Legends of the Mandalorian
Jun. 16th, 2021 11:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofelevenSo I finally caught up on The Mandalorian, and I can't really give an honest review – since so much of it felt like a homage to the Star Wars I grew up with, and by that, I of course mean the 1990s Bantam novels.
There's not a lot here that wouldn't have felt out of place in that continuity; hell, even the timeline works pretty well – it's five years after Endor, so Fett's getting his armor back just in time for him to make his public return in Dark Empire in a few months time, and Luke's just starting to think about rebuilding the Jedi Academy. It's delightful to see what could easily pass for that era portrayed on screen, and so I can overlook any quibbles I have with the execution.
And I do have quibbles; what I found fascinating was how much the new continuity seems to be consciously borrowing from the Legends era – both the good and the bad. You'd think having a clean slate would provide an opportunity to look back at the flaws of the past and avoid them this time around, but nope. Let's bring back Fett once again as an unkillable badass, and ignore how little that matches the character actually on-screen. Let's set up a new generation of interesting heroes, only to have them overshadowed by the OT characters again! Hell, even the... dubious nature of the CGI used to recreate Luke felt like an unintentional homage to the increasingly poor and uncanny depictions of the original actors that tended to dominate the covers of the Bantam novels.
And what really struck me is that they seem to have bafflingly borrowed Bantam-era continuity's habit of undercutting their own stories by bouncing back and forth through the timeline, so setup would come out years after a story was already concluded. The Empire's back, and once again a force to be reckoned with? Yeah, we already know that, we saw the sequel trilogy. They're doing evil experiments with midiclorians? This feels less like a storyline that the Mandalorian will resolve on its own, and more foreshadowing of Snoke or Clone-Palpatine or whatever the hell was going on in Rise of Skywalker. It reminded me of nothing so much as the Wraith Squadron novels trying to set up an epic showdown between Warlord Zsinj and the New Republic, years after the underwhelming conclusion of that story had already been published in Courtship of Princess Leia.
It feels very much like the writers and producers of this show grew up with the same era of Star Wars that I did, and have a very specific, idiosyncratic image of what makes a Star Wars story – including aspects that perhaps should have been left behind.
There's not a lot here that wouldn't have felt out of place in that continuity; hell, even the timeline works pretty well – it's five years after Endor, so Fett's getting his armor back just in time for him to make his public return in Dark Empire in a few months time, and Luke's just starting to think about rebuilding the Jedi Academy. It's delightful to see what could easily pass for that era portrayed on screen, and so I can overlook any quibbles I have with the execution.
And I do have quibbles; what I found fascinating was how much the new continuity seems to be consciously borrowing from the Legends era – both the good and the bad. You'd think having a clean slate would provide an opportunity to look back at the flaws of the past and avoid them this time around, but nope. Let's bring back Fett once again as an unkillable badass, and ignore how little that matches the character actually on-screen. Let's set up a new generation of interesting heroes, only to have them overshadowed by the OT characters again! Hell, even the... dubious nature of the CGI used to recreate Luke felt like an unintentional homage to the increasingly poor and uncanny depictions of the original actors that tended to dominate the covers of the Bantam novels.
And what really struck me is that they seem to have bafflingly borrowed Bantam-era continuity's habit of undercutting their own stories by bouncing back and forth through the timeline, so setup would come out years after a story was already concluded. The Empire's back, and once again a force to be reckoned with? Yeah, we already know that, we saw the sequel trilogy. They're doing evil experiments with midiclorians? This feels less like a storyline that the Mandalorian will resolve on its own, and more foreshadowing of Snoke or Clone-Palpatine or whatever the hell was going on in Rise of Skywalker. It reminded me of nothing so much as the Wraith Squadron novels trying to set up an epic showdown between Warlord Zsinj and the New Republic, years after the underwhelming conclusion of that story had already been published in Courtship of Princess Leia.
It feels very much like the writers and producers of this show grew up with the same era of Star Wars that I did, and have a very specific, idiosyncratic image of what makes a Star Wars story – including aspects that perhaps should have been left behind.
no subject
on 2021-06-20 04:35 am (UTC)The timeline issues remind me of the Marvel movieverse: large chunks of screentime feel like they're either setting up for some other movie but doing nothing for the movie you're actually watching, or are just so fans can say, "Hey, I recognize that guy/planet/fuzzy dice!" In both cases, it feels like you can't properly appreciate the movie unless you've done your homework by watching about 20 other movies and probably also reading a bunch of stuff. I guess at least Bantam is a good reminder that Marvel didn't invent this problem?
It's especially annoying because one of the new new tie-in novels I bothered to read, Claudia Gray's Leia, Princess of Alderaan, handles references to other books and movies in the continuity so well. There are a bunch of them, and it adds depth if you know the references--but they also have a self-contained purpose within the book and I think they'd still be effective from a storytelling perspective even if you had only seen the fist six movies and nothing else. Like, it's the early days of the Rebellion coalescing as an organization, and there's a lot of vigorous debate over what methods are appropriate, so of course there needs to be someone the others think is hurting the cause by being too extreme and violent. Hearing a few arguments about him during strategy meetings and having him plan an attack which endangers Leia makes sense within the story. If you know the name Saw Guerrera, you can go, "Cool, this conflict is still a problem a couple of years later in Rogue One! This seems logical and it's fun to know how his story plays out!" But if you haven't seen Rogue One, he still has a reason to be there and makes sense. You don't feel like he's a teaser trailer plopped into the middle of the book. There's no "but the other shoe never dropped!" feeling. Ditto the planet Crait, awkward teenage Amilyn Holdo, etc. I wish more media-verses handled their cross-references so well.