

Speaker 4:
[64:19] Yeah, pretty much. Bounty put on his head and all the other bounty hunters come after him, but that's what we're getting here. Another shootout in the middle of town and he's kind of pinned down and it's just him and baby Yoda until the underground Mandalorians come out and help save the day.

Speaker 6:
[64:36] And this is kind of where the budget of the series shows itself, right? We haven't talked about the volume yet and how more than half of this series was shot inside a single warehouse with a big curved LCD screen. But whenever we have flying effects of these guys with their jet packs, anytime the Mandalorian uses his flamethrower, especially here where he sputters out of ammo, the effects aren't the greatest.

Speaker 5:
[65:05] I think this show looks great. We have very few TV shows that can emulate this kind of action. Is it's movie theater $200 million an episode looking good? No, but I mean, I think it competes with anything you're going to see on any streaming service.

Speaker 4:
[65:21] I'm perfectly impressed by the special effects and by the action and the stunts. The only thing that my eye keeps getting drawn to is the sense of smallness. I keep getting a sense of the size of the set that we're on, that might be because of the volume or whatever, but it does feel smaller to me. But that's okay. We're dealing with a lone gunman and this foundling child. It doesn't need to be a sprawling epic thing every time.

Speaker 6:
[65:46] I feel like the volume is very noticeable in the desert scenes, less so in the forests and things. But when he's with Quill or later on when he gets to Tatooine, I feel like the volume was a hindrance and made things look cheaper. And you could just tell they were on a small set. Other times I didn't notice it as much. And I do know that in future seasons, they're going to rely on the volume even more than they did in this first season. The first season, they did go to a few LA locations to do some shooting. But I just felt like some of the CG effects weren't great. The scene had most of the problems.

Speaker 4:
[66:27] So Mando as he's escaping gets a shot off and hits Carl Weathers and might be somewhat surprising if they didn't just show us immediately that nope, hit him in the Beskar, he's fine. The old cigarette box in the pocket saved the bullet shot.

Speaker 6:
[66:41] I couldn't decide if Mando did that on purpose. He knew the Beskar was there because Klieg shoot it to him earlier.

Speaker 5:
[66:51] He did it absolutely on purpose. He did not try to kill him. Again, I wouldn't like that guy if he did that. He just wanted to get away. He knew that he was doing something that was against code. This guy was acting appropriately. But yes, he's not going to kill him for it. What's kind of charming about Mando is that he bends. When he gets in the ship and Grogu is sitting there, he'll eventually pop off a knob on the ship. At first, it's like, don't touch that, don't flip that switch, don't pull that knob. But at the end, he's unscrewing knobs and giving it to the kid and being like, play with it. That's the bonding that happens here. That's the humanizing that happens between these two in these middle episodes.

Speaker 4:
[67:32] And it's also the character arc that we're going to be following of the Mando throughout this entire series, as him kind of breaking away and learning there's more to life than this creed that he's been following since he was a child. And we're going to see that stacked up against the way he interacts with other Mandoes coming up forward here in the series. So I think if you're not enjoying the growth of him turning into a fully realized human man, then I don't know what's here for you to glom onto.

Speaker 6:
[67:57] No, I do like this character evolution. Again, I've seen it many times in Clint Eastwood movies. It's not original, but it's fun. I like seeing the pastiche in the Star Wars setting. I think that is one of my complaints with the Mandalorian is its lack of originality and how it feels like a mashup of so many things we have seen before either in previous Star Wars movies or other movies that are being overtly referenced.

Speaker 5:
[68:24] Star Wars is a pastiche. There's nothing original that Lucas did. It was all old serials in Japanese movies and what have you. This is just continuing that tradition and honoring what Star Wars had done before. Well, I would add, doing it very well. You didn't watch no Kurosawa when you were eight. You didn't know where this came from and that's okay. You don't have to, but I guess what I'm learning is, the less you know about Star Wars, maybe the better the series goes down because I'm all for it. When we get to episode four, it asks a very provocative, interesting question. Okay, so we're watching this killer who ends up having some kind of heart. Well, what keeps him doing this job? When will he take off the helmet? He's given a pretty good reason to stop being a warrior when he lands on this planet.

Speaker 6:
[69:14] And this is the episode directed by Bryce Dallas Howard. And it's definitely the A Fistful of Dollars episode where the townspeople need the gunslinger to help them fight off the attacker, the invader.

Speaker 5:
[69:30] I saw her name and it really did. I was like, what? Is this something she does? And apparently it is. She's done a couple of others. Of course, her dad is a very famous director and actor, but mostly director, and put her in a lot of those projects. So I'm sure that he showed her the ropes as well, but yeah, it's a confident directorial debut for Bryce.

Speaker 6:
[69:49] Not her debut. She's done some TV before this, and she'd done a couple of films before this. I think small indie stuff.

Speaker 5:
[69:56] Yes. So it comes from her. And again, her focus is a mother and a daughter. We see this fishing village. The opening shot is of them being raided and attacked and having to hide under a wicker basket in a pond in order to save their lives. When Mando comes rolling in, I think, Oh, of course, this is exactly the kind of samurai scenario we saw. I mean, I'll just go ahead and say it. This is a remake, right? This is seven samurai with, I mean, I guess they're short five samurai. He only finds one other one to bring along. Giancarlo of all people.

Speaker 6:
[70:29] Yeah, she has a troubled Star Wars history. She settled her lawsuit with Lucasfilm recently. But you know what? I like Giancarlo. I'm just going to say it. I liked her in The Fast and Furious. I liked her in Deadpool, the 2015 movie where she played Angel Dust. I like her here. I think she has some good charisma as a rebel shock trooper. I misunderstood at first. They called her a shock trooper, so I assumed that meant stormtrooper. But she was a rebel and she's from Alderaan, a peaceful planet. They have no weapons there. How does a shock trooper come from Alderaan? I like the dichotomy.

Speaker 5:
[71:07] Yeah, I don't know what went wrong with Gina. I guess you can fill me in. I assume she said something or did something and got canceled. But yeah, if you've ever seen the Soderbergh movie Haywire, she was the star. He actually made an action movie built around her. And while I would not call her a great actress, she had a lot of charisma in that part. And I think she works. She's refreshing. She plays well off Pedro here when they meet at this bar. And she's one of the bounties. He could haul her in, right? That's the tension.

Speaker 4:
[71:36] She's wanted for sure. I don't know if there's an active bounty out for her or whatnot, but the fact that they're both there is only going to draw attention and they decide this town isn't big enough for both of us and one of us is going to have to get out of here.

Speaker 5:
[71:48] And of course, cut to Grogu sipping the soup while they fight. Every time they do a Grogu eating something shot, I'm here for it.

Speaker 6:
[71:55] It's so strange because anytime we watch a movie and they cut to the dog, you hate it. But you just love this Grogu.

Speaker 5:
[72:03] I do. And I don't hate dogs. I just think that it's cheap manipulation.

Speaker 6:
[72:07] No, but you hate whorey filmmaking editing.

Speaker 5:
[72:10] Let me put it in perspective. I love pugs, but I have not seen Lilo and Stitch, nor do I ever want to in my whole life. Just because you can look like a pug and be cute, is it enough to keep me here? I'm not going to keep coming back week after week just to get a spit take from a little green muppet. Needs to be something more. What I will compliment this for doing is, they don't cut to this Grogu every time and go, look at Grogu, everyone go, oh, studio audience. It's sparingly. They use it just enough to remind you that this is a family project, that everyone can watch this. People that thought Mandalorians were badasses can enjoy this because it's a badass show. And their three-year-old, four-year-old can also watch it and find something adorable here.

Speaker 4:
[72:58] And I also like that it's kind of out of necessity, right? Because this is a practical puppet. We're not looking at a CGI creation. And so, Grogu himself doesn't have much mobility. They can't necessarily show him walking around all over the place. So, they have to sparingly show him and do more reaction stuff than action stuff with him.

