The Mandalorian - Season Three Review: This is NOT the Way

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A major disappointing season from this once terrific series.

Season one (2019) and two (2020) of The Mandalorian were as good as it gets in terms of Star Wars storytelling. So much so that a dear friend of mine, the biggest Star Wars fan I know, once waxed poetically to me about how the series’ creator Jon Favreau was the savior of the Star Wars franchise.

Whether you believe that about Favreau or not, the truth is that The Mandalorian undoubtedly set the bar very high for the bevy of Star Wars series that came in its wake. Unfortunately, the majority of them have failed to live up to the standard.

For example, the alarmingly awful The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi fell shamefully short of The Mandalorian’s high standards. Things were so bleak at Mickey Mouse’s money-making machine after the back-to-back egregious embarrassments of Boba Fett and Obi Wan, Disney’s Star Wars television ventures seemed on the precipice of annihilation like Alderaan on the wrong end of a Death Star blast.

Then the top-notch Andor arrived on the scene. Andor was able to equal, and in some ways exceed, season one and two of The Mandalorian’s high storytelling standards and Disney once again felt like the had righted the good ship Star Wars.

But now the roller coaster continues with season three of The Mandalorian, whose eight episodes concluded on Wednesday, which scuttled all the creative and artistic momentum of its previous two stellar seasons and of the superb Andor.  

Unfortunately, season three of The Mandalorian feels more like an extension of the sub-par work of The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi than a continuation of the excellence of seasons one and two of The Mandalorian.

Season three is an exceedingly frustrating, irritating, incoherent, dull, lore-desecrating exercise that besmirches the once mighty legacy of The Mandalorian brand, reducing it to just another Star Wars piece of junk in a galaxy quickly filling up with Star Wars junk.

The storyline of season three lacks immediacy and consistency, and instead feels like writers/producers trying to sell Star Wars toys while they kill time waiting for other series, most likely the forthcoming Ahsoka, to carry the Star Wars narrative load.

The (spoiler-free) loose premise of the season is that Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his de facto adopted son Grogu – aka Baby Yoda, join with Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sakchoff) to try and return to Mandalore.

The premise never compels, and the villain (I won’t say who it is to avoid spoilers), once revealed, feels like a creative cul-de-sac that is repetitive and redundant and redundantly repetitive.

The series featured the worst episode (episode six – which contains cameos by Lizzo and Jack Black – God help us!!) in the history of Star Wars tv which is an astonishing accomplishment considering the staggering level of incompetence of The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi.

The season finale, while not a great finale, was an action-packed episode and was, to a point, entertaining, but it didn’t elevate the series or make it make sense.

As much as I enjoyed some of the action at times in the finale it was also ridiculous to the point of shameful, and it stretched Star Wars lore and the established rules of the series and the Star Wars universe beyond recognition.

For example, earlier in the season Mandalorians chasing a giant monster had to stop because their jet packs ran out of fuel after roughly a half mile. But in the finale, Mandalorians were flying thousands of miles and breaking through the atmosphere of a planet and into space with ease using their jetpacks.

Another example is that in the finale the villain/villains have great powers (I’m doing my best to avoid spoilers) and yet they end up being like every other dopey background actor stormtrooper who gets felled with ease by the good guys.

The biggest problem with season three though is that it felt like it was no longer about The Mandalorian but rather about the WOmandalorian. Female warrior queen Bo-Katan Kryze became the focus of the drama and the hero who continuously kept saving the damsel-in-distress Din Djarin from peril.

Making things worse was that Katee Sakchoff, an actress I loved on Battlestar Galactica, was dreadful as Bo-Katan. In season two Din Djarin worked with a bad-ass woman warrior Cara Dune, played by Gina Carano. Dune was really cool and Carano was great in the role, but then she said something on social media about Nazis that made the Nazis at Disney upset so they fired her. The reason I bring this up is because, and I never thought I’d say this in my entire life, but Katee Sackhoff is no Gina Carano, and The Mandalorian season three suffers under her relentlessly weak performance.

Which brings up another issue that is becoming glaring, and that is Disney’s princess problem. What I mean by that is that Disney made its bazillions by telling female-centric stories for girls about princesses. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and on and on. The problem is that they’ve purchased Marvel and Star Wars, two brands that tell archetypal stories about boys and men for boys and men.

Instead of embracing what made Marvel and Star Wars successful, Disney has reverted to form and gone about dismantling the male archetypes and replacing them with “princesses” - inadequate and inappropriate female characters.

