Mandalorian running thread

Filoni deserves a ton of credit.

I really wonder what him and Jon Favs could have pulled off if they had been the ones driving the bus on the sequels.

I suspect the sequels, which I thought were fine, would have become iconic.

There’s a “joke” floating around that the one thing Star Wars fans hate is seeing Star Wars characters in Star Wars. That’s been true for the movies, it seems, but not the shows.

It largely seems it is because Filoni and Favs put the work in. I also wonder how much hand they’ll have in the other shows. I’m guessing Filoni will be the one most heavily involved but that’s just a guess.

 

After some further thought and discussion with friends, I wanted to expand on something I said earlier.

Spoiler: The Rescue, Moff Gideon's bogeyman

Luke Skywalker is absolutely a bogeyman for surviving Imps. In fact, he might be THE Bogeyman. The clunk in their closets, the random squeak of a stair settling, the bump-bump-bump of water moving through pipes in the walls … for some of them, even if just for a moment, they think Skywalker's arrived to get them.

Think about who Luke Skywalker is and what he's done. The orphan farm boy nobody (so far as they know) from the back side of beyond on a nothing planet in the galactic equivalent of the back side of beyond. Just in the first trilogy:

• He found Rebel droids that had the Death Star plans, dug up an Order-66-shoot-on-sight ghost, escaped with the ghost from the Imperial stormtrooper squad that had killed his adoptive parents when sent to recover the droids, walked into the first Death Star without being noticed, walked out of that first Death Star with nary a hair out of place and having freed a Sith Lord's VIP (very important prisoner), came back to the first Death Star in an X-wing (having never flown one before) and destroyed the Death Star by himself without even using his snub fighter's targeting computer to take the shot and after holding off the attack on him led by that same Sith Lord, a standout fighter pilot himself.
• He impeded the Imps' last best shot at ending the rebellion by figuring out how to trip their armored transports on Hoth.
• He disappeared for a month, then when he re-appeared at Cloud City over Bespin he not only escaped a neat trap set for him by that Sith Lord, he escaped from a lightsaber duel with the Sith Lord and only lost a hand.
• He reappears back on that backwater planet, frees his friend who had been captured by (again) that Sith Lord, takes down the criminal mastermind of the Outer Rim's Hutt-controlled space region, hands himself over to that Sith Lord, is taken in shackles into the emperor's throne room for a confrontation with the Sith Lord and his master, the emperor … and somehow, the orphan farm boy not only escapes with his life, he's the only person to exit the throne room and both of those Sith Lords die. And again a Death Star was destroyed.

And that’s just the movies.

Luke Skywalker is responsible for the death of everything those old Imps were working toward, from a certain point of view (heh). Now he shows up again, mows through Imperial Dark Trooper war droids that individually are each as effective as a squad of stormtroopers, and singlehandedly ruins what Moff Gideon has been working toward.

(Again.)

Two things.

First, Gideon was terrified. And rightly so, from his point of view.

Here he is, just moments before the X-wing arrives. He thinks he has won.



And then Skywalker shows up. How does he react?



He’s terrified. The great Moff Gideon is shitting his black Imperial armor.

Second, he was terrified before anyone knew that the pilot of that X-wing was Luke Skywalker. How did he know so quickly? Deductive reasoning? Or something else?

I postulate that Gideon is Force-sensitive, probably a former member of Palpatine's Inquisitorius (explains the armor) and possibly a full-blown Inquisitor. He was pretty good with the Darksaber … maybe a former Jedi himself, turned to the dark side by torture at the hands of the Inquisitorius? That was an established plot point in Rebels.

Something to ponder as we wait, anyway.

I also have thoughts about Bo-katan and what comes next, but that will be later.

 

Rogue 1 is up there, but Got Ham was that great!

Spoiler: The Rescue/Grand Moff

I think Gideon is Sith Apprentice. He's aware of too much to not be force sensitive. He sees the X-Wing and senses Luke right away or at the very least—as a big-wig in the Empire—recognizes the X-Wing. I'm guessing the former.