Speaker 6:
[73:17] It is a CG augmented puppet. A lot of the facial stuff was tweaked in post. It was not pure puppet wizardry. But yes, a lot of it was practical puppetry, and I appreciate that.

Speaker 5:
[73:30] Okay, we all agree we like Grogu.

Speaker 6:
[73:32] I love Grogu.

Speaker 5:
[73:34] Okay, thank you. Thank you. I love to hear the word love, because I was feeling like it was coming through clenched teeth.

Speaker 6:
[73:40] No, there was a period where I could not buy enough Grogu stuff, and then I got kind of sick on Grogu, you know. It's kind of like tequila. There is such a thing as too much Grogu, but I love Grogu in moderation. How weird.

Speaker 5:
[73:55] You weren't watching The Mandalorian, but buying Grogu. Cute is cute.

Speaker 4:
[73:59] Yeah. Fair. But we're on this planet for something else, right? We're gonna see Mando kind of have a, I don't want to say crisis of conscience, but like maybe just a rethinking of his life. He sees these villagers leading a simple life. They farm blue shrimp, and that's all they need to survive. I think we see him kind of considering maybe settling down here with this single mother.

Speaker 5:
[74:23] Absolutely. Omar has got it going. And I think there's a part of him that would very much, because once you take off the helmet, that's the rule I hear. Once the helmet is off, well, you could never put it back on. You just can't. So if he were to have that moment, then he's fated. He'll stay here with these people forever. And she even asked him early on, when was the last time you've taken it off? And so it becomes this tension between them.

Speaker 6:
[74:49] It does make me wonder at first, like, how does he shower? But then it's clarified, he can't take it off in front of other people. I'm like, it must be hard to eat with that helmet.

Speaker 5:
[75:00] Mm-hmm. I was thinking about food, because he's always ordering for Grogu, but he doesn't eat himself in the restaurant. And so interesting that, yes, again, how isolated, how disciplined a warrior he has to be here. But when he and Kara go out into the forest to see what they're dealing with, it's not just raiders. They see ATS-T tracks and they think they can't win.

Speaker 6:
[75:23] I love also, again love, that this episode takes the stupidest imperial vehicle. It was basically a joke how teddy bears could destroy these in Return of the Jedi. It gives it like red glowing eyes and makes it really dangerous.

Speaker 4:
[75:43] Yeah, I'm loving what the creators, I mean, obviously, Favreau and Filoni grew up with the same toys in their toy box that we did. And throughout this series, they're going to throw in little things that we used to play with as kids. We've already seen like a E-Web Cannon that was a Kenner creation. And now we're seeing ATS-T that kind of got pimped out. It feels like stuff that they remember playing with. I'm enjoying seeing these things and it helps remind you, hey, we're in Star Wars.

Speaker 5:
[76:10] Yeah, I couldn't have told you where I saw this thing before. I probably would have called it an add-at.

Speaker 6:
[76:16] Oh, I'd have to come to Springfield to slap you for that one.

Speaker 4:
[76:19] It's a chicken walker.

Speaker 5:
[76:21] Yeah. Anyway, the point is that, yes, they think it's going to be hard to take down Raiders with an ATS-T, but in true Seven Samurai style, they're not doing it for the money, right? These people don't have money. They know that this is about something else. This is about protecting innocence and teaching people how to protect themselves. We have that whole montage of them, point the spear in the right way, and fire practice, and digging the moat so that when the ATS-T gets to the lake, it'll fall in and break. Seven Samurai is three hours long. Obviously, there's more room there to be a more intricate human story, but Bryce does the best she can with 35 minutes.

Speaker 6:
[77:03] It is fun to see the townspeople get involved in it, like was done in Seven Samurai, and Three Amigos, and so many others.

Speaker 4:
[77:12] What I'm hearing is that we've all seen it enough to know that this is shorthand for something bigger, and we don't need to see a half-hour training montage. We get what's going on. They're training these people to protect themselves, you know, not just this time, but for the future.

Speaker 5:
[77:26] Exactly. And they win very quickly. I think it's done in low level, right? You can't really see the villagers killing the raiders. We really just focus on the ATS-T falling over, and I think that's the wiser thing. Anytime they can focus on killing droids, that's a safe place to be for this family show. Killing people, we minimize that.

Speaker 6:
[77:45] And I really do like Cara Dune in this. I didn't expect to. I liked what she did with Angel Dust in Deadpool, but that didn't show a lot of acting range. But here, when she's jumping in that pond to lure the ATS-T into the pond where the trap is and using her big machine gun Gatling that she hauls at her side, I'm really enjoying the action with her in it.

Speaker 5:
[78:12] She enhances this duo. So far, it's just been Grogu and the Mandalorian. But yeah, you wish that she would come along at the end of this and be a threesome. But she, for whatever reason, decides to hang back. I guess she likes blue shrimp.

Speaker 6:
[78:28] She'll be around in a few more episodes this season and future seasons till she pissed off Disney. She was gonna get a spinoff show.

Speaker 5:
[78:35] Yeah, I felt that. I feel like there's a point in the show where they just pull her, and I didn't quite understand why.

Speaker 4:
[78:41] Well, not yet. Her off-screen antics wouldn't occur for another year or so from here. But yeah, I mean, this episode wraps up, and for a moment there we think that maybe Mando's gonna leave the child behind in this village, but that plan is quickly scrapped when they realize the bounty hunters are back looking for the child and have traced them there.

Speaker 5:
[79:00] Kara, that's her last job, is to take the guy out in the back, and there's no sense of believing that you're safe here. We have to keep moving. I guess when you have that perspective, what does the Mandalorian hope to do? Where does he hope to find that it can be safe?

Speaker 6:
[79:17] I think it's just on the run. He just needs to keep moving and find a desolate place to hide out and stay low. I think he thinks this will blow over. I don't think he thinks they're gonna hunt him forever.

Speaker 4:
[79:31] So as we move into the next episode, I think we get our first spaceship action here. We get to see the Razor Crest evading a fighter that's on his tail and good old traditional Star Wars graphics with the locking in on the ship and his ship gets damaged. The Razor Crest is down an engine.

Speaker 5:
[79:50] The point is that he's gotta stop at another planet and this is one we've been to before. I didn't recognize it at first, not until we get to the bar, but at first we land here and he meets a mechanic. And I read this wrong. I read Amy Poehler and I'm like, damn, they did an amazing makeup job on her. That looks nothing like her. No, Amy Sedaris, Strangers with Candy, okay.

Speaker 6:
[80:14] No, I like Amy Sedaris. I like her brother more, but Amy Sedaris, yeah, Strangers with Candy, Elf again. So there's the Favreau connection. It's fun to see her here, but man, Tatooine, really? Mos Eisley, really? Is he in Docking Bay 94?

Speaker 4:
[80:37] I know.

Speaker 6:
[80:39] Isn't Tatooine supposed to be like out of the way, nobody goes there?

Speaker 5:
[80:44] Isn't that where you would look if you were trying to hide out with a green child?

Speaker 4:
[80:48] I hear everything you're saying, Arnie, but guess what? We're not dealing with somebody who's one of the Skywalker Clan or anything. This is just a citizen of the galaxy and people go to Tatooine. It's not a desolate planet. So I see both sides of this. You're right. They might as well put them in Docking Bay 94 because they're going to hit everything else right on the nose. We're in Mos Eisley. We go to the Cantina. I think it's actually pit droids from episode one that are still hanging around. It's too much member berries here.

Speaker 6:
[81:18] Oh, way too much. And he goes to the Cantina that's being bartended by EV-99 from Return of the Jedi being voiced this time by Mark Hamill. But in the credits, it is EV-99. So that droid that tortured 3PO and R2 from Jabba's Palace. He wasn't on the sale barge when it blew up and he wandered into town to get a job at a bartender. And isn't it funny that the Cantina didn't used to allow droids and now there's our 5D 4.

