Until Disney acquired Lucasfilm, everyStar Warsmovie was an event. Even after Disney resolved to crank out at least one newStar Warsmovie per year from 2015 – 2019, those movies still felt like events; major cogs in a machine that if you wanted to know how it worked, you needed to show up on opening weekend to be part of the cultural zeitgeist. Whether you loved or hatedThe Last JediorThe Rise of Skywalker, you still needed to see them becauseStar Warsmovies were still relatively rare, and this was the big saga, the monomyth of our times.
The Mandalorianstrips all of that pomp and circumstance away to simply exist. It’s obviously still forStar Warsfans, but it’s about as low stakes as theStar Warsuniverse can get. There are only two main characters—The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) and The Child (aka Baby Yoda)—and they go on adventures. Neither one of them is going to die, and it’s not like they’re going to get into a big fight because The Child is non-verbal. The Mandalorian’s quest is to reunite The Child with its people and avoid all the people that are coming to kill him even though those people will inevitably fail. At best, they’ll separate The Mandalorian from The Child for a period of time, at which point we’ll be wondering when the duo will get back together to go on more adventures.
If this sounds like a criticism, it’s not. It’s my favorite aspect of the Disney+ show. While executive producerDave Filoniis clearly working to include a lot ofStar Warsmythology at the edges, you don’t really need it. When Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito) busted out with a darksaber in last year’s season finale, you didn’t need to know anything about the darksaber. You could look online for a history of it and learn how it factored into Filoni’sClone Warssaga, but at the end of the day, it’s a bad guy with a neat weapon, and he wants to take The Child away from The Mandalorian. The mythology colors the narrative, but it is not essential to understand the plot beyond what you’ve seen in the movies.
What’s more,The Mandalorianhasn’t really bothered with trying to construct its own mythology at this point. There’s a bit of the backstory of The Mandalorian and what happened to his people, and there’s the generalStar Warsuniverse of the whole thing, but this is an aggressively uncomplicated show, and it’s all the better for it. In a time when genre TV demands either binge-watching or massive Wikis to decode exactly what’s happening,The Mandaloriancomes along and allows you to simply enjoy some episodic television where everything is exceedingly simple.
This has madeThe Mandalorianthe perfect way to kick off my Friday mornings. I take the dog for a walk, I make myself some breakfast, and then I watch The Mandalorian go on some standalone adventure for an hour before starting my workday. It’s light viewing that’s exceedingly rare in the era of the prestige drama where everything has to be life-and-death stakes with depressing subtext just beneath the surface.The Mandalorianis a reprieve from all of that, and while it may not be the most challenging thingStar Warscould do, it occupies a comforting little corner where I don’t have to worry about every single plot beat becoming fodder for a massive Twitter war.
PerhapsThe Mandalorianwill get more complicated as it goes along, and perhaps it will introduce consistent side characters whose fates are less certain than The Mandalorian and The Child. But until that time,The Mandalorianis something I never thoughtStar Warscould be: breezy.
