Welcome to The Mandalorian Teleplay Chronicles. I will be reviewing every episode of The Mandalorian’s first season with an eye towards helping writers learn TV writing. Here’s a link to my review of the first episode here, a link to the second episode here, a link to episode 3, episode 4, and episode 5.
Genre: Sci-Fi Fantasy (Half-Hour Drama TV??)
Premise: This week, Mando teams up with four fellow bounty hunters to spring a prisoner from a prison ship. In the process he learns that they plan to leave him behind.
About: We are six episodes in. Before this episode, we had two good episodes and three bad ones. The good news is the Rick Famuyiwa, who directed my favorite episode of the series (Episode 2 – Jawa Adventure), is back in the director’s seat. This week, he’s also writing, which is good news if only because it means he’s taken Dave Filoni out of the mix. Famuyiwa is joined by Christopher Yost, who penned Thor Ragnarok. Heads up for Mandalorian fans. Next week’s episode comes out Wednesday. Then they’re off for a week. Then the final episode is on the Friday of the week after.
Writers: Rick Famuyiwa and Christopher Yost
Details: 40 minutes? 42 minutes? (the credits are 80 minutes long every episode so it’s hard to determine the actual run time of these things)
I’m done with this show.
I mean, I’ll watch and review the last two episodes. And I’m sure they’re going to add some cliffhanger at the end of the season (Boba Fett? Jabba the Hut’s son?) that will make me check out the first episode of Season 2. But after that, I’m done.
This is not what I was hoping for at all. I thought we were going to get an expansion of the Star Wars universe with new and fun interconnected storylines. Instead we get this cartoon format “adventure-of-the-week” b.s. Literally 99% of the people who watch this show want an interconnected story. But of course that’s not the way Lucasfilm operates. Give the fans what they want?? Hezell no, that would make sense. We’ll make the Star Wars we want to make and you’ll suffer for it.
Some of you may say that I’m just mad that they didn’t give me what I was expecting. No no no. They legit hoodwinked us. They introduced baby yoda and this mysterious cloning guy – implying that we were entering a larger season-long story. Now Baby Yoda is nothing more than a meme. His inclusion in each episode is a strain. He’s a plot point that needs a character to say “You stay here” for 30 minutes while the episode happens.
And Friday’s episode? Friday’s episode was not Star Wars. Friday’s episode was Deep Space Nine Wars. It was Star Trek, complete with bad make-up and awful acting (the devil guy and purple girl especially). That’s another thing. I never watched an episode of Game of Thrones and thought, “They skimped on money there.” Yet I was constantly annoyed by the cheap production value in this episode. They built the entire episode around a single freaking hallway! They built ONE HALLWAY and kept running around in it.
For those who didn’t see the episode, count yourselves lucky. It follows Mando as he reconnects with an old terrible actor who always seems to arrive on a show’s worst episode. I remember this actor when he appeared on Lost and screwed up a few episodes of that show. Anyway, he puts together a team for Mando to go break a prisoner out of a prison ship. The team consists of Bill Burr, Twi-Lick, Devil Man, and Zero Bot.
They infiltrate the ship, go break the guy out, and we learn that the prisoner is Man Twi-Lick, the Twi-Lick woman’s brother! Somehow Man Twi-Lick’s makeup is even worse than his sister’s. Then, wouldn’t you know it – they turn on Mandalorian! Locking him up. They *could* just leave, of course. But no, they hang around for a bit, allowing time for the Mandalorian to escape and then hunt them down one by one. The end.
Last week, in the comments, I was arguing with a reader about isolated episode TV versus storyline TV. My argument was you should write something that connects. Almost EVERY SINGLE SHOW on TV today has a through-line.
Why? Well, you have to remember why they did it differently back in the day. It was because there wasn’t a medium that allowed people to re-watch shows. The only time a show was on was when it came on TV. If you missed it, you missed it. TV execs back then were worried that if someone missed an episode and that episode was critical to understanding the show, then the next episode would be confusing, dissuading the viewer from watching future episodes. The solution was to make every episode its own isolated thing (this is why sitcoms used to be so huge – they were ideal for this format).
But then DVDs came along and people were buying entire seasons of shows and so it made sense to create more of a through-line from show to show. Then the game really changed when Lost came out. That was the first show where you had to watch every single episode to know what was going on. After that, the further advent of “watch a show whenever you want” occurred when streaming arriverd. Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones became mega-hits specifically because you had to watch every episode to find out what happened.
Long story short, making The Mandalorian an “every episode is a standalone episode” show makes no sense. ESPECIALLY because it’s Star Wars, the biggest fictional world ever created. Why are you doing this? It makes it feel like a Saturday Morning cartoon, which it ISN’T. It’s a live-action 20 million dollar an episode show. Not only that, the seasons are SHORT! You don’t have to come up with a 20 episode arc here. It’s just 8 episodes! You can’t connect 8 episodes??