Speaker 5:
[81:50] Or you could just have my experience and go, hey, I think this is the bar from the first movie. And I wasn't sure. That's how much I'm connecting with it.

Speaker 4:
[81:59] Just to be frank, it is bothering me a little bit. Like, because we're about to meet this character, Toro, who's not only in this Cantina, he's sitting exactly in the same spot Han Solo sat in, sitting the same way Han Solo sat. There's something to be said about a little bit of restraint. And I feel like in this episode, they just tore off that band-aid and went full on restraintless.

Speaker 5:
[82:19] I will point out that Filoni is both directing and writing this in its entirety. So if there's a fanboy quality, he's the fanboy, right? He's the one that would be the geekiest about all this stuff.

Speaker 6:
[82:32] And he admits that this was Jon Favreau saying, go watch the Sam Peckinpah TV series called The Westerner. There's an episode called Hand of the Gun. And it's about a young guy who wants to be a cowboy and is dishonorable and gets gunned down at the end. So just the way the last episode was Seven Samurai, this is a retelling of a 60-year-old TV episode.

Speaker 5:
[83:00] That reference I will not get. I haven't watched that show, nor will I. I didn't even realize the Han Solo connection, but now that you said it, that's what they were going for. Yes, I know I don't trust this kid. I know that when Mando walks in here and this kid says, this is my first job and I really need help tracking down this assassin, want you to be my friend, I kind of knew that he was the bad guy.

Speaker 4:
[83:21] He would eventually become the bad guy. I think he's an opportunist, but what's supposed to visually throw us off and give us some clues is that, if he's a bounty hunter, why is he so fresh? It looks like he just got out of Bounty Hunters R Us at the mall with his fresh new digs and is out on his first assignment.

Speaker 5:
[83:37] Inexperienced, but more to the point. I just felt like Bando was being lured into a trap, of course, right? In Star Wars, but yes, that he would do all the heavy lifting and that this kid would double cross him. It's what I guessed the episode would be.

Speaker 6:
[83:51] And I didn't. Honestly, I didn't realize this was going to be an isolated episode that doesn't push the narrative forward. But I thought last episode we got Cara Dune. Maybe this is the Mandalorian building his surrogate family. He started with Mando, Quill, Cara Dune. I thought this guy might be the Chachi to the Mando's fauns.

Speaker 5:
[84:15] Okay, I could see that, I guess. So he didn't seem to bring anything to the party. I mean, when he fights Cara, you know that she can hold her own. This guy does look like a user, a loser, someone that just doesn't bring much.

Speaker 4:
[84:29] But your instincts aren't too terribly off, Arnie. This episode is here to give us a new character to take along with us in the future. The assassin they're hunting is Fennec Shand and she will return.

Speaker 5:
[84:42] I don't even remember that. I don't remember this episode. This one, nothing came back to me about this and this character. I didn't know if I was supposed to know Fennec Shand or what this means. These are Tusken raiders, right? They trade Tusken raiders or some binoculars for passage, and pretty soon they corner her in a desert. And I guess the point is who's using who, right?

Speaker 6:
[85:04] Yeah, who knew Tusken's new sign language?

Speaker 4:
[85:07] And Mando's pretty well fluent in it, right? So he gains some passage across the Dune Sea, but we don't know who to trust here. They fight their way up to Fennec Shand, who was getting some pretty good shots on him from afar with her sniper rifle, and they get the drop on her, and eventually they get her on the ground, and they decide, well, we only have one speeder bike, so we're gonna have to go back and get this dew back that's a couple clicks down the desert. And Fennec kinda talks Toro into turning on the Mando here.

Speaker 6:
[85:35] Ming Na Wen, I have loved this actress since The Single Guy, a Jonathan Silverman NBC sitcom from the 90s. What I always forget about Ming Na Wen is she's a Disney princess. She was the original Mulan, and so she is deep in with Disney. Disney hires her all the time. She was in the Agents of SHIELD. TV series. Here she is entering the Star Wars universe, but she's in a lot of Disney and other live action things. She was the mom in the most recent Karate Kid movie, but she's still a badass. I just can't believe what a badass she is for her age. I was surprised that we only get one episode with her here, especially since I thought I knew that name. I thought they made a figure of her.

Speaker 4:
[86:33] Yeah, and she's going to be given more to do in the future, just not this season. It's a nice little Easter egg, I guess, for whether or not they knew they were getting more seasons, or if this Disney television experiment would keep going in the future. But it's cool to see her face, it's cool to see another bounty hunter, an able one, who's actually able to land a shot. So much of Star Wars is people getting shot at with blasters and being missed by a mile.

Speaker 5:
[86:58] The important thing that I heard here was she knows what went down. Mando's are so rare that if I see one, it must be the one that I heard about on Navarro. And that yes, once Mando doesn't want to leave them alone, but gets kind of talked into going back for the lizard, she uses that opportunity to wise up Toro. You're telling me you don't think Toro would have betrayed Mando if she hadn't put the bug in his ear?

Speaker 6:
[87:25] I don't think he's smart enough to know to betray Mando. I don't think he knows what Beskar is. I don't think he knows Poodoo from Shinola. It's only because she's dangling a carrot of bigger payday than he does anything.

Speaker 4:
[87:39] No, no, not the pay. See, he's very much so not about the money. It's the prestige of bringing in the Mando.

Speaker 5:
[87:45] Yeah, he wants to be a legend. That's what I hear. You know, all young people, they want to have the glory, right? And so, I don't know what he thinks he could get by shooting a mechanic and baby Yoda, but I'm real glad that he gets killed at the end of this. And tell me, so this is a setup. We do cut back to Fennec. And who is fighting her body? She's not dead?

Speaker 6:
[88:08] I looked it up. It's a spoiler.

Speaker 5:
[88:10] Let's...

Speaker 6:
[88:11] it will be picked up upon.

Speaker 5:
[88:13] I mean, I've seen it. You can't spoil it for me. I've seen all these episodes. I just don't remember. It's someone I know? Yes.

Speaker 6:
[88:20] And I don't know if you've seen it, because it might be in one of the spin-off shows you didn't watch, because it doesn't have Grogu.

Speaker 5:
[88:27] Yeah. I didn't watch no Book of Boba Fett. When you said, we've got to cover Book of Boba Fett in between Mando season two and three, I went, huh?

Speaker 6:
[88:34] Well, you missed some Grogu.

Speaker 5:
[88:37] I'm sure I did. I'll live. Well, no, because I'll see it. Anyway, let's move on. There's another episodic episode to cover.

Speaker 6:
[88:44] And this one, again, a whole bunch of guest stars, some of whom I care about, some of whom I don't. Bill Burr, funny stand-up comedian. I didn't know Boston accents were a thing in a galaxy far, far away, but I guess so. And Clancy Brown as a Devaronian. Devaronian, of course, was the devil alien in A New Hope. And Clancy Brown, I will never be sad to see in something.

Speaker 5:
[89:12] Yes, you are. We all saw The Bride. It was horrible.

Speaker 4:
[89:18] Oh, yeah. Bill Burr, another comedian who famously not only hates the prequels, he hates Star Wars. It's funny to see him here because he thinks everybody who's into Star Wars is just the biggest nerd in the world. And here he is taking a paycheck.

Speaker 5:
[89:35] Yeah, but I like this crew and I like what this episode does. It's a different kind of it. We've seen a lot of bounties being pursued and now it's a breakout. You know, that's another thing about Westerns. Somebody got thrown in jail and we got to get a posse together and break them out. Fun that we get this gang, some of which knows Mando. We'll see this Twi'lek is an old girlfriend. And so again, we're just learning these little bits about Mando. I'm realizing how much the show is about Mando. I want to point out the child has been barely in these last couple episodes. He won't play a big part in this. They are not overplaying their hand with his cuteness.

