A quick Last Great Screenplay Contest Update here!
Genre: Sci-Fi Fantasy/Televsion
Premise: Mando and Baby Yoda must travel back to Tatooine in search of a fellow Mandalorian.
About: It’s baaaaaa-ack. The Mandalorian is back along with a fresh batch of rumors, the biggest of which is that Pedro Pascal, who plays The Mandalorian, left production midway through the season due to an ongoing dispute about not being able to show his face onscreen (the Mandalorian mythology states that you can never take off your helmet). It’s unclear what this means for the show but it, supposedly, altered some storylines in the second half of the season. We will have to see. I’m currently in a “mostly” Star Wars boycott (based on Wesley being “mostly” dead in The Princess Bride). Until they get rid of Kathleen Kennedy and get a real leader in there who understands the Star Wars universe, this is the only show I’m watching and I’m watching it with my arms crossed. Jon Favreau is directing a few of the episodes this season for the first time. He also wrote a ton of them.
Writer: Jon Favreau
Details: 56 minutes (longest episode yet!)
GSU has been coming up a lot lately in my consultations. Either the writer is asking me how it works or I’m suggesting how to utilize it better. It’s a common conversation piece when discussing screenplays. Well, this week’s episode of The Mandalorian taught me something. And that is that GSU is not a magic wand. You do not wave it over your unfinished document and all of a sudden it becomes great.
If anything, GSU is what makes your script OKAY. It’s there to give your screenplay a framework so that it works. It’s rare that GSU actually elevates a script into greatness. For that, you need a unique voice. Or you need a killer concept. Or you need some amazing plot twists that no one saw coming. Or you need an insane command of some major element of the craft – Hitchcock with suspense. GSU is a frame. It conveys to everyone, “This is a painting.” But you still have to paint the painting.
Mando is back at it again – trying to figure out what to do with Baby Yoda. I guess we’re extending that storyline out for two seasons then. That’s not going to cause repetition issues in the storytelling or anything
He hears of one mysterious Mandalorian hiding out on Tatooine so that’s where he goes. There he runs into a sheriff of a small town who’s wearing the Mandalorian armor (but is not a Mandalorian)! After a standoff, the sheriff tells Mando that he can have the armor if he helps him defeat a giant sand worm that’s terrorizing his town.
Mando agrees but explains they can’t do this alone. They’re going to need the help of some locals – SAND PEOPLE! Nobody on Tatooine likes sand people so there’s a lot of resistance. But they eventually form a temporary pact to kill this thing so they can all be happy. Spoiler alert – they succeed. And at the end of the episode, we see a man standing on a cliff watching. That man? Boba Fett.
First, let’s get to the obvious. This is a rerun. We had an episode early in the first season with the Jawas where they had to kill a giant bulldog lizard thing. We had an episode later in the season where they had to kill an AT-AT that was terrorizing a village. This is the same episode. I mean, what’s going on here? We’re not even 12 episodes into this show and we’re already repeating ourselves a second time?
This, if anything, is why they need to ditch this “villain of the week” format and start making the show serialized. Because there are only a set number of “missions” you can send your hero on. We need some nuanced story development. We need to get into these characters’ lives. Why make a Star Wars TV show if you’re just going to give us a series of mini-movies, all of which aren’t nearly as good as, you know, the ACTUAL MOVIES.
One of the reasons we’re not getting this expanded, epic type of storytelling is that the show is 99% told through one character’s POV. When you do that, it’s the very definition of non-epic. How can we get a sense of the biggest universe if we’re only ever seeing things through one character’s eyes? Look at Game of Thrones. We might cut to 7 different storylines in a single episode. Mando doesn’t do that which is why it’s being forced to repeat itself less than a dozen episodes in.
The funny thing is, this is exactly what feature films were made for. Since they’re only two hours long, you tend to want to tell the story through one character’s POV. You don’t have the time to bounce around to a lot of people. Yet Star Wars films have always bounced around. So in the movies, they’re doing the opposite of what they’re supposed to do and in the TV show they’re doing the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. Classic Star Wars.
Another thing I noticed was that Favreau has a strong case of genre blindspotting. This is when you love a genre so much that you lean into all its cliches without realizing it. Favreau is obsessed with Westerns. I’ve reviewed a Western script he wrote. He also directed Cowboys vs. Aliens. He loves the genre. When you’re obsessed with certain stories, it’s easy to fall into the habit of “I want to do that too.” So when you have two guys in a Western bar, you’re going to want to write that face-off showdown the way you’ve seen it in every other Western. Which is what happens between Mando and the Sheriff.
Now you may say, “C’mon Carson. It’s a Western. Those scenes are part of the language.” They are part of the language. But that doesn’t mean you can lazily script exact replicas of scenes we’ve already seen a million times. My rule with genre blindspotting is two-fold. One, limit the number of cliche moments as much as possible. If you want to throw a couple of tropes in your script that you’ve seen in other Westerns, be my guest. But if you do that three or four times in a single episode/movie, I promise you, your script will be labeled cliche.
Two, always look for a way to twist the cliche. It should never go down exactly as expected. In fact, one of the biggest advantages of using cliches is that the audience believes they already know what’s going to happen. You can use that expectation against them. A good example of this is the bar scene in the Cohen Brothers’ Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Between Buster’s small stature, laid back demeanor, propensity to talk a lot, and lack of a gun, the showdown between him and the other cowboy plays out anything but predictably.
If you made a list of all the things that I didn’t like in screenwriting, somewhere in the top 5 would be a script that goes exactly how you thought it would. That is the WORST. Cause it exposes you as a storyteller. You either a) don’t know what you’re doing. Or b) are so effing lazy that you’re not willing to do the hard work and find better options to all your story choices. Literally an 8 year old could’ve told you exactly what was going to happen in every minute of this episode. That’s how obvious it was.
So to say I’m frustrated would be correct. To say I’m surprised? Not really. Outside of Baby Yoda, Mandalorian has kept things so vanilla and so predictable that spotting an original plot point is akin to spotting John Boyega at Rian Johnson’s birthday party.
I’m not mad, though. Star Wars is facing much bigger questions, such as what it’s going to do with its movie division. They literally have zero plans going forward. Until they let us know what their next trilogy is going to be, we might as well all be stuck in the Sarlac Pitt, as my Star Wars fandom feels like it’s being slowly digested over a thousand years.
I’m not against setting a trilogy in the New Republic Era (200-300 years before the Prequels). Anything that forces writers to be creative and come up with new stories and new characters – I’d love that. But, honestly, I think Kennedy is so scared to make a decision right now that I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t get a feature Star Wars announcement for a couple of years. Which means I’m stuck with 700 more “creature of the week” Mandalorian episodes. Yay.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Tension comes from uncertainty. It comes from us not knowing what’s going to happen next. Is there a single person in the universe who didn’t know, when Mandalorian and the Sheriff squared off at the bar, that nothing bad was going to happen to either? If you don’t have genuine uncertainty in a situation, it’s extremely difficult to create tension.
