The Mandalorian movie is just repeating Marvel’s mistake of giving us homework
I don’t think it’s a particularly revolutionary statement to say that homeworks sucks, it’s an opinion that pretty much everyone seven and up has because we all just find it a bit pointless and would rather spend our evenings watching movies and eating chicken nuggets. I’m what they call an “adult” now, so I don’t have to do homework anymore, unless you count taxes as such. The problem is though, with big IP-focused franchises taking up most of the big and little screens, homework is seeping into the media we watch, and it’s getting a bit boring. And now, The Mandalorian & Grogu, just announced this week, is the latest film you’ll have to study for to even remotely fully appreciate it.
The Mandalorian, for the unaware, is a Disney+ series that started back in 2019 featuring a specific Mandalorian, Din Djarin, played by Pedro Pascal, and it’s pretty fun! Obviously massively inspired by Lone Wolf and Cub, it’s a series that to start is pretty self-contained, the first season offering an adventure-of-the-week kind of deal that is often pretty fun due to the “grumpy, unwilling warrior forced to look after a baby, and also this baby has psychic powers?” dynamic it has going on.
After that, the show kind of took a turn for the worse, as it began to build up a bigger narrative arc that ties into the broader Star Wars universe, bringing back characters from animated series The Clone Wars like Bo-Katan. It’s fine, sometimes bad even, but it’s not really what I signed up for with the first season. What makes matters worse is that in between the second and third season, The Book of Boba Fett aired, a wholly mediocre show that had an entire two episodes focused on Din that barely had anything to do with the green-helmeted bounty hunter. Which, in order to see more of my moody space dad and his terrible son, meant I had to suffer through The Book of Boba Fett.