Speaker 6:
[90:10] No, in fact, I feel like they're underplaying their hand. How do you guys feel about these two episodes? Because personally, I find them to be entertaining time wasters. I could watch an episode of The Mandalorian or watch an episode of Cheers and get just about as much out of either when it comes to this.

Speaker 5:
[90:26] It's what I thought the show would be. I thought they would do this for five or six more years. I thought they had told us there'll always be on the run and they'll always be landing on planets and getting into an episode of The Week Adventure.

Speaker 4:
[90:38] Yeah, and it's what I point to when I hear other fans start talking about the declining quality of the Mando in the later seasons, acting like this wasn't what it was all along. It's always been episode of The Week type of adventures with a larger story underneath of it.

Speaker 5:
[90:54] Absolutely. Yeah, as far as I can remember, it's like that all throughout. And yeah, I like this crew. I think it's a fun thing. Yeah, they've got to go into a droid prison, of course, because we can shoot droids. We can't shoot human beings. Add this fully automated prison ship and break somebody out. The Twi'Lix brother.

Speaker 4:
[91:12] But we don't know that's the mission. We just know that we're extracting somebody. They definitely leave that information out for Mando because apparently they have a history together as well.

Speaker 5:
[91:21] They keep hitting episode after episode. I don't think there's one that they've missed it. That Mando doesn't like droids, right? When he sees these droids moving around and he gets a big action scene coming up behind the big horn guy, sets them off, and he's the one that takes them out. Anytime there's robots involved, he's triggered.

Speaker 6:
[91:38] And the one piloting the ship is the one who I think looks like 4LOM, which was the bounty hunter. I don't know if this is technically a LOM model of droid, but he's got the big bug eyes like 4LOM had and things. So I feel like they're reaching back to yet another bounty hunter from Empire Strikes Back here. I just feel like they shouldn't pander so much. There shouldn't be so much fan service.

Speaker 5:
[92:06] This is not pandering. I'm here to tell you, most people are not getting this. You guys see it. We don't.

Speaker 4:
[92:13] Keeping in mind, the aim is to bring in a larger audience of Star Wars. That means people who may have seen the movies way back in the day once or twice.

Speaker 5:
[92:22] Yes! I remember that little thing that went around. I don't know what movie it was. I recognize that as a callback. I feel I'm smart by seeing them.

Speaker 4:
[92:33] But this episode, I think, is probably the most intense out of all of them, right? There's quite a bit of sneaking around this prison ship, and alarms going off, and doors closing, and there's almost a horror movie vibe to it, right? Almost an alienish type of vibe going on here.

Speaker 6:
[92:49] I wish they would have leaned into that a little bit more, because it does feel like a ghost ship. We're eventually going to find there is one human on board, but to have a little bit more of a presence on this ship would have been nice.

Speaker 5:
[93:01] It's too goofy to be ominous, is what I would say. There's too much patter. There's too much attitude. The characters are too funny. Even when the Twi'lex throws the knife and kills the one human, I don't feel like this is a dangerous episode, maybe for little ones. But yes, there's one human being on here and she kills him, and he's hit the button. That means that there are a bunch of new Republic ships coming their way now and they've got to act fast. And this is the big betrayal. This is usually the case. When I think about breakouts, usually this happens. We're breaking one out of prison and then we're betraying one of the posse and leaving them behind to be caught.

Speaker 4:
[93:40] Yeah, you knew something was up. I don't know how surprising it was that they were going to turn on Mando.

Speaker 6:
[93:44] Not very surprising. I saw it coming a mile away. Bill Burr was seeming too chummy. You know what was reminding me of was Lando and Han. When Han thought Lando was going to be out for him, and then like buddy and hugging him and everything, and then it turned out Lando betrayed him. That's what I was getting off Bill Burr here.

Speaker 5:
[94:04] I got it more off Ran, the guy at the beginning who was also on Deadwood, a western show. He's like Mando, my old friend. I mean, like that was what he kept saying. It felt disingenuous. And to find out that he really only wanted the ship, didn't even really want Mando, kind of meant that yes, Mando was being set up, and Mando has hidden the child. He's put him in a closet, they found him and he's tried to downplay it like, oh, I just have a pet. But while they're running around in the ship, we do see that that droid is getting suspicious. He, I think, accesses some of the hologram messages of Karl Weathers. He's like, oh, this thing might be worth some money. Everyone's going to betray everyone. That's fun when you have a team of thieves get together. There is a lot of double crossing and betrayals. And yeah, Mando is not going to flinch. He uses his grappling hook to grab a droid arm, free himself, and give these guys what they deserve. We think he's killing them.

Speaker 6:
[95:00] I love that the droid bleeds oil. And I also love that Bill Burr is given crap by Clancy Brown, or maybe it's by the Twi'lek girl, but that he let the Mandalorian live. He thought, oh, wouldn't it be fun just to trap him in the cell? And he didn't last in that cell 20 minutes.

Speaker 4:
[95:21] One question, why is there a locking mechanism on the inside of the cell? That should be on the outside too.

Speaker 5:
[95:26] Bad design, yeah, I guess. I mean, maybe the droids get locked in. I don't know.

Speaker 6:
[95:31] There's a reason the Empire could take over the New Republic, right?

Speaker 4:
[95:34] Yeah, right.

Speaker 5:
[95:35] Yeah, yeah. We've already established these guys aren't together. They're not with it.

Speaker 4:
[95:40] But that's not my biggest problem with this episode. My biggest problem is, is a lot of times in these series, you got to believe your eyes, right? Earlier, the first episode, the first scene, we see Mando get through this bunch of bad guys at a cantina by dragging one guy through the door halfway, that door closes on him and cuts him in half. Here, I know Davorians are supposed to be tough and stuff, but this guy gets smashed from a door coming down and smashed from a door coming side to side. That guy is goo. There's no way he survived that. But we do see him at the end still alive somehow.

Speaker 5:
[96:11] Yeah, that felt patronizing. But again, you got to remind yourself that selling those baby Grogo toys and all was part of the aim, right? You can't splatter somebody in a kid show. And this has got to work in both ways. It's got to be a bounty hunter show and a kid show.

Speaker 4:
[96:26] Agreed. But they are killing humans. They do kill the one rebel pilot.

Speaker 6:
[96:30] But it's bad guys killing humans. It's a TV 14 show, but our hero doesn't kill people.

Speaker 5:
[96:37] Every now and then, he only kills bad people. But it's Star Wars. I don't come to Star Wars to see people get killed. That's not what it's about. I think it's just the right quotient of devilry and betrayal. It works. It keeps us on our toes. All these four people, I like the tables being turned and we'll see each of them try to take on Mando. And at the end, Quinn, the rescued prisoner, convinces him, you get no money if you don't take me back. And so he brings him back to Ran. But with that tracker, so that he's also bringing the New Republic X-Wings, piloted, I believe, by all the directors.

Speaker 6:
[97:13] Filoni is definitely one of them. And then Famo Yee-Wah is one of them. And Deborah Chow is third. Bryce Dallas Howard doesn't get an X-Wing. And Taika Waititi's already IG-88. He doesn't need two action figures.

Speaker 4:
[97:27] No, but they think that they've gotten rid of the Mando. They order them to be shot down and the public shows up and blows them up good.

Speaker 5:
[97:33] It is a shock when we cut at the very end and see that Mayfield and Berg and Jean are all in a cell. So yes, maybe that feels like a little bit of a sellout. But again, I didn't come to this for the blood. That's just not what Star Wars means to me.

Speaker 4:
[97:49] Also saving another character to put on the shelf for use in later seasons.

