Everyone online is talking about The Mandalorian, the new Star Wars TV show. The flagship launch series of Disney+ has had people buzzing since the first episode dropped, and every week it seems to get better. The title character is already viewed by fans as a badass, and of course everyone loves Baby Yoda. But what makes the series work so well is the writing, and I'll expound on this below the break. (There will be spoilers at least for the first episode of The Mandalorian, so be warned.)
As I write this, Chapter 7 of the show has just gone live, with one more episode to go before the end of the first season, and a second season already in the works. The series, in case you don't know, follows the exploits of Pedro Pascal's titular bounty hunter, as he takes jobs to make ends meet, repair his ship, and protect an alien child from a sinister Imperial officer. Stoic and laconic, the Mandalorian (or "Mando," as he's frequently called) manages to express a lot with few words and shifts of body language, and he has a code of honor about him, something instilled in him through his culture.
Through clever writing and usage of tropes, The Mandalorian uses the principle of "show, don't tell" to construct a series that doesn't require its viewers to know a thing about Star Wars or its universe. To be sure, you can appreciate it a lot more if you have delved a little more into the universe, but this show has been made to stand on its own and it does it superbly. Let's just take a look at the first episode and you'll see what I mean.
Cold Open
In this sequence, we see a bunch of thugs bullying an alien man in a bar in a frozen wasteland when Mando shows up. The sight of a Mandalorian draws attention, and when one of the thugs tries to touch the beskar steel pauldron of Mando's armor, it triggers a fight which Mando wins. But the grateful alien is actually a bounty and Mando rather bluntly tells him, "I can bring you in warm, or I can bring you in cold." Mando then takes a landspeeder taxi back to his parked ship, and barely flinches when his ship is attacked by a water-dwelling creature. The bounty keeps chattering on to awkwardly fill the air, and seems to be looking for some way to escape, before Mando abruptly shoves him in a carbonite chamber and freezes him.
Right from the get-go, in showing the alien and the thugs (who speak in an alien language themselves), The Mandalorian establishes the sci-fi setting, further emphasized with the laser blasters. This sets up some expectations and makes it generally easier to accept the basics of such a setting, like spaceships, robots, holograms, and so on.
From his entrance and the reaction his appearance causes, the Mandalorian himself gets established as not someone to be trifled with. His patchwork armor, while a sign that he's not fully equipped, suggests that it has seen damage, and that he's survived it. The thugs addressing him as a "Mandalorian" confirms for us that this is our title character, and establishes "Mando" as an abbreviated nickname for his people.
The fight that follows lets us see that Mando can also handle himself in a fight, with a number of gadgets in his armor to help him, and that he's a combat pragmatist. He uses whatever's at his disposal to dispatch his foes, but that he wasn't looking to kill until one of the thugs draws a blaster and shoots, at which point Mando draws his own gun. Further, his armor's durability is proven when the thug's shot pings off the beskar steel. This, combined with the thugs' reaction to seeing it, shows us that beskar is a rare metal of value, as well as practical worth in that it can deflect laser fire.
The quick and brutal way that Mando dispatches the thug who drew on him-- by using a tether to drag him into an automated door to bisect him-- coupled with the way he shuts down the bounty's babbling in the bar cements him as a ruthless person. This is a man who will complete the job he's taken, who doesn't like to negotiate, and woe betide anyone who gets in his way. Mando's utter refusal to respond to the bounty's chattering in both the bar and later on his ship builds on his laconic nature, and the ruthlessness gets locked in when he freezes the bounty in carbonite.
The landspeeder sequence helps establish the existence of robots-- or "droids" as they're called in Star Wars-- and that Mando doesn't like dealing with them, to the point he'll take a more dilapidated human-piloted taxi rather than the droid-piloted one. This bias is further developed in later scenes and episodes, which I'll expand on later. The way Mando calmly deals with the alien sea monster that tries to attack his ship just further builds on his badassery, and shows us what the big taser-rifle slung across his back can do.
On Nevarro
The next part of the chapter shows Mando delivering his bounties to the authorities and then reporting to Greef Karga, the Bounty Hunters' Guildmaster, and the two negotiate in terms of payment. Needing more work, Greef gives him a chit to go see a client about a job. This turns out to be an Imperial Remnant officer. The Imperial hires Mando to bring in an "asset" in exchange for payment in ingots of beskar, giving him one ingot as down payment. Mando brings this to an underground Mandalorian enclave, where their blacksmith forges a new pauldron for his armor.
The payment negotiation scene tells us a few things. Greef tries to pay Mando in Imperial credits, but Mando points out the Empire is gone and their credits aren't worth much anymore. This tells us a little bit more about the setting-- there had been an empire which has since collapsed-- and the struggles that people are going through. Mando even makes comment about how some of the other jobs that Greef has for him will barely cover the cost of fuel. This is something that many viewers can probably relate to, when it comes to poorly-paying jobs, and rising gas prices.