So, in Marvel we get Thor replaced by Lady Thor, Black Panther replaced by Lady Black Panther, Hawkeye replaced by Lady Hawkeye, Iron Man replaced by Iron Heart aka Lady Iron Man…not to mention the cavalcade of female led-projects like Black Widow, Captain Marvel (who originally was a man in the comics) and now The Marvels. In Star Wars the most obvious example was that the center of the latest trilogy was a female, Rey, while the two previous trilogies focused on Luke and Anakin.

I understand Disney’s insipid impulse to feminize everything and even understand its insidious desire to socially engineer through its products, but what shocks me about this is Disney’s incredible misunderstanding of the basics of myth and archetype.

As Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung teach us, the woman’s hero journey (or heroine journey if you will) is very different from the male hero journey. Different narratives and archetypes are needed and necessary in order to tell the heroine’s journey, but what Disney (and most other modern storytelling) is doing is simply replacing men in the hero’s journey with women.

The reason why these stories, on the whole, fail is because they do not resonate in the collective unconscious due to their mythic and archetypal misunderstandings.

This does not mean that women can’t be leads in action stories…quite the contrary, but they must go on a heroine’s journey not a hero’s journey. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien is a perfect example of the heroine’s journey in an action role. Ripley is at her core a feminine mother character (in the first film this – among other reasons - is why the cat is so important – as Ripley must nurture and save it), just like the mother creature she fights.

Another example is Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) from the fantastic 2015 film Sicario. Macer is an FBI agent but she must navigate the brutal world of men all the while knowing that she, as a woman, is more vulnerable than the men she is surrounded by. As much as she wants to be “one of the boys”, she never will be and that is part of her journey…coming to understand the nature of things and the perilous, nearly indecipherable world of men.

While audiences, for social or political reasons, may support these Disney designed female-led hero’s journeys, on a very deep psychological level, they are agitated by them and often repulsed by them and that’s because they are the anti-thesis of our inherent psychological and mythological conditioning.

No doubt there are some who, again for social or political reasons, want to decondition audiences from what they would describe as an archaic view of men and women, but the human psyche and collective conscious and unconscious, don’t work that way as they have been built over thousands of years and don’t bend to whatever is fashionable in the decadent society du jour.

Back in 2015 right after the female-led The Force Awakens hit theatres, I was at a dinner party with a bunch of Angelinos and the movie came up as a topic of conversation. I chimed in and said I didn’t think it was very good and a woman sitting next to me, who was there with her maybe ten-year-old daughter, leaned over and whispered into my ear, “yes, but the message it sends to girls, and to boys about girls, is really important.”

I nearly bled to death biting my tongue in an attempt to avoid a social mis-step. What I wanted to tell this woman was that the privileged life she led, the big L.A. house she lived in with the “I’m With Her” sign in front, and the security of her existence, was built by…men. Many of them ugly, brutish men, who she would despise simply because they were ugly and brutish men. These are the same men who throughout history have eliminated any and all threats to her plush, decadent, million-dollar, echo-chamber existence.

This is the type of woman, a pampered princess, who demands “equality” for women and girls, but when push comes to shove, she only wants the kind of “equality” where she is awarded unquestioned deference and privileges due to her “victim status” as a woman which elevates her above by those deplorable men who intervene to protect her from the vicious darkness of the world.

If this woman lived in Ukraine she would, as did most of the Ukrainian women, leave to go live in other parts of Europe while all the men of fighting age (and well beyond and beneath fighting age) were forced, through force or conscience, to fight, and ended up being slaughtered by the vastly superior Russian military.

This is why Sicario is so impactful, as it shows in the bleakest, bluntest terms, that play-acting as a tough chick won’t cut it in the world of men. Men inherently understand this as we’ve navigated the perils of the brutal world of men our entire lives and know what the real deal is.

Yes, women have been on the receiving end of toxic masculinity…but they’ve also benefitted from men’s sacrifice and masculinity’s ability to protect them in a dangerous world to such a degree that they now feel safe and secure enough to incessantly bitch and moan about how all masculinity is toxic.

That’s a long way of saying that when Bo-Katan saves Din Djarin for like the fifth time in season three on The Mandalorian, it made me laugh at how ridiculous and shameful it was even for a silly, sci-fi series on a corporate streaming service hellbent on promoting a social-political agenda.

It is fitting that Disney now turns its Star Wars hopes to Ahsoka, which hits Disney plus in August and tells the story of the female Jedi who was once the Padawan of Anakin Skywalker. The girl power galaxy strikes again.

As far as The Mandalorian season three goes, it was a major letdown compared to season one and two. The series lost not only its cohesiveness and its competence, but more importantly its purpose and meaning, and there’s no telling if it’ll ever get it back.