Speaker 5:
[97:53] Episode 7 is kind of the typical penultimate episode. It's setting up a whole lot without doing too much. Basically, Mando is going to be called back to Navarro and Carl Weathers is going to try to talk him into a plan that we can use Grogu as bait. You could kill that client and keep the baby. I'll clear your name and it'll all go just fine.

Speaker 6:
[98:16] Of course, you can't trust Carl Weathers in that at all. And fortunately, Mando isn't stupid enough to buy it. He goes and gets Carl Doon and Quill and some blurbs.

Speaker 5:
[98:26] And IG-11, much to his dismay, he won't eat the food, won't drink the tea. But that robot has been brought back to life. Nick Nolte, and this is sort of true to his character, right? He's all about healing. He talked about wanting peace, taking something that was built for war and turning it into, well, a slave. I mean, maybe that's a little backward. But again, a nice servant robot feels like some kind of progress.

Speaker 4:
[98:50] Yeah, nursing droid. He's there to nurse and protect. Even at that, Mando doesn't trust him.

Speaker 6:
[98:55] I did like that it's kind of like a perversion of to protect and serve, to nurse and protect. And Taika Waititi, I feel, does better as an ironic nursemaid droid than as an actual bounty hunter. I think his humor just lends himself towards being nurturing in that way. And yes, it's going to make Mando confront his hatred of droids.

Speaker 5:
[99:19] Yes. When we have the next episode called Redemption, this is exactly the redemption we're talking about. Droids will raise in esteem with this droid-hating Mandalorian. But right now, he's against it. They land and Grief is going to kill them if only some winged creature, you guys know what it is, hadn't come down and torn his arm.

Speaker 4:
[99:41] No, these are new to me. I thought maybe Minox or something, but they look like new Star Wars creatures. Just winged creatures that apparently they weren't too savvy to while camping out in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 6:
[99:51] It seemed very convenient that these creatures we never saw before or again just happened to come and wound Carl Weathers so the baby can heal him.

Speaker 5:
[99:59] Yeah, just pick out Carl, give him some poison, and that means that the child can show his worth, right? Everyone's heard about the Mudhorn incident, but now everyone has seen for their own eyes, he saves lives.

Speaker 4:
[100:12] Yeah, sort of healing, force healing.

Speaker 5:
[100:14] That means that Carl Weathers can't go through with it.

Speaker 6:
[100:17] I do like the betrayal of the betrayers. When Carl Weathers shoots the other two people he brought along to capture the Mando, and he betrays his allies to help Mando then, and it's because the child is something special, so he's going to turn on Werner Herzog.

Speaker 5:
[100:35] I'm sad that Herzog is going to be taken out of this series. I feel like he could have worked as the Big Bad. We're about to meet the Big Bad, but I do like this scene, this moment that he has, where he really asks, you know, what did the Mandalorians get by resisting the Empire? Don't we improve every culture that we touch? That he's able to defend the actions. And we thought at the end of Return of the Jedi, it was a happy ending, but maybe this universe isn't a real bad state. Maybe he's making a good point about the rebels not being capable governors and people that can keep the hope alive once quote unquote evil has been vanquished. It's a good moment. He gets called away and shot. That's the end of Werner Herzog and commercial TV projects, I'm sure, forever.

Speaker 6:
[101:20] I agree with you. He has such a fun bad guy energy. I could have seen him be the big bad, but he probably just doesn't have so many movie projects he needs to pay off, that he wants to do multiple years of this. So we're going to bring in scenery chewing, I'll do your franchise, Breaking Bad's Giancarlo Esposito or Maximum Overdrive's Giancarlo Esposito. That's what I had him sign at a con last year.

Speaker 4:
[101:46] Yeah, he's been in as much as Pedro Pascal has over the last six years or so. Both of them have blown up and to have them both in this series is kind of a treat.

Speaker 5:
[101:54] I had forgotten this. I had forgotten that he was the big bad rolling in here when the TIE fighter comes down and he comes out. We thought they were in trouble, they were surrounded by stormtroopers, but now they're really in trouble and I think it's good to escalate. This is what you want to do right before a climax is great real tension. And this is the real heartbreaker, he's killed Dick Nolte already. Two troopers have already sped off and shot the guy that was trying to get the kid to safety. And now poor Grogu is in the hands of the enemy.

Speaker 6:
[102:23] Yes, but not very competent enemies because as episode 8 starts, 8 directed by Taiga Waititi. And I take back what I said earlier about no episode has a director's style. This six minute elongated cut scene opening of Jason Sudeikis from Saturday Night Live.

Speaker 5:
[102:44] Okay, I was wondering who these chuckle heads are.

Speaker 6:
[102:47] And Adam Polly, who we reviewed in all those Sonic the Hedgehog movies. He was the main human in the Knuckles TV series.

Speaker 5:
[102:56] Oh dear. Okay. Yes. All right. Well, redemption for him too. I'm glad this is called redemption.

Speaker 6:
[103:03] So we get both of these guys just shooting the crap and not shooting their target. They literally can't hit a target from two feet away. This screams Taika Waititi post-Ragnarok. It's that kind of humor that felt really out of place in this episode.

Speaker 5:
[103:23] Well, we hadn't felt it yet, but I do think it's telling us something important. Like Moth Gideon came in last episode and we're like, Oh, new Darth Vader. And now we get this as a comic juxtaposition and it's like, yeah, well, we heard this guy just kills people randomly for interrupting him or whatever. And so again, do we go in or do we not? Do we just sit here and wait to be called? Do we bring him the baby Yoda at the right moment? You would just freeze, right? Because you feel like one tiny mistake. If we showed up at the wrong moment with this kid, that's it. Curtains for us. So they're just going to wait it out at this checkpoint. And because of that, IG-11 can spin in and save the day.

Speaker 4:
[104:01] To me, it's a little bit of world building. Like you said, Stuart, it's like it's giving us information about who this new guy in black is, right? Because all of his troops are shiny and new. And what we've known about the Empire is that it's just old dusty stormtroopers kind of rag tagging around just like these guys. But no, there's something bigger going on here. There's a more organized faction of stormtroopers and a general out there.

Speaker 6:
[104:24] And the outside of the compound where Gideon is with all those troops, they couldn't fit that on the volume. They actually went to like a train depot outdoors and called in some members of the 501st Cosplaying Group to add more troopers because they literally just didn't have enough suits of armor at Lucasfilm and had a really large scale location shoot for this one.

Speaker 5:
[104:50] Yeah, it felt like that, you know, small TV series. But yes, they had plenty of stormtroopers here, a lot of danger. You feel like our protagonists are surrounded. We've seen this flashback about five or six times now. I don't quite understand what we learn other than the child thought he was going to be killed by droids, but was saved by Mando's. And why does Moff know his name?

Speaker 4:
[105:13] It just goes to show that he's big enough to have this information, right? Like we're going to learn in later series that there's some history. But it's an intimidation tactic here, right? He knows who Cardoone is. He knows who Din Djarin is. First time we hear his name. And I think it's probably clarifying for some folks like you, Stuart, maybe like, oh, this isn't Boba Fett after all. This is a different guy. Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[105:35] God bless us all. Right. Yes. Even I knew by this point it wasn't Boba Fett. But is that Boba Fett rescuing him? Is Boba Fett in this episode at all?

Speaker 6:
[105:43] Not in this episode. No.

Speaker 5:
[105:45] All right. He is coming, though, as memory serves. At some point, he's here.

Speaker 6:
[105:49] There is a Book of Boba Fett TV series that crosses over with the Mando and I'm not saying anything more.

Speaker 5:
[105:55] Anyway, IG is the one that's truly going to save them. Yes, baby Yoda does do his handwavy magic. I do love the way Carl Weathers kind of refers to it. Like do your handwavy magic. But he does stop a stormtrooper with a flamethrower. But by and large, these rebels are screwed were the droid not able to spin in here and take them all out.

Speaker 4:
[106:17] Then cut the grate that they could use to escape into the tunnels.

