THE MANDALORIAN
AS SLEEK AS BESKAR, AS DYNAMIC AS A LIGHT CRUISER, AS SOULFUL AS GROGU’S EYES, THE MANDALORIAN IS THE POP-CULTURE PHENOMENON OF OUR TIMES. JOIN US ON A DEEP DIVE INTO THE BOUNTY-HUNTER SHOW THAT KEEPS PAYING OFF
Because you asked for it, here’s a celebration of the best Star Wars content to hit the small screen since Lumpy.
IT WAS A
period of civil war. The fandom had divided into factions increasingly entrenched in opposing viewpoints, with little hope of surrender from any one side.
For a saga that was always supposed to be about balance, Star Wars somehow lost it along the way. After The Force Awakens reignited the spark of the galaxy far, far away, the unified excitement it conjured couldn’t last. The Last Jedi split opinion like a Resistance cruiser blasting through a Dreadnought at lightspeed. Solo: A Star Wars Story demystified a character whose mystery was really the whole point, and sputtered at the box office. And The Rise Of Skywalker proved even more divisive in its attempt to bring all nine Episodes of the Skywalker Saga full circle. The one thing Star Wars fans could agree on was that they couldn’t agree about Star Wars.
Until a certain mysterious gunslinger walked into town.
THAT’S DIN DJARIN’S
thing, it seems: striding boldly into places besieged by conflict and putting it right, going about his business with nary a dent in his beskar steel. And just when Star Wars fans were at their most divided, The Mandalorian united them once again.
For a franchise so inherently cinematic — whose every instalment is the definition of event cinema — it took a move to the small screen, and a spin-off story based on Boba Fett’s fan-favourite armour design, to finally bring the people together.
Two seasons in, it’s abundantly clear why The Mandalorian gets Star Wars so right. It’s because the show, and its creator Jon Favreau and executive producer Dave Filoni, understand that there is no such thing as ‘right’ Star Wars or ‘wrong’ Star Wars — there is only Star Wars. (With perhaps one exception: the Disney theme parks’ Hyperspace Hoopla dance-offs, whose highlights include bling-clad Jawas strutting to Aerosmith’s ‘Walk This Way’, and Darth Vader shaking his evil hips to Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’. In no world can this be considered ‘right’ Star Wars.)
It’s a powerful notion, though: that every facet of the franchise, its multitudes of characters and stories and eras, is equally valid. There’s always been conflict in what Star Wars
could or should be. The prequels were castigated for being stylistically and tonally different from the original trilogy. Some fans fundamentally disagreed with The Last Jedi’s vision of Luke Skywalker. Decades ago, many felt that the Ewoks had no right to take down the Empire in Return Of The Jedi.
But The Mandalorian’s creed is that all Star Wars is worth celebrating. It’s a show that wholeheartedly embraces every era, every corner of the universe — the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy, the sequel trilogy, the Clone Wars and Rebels animated series, the canonical expanded-universe novels, even obscure retro toys and old video games. It’s not that
The Mandalorian is somehow more authentically Star Wars than the recent films — it’s that it recognises that all of Star Wars is authentic
Star Wars. This is the way.
WHILE THE MANDALORIAN
manages to appeal to every sub-section of the Star Wars
fandom, it’s no wonder that those who grew up in the playgrounds of George Lucas’ imagination have fallen particularly head-over-heels for the show. While the prequels were jarringly digital after the rusty-old-junk practical aesthetic of the original trilogy, and the sequels popped with a contemporary-blockbuster visual sheen, the look of The Mandalorian is vintage Star Wars
— all scuzzy Outer Rim towns and backwater bars and grimy retro-futurist tech. Every episode is packed with eye-catching aliens that could have come straight from the original Mos Eisley cantina sequence. (A giant ant by the name of ‘Dr Mandible’? Sure!) And, of course, it helps that the show is set in the aftermath of Return Of The Jedi, as the last vestiges of the fallen Empire cling to power — a time period that affords Favreau and Filoni the chance to romp around in Imperial facilities and revel in classic Star Wars iconography.
But the show’s reverence for George Lucas is much more than skin-deep. The Mandalorian
riffs on the very things that inspired Star Wars
in the first place (with actual riffs, courtesy of Ludwig Göransson’s invigorating score). It’s no secret that Lucas was heavily influenced by Western tropes, and more than any other outing in the franchise, The Mandalorian
delivers Sergio Leone in space (Season 2 premiere ‘The Marshal’ could have been called ‘A Fistful Of Credits’). And it doesn’t just capture the cowboy vibe. The Mandalorian also cribs from Lucas’ other biggest inspiration: Japanese popular culture. Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress
was the blueprint for the original 1977 film, and the Jedi and lightsabers were always a stand-in for samurai and katanas. Here, the clear influence is Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s manga Lone Wolf And Cub — the tale of a wandering assassin travelling through feudal Japan with his three-year-old child. Right from Chapter 1, Mando is the archetypal Lone Wolf — but his story only really begins when he finally finds his Cub.
It’s impossible to celebrate the joys of The Mandalorian without waxing lyrical about its most joyous component: The Child. Again riffing on a beloved element from the original trilogy, wizened Jedi Master Yoda, he turned out to be the surprise star, not appearing in any promo materials. Chapter 1 was itself a pre-reel for the show’s true premise: the galaxy’s biggest badass, looking after with the galaxy’s cutest critter.