I should have known from the moment the X-Wing it was Luke. I had to wait to see his gloved hand to realize who it was. I knew the guy in the X Wing was Jedi, but I talked myself out of a Luke appearance earlier because I didn't think they would cross over like that.

Mrs. Highlander-Spartan asked given what we know about the fall of Luke's Jedi temple with Kylo betraying him, does this mean Grogu dies? I told her there is some time yet because Kylo has to grow up, but now I'm wondering about the timeline. Where are we relative to the rise of the Knights of Ren? Or like others have suggested, is Grogu going to be Snoke?

Either way, what an ending.

 

The spoilers really are everywhere. A close friend of mine is more of a Star Wars fanatic than I will ever be, but she doesn't have Disney+ yet. She and her husband are getting it for their teenage daughter as one of her Christmas presents, so the thinking was they would hold off until school was on winter break. I told her today that avoiding social media isn't going to be enough. She's just going to have to avoid turning on a computer.

Another friend from college spoiled it on Facebook. I did not give her the public shaming she deserves for fear of more people seeing the offending post if I was to comment on it.

 

I waited until it was all out because I have gotten used to freaking binging things, and while I didn't quite get to the end by Friday I came close and finished it yesterday without finding out any spoiler of significance. Not sure I would have made it much longer, though.

That said, I had this same thought and I'd expand the last 45 minutes to the whole second half of the season and especially the last two episodes. I think it was the best thing Star Wars since the original trilogy but I, too, have to put Rogue One in there for consideration of being really close. In a way they both used a similar formula, although the Mandalorian season ends much more upbeat, in they took a separate story from the Skywalker saga and merged it with the existing universe fairly flawlessly.

If they keep trying to do stuff like that they will eventually strike out, but it was a great ride for sure.

 

As Tom Hanks once said... you never kill the dog.

We can talk more tomorrow morning.

 

See what I said previously about Gideon. Palps didn’t want more than one apprentice at a time.

 

If this is post Jedi, isn't Vader dead? Did we establish a new apprentice? Episode VII establishes at some point here Kylo goes over and we learn who the true puppet master is, but that still leaves the gap here.

And I say all of that realizing when I first wrote what I wrote, I didn't fully process what you wrote ... so there's that ... which is something ... I think ... Look I've got I've been stuck in my house too long brain.

 

re: The timeline, I believe we're currently about five years after Jedi. So, Ben Solo is somewhere in the not born to 5-years-old age range right now, and the scene where Luke has a crisis of conscience in The Last Jedi seems to take place when Ben is 18ish to me. A dozen years is plenty of time for a bunch to happen in the SW universe, so:

Spoiler

I kind of think that the next time we see Grogu, he might be bailing Mando out of some shit. We pretty much only saw Yoda when he was at the end of his life in the original trilogy - It would be interesting to see a full-powered whatever-species-that-is. Whenever the next set of movies comes out, it's not that hard to imagine they're centered around some combination of Grogu, Ahsako (no clue how long her species lives), Rey, Finn and maybe Mando. Even if they don't want to go in that direction, it's easier to build a TV series around a puppet than human actors. (The open question with all of these people is, "Hey, where were they during the most recent movies?", but the universe is a pretty big place and at least with HEY MANDO, I've gotten the impression we're mostly dealing with the outer fringe.)

 

I don’t think it would make sense to see Grogu at full power. Remember, with Yoda’s 900-year lifespan as a baseline, Grogu is basically a 4-year-old. Five years from now, he’ll be like 4.5.

 

Ok, enough with the spoiler crap. If you have not watched it yet, stop looking at this thread.

 

There is a not-so-subtle message being pushed in the Star Wars franchise that war is bad. A lot of people die when the Resistance and Empire square off. I could see the next few seasons of the Mandolorian working in the current time frame, but then jumping in time to an older Grogu and an ancestor of Mando wearing the armor in a timeframe that is post-Rise of Skywalker fighting dark side creations.