Speaker 6:
[106:21] Yeah, because Cara Dune tried, Mando tried, nobody could cut it. But IG-88 has that droid welder tool the droids have and can cut through to the very safe Lava River. That's always a good escape route.

Speaker 5:
[106:37] Let's take the lava. But of course, the most important thing that he does, and this may be a little bit overstated, but again, I think for a younger audience, this probably has an impact. Maybe not Luke, I'm your father impact, but Mando taking off his helmet. We've all wanted to see Pascal. The others have gone into that grate. He thinks that this droid is going to kill him, or at least he thinks that he doesn't have a hope of healing. So why not just take me out? And that IG can just back to spray him and bring him back to life. Is him healing his droid hatred and his childhood trauma?

Speaker 4:
[107:09] Stuart, I have to say how proud I am of you, you getting back to. That's a big step in your Star Wars development.

Speaker 5:
[107:16] I made you proud. Good. Yeah, I wrote that down. When the back to tank appeared, I don't know what it was. I think it was Andor or whatever. I did write that word down.

Speaker 6:
[107:24] They go all the way back to Empire Strikes Back. When Luke got hit by the Wampa, he was in a back to tank. So that's what we're all member-burying back to.

Speaker 4:
[107:33] But before we hit the Lava River, we discover that there's no more Mandalorians in the tunnels where they once lived. There's a big pile of armor that's still laying around, and it seems abandoned until they do run into the armor who has stayed behind.

Speaker 5:
[107:47] Yeah, I thought that was interesting, right? Because we know what that means. There's a whole bunch of people that live by that code that in order to escape with their lives, they had to get rid of their own identity and their culture.

Speaker 6:
[107:58] Is that what it means? I thought they died.

Speaker 4:
[108:00] Yeah, many of them were wiped out.

Speaker 6:
[108:01] I thought the Empire went down there and just killed them all. And this is like the armor left by the dead. I don't think they took their helmets off. I thought they got killed.

Speaker 5:
[108:10] Well, what she said, the way I heard it was she said they removed their armor. So this was them slipping off in the middle of the night is the way I took it.

Speaker 6:
[108:18] What I heard was the Mando asked the armorer, did any survive? And she said some might have. And since he's asking if any survived and there's this pile of armor, I thought this pile of armor represented dead Mandoes.

Speaker 5:
[108:33] Then they would be there wearing them. Then you would be looking at corpses.

Speaker 4:
[108:37] No, no, she's there to clean up and recover what she can before moving on to find the survivors.

Speaker 5:
[108:43] Yeah, she'll melt it down and make it into something great for the foundlings. Some playset, right? Swings, slide.

Speaker 4:
[108:50] But this is where she kind of bestows upon Mando. You have a choice to make here. This child is now your ward. This is not just something that you're gonna tag along with. This child is now in your care.

Speaker 5:
[109:00] Season two, we lay it out for you. Go find the Jedi. He's got a home and you gotta find him.

Speaker 6:
[109:05] Although she also says, this is your foundling. You have to take care of him. And what I hear that as is that at some point, the child will have to choose, am I gonna be a Mando?

Speaker 5:
[109:18] Yeah, well, I mean, they get a signet of the only two. She's like, you're a clan of two now. It's only these two. I assume he'll get a suit of armor at some point. Maybe in the movie. I don't remember that happening in the show, but I'm gonna bet in the movie that Grogu gets his Boba Fett on.

Speaker 4:
[109:35] That's a pretty good bet. I feel like that's what a lot of this has been building up to. But yes, in this moment, yes, getting the signet is a big deal, right? Arnie brought it up earlier. The tattoo that we both have, I have the same one, has been something that has been there to symbolize Boba Fett and came to be a Mandalorian symbol. And to see the ceremony of why and how something like this is chosen, I felt was kind of cool. I felt like it adds to the lore of the Mandalorian culture here. He gets the Mudhorn.

Speaker 6:
[110:04] I'll agree with that. I like that he had thought he wasn't deserving of the signet of the Mudhorn because an enemy helped him. And this is also accepting Baby Yoda is not my enemy. Baby Yoda is my clan. And so we will both be of the Mudhorn. And now it's no longer dishonorable that Baby Yoda helped me slay the Mudhorn.

Speaker 5:
[110:26] And he gets his ride in Phoenix. For the last couple of episodes, he's been like, I want one of those whenever they jet pack in. And he'll get one of those as he's leaving. It's obviously just to make the Armorer a little bit more badass, but I do think it's really satisfying that they give her a fight scene where she just really shatters Stormtrooper helmets.

Speaker 4:
[110:47] Oh yeah.

Speaker 6:
[110:48] I think it's cool to show the Armorer was still a good warrior and not just a blacksmith, that she could kick some ass. Throwing one of them into the kiln, that's pretty harsh. And yeah, I thought she might be done away with or captured here, but no, she can stand her own against those troops.

Speaker 4:
[111:05] As the rest of our gang makes their way off to the Lava River, the only way out.

Speaker 5:
[111:11] Yeah, I don't buy this scene. I think you already had this scene, quite frankly. Mando taking his helmet off to have a droid heal him was enough. Having IG being like, I'm going to go blow myself up and Mando being like, no, I love you now. It's a bridge too far for me.

Speaker 4:
[111:27] Here's where I have a problem. If Gideon knows where they are and he's going to ambush them on the way out, really, is that the best military tactic? Is to have them all standing around looking at a guy who's about to blow up? Stagger your men a little bit. Have some standing back, just in case.

Speaker 6:
[111:43] You know, he has a tie fighter, a really cool tie fighter that can land, which we've never seen before. They have E-web cannons and all this other stuff. Couldn't he have put something there besides some of the worst shots in the galaxy?

Speaker 4:
[111:58] Yeah, this escape was a little too anticlimactic and over too quickly, but that's because we do have a little bit of a bigger scene we're building up to. It wasn't the Stormtroopers that we needed to be worried about. It was Gideon and his tie fighter.

Speaker 5:
[112:10] Yeah, you got to give him more than a speech. So far, he's just been someone that's talked tough outside the complex. And now, yes, he's going to be shooting at them and flying around in jet packs, right? Everything's better with a rocket pack. It's over pretty quick, but, you know, on a TV budget, it's more than you could ask for, really.

Speaker 6:
[112:29] It's really funny to me to see Giancarlo Esposito in that cockpit doing maniacal laughing faces. I think of him mostly as Freeze from Breaking Bad where he was so stoic. And to see him go this big is weird to me.

Speaker 4:
[112:49] He only gets bigger, Arnie, so buckle up.

Speaker 5:
[112:51] He's got a black lightsaber. We'll see that as sort of the stinger. No one goes to look in the rubble except for the Jawas, and he cuts himself out. Of course, he's not dead, just because Mando planted a bomb on him.

Speaker 6:
[113:02] I'm gonna have to go back. I remember the dark sabers showed up in Clone Wars. I don't remember a whole lot about the dark saber. I know I had the toy.

Speaker 4:
[113:10] Yeah, this is Dave Filoni laying down pretty much a major Easter egg and a hint as to what's to come, right? Like, we're gonna learn quite a bit about the history of the dark saber and why it matters.

Speaker 5:
[113:21] Anyway, yes, it's goodbye for now, right? Mando and Child are heading out, and they'll be seeing all of these people again. But we'll take another year before we get Season 2.

Speaker 6:
[113:31] But are you jazzed for it? Justin Stewart, do you recommend Season 1 of The Mandalorian? Justin.