Like Kim Kardashian before him, Baby Yoda broke the internet. It’s not hard to see why — anyone with eyes and a heart couldn’t fail to fall for Grogu (who are we kidding? He’ll always be Baby Yoda). Maybe it’s those big black eyes, or that fuzzy green coconut head, or the way the sun shines through his soft pink ears. Perhaps it’s the cooing noises he makes, or how he’s always getting into mischief, filling his gob with whatever he can get his tiny magic hands on (frogs! Spiders! Forbidden eggs!) Really, it’s all of the above. Either way, The Child is pure Star Wars gold.
It might seem obvious now that the kid would be such a monumental hit, but his success was never guaranteed. Star Wars fans have had a complicated relationship with cuteness, dating right back to 1983. After the unabashed darkness of The Empire Strikes Back, Return Of The Jedi’s
Ewoks were a turn-off for fans who weren’t prepared for cuddly, forest-dwelling teddy bears to play a major role in defeating the Galactic Empire. Today, the Ewoks are a long-accepted part of the golden original trilogy — but their sense of daring delightfulness lived on in Jar Jar Binks and the Porgs, who each faced a backlash for having the audacity to invoke childlike joy.
Props, then, to Favreau and Filoni for giving us hands-down Star Wars’ most heart-poppingly adorable creature, and making him the focus of the entire story. Mando might get top billing, but it’s Grogu — the mystery of his existence, the possibilities of his future — driving the narrative. Yes, he’s a marketing team’s dream. He’s endlessly Gif-able and meme-worthy. But to put that cuteness at the heart of a Star Wars narrative is genuinely ballsy.
This is what The Mandalorian does, though — it embraces even the most unpopular areas of Star Wars with open arms. Just see the Imperial base reveal in ‘Chapter 12: The Siege’, which dared to invoke the prequels’ derided notion of midi-chlorians and the Sith-cloning that led to the creation of Snoke and the resurgence of Emperor Palpatine in The Rise Of Skywalker within a single scene.
The dynamic between Mando and Baby Yoda continues to be the series’ most compelling thread — how the kid is learning from his new father figure, how Din is visibly softening. It’s yet another way that The Mandalorian really understands the essence of Star Wars. The Skywalker Saga was always a grand, operatic, family story. On the small screen, it’s simply found a different kind of family to focus on.
WHEN THE RISE
Of Skywalker signalled the end of Star Wars’ central saga, the question of its future loomed ominously. And while more spinoff movies are in the works, The Mandalorian shows why that question was so hard to answer: because the ideal vehicle hadn’t been invented yet.
It feels inaccurate to label it as a TV show. Sure, it’s an episodic story — but it doesn’t behave like television, at least not in the golden-age-of-tv-drama sense that we’re used to. There are recurring characters, but it’s not an ensemble piece. The episodes have no B-plots, and Mando is in near-every scene. The sense of blockbuster scale is way beyond even the most expensive Netflix drama. The Mandalorian
isn’t a movie, but it’s not typical TV either. Structurally, stylistically, it’s something new.
It’s not just the medium that the show is evolving — it’s Star Wars itself. For the first time in live action, the Force and the Jedi are no longer the centre of the galaxy. The Way Of The Mandalore is a whole new culture and creed to explore, with its own rules, traditions, and splintered factions. The introduction of a live-action Ahsoka Tano — thrillingly crossing over from the animated series, where she was Anakin’s apprentice — provides a tangential connection to the Skywalkers, but for the most part these are thrillingly new adventures.
Behind the camera, The Mandalorian is what the future of Star Wars should look like. Across all three movie trilogies (and the Star Wars Story spin-offs), only white men have directed cinematic Star Wars. Already, The Mandalorian
is redressing that balance. So far, the likes of Rick Famuyiwa, Bryce Dallas Howard and Carl Weathers have brought action spectacle in abundance. Deborah Chow’s brilliant work has seen her snapped up to helm the upcoming Obi-wan series. And the Season 1 finale was shot through with Taika Waititi’s own distinct flavour. It’s only right that a show presenting a galaxy of infinite possibility should come from creators of infinite diversity — finally, The Mandalorian
is making that happen.
It’s not just who’s making it — it’s how it’s made, too. Star Wars has always been a technological gamechanger. Industrial Light & Magic set a new standard for special effects with the original trilogy, while the prequels pioneered groundbreaking digital production processes and CGI visuals. Already, The Mandalorian has left its mark on Hollywood by shooting on ‘the volume’ — a hi-res video-wall that renders realistic in-camera backdrops in real-time, creating whole worlds in a single room. George Lucas’ innovative spirit is right there in The Mandalorian’s DNA — always pushing forwards creatively.
THE JOY OF
Star Wars has always been that there’s something in it for everyone. It’s an old-school, serial-inspired adventure story. It’s about nobodies being somebodies in a galaxy far bigger than they can comprehend. It’s bold and dark, and also sweet and silly. It’s for kids and big kids alike. It’s old and new and ever-evolving.
The Mandalorian is all those things, too. Whether you grew up on the originals, adore the sequels, have been a long-standing prequels apologist, or devoted years to watching the animated series, The Mandalorian contains whatever it is you love about the galaxy far, far away. It’s ironic that Mando himself isn’t a Force-user — because of all things, it’s The
Mandalorian that found a way to bring balance back to Star Wars.