As much as I think Lucasfilm learns, they take two steps backward. BOBF proved as much. If these rumours are true, I can’t say I disagree with others sentiments about this being the final nail in the coffin for Star Wars for me. For the wider population, Star Wars will never die. Disney will pull every cent they can out of its rotting corpse if they can, but they fail to see that in going for a cheap buck, the quicker more seductive path, they are actively killing this brand by tying it to a property that DECREASED in popularity and box office every movie. That is proof of a dying franchise. Of fans who are uninterested in that story and the characters as well as what it means for the world at large. This is a studio in Lucasfilm who will not admit fault. Just like Rian Johnson’s rhetoric that TLJ is perfect, LF continue to put the blame on the fanbase. The viewers. Because of course Star Wars fans will never be pleased, and everyone just went into that movie with expectations that weren’t going to be met, as if the bare minimum of Luke being in character was such a tall bar for Johnson. I think the response to the failure pushing blame on the detractors left a bad taste in many fans’ mouths.
But fine okay, you gave us The Mandalorian. It isn’t perfect but it has enough care to at least not destroy the entire timeline or be an awful joke or assassinate fan loved characters. The bar was not high, and for two seasons, they surpassed that easily, even gave us some feelings of passion and excitement back for this brand. It felt like there was a beautiful arc that had come to completion with Grogu going with Luke to be his first student, marking an opportunity to give us Luke…the teacher. Not the grump Jake we got in TLJ, but a Jedi at the height of his powers. Were all the pieces to get there perfect? Absolutely not. But we got there, and Din is a kinda cool character and there’s an interesting conflict between he and Bo Katan along with his own tribe. Mandalorian politics was always so interesting and intricate in The Clone Wars show and having Filoni involved meant that would likely be portrayed really well. Ahsoka mentioned Thrawn, could we actually get something comparable to the incredible Zahn trilogy. That was where my head was after S2 of Mando, December 2020. It felt like they’d actually managed to right the ship just a bit, and set up some interesting elements for the future. For an entire year I actually kind of felt excited for Star Wars again. All they had to do to get me back in was follow those three rules. No character assassination. Don’t destroy the timeline. Don’t be an awful joke.
And then BOBF happened. All this goodwill for the treatment of Boba in Season 2 of Mando went backwards in character arc and in power level. Luke’s final scene shows a complete ineptitude of understanding his arc in ROTJ. Character assassination of beloved icons. I guess we can mostly give BOBF a pass on the second bar of not destroying the timeline (although it KILLED all my hopes for the future of the “Mando-verse”) but the third…basically dont be an awful joke…i think the many many wonderful pages of the BOBF discussion on this board serve as the biggest fail grade possible on this bar. Okay but surely Debroah Chow, who directed two of the best episodes of S1 of Mandalorian won’t let us down with an easy home run.
And then Kenobi happened. Character assassinations happening basically every 10 minutes. Timeline fractures that require you to literally ignore the show’s existence for the original Star Wars movie to work. Oh and by the way, has almost as many jokes to be made about how awful it is as BOBF. But this wasn’t just Boba Fett getting destroyed, or a small Luke scene that some may not entirely notice is laughably out of character. This was much more than that. I speak as a lover of the prequel era, who grew up on those movies, and never knew a Star Wars without them included. I was thoroughly disappointed with the ineptitude of the writing team in handling an easy slam dunk. Just tell an Obi Wan story, about him dealing with all the trauma. About the fact that he lost everyone. All the other Jedi except Yoda. Gone. His friends? Gone. His master? Gone. His brother? Gone. Gone so bad that he was burnt to a crisp. Obi Wan got to be a part of every death of a key person in his life. Qui Gon. Satine. Padme. Anakin. He’s the one with them at the end, and the only one that remains in his mind. And a reminder of that in Luke is what he gets to watch over. I think that really human drama could have pushed it into something really special, being some of the best Star Wars in decades. But instead…Reva happened. Okay that was a tangent…but an important one because I think you can see where I’m going with this.
Yes. Andor got a predominantly extremely positive reaction. But the bridge was burned with these two shows. Now Mando should be the opportunity to reforge that bridge again. But instead, Lucasfilm and Faverau and Filoni have decided that THIS is the time to show that the entire time, this was building to showing how Palpatine’s cloning happened. I get it, there were points of reference in the series for this being the case but…I was willing to ignore them because of that hopeful feeling. The fact that this show had to be built within the ST canon has completely kneecapped it and I wish…I so wish they just ignored it. The Sequels were like 2-3 years of time and didn't really feel ‘Galactic level’ in the way that the Prequels and Original Trilogy did. They could have just not acknowledged it. But no…Grogu has to go back to Mando because Luke’s first student was Kylo! The moment where that clicked for me made this new development entirely fathomable. And i feel like we’re in for another series like the two above that fails on a simplistic level because tying in the ST cannot work. The writers of the ST didn’t want to tie it to the end of ROTJ, they wanted to get to Empire vs Rebels again without any care as to why you can’t just immediately do that. The ST doesn’t even tie into itself, Johnson and Abrams were in a rap battle and we got three stories that are only connected because they have the same characters in them. Everything about each is so vastly different than the last. This right here is the problem with pretending a Clone Wars like answer exists for this trilogy. And in using The Mandalorian, a show that used to give us hope for the future of Star Wars, as a vehicle for that patchwork, they are sinking not just that show, but also the whole of this brand again. This is a studio that does not learn from their mistakes. If that rumour is true, I can’t say I’m shocked, but what a colossal disappointment the payoff for all that hope is.
Oh hey…just like The Last Jedi.
It’s like poetry folks, it rhymes.