Speaker 4:
[113:41] I set up top that I watched this live as it was coming out, and I really enjoyed it week to week. It was fun to speculate what was coming next, like what they were teasing at the end of certain episodes. We see mysterious figures pop in. We see mysterious objects pop in. And week to week, it was a very fun experience. And coming back and rewatching it again, I still very much enjoy it. I still think the directing is great, the writing is very good, and they do so much with a TV style budget. But I do have to say that it loses a little bit of rewatchability when you know the bigger story. Some of these smaller stories feel even smaller. I don't know that I find as much joy in watching them train up a village of shrimp farmers for the third or fourth time. I feel like some of these are watch once and move on with your life. But I'm not here to judge it based on rewatchability. I have to judge it with fresh eyes. And so on that stance, I think they're doing a very good job telling us fresh stuff. Even if they do go a little too far into the, hey, look at that, remember this type of stuff. Small doses of that can go a long way. And I think they need to dial it back moving forward into some of the later seasons. I think they found their audience. They found their golden goat and baby Yoda. I don't know that they need to keep pointing at things and saying, hey, you guys remember this? I think you've got your crowd now. So they can dial that back. But it does feel more TV-ish than what I remember. But that's okay. We just got through Andor, which I felt like was such an epic. And this is kind of a tonal shift coming off of that. And it's kind of backwards with the way I originally took it in. When I first watched Mando, this was the first thing. And Andor was yet on the horizon. So, watching these out of order like this is a little confusing to my Star Wars brain. But I have to say, overall, I still enjoy it. And what I like the most about it is that we're in a period where, for the most part, this story has not been written. We're dealing with characters that don't have a backstory. They don't have places to be in the future, like so much Star Wars tells us. With Andor, my problem was, is they can only do so much. I know how Andor dies in the movie that comes after this show. With the Mando and Grogu, the future is wide open. Either one of them could die at any time and we wouldn't know. So with that in mind, this is a very large recommend for me. I think this first season is very good television and I can't wait to talk about season two.

Speaker 5:
[116:10] Stuart, you know, last time I got some pushback for using the word transcend in describing Andor, but I stand by that word. Andor was a show that went beyond what you expect Star Wars to do in terms of story sophistication and emotional complexity. Mandalorian by contrast embraces, I think, all that makes Star Wars, Star Wars. It is so Star Wars and all the better for it. The way that it marries new technology with old-fashioned storytelling, the spaghetti western. I was thinking specifically, I don't know if you guys ever saw the movie series and a comic book series, Lone Wolf and Cub. I was about a Yakuza man and a child walking around feudal Japan trying to find their way. They take all these references here and they make me love stuff that I didn't watch and of course Star Wars again. And the appeal goes well beyond Grogu. I want to say I came to this thinking it would just be a bunch of cute spit takes. And yes, that puppet is absolutely delightful. I don't know how anyone could want to see it committed to death other than Werner Herzog. He's the only man that I believe that would want to kill baby Yoda. But he is not in the show. I wouldn't have stayed with the show week after week if it was about cuteness. Credit really belongs to Pedro Pascal, who has to do some heavy lifting under that Beskar steel. It's hard to act when no one can see your face, when it's all about your voice and your posture and your stunt double. It's really hard to fall in love with a character. But I really do. I really connect with this man who has learned to live with the code and realizes that even though he's a bounty hunter, not necessarily the most charming or easily relatable profession, he kills for money. But like all of us, he can't deny that when he sees a kid in trouble, he's willing to do anything for it. And so I think it works for both audiences. If you like badasses, you're going to love the Mandalorian. If you love cute kitty things, you're going to love the Mandalorian. My review is the same for Andor as it is for Mandalorian. This is the best Star Wars has been since 1983.

Speaker 6:
[118:16] I understand better now why I stopped watching it in 2019. It is a little bit more episodic than I would like. I like to think of Star Wars as an epic and this feels small. I feel some of the sets seem small because of the volume and it's revolutionary, but also limiting in scope in certain ways. I feel that outside of the child, the story seems small and the child is certainly not much more in this series season one than a MacGuffin. I know we're going to find out more, but right now it's just everybody wants the child. It just happened to be a living, breathing, force healing MacGuffin that was very cute and sold a million toys. But I do think the acting here is better than it needed to be. Pedro Pascal does so well with just the voice and not even being able to show us his face except for a few seconds. But across the board, I really think Carl Weathers did a great job. I wasn't expecting that of a man who I haven't seen do serious work in a long time, but he plays a lot of different flavors of his grief carga in great ways. Werner Herzog is just incredible. Giancarlo Esposito is a lot of fun. Gina Carano was a discovery that I really enjoyed. And then some of the smaller character actors, Clancy Brown, Bill Burr, everybody just did good in this series. I really enjoyed the performances.

Speaker 5:
[119:55] I do think there's a lot of relying on original trilogy. And I think about when this was made right after Backlash over The Last Jedi. They were still reeling from that. And then Solo and Rise of Skywalker would be coming out during production of this. I feel like there was a mission statement. Get people back to the original trilogy. Because the sequel trilogy has proven too divisive. And so that's why I think I feel like I'm getting the armorers hammer in my face sometimes with callbacks to the original three movies. But overall, at the moment, I like the series. I'm recommending season one, but it feels very inessential to me. It feels like some of those EU novels I read and enjoyed. If you want more Star Wars, this is more Star Wars. But it doesn't feel like anything hinges off this yet. Now, I know next season is going to be the hunt for the Jedi. I know that the universe is going to get vaster for the Mandalorian in future seasons. I hope that this is merely setting up the characters that can do more important stuff later on. But yeah, recommend.

Speaker 1:
[121:11] I'm glad. What Star Wars fan wouldn't enjoy this? That's really what I kept asking myself. How does it not please all quadrants? Maybe it's not your favorite. Maybe you don't geek out the way that I am. But I do think that everyone, small child, grandmother, I watched it with my mom, 83 years old. She liked it.

Speaker 2:
[121:29] Yeah, I mean, and I think that... That's part of the mission statement, like Arnie was saying, more OT, but I think even bigger, let's reach a bigger audience.

Speaker 1:
[121:37] They do that, it has that reach again. I think that Star Wars, what I heard Arnie say that he was bumping against in Andor was, there should always be an outreach to that inner child, and this one made me feel young again. Watching it made me feel like I was back in third grade.

Speaker 5:
[121:53] It definitely has that original Star Wars flavor I felt Andor lacked, but Andor is still my favorite Star Wars TV series that we've covered so far, and I doubt if it's going to be superseded by Ahsoka.

Speaker 1:
[122:07] Well, when we get there, I'm not saying that this is preferential, I'm just saying that if your concern was that Andor was too adult, problem solved, and we'll see. I think it does take on a more Andor complexity. I remember how it ends. There's a lot about Season 2 I don't remember. Again, I was there mostly for Grogu eating porridge, but I do remember how it ends, and I'll be curious to watch it with a more critical eye this time.

Speaker 5:
[122:31] I know nothing. I haven't seen a frame. All right, I do know something. I know how Season 2 ends because that was spoiled all over the internet. And wasn't Season 2 the one that had Blue Jeans Guy in it as the cameo?

Speaker 1:
[122:43] Who's Blue Jeans Guy?

Speaker 2:
[122:45] A crew member was visible in the original viewing of the show. Guy in blue jeans and Star Wars holding a boom mic.

Speaker 1:
[122:55] Anyway, I love this. If Star Wars is not your thing, why don't you join us Friday for a real head twist. I spit on your grave the 1978 sexploitation rape fantasy horror flick.

Speaker 5:
[123:11] Yeah. Baby Yoda? Or I spit on your grave.

Speaker 1:
[123:15] Yeah. I mean, it's a real... Yeah. I mean, I don't know how you do both in the same week, but we're going to try.

Speaker 5:
[123:22] You're the one who scheduled it.

Speaker 1:
[123:24] I know. It wasn't like I plotted it. It was like, you know what combo would be great? Boat Motors and Baby Yoda.

Speaker 5:
[123:36] Yes, we are starting a two-fer for patrons. For our April patrons this Friday, the 1978 exploitation film, I Spit on Your Grave, that next week, May, instead of May the 4th be with you, May more spitting on graves be with you.

