They pretty much blew their load with the fan service this season, obviously culminating with the big Luke cameo in the finale. Unless they come up with some substantive plot in season 3 it seems they may have a problem going forward. Fan service itself isn't a problem but fan service BY itself can quickly become one. I don't see the video game like structure carrying on much longer.
shareStar Wars is back on track, so fan service was probably part of the strategy.
sharePeople said the exact same thing about the Di$ney trilogy....
sharePeople said the Disney trilogy was on the right track because of Force Awakens.
The Last Jedi derailed it by trying to do something different.
Star Wars is primarily about space magic and space dogfights. It seems weird to say Mandalorian is all fan service when it leaves most of those two things out.
Season 2 was fantastic, up there with the original trilogy, you just like to whine about star wars even if its good.
shareHappy for you that you enjoyed it. I just don't share such blind enthusiasm. Fan service alone just doesn't do it for me.
shareIt has everything, fan service, good stories, new characters, its excellent, its a star wars fans wet dream, not sure what you want from star wars but i imagine it to be rather shite, enjoy.
shareBut....haven't you heard? Favreau and Filoni are the masters of star wars.
shareFine by me, and I've been a fan since 1977!
shareI didn't grow up with the OT so I just don't have that level of nostalgic connection. I was a only a casual fan until after watching the PT. For me personally it was the "world building" and "lore expansion" of the prequels that made me a bigger fan of Star Wars as a whole and definitely made me a bigger fan of the original films. It wasn't the fan service. Fan service alone can only carry you so far. The Di$ney trilogy is a stark reminder of this. Granted the show has so far avoided making the other disastrous mistakes of those films.
share"Fan service alone can only carry you so far."
True, that! But the thing is, "The Mandalorian" isn't offering fan service alone, it's offering a show that's solid and gripping in its own right, which I think is accessible to people who've never seen Star Wars, and which has greatly expanded the Star Wars universe.
And which has pulled tropes from all the hell over pop culture, particularly "lone gunfighter" western films, so why the hell shouldn't they pull some tropes and stuff from the Star Wars canon. A bit of fan service is just some extra icing decorations on a really tasty cake.
Agreed. It's also doing a lot of world building on top of that.
shareI do like some good solid worldbuilding going on behind the main action! It's one of the things I always loved about Star Wars, the production design is top notch and presents us with this entire believable working civilization.
The Sequel Trilogy needed more of it, and "Mandalorian" brings tons!
I am not sure what you mean with "fan service". Meeting the decades old expectations of the audience? Anything wrong with it? What's the difference of "fan service"? "Fan disturbance"? At least that's what Disney delivered with Ep.7-9...
shareThey showed a tie fighter scrap yard with repurposed AT-ATs, how dare they!
Feels pretty organic to me. It makes logical sense to have a scrap yard for all the Imperial stuff thats not needed and having war prisoners doing the work. Salvage and repurpose.
Yeah there was also a scene like this in that Jedi game that recently came out that I can't remember its name, it stars that black lesbian-looking chick who always seems to be taking on pro-Communist roles recently.
Anyway, I really liked the whole scrap yard sequences in both properties, because there is that lingering thought "Where does the Empire get all their equipment from and WHO builds it all?" now we know it's basically like our version of a privatized prison... but in space.
As far as I know the empire was raping planets, using slaves and contractors to build everything on the cheap.
The tie fighters were cheap and disposable, both ship and pilot. Made for short distance runs, very fast because they were bare bones. The cockpits didn't have any oxygen pumped into them, that's why the pilots had to wear the suits with pipes coming from the helmet to give the pilot oxygen.
Don't understand people whining about cheesy fan service. There's loads of decent world building and organic fan service.
As the show shows, it's never black and white. The Empire were space Nazis, genocide of the billions, enslaved whole planets. But on other planets they kept order and peace, when the Empire were dethroned there were power struggles and it ended up being worse than before for them.
Like with the sand people, they weren't just thrown in as a wink to the fans, they were integral to the plot and we found out a a lot about their background and how they fit into the universe. Its not black and white. As far as we knew the sand people were bad, humans good. The sand people are the indigenous peoples of that planet and the humans came along to rape their land. You can imagine why they had a stick up their butt. As far as we know the sand people could consider the human
invaders the same as galaxy does of the Empire.
The show opens a lot of doors for the politics and they mostly do a good job of not ramming it down your throats. Unlike the prequels where we had to sit through monologues about trade routes and politicians arguing, in Mando its weaved pretty nicely into the stories.
The show lets us see the politics at ground roots. The small town Olyphont was protecting that was took over the minute the Empire fell and like the freedom fighters in Chapter 15. At no point did the show tell us they were freedom fighters trying to blow up the cargo trucks and the showmakers trusted us to figure it out for ourselves. Then when the tie fighters came in to save the day the show cheered for the tie fighters with the victory music, even though historically we always root for the Empire to lose and in that elation, victory lap it also showed that the Empire soldiers were real people adding humanity to the "bad guys". Even though the victory we were celebrating was the killing of freedom fighters trying to protect their homeland.
