Best thing yet in Star Wars franchise
The Mandalorian is a true ‘space Western’
It’s the holidays. You may have time to fill, and I certainly have column- inches. That’s my real reason for indulging myself with an “I saw The Mandalorian and liked it a lot” column. But I know there are some people out there, ones about my age, who have grown altogether disconnected from the Star Wars artistic franchise. Maybe you found yourself growing tired of the claustrophobic, incestuous self-regard that polluted the main line of Star Wars movies. Maybe you tried some of the peripheral ones and found them pretty but insubstantial.
The Mandalorian, Disney+’s live- action Star Wars streaming series, cannot have seemed promising. At heart, as we all know, the show is a high- tech spinoff from one cool costume design in the original Star Wars movie. It is basically as if an “action figure” ( a term that itself is now universally recognized as a means of selling dolls to boys) were exposed to some sort of financial growth ray and sprouted to Godzilla dimensions. How could it possibly be any good? And how could you trust Star Wars’s middle-aged true believers when they told you it was good?
Well, that’s my credential. I loved the original Star Wars at the age of six, and was thoroughly sick of the whole thing by about the year 2000, and I’m telling you that The Mandalorian is better than anything else in the franchise, period. It may be on par with the best of Star Trek. It even rips off Frank Herbert’s Dune in an episode that might not embarrass Frank Herbert.
I would have bet the farm against this being possible. The Mandalorian is not in any way arty; it is not really an adult show. It is not “hard” science fiction. It hits the viewer square below the belt in some of the same ways that other Star Wars movies do. The central conceit of the show — the Lone Wolf and Cub relationship between the title character and the chihuahua- sized alien innocent he decides to protect — is pure focusgroup opiate.
The Mandalorian is explicitly a “space Western,” and lays this on pretty freaking thick. By the time Timothy Olyphant shows up ( as a frontier lawman) in season two, with his Earthling coal- country accent mostly intact, you won’t even roll your eyes anymore.
But laid onto this cheesy, tempting matrix — and why should we use “cheesy” as exclusively a term of condemnation? — is a delightfully skeptical, revisionist attitude toward the earlier Star Wars corpus. In Star Wars, barely anything is done beyond costume design to establish that the Empire is wicked and the rebellious Republic is good. Early in the original movie Darth Vader commits a form of super- genocide by destroying the planet Alderaan; having established that he is thousands of times worse than Hitler, he then spends the next 40 years as a goth anti- hero, eventually “redeeming” himself through a single timely act of murder. This was unforgivably lazy, trashy storytelling — the creation of emotional effects by mere button-jabbing.
The Mandalorian is set on the fringe of galactic civilization — as I say, it’s a frontier story — and even visits Tatooine, the original Star Wars planet. But it fills in the colour that the movies could never bother with. Tatooine acquires an actual character rather than serving as a handsome backdrop. The characters remember the Empire with hatred and fear, but they are also living in a power vacuum; not everyone has come out ahead. The New Republic is liberal and well- meaning, but has perhaps not entirely lived up to its billing.
The Mandalorians of the title are an underground religious warrior cult like the Jedi, but “the Force” does not serve as a chronic, insufferable deus ex machina: it is reduced to the role of what a film buff would call a McGuffin, rather than being allowed to take over the proceedings. And neither of the cults are presented as narrative axioms. If I can be forgiven one spoiler, the protagonist of the series eventually runs into more urbane, less fanatical Mandalorians who have evolved beyond his own militancy — and who clearly think of him as a hopeless cornball, more of an evangelical country cousin than a true brother.
This is a space Western, in other words, that really deserves the name of “Western.” Like the great Westerns, it steals shamelessly from everywhere, ranging from Shakespeare to Seven Samurai to Guardians of the Galaxy. It is a true TV anthology series in the mould of The Fugitive, and could almost have been called “The Fugitive.” The anthology format would leave room for weak individual episodes, but I never ran into one.
Some of the special effects are incredible even for Star Wars. In our CGI- saturated world, one no longer expects to literally yelp or sigh during battle sequences; in this series it is almost routine. Star Wars, I didn’t think you had it in ya.