Speaker 1:
[123:58] God help you is really the sentiment I have.

Speaker 5:
[124:02] Because we will be reviewing the 2010 remake of I Spit on Your Grave. There's a lot to be discussed. We will also briefly discuss each film's various sequels and requels and spinoffs.

Speaker 1:
[124:18] Oh my God, I felt so dirty after doing that series. Without exaggeration, it's an intense one, guys. It may not be for you. Definitely read up on this and see if you're prepared. But if you are, then yeah, we're there for it. I think it's a really good conversation.

Speaker 5:
[124:32] And if it's not for you and you'd prefer something more in line with baby Yoda, like Inside Out 1 and 2, all of these shows are available for patrons of $10 a month. You get 120 bonus review podcasts by being a $10 a month patron. So you can get Beetlejuice, Inside Out, Apocalypse Now, I Spit On Your Grave, Enter The Dragon. There's going to be something there that interests you at the $10 a month level. If you want to support our show and let us keep doing the show we do for free every single Tuesday, become a patron on Apple Podcasts, Patreon, or Podbean. For $10 a month, you're getting, yes, 120 bonus reviews and a new one added each month. And hey, who knows what the hell it's going to be if we're doing I Spit On Your Grave with Star Wars.

Speaker 1:
[125:31] Yeah, a couple months ago, we were doing Estonian art films with The Fencer. It's a wide reaching net, films I never expected to talk about.

Speaker 5:
[125:39] So you can find all the details at nowplayingpodcast.com/donate. And if you can't support us financially, we always appreciate a five-star review and some written remarks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, your podcast host of choice. It really does help spread the word about our show. This is the way everybody's saying it. I got to say it too, right?

Speaker 1:
[126:06] Okay. You know, can't beat them. Join them.

Speaker 5:
[126:09] So Justin Stewart, thank you for joining me. We'll be back Tuesday with Season 2 of Mando, because the podcast will be with you always.

Speaker 4:
[126:32] That was impressive, Mando. Very impressive. It looks like your guild rates have just gone up.

Speaker 3:
[126:39] Thank you for listening to this Now Playing Podcast review.

Speaker 4:
[126:42] It's over. Let's get the hell out of here.

Speaker 3:
[126:45] We hope you enjoyed the show. That's the understatement of the millennium. Help us spread the word about this show by leaving a five-star review on Podbean, iTunes, or your podcast store of choice. I will help you. Want more reviews like this one? In the archives section of nowplayingpodcast.com, you'll find more than 1,000 in-depth movie reviews from our panel of hosts.

Speaker 4:
[127:07] Man, we did some crazy stuff, didn't we? That was a long time ago.

Speaker 3:
[127:13] On our site, you can hear reviews for every installment in the world's biggest film franchises including the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man, Batman, X-Men, James Bond, Middle Earth, Jurassic Park, Fast and Furious, and Transformers.

Speaker 1:
[127:29] Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go.

Speaker 3:
[127:32] Plus, we have individual movie reviews such as Titanic, ET., Inception, Big Hero 6, Ready Player One, Pulp Fiction, Apocalypse Now, Doctor Strangelove, and hundreds more.

Speaker 4:
[127:45] And you?

Speaker 1:
[127:47] You're welcome back here anytime.

Speaker 3:
[127:49] And come back to nowplayingpodcast.com next Tuesday for another all-new Movie Review Podcast.

Speaker 4:
[127:56] Next job, take some time off. Enjoy yourself.

Speaker 3:
[128:01] Now Playing is an independent podcast, 100 percent crowdfunded thanks to listeners like you.

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[128:07] Thanks for the tip.

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[128:09] Become a Now Playing patron and you can get access to dozens of exclusive bonus podcasts.

Speaker 2:
[128:15] I'm gonna need one more thing.

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[128:16] Give me those credits. For a $10 monthly pledge, you can hear our host review Apocalypse Now, Real Genius, Taxi Driver, Con Air and dozens more.

Speaker 4:
[128:26] They won't even cover fuel these days.

Speaker 3:
[128:28] You can subscribe to get these bonus podcasts through Apple Podcasts, Podbean and Patreon.

Speaker 2:
[128:34] You take my credits. Buy yourself a drink.

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Speaker 4:
[128:57] If you would consider one last commission, I will very much make it worth your while.

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Speaker 4:
[129:11] Thank you.

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Speaker 3:
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Speaker 4:
[129:33] I received your transmission. Wonderful news.

Speaker 3:
[129:37] You can also compare notes with us on Letterboxd. Go to letterboxd.com/nowplaying.

Speaker 4:
[129:43] You know where to find me.

Speaker 3:
[129:45] And follow Now Playing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and our YouTube channel.

Speaker 4:
[129:50] I await your arrival with optimism.

Speaker 3:
[129:53] Now Playing Podcast is produced by Arnie Carvalho.

Speaker 1:
[129:57] Looks like I'm calling the shots now. I'm partner.

Speaker 3:
[130:00] Associate produced by Jason Latham. Your reputation was not unwarranted. Executive produced by Hunter Gibson, Jeff Gannon, Tony Lanzalotta, Garrett Collins, Brent, Morgan Beck, Tom Ward, Julian Lewis, and Andrew Doren.

Speaker 4:
[130:17] It means more to me than you will ever know.

Speaker 3:
[130:23] Now Playing is edited by Santiago and Arnie.

Speaker 4:
[130:26] Make sure you clean up your mess.

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[130:28] Credits read by Brock. I have spoken. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the individual hosts and may not reflect the views of Venganza Media Inc.

Speaker 4:
[130:39] If you're asking if you can trust me, you cannot.

Speaker 3:
[130:43] Venganza Media Inc. is not affiliated with and this podcast has not been prepared, approved, or licensed by any entity that created the film analyzed herein.

Speaker 2:
[130:53] I don't like this.

Speaker 3:
[130:54] You always were paranoid. All movie clips and music included in this podcast are the intellectual property of their respective copyright holders. They are included here for the purpose of review and no infringement is intended. I get that point.

Speaker 2:
[131:09] Do you get the point?

Speaker 4:
[131:09] Yes, I get the point.

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[131:12] Now Playing Podcast is an exclusive trademark of and may not be used without the express written permission of Venganza Media Inc.

Speaker 4:
[131:20] Hey, let's make the baby do the magic hand thing. Come on, baby. Do the magic hand thing.

Speaker 3:
[131:26] Now Playing is a Venganza Media Production copyright 2026 and no part of this show may be reproduced, repurposed or redistributed without the written permission of Venganza Media Inc. All rights reserved.

Speaker 4:
[131:38] This is the way. This is the way. This is the way.

Speaker 5:
[131:52] Brian Possein was on a nerd stand-up comic tour and show. I remember seeing Brian Possein live. This is actually a Star Wars-related story. I had just started the Star Wars Action News book club, and I was reading a New Hope novel, and I had four different highlighter colors, so I could highlight different parts of the novel different ways. And Brian Possein was doing stand-up, so we went to Chicago to see him, and he was like, so you guys go to the clubs much? And nobody applauded. He's like, what, are you all a bunch of nerds reading novels with highlighters? I had to laugh really hard because that's what I'd been doing before the stand-up show that night was reading a Star Wars book with a highlighter.

Speaker 1:
[132:36] He knew his audience.

Speaker 2:
[132:39] I've been a fan of Jon Favreau for a long time. He was in PCU, which was one of my favorite just stupid put-it-on movies.

Speaker 1:
[132:46] Oh, God. You and Arnie just need to do that show. Just do that f***ing show.

Speaker 5:
[132:50] You know, I met Jon Favreau at the Siskel Center in Chicago and mentioned how much I love Gutter in PCU. And he's like, people just keep talking to me about Gutter. This was before Iron Man had come out, but after Zathura. Right.