In the same episode the republic prison scrap yard, the village where the Empire just ran their cargo trucks right through, an ex stormtrooper feeling anger after his battalion and lots of innocents were wiped out over 1 mans decision along with other many other elements in that episode that helped world building.
The show is building up there are no black and whites in the Star Wars universe.
"Fans" always complained, especially recently about Star Wars having zero substance. Star Wars is merely good, bad, black, white, Jedi, Sith, Death Star. The universe is thin, very small with no other avenues to go down other than "Jedis" and "blow up Death Star".
No substance to Star Wars? This show proves otherwise.
Now the whinos complain there's no substance without "Baby Yoda". The story is finished. Probably the same people complained that Baby Yoda was only created to sell toys, when there were no toys on the market at the time Baby Yoda was revealed at the peak of the hype. In fact, Disney missed a trick not to mass produce and have those suckers on shelves to purchase.
Now here is the substance we needed for the franchise to grow just like each Star Trek episode added more and more, layer upon layer.
Grey areas of who the good guys and bad guys are. This through line keeps creeping up all over the show which adds a lot of depth to the story and the universe.
Then you get people complaining they saw an AT-AT in the background of a scene set in that very same Universe. Or a cool character appeared to be included in the plot and future stories.
Unlike Rogue One where characters from the old movies appeared on screen, winked at the camera and we never saw them again.
Mandolorian is subverting my expectations building upon a world people said had no substance.
You make some excellent points, a few of which never crossed my mind.
However, I don't think it's so much that people are just whining about the potentiality of a Season 3 for The Mandalorian, so much as they're absolutely terrified that Kennedy and co., will ruin and ravage the good name of Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau's baby.
As you mentioned, there's a lot of lore to explore, and tons of world-building that took place just within the background or sub-plots of The Mandalorian. It's just as easy to explore that worldbuilding as it is to destroy it (viz., The Last Jedi).
So, in some ways, I can understand the apprehension of fans not wanting anymore from The Mandalorian as a series for fear of the whole thing going bust. And in many ways, I think I agree with them on that. I don't trust Disney to just let well enough alone and give the creators ample room to create and entertain.
Disney has made it absolutely clear that it's not about the money for them... it's about the message.
They would (and have) willingly tank(ed) a brand just to push their die-versity agenda and the degeneracy of the Rainbow Reich, even if it costs them billions and an entire generation of good will from fans.
I'm pretty sure if you ask most fans who don't want a third season for The Mandalorian, it's the fear of the show being SJW'd to the brim that keeps them up at night with cold sweats under their Yoda bed sheets, hugging their Jango Fett body pillow for dear life after ruminating on the possibility that Mando could bite the dust in the third season to a female-clad lesbian Mandalorian who wants to turn the planet Mandalore into a gender-neutral pit stop for alien transvestites.
So, if there aren't degenerates and perverts in charge of destroying Star Wars anymore, then newbies and fake fans call it fan service. "Where's muh subverted expectations? DERP!"
shareLot more fan service coming. I'm not actually sure why they veered from this angle in the first place. Rogue One was Fan Service: The Movie and that was the right track. I think the next few series and maybe seasons of this show (I doubt more of this is coming) are gonna be nothing but fan service. Build the trust with the fans, get all your production models in place for the universe of Star Wars, get all your crews trained and the right creative talents in place, then you can finally start playing around with new ideas. If you just hire a bunch of jackoffs and tell em to go make a Star Wars movie, you're gonna get the Disney Trilogy. LucasFilm had a whole legion of folks in place making shows and video games and books and they just threw all that crap out. It's baffling. They could have hit the ground running. I mean they built a freaking theme park and left the fan service out of it. The whole point of a theme park IS fan service.
shareI'm not telling anyone not to enjoy the show (I think it's "mostly" fine) or to reject fan service but I am saying that if that's ALL you ask of Star Wars then you are setting things up to be a disappointment. The greatness of Star Wars often came from taking risks and trying new things. The Empire Strikes Back (often cited as the best of the OT) is a prime example of this. Star Wars should be more than a nostalgic theme park of "member berries".
shareAgree with you. Very entertaining show. Great to good visuals . Good music .
Story wise , it's plain stupid . Mando is plain stupid and every episode from season 2 at least is riddled with nonsensical decisions by the main characters .
In season 3 storm troppers should just come pre-shot at this point , just drop them where mando and the other character are shooting .
For me it remains a guilty pleasure ,as long as i dumb myself down(aka turn my brain off).
Kinda remind me of the prequels, which i still enjoy , altough they are not verry good.
As an example : Are there any people that didn't thought that the most obvious decision against the krayt dragon was to strap a bantha with explosives and blow it up by remote ,instead of that retarded trap, which got a bunch of people killed?
FFS trowing a granede when it attacks with it's mouth open is better than what they come up with.
So ,fan service is required at this point to make you overlook the quality of the story and the stupidity of it.
It's not a great show, but a good show with many flaws. I can live with the flaws. It is a giant nerdfest, for sure. Having said that, it is now established as the flagship for the new Star Wars Universe. Like Arrow. So, lots of fan service was required not only to get the universe back on track, but for the coming spin-offs as announced by Disney.
share