Season three of The Mandalorian was so deflating, it left me wondering not only what the future holds for Star Wars, but if it has a future at all.

The cold, hard reality is that The Mandalorian, Star Wars, Marvel, and our entire culture in general, is an utter mess, and it needs to get its balls back and quick if it wants to survive.

As the Mandalorians would say, “This is the way.”

©2023

The Book of Boba Fett -Episode One Initial Reaction

‘The Book of Boba Fett’ series is bursting with potential but is off to a very slow start.

The new Disney Plus show can go either way after its uneven first episode is a mixed-bag of flashbacks and mediocre fight sequences.

This article contains minor spoilers for The Book of Boba Fett.

In the wake of the critically and commercially successful Star Wars series The Mandalorian, streaming service Disney Plus has gone back to the well with the new spin-off series, The Book of Boba Fett.

Boba Fett, the bounty hunter who famously bagged Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back, is a character that has long been adored by Star Wars fans, and when he made his surprising return in The Mandalorian (surprising because he had seemingly died in Return of the Jedi), it was met with raucous applause from the Star Wars faithful.

Now Boba is no longer a background or supporting player, his name is on the marquee, but after watching the somewhat uneven first episode of The Book of Boba Fett, it’s too soon to tell if the infamous bounty hunter has the star power to hold audience’s attention over the course of a seven-episode series.

The Book of Boba Fett, which stars Temuera Morrison as Fett and Ming-Na Wen as Fennec Shand, a mercenary and assassin, premiered its first episode on Wednesday December 28, and will release a new episode for the next six Wednesdays, for a total of seven in all.  

The opening episode, written by Jon Favreau (director of Iron Man and creator of The Mandalorian) and directed by Robert Rodriguez, is titled ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’, and it uses flashbacks to show some of Boba Fett’s strange journey after he went into the Sarlacc’s mouth on Tattooine in Return of the Jedi, up to the present day where he is a crime boss sitting on Jabba the Hutt’s old throne.

Fett’s history deeply informs his present, and so the flashbacks make complete narrative sense, but that said, they also slow down the pace of the program, leaving it at times on the precipice of tedium.

Also hampering the show, at least thus far, are some pretty sub-par action sequences. One fight with Boba Fett and Fennec Shand against a group of anonymous ninja assassins on the streets of Mos Espa, is very poorly choreographed and shot, so much so that it looks amateurish.

Although in contrast, there is a solid sand battle between Boba Fett and a very cool looking sand beast in one of the many flashbacks. Hopefully this sequence, and not the predictable and dull fight in Mos Espa, is a preview of the type of action we can expect in the coming episodes.

The visuals of the show also leave something to be desired, as the cinematography of the first episode is painfully rudimentary, and lacks imagination or cinematic flair.

As for the cast, again, thus far it could go either way. Morrison is not a particularly compelling screen presence, and neither is Ming-Na Wen, but there’s always the possibility that they find their sea legs and grow into their characters as the series continues.

As the show moves forward, there are some potentially intriguing storylines. For example, the mayor of Mos Espa refuses to pay tribute to Boba, and his representative even delivers an ominous threat to the crime boss, something which should lead to some fireworks down the road.

Another somewhat intriguing angle in the story is that while Boba Fett is obviously no shrinking violet as a crime lord, he also doesn’t want to be an arrogant and brutal tyrant like Jabba the Hutt.

For instance, Boba demands he walk around “on his own two feet” as he patrols the city of Mos Espa, because unlike Jabba he won’t be “carried around like a useless noble”. He follows that up with, “Jabba ruled with fear. I intend to rule with respect.”

Fett is no Jabba, he’s a working man’s crime boss. And he isn’t the cold-blooded bounty hunter of the past either, he is more forgiving. For example, he pardons two of Jabba’s bodyguards because they were loyal, and by sparing their lives they become loyal to him.

That said, Boba Fett still has the killer instinct when he needs to, like when he gloriously obliterates one of the ninja assassins who ambush him on the streets of Mos Espa in the best shot of the show so far.

This conflict within Boba Fett, and between Boba Fett and the world, has a great deal of dramatic and narrative promise, but the first episode leaves me uncertain as to whether this promise can ever be fulfilled.

I have to say, I felt the same way about The Mandalorian at first too. And the reason I am so cautious in my criticism of The Book of Boba Fett is because The Mandalorian got better and better with each episode, and I ended up absolutely loving the series even though I’m not much of a Star Wars aficionado.

Ultimately, after just one episode The Book of Boba Fett is too much of a mixed-bag and too uneven to make any judgements on whether the overall series will be worthwhile or not. Hopefully, this flawed series opener is the bottom and everything goes up from here.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021