Carole & Tuesday has a whole episode of someone needing to get back to a venue on time to sing a song, and ends with multiple characters singing full songs. Every episode starts by telling you how the whole show will end. It has a long tournament arc around music that literally has every act sing every song. Also, the Mermaid Sisters.
She-Ra was a standard kids’ show for the first season, and then swerved into some secret-of-space Grand Admiral Thrawn Culture-adjacent forbidden romance hard
His Dark Materials is so far everything I ever wanted out of an adaptation of those books. It’s moving at just the right pace, and the casting is superb.
Dark Crystal is puppets. That’s enough. It’s an excuse to see how far they can push the puppetry.
The Good Place is itself a high concept show. Every time I start to get even a little bored or start to anticipate where it’s going, it’ll swerve. Also, it ends (soon), and thus is going somewhere real. It’s surprisingly Culture-adjacent.
Feh. Unless you make it a heavy direct analog to a certain manga and lean into that, I’m already bored with said asset based on spoilers and gifs alone.
I can just read spoilers or watch only the plot episodes.
I have almost no interest left for stories that are about what happens. I increasingly desire abstraction and ambiguity in all forms of art. Give me the Star Wars Picasso. The movies still have some of that going on. The scene where Rey goes into the dark place and there’s the infinite mirror thing, for example.
It is the best hybrid puppet and CGI tech demo I’ve ever seen. I also think that Pedro is doing some serious acting with body posture and voice. From a technical standpoint I am engaged.
The fourth episode is literally an homage to the Seven Samurai. Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni have said that they’re huge fans of that movie and The Magnificent Seven. This was their chance to make the Two Samurai in Star Wars. Episode four is a love letter to Akira Kurosawa and the entire series is a love letter to spaghetti westerns.
Also I think this episode serves 2 key purposes: 1. Mando can’t just hide out somewhere establishing this will be a chase story, 2: Introduce Cara Dune. In stills released to the press for the series she was shown with a large low slung machine gun that we clearly did not see in anyway in the episode we saw. I think she’ll be back and this was a way to introduce her and her abilities.
I agree. And I forget where I read it, but a reviewer who had seen either the entire first season or at least more episodes than have been released so far mentioned that the Mandalorian eventually has a “crew,” so it makes sense to introduce her and then have her show up later.
I actually thought that the bounty hunter robot in either the first or second episode would be part of the crew as well, but you know what happened to the droid…
There are only two of them… There’s no one else to gather.
No, it doesn’t make the episode good automatically, but that’s the context in which I viewed it, and I think that the Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven is popular enough that a lot of people are also going to watch it in that context.
This episode wasn’t about plot twists or trying to push the envelope or be avant garde. Given the previous episodes of this show, as soon as I saw agrarian village being attacked by barbarians, I pretty much knew what was going to happen and my enjoyment came from how well executed they pulled off the tribute.
And in the context of an homage, as a tribute to one of the best movies of all time, I didn’t need originality. I just wanted a good adaptation of The Seven Samurai into the Star Wars universe and I got that.
This episode actually reminds me of the Cowboy Bebop episode that was basically a tribute to Alien(s). At its most reductionist, you could describe that episode as the crew of the Bebop runs around the ship trying to catch a mysterious creature for 23 minutes.
I liked the Mandalorian more than Scott I guess, but episode 4 definitely did feel like standard hollywood getting in it’s own way like they often do. They were too on the nose with the “it’s seven samurai, but star wars!”
And I know it’s considered “not cool” to criticize star wars for it’s soft science/do it for the plot/etc decisions, but I had a wtf moment when they were trying to talk up how tough an AT-ST is in a contrived way and claimed nothing on this planet could take it down. Even if they were intentionally bullshitting, we saw that the mandalorian’s ship is basically a slave 1 equivalent which should basically be able to drop an AT-ST in a couple seconds against the back armor. And some people want to say “but he wanted to lay low”, but I’m not buying it. It’s something that could have been fixed with a single sentence of dialogue for one excuse or another, but it bugs me.
But once again I guess I don’t like Star Wars, I like Wars In SPACE apparently.
Yeah I can dig the Star Wars well enough, but mostly just like wars in space too. Which is why I’M HYPE AS FUCK about THE EXPANSE IN 10 DAYS FUUUUUCK YESSSSS.
Thought I was in the TV thread. But yes, waiting for the whole season of Mandilorian to be done and I’ll then watch it all in one shot.
I forgot there’s even another movie coming out. I guess that’s coming.
I like how Mando is taking a lot of elements from star wars lore, lowering the stakes and letting some of the tech that usually is supposed to be threatening but isn’t in the movies like the AT-ST and made it extremely menacing on it’s own.
Episode 6 had some nice genre cross over. I also think the lowered stakes you are talking about are perfectly exhibited during the midpoint and at the ending of the episode.
Star Wars part 9. It’s fine. Not worth much discussion.
Except: who the hell is in the C3PO costume? Totally the wrong body shape. Can’t move like the character at all! Did the main actor get sick and they just picked a random extra to wear the suit? Omg worst C3PO ever.