The meeting with the Imperial Client brings a few more things to light. That former Imperials now keep themselves in safehouses, and their stormtroopers' armor is visibly dirty, shows that they're not quite as powerful as they once were, but still not ones to be taken lightly. The moment Mando draws his gun in response to someone rushing into the room, the stormtroopers have their own weapons trained on him. Mando, however, dismisses their threats to further build his badass nature. ("We have you four-to-one." "I like those odds.")
The Client comes across as polite, even asking Mando to lower his gun with a "please," but he notably never tells his own troopers to lower their weapons. He manages to talk Mando down, and expounds a bit on the current troubles befalling the galaxy. He agrees with his underling, Dr. Pershing, that they need the asset recovered alive, but acknowledges "bounty hunting is a complicated profession" and will accept if the asset dies, as long as proof is provided and at reduced payment. Therefore, we can surmise the Client is a practical and reasonable man, but not one to have as an enemy.
In the Mandlorian compound, we see others of the Tribe, all wearing helmets, and we're introduced to the Armorer, a female Mandalorian. She very quickly establishes her leadership role, as Mando turns his beskar ingot over to her. We find out that the beskar-- stamped with the Imperial seal-- was taken from the Mandalorians during "the Great Purge." This is explicitly meant to draw comparisons to Nazi Germany (that the Client is played by the German Werner Herzog helps) and stolen Jewish gold. And one ingot is generous enough that in addition to making another piece of armor for Mando, the Armorer can use the rest to sponsor many foundlings. So we know that the Mandalorian Clan we're looking at takes in orphans and foundlings, to give them a home, and further that Mando himself was a foundling.
During the forging process for his new pauldron, we're treated to a flashback, giving us a sense of how Mando ended up an orphan. In some battle-torn hometown, his family runs for shelter. This scene is expanded on in later episodes, when we see that Mando's hometown was attacked by battle droids. Thus, a very clear reason for Mando's hatred of droids is given, so he's not just a straw bigot.
On the Job
Mando travels next to a different desert world to track down the asset. Not long after touching down, he's attacked by native animals, but is rescued by an old farmer, who provides hospitality while Mando patches up his damaged gear. The farmer, Kuiil, teaches him how to bond to the creatures so he can ride one to where the asset is holed up, protected by a small army of mercenaries. Mando finds another bounty hunter-- a droid-- has turned up in search of the asset, and reluctantly joins forces with it to fight their way through the mercs. But when he finds that the asset is actually a baby, and that the droid is ordered to kill it, Mando promptly guns the droid down.
For the first time in the show, we see that Mando is not an invincible hero, when he's attacked by two blurrgs. He struggles to free himself from their clutches until Kuiil shows up to stun them. This, along with his caution in approaching the mercenaries' stronghold, lets us know that for all his badassery, he's still only one man with limited resources and the vulnerabilities that one man can have. He's good at what he does, but there's limits to even what he can do.
Kuiil ticks a lot of the "old master" tropes. There's hints at an adventurous, or at least "interesting," past when he was younger, and he just wants a peaceful life. This is why he agrees to help Mando, as the mercs' presence is disrupting his peaceful world. He does things on his own terms, declaring "I have spoken," when finished setting his terms. He knows of the Mandalorians as well, and as much as dares Mando to learn how to ride the blurrgs by evoking a Mandalorian legend about his people once being able to ride a mythosaur. We can derive from context that the mythosaur is a great beast which is difficult to tame.
IG-11, the bounty hunter droid, demonstrates that there are other hunters out seeking the asset. He provides some humor as well, such as when negotiating how they'll split the rewards while under fire, to his repeated attempts to self-destruct the moment it appears they'll lose the fight. While Mando doesn't like droids, he and IG-11 quickly adjust to one another and work well as a team, giving some potential for Mando to get over his distrust of droids in the future.
Mind you, he loses that begrudging trust in IG-11 in the very next scene, when the two of them find the asset. Despite the Client informing them that the unnamed asset was fifty years old, the asset turns out to be an alien baby. In one of the few bits of "telling instead of showing" in the episode, IG-11 simply notes that some species age at slower rates. When IG-11 raises his blaster to shoot the baby, Mando stops him, noting that he was allowed to bring the asset in alive. IG-11, however, had no such orders and was still willing to kill a defenseless child, which is what makes Mando kill the droid. One foundling protecting another, entirely fitting within Mando's character, and finally showing that this laconic, ruthless bounty hunter still has a soul.
In Summary
Later episodes of The Mandalorian continue this trend, of minimal exposition and proper usage of tropes, to further build the world for the casual fan. While it's true there are plenty of references and name-drops to other Star Wars properties that a casual fan won't catch, one doesn't need to, as they're often presented in a context that makes it easy enough to grasp the basics. The result is a space western that anyone can watch and understand.
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