It’s frustrating and it’s maddening and it’s sad. It’s sad because this show is going to die. Probably not this season. But next season for sure. It’s been exposed. Everybody who talks about it says the same thing. “Yeah it’s kind of good… um… but why aren’t the episodes longer and why isn’t the story connecting?”
And look, if every episode was actually good, we’d be having a different conversation. If you somehow made this archaic format work for the show, I’d be all for it. But this isn’t Saturday Morning Cartoons. You have a rabid fan base desperate for a Star Wars with substance and you’ve given them the opposite. I don’t get it. I don’t get how they could’ve miscalculated so badly.
But okay, let’s get at least SOME writing tips from this abomination of an episode. What you have in today’s episode is a heist plot. A group of guys go in and try to retrieve something from a place where it’s theoretically difficult to retrieve that something. So that’s what we’re critiquing. Did they do a good job of executing that story?
I’ll start by saying this. A lot of writers will tell you that heists should never be about what’s being taken. That it should be about the characters and how they go about getting the job done. This is bad advice and I think I know where it comes from. It comes from the fact that all heist plots used to be about money. And money is boring. So it would make sense to say it shouldn’t just be about the money.
But heists have evolved over time and now heists can be about retrieving anything. That’s something you should take advantage of. Cause it means you can use the object being retrieved as a means to manipulate the plot. And what I like about this setup, in theory, is that by making the heist a prisoner, you’ve got more to work with in terms of plot evolution. You can make the prisoner a surprise. The prisoner can also have their own plans, want to do their own thing that doesn’t line up with the heister’s plans. So the setup to this episode isn’t a bad one.
But one of the principles of good writing is to find something new in an old setup. So if you’re going to be the 800,000th person to write a heist show/movie, you should add a new idea to the mix. There was none of that here. The execution here was so basic — THERE WAS ONE HALLWAY! — that we were ahead of the show the entire time.
One of the ways I measure good writing versus bad writing is to ask, “Is this something the average amateur writer could’ve come up with?” And the answer with this episode is undoubtedly yes. There is literally nothing in this episode that Joe Schmoe over at the Grove Starbucks couldn’t have come up with. It follows the beats so religiously that it’s practically begging to disappear the second it’s over.
And if that isn’t bad enough, there is ZERO resistance in this plot. There is never a doubt that they’re going to be able to get the guy out. These Battlestar Galactica droids were about as menacing as a can of Raid. Now some of you may say, “Well, how difficult really was it for the characters in the original Death Star?” I remember specifically feeling like they were f&*%d in that trash compactor. There’s one shot in particular where the walls are coming so close to each other that the edge of the moving wall starts covering the frame. I was legitimately worried that they weren’t going to make it.
That never happened here. Not once.
Then, on top of that, the show is way too short for this kind of storyline! This is the whole reason why you need to be connecting your storylines. You’re trying to set up six brand new characters AND create an entire heist story in 40 minutes?? Come on. Look at yourself in the mirror. Be real. If you’ve been building up to this for two episodes, you’re golden. But squeezing it into one episode? It’s disaster sauce.
One of the clearest examples of this is when Mando gets locked in the cell. The show is so short that they didn’t have time to establish that he was stuck there before they had to write a scene of him breaking out. And the problem with that is, if you don’t first establish that he’s REALLY STUCK THERE, that it’s GOING TO BE DIFFICULT TO GET OUT — maybe he tries a few things and they don’t work — if you don’t do any of that, then it feels too easy when he gets out. We don’t feel like he’s earned it at all. It’s only happening because the plot needs it to.
In retrospect, it’s clear to me that Favreau wrote those first three episodes as a self-contained story and didn’t have a plan afterwards. And we’re seeing that play out here. Each episode is less and less connected to the previous ones. And that’s too bad because Rise of Skywalker comes out Friday and it’s looking iffy. So I was hoping this series would take the Star Wars mantel and give us the great adventures and cool stories that Star Wars fans deserve. That isn’t the case.
[x] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the biggest misconceptions is that the “bunch of bad guys joining together to go after something” is a slam-dunk show/movie setup. Just like any idea, you still need to do the work to make it work. You still need to create original characters that we’re interested in. You still need to make the heist itself unique in some way. You still need some genuine surprises along the way. A lot of people point to the fact that The Dirty Dozen was so great. But how many versions of that setup have been awful since? Way more than have been successful. Does anybody remember Suicide Squad? Never ever rest on your concept. You are starting from a better place than a lame idea – you’ve got that going for you. But you still have to put everything you’ve got into the story and characters if it’s going to shine.
