Mando is losing its luster for me

I want to be very clear here...
At no point is it my view that Mando is a show that has failed to communicate its narrative, or convey the narrative arc of its primary protagonist.

The fact that the show conveys character development and a narrative arc does not change the effect of the (sometimes wildly) off-topic distractions this show has in it.
Look at it rephrased about something else. Let's say a painting series about ice cream.

For a painting series featuring such a limited subject material that can't emote, I would argue that it's actually rather remarkable how much emotion the ice cream conveys over the course of the series of paintings. Despite the many 'distractions' (of naked women eating ice cream, which the painting series did not first include) you mention, I would opine that the overriding power of the painting series still shines through.

Perhaps.
But 2 points.
1) If you don't find shoving naked women into paintings to be all that remarkable, then the provocativeness or marvel of their inclusion isn't going to be all that interesting to you (yes, I am comparing Luke Skywalker showing up in Mando as equal to tossing naked women into paintings about ice cream).
2) A painting series about ice cream managing to be about ice cream isn't all that impressive as a bar.

Likewise:
1) If you don't find all of the "Star Wars greatest hits" to be all that remarkable, then the provocativeness or marvel of their inclusion isn't going to be all that interesting to you.
2) A show about a character managing to be about that character isn't all that impressive as a bar.

And on point 2, I think Mando has far more good qualities than that it at least manages to convey a powerful narrative about its primary protagonist.
That's every other show out there right now - everyone is tossing around powerful protagonists right and left. Our television is littered with "powerful shows" like Europe is littered with castles.

I've talked about those qualities a few times, and they are what really impresses me and draws me back to the show. Not it's "powerful narrative" (that's actually a turn off for me at this point - I'm kind of sick of that attribute being steroided).

Keeping the story squarely on the subject of the series was never a part of what I discussed. I never claimed it wasn't about Mando as a narrative arc.

What I did say was that it repeatedly focused momentarily, and intermediately in length, on other things than Mando and displayed them in ways that focused on the object or subject's wow-factor to audience minds outside of the context of Mando at a rate of frequency that I found to be unenjoyable, and that some of them weakened the standard narrative devices at times in exchange for those contrivances. If you are a fan of those objects and subjects, then it is not going to be a problem. However, if you are not interested in those objects and subjects, then the focus on those objects and subjects will be a problem because every time the lens focuses on them for their cool-factor in-and-of-themselves (even if that focus on their cool-factor in-and-of-themselves is being mixed with narratively relevant motives) your enjoyment and interest level will drop.

Just because something has been made to have relevance to Mando doesn't mean the primary reason that it's there is not because of the wow-factor that thing has to the mind of the audience outside of Mando.

You can have someone drive a Ferrari in your story. It doesn't matter how relevant it is to the show, a part of the reason that that Ferrari is there is because it's a Ferrari.

Top Gun doesn't have F-14's because the narrative needed F-14's. They wanted a show about F-14's and found a way to get a story written that made F-14's relevant to the story.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I wasn't using the early episodes of Supernatural as good examples. I was saying that it took them a while to get the balance right, and that for the first couple of seasons it was more episodic and sporadic (at times painfully so).

A good example of episodic is the early X-Files, which didn't bother with any narrative arc for either main character.
Supernatural tried to squeeze both episodic and serial narratives into the show, which is what Mando is doing, and wobbled quite unsteadily for a while until it got it right, around season 5 or so when it figured out how to juggle both together without having to awkwardly drop the ball on one or the other - or suddenly shove exposition into walls of dialogue to catch everyone up to speed on something they were supposed to care about that they had no idea existed before the wall of dialogue.

I wouldn't care one bit, and would prefer it, if Mando were like Knight Rider, but it chose to attempt to be like Dr. Who or later seasons of Supernatural.

The problem that I have births out of this because episodic serial narratives (that is, they do both at the same time) are already hard enough; trying to smash in tours of the universes' "greatest hits" on top of that is an incredibly difficult and challenging chore - one that makes any writer, no matter how good they are, struggle to balance three competing components instead of ether one or two.

Further, again, I really don't care what other people think of the show in this regard.
The subject is how the show is going for me. Not other people.

Which is why I made the point about Top Gun and F-14's.

It really doesn't matter if it was set up. It doesn't change what the creator's motivations were.
You can make anything relevant. It's not like they needed Luke. They wanted Luke and made it relevant for him to be there.

Just like they wanted Fett and made him relevant to be there.
It's fiction. You can do anything you want. There's no hand forcing you to make any object or subject the focus of attention. It's your creative choice as to what you put in there. If you set it up to bring in something you want, and someone doesn't care one bit about that thing you brought in, then for them, no matter how logically justifiable you made that tangent, it won't interest them and any amount of time you spend focusing the camera there will be wasted time to that person.

I'm that person.

Also...I call bull on this being an absolute state, and I do because of one very simple example.


This scene has nothing to do with Mando.
It exists purely for the fans of the universe's enjoyment regardless of Mando.

More to the point, anyone can justify just about anything.
Just because there's a narrative thread one can link between things doesn't mean that the link makes something that occurs on screen any more palatable.

Showgirls is an entire narrative that makes it entirely logical why you would be staring at the naked body of Elizabeth Berkley, but that doesn't mean that you'll be good with it if you don't want to be staring at her naked body.

Now imagine for a moment, that you tuned in to watch something other than that and that's what you kept getting hit in the face with?

Imagine you tuned into a film about the NON-TOP TIER SUPERHERO stuff of a superhero universe and you kept getting smacked in the face with TOP TIER SUPERERO stuff...regardless how logical it is.

And for the record, I was not a fan of Grogu from the onset. I REALLY didn't tune into Mando to find out more about Yoda's species.
He's funny and fits the bill as the orphan token innocent, but man I would have really rather that been anything other than a Yoda poke.

He's actually a great example of off-focus tangents. Probably the single best one, really.
What toy was flying off the shelves? What was everyone suddenly obsessed with?
Mando? Nope. Not Mando. No one was drying up shelves of his toys and flooding the internet with his memes. There were some, but no where close to the rocket ship that became the "Baby Yoda" fad. Now it was all about Baby Yoda and his Force power problems. Mando was relevant in so far as he related to Baby Yoda.

And yeah, the narrative still worked on Mando as the focus, no kidding. But again, that entirely misses the point.

Star Wars fans, above anyone else, are extremely well aware of this as the amount of logical hoop jumping that exists in Star Wars films to plop certain things on the screen is probably more than any other franchise on record, and just because it's logical in the narrative as a point of exposition hasn't made things that some fans don't find enjoyable suddenly worth it, or remove the experience of disinterest go away for them.

You can't reason why fans shouldn't really hate every time the camera plops onto Ewoks or Jar Jar for those who do. I mean, you can, but it's also try that those throw ins are straight up structural weaknesses, and Lucas full well knew it and openly repeatedly accepted those hits in trade off for what he was getting out of it in his ambitions - which is, and I want to be massively clear here, ABSOLUTELY FINE.

There's ZERO requirement for Mando to be structurally solid and impervious to all disinterests!
That's impossible! You have to pick what it is you're doing.

What they are doing is a show that's more Encyclopedia Star Warsica than it is not, and THAT means I'm not going to be as interested as would otherwise be.

You can't reason me into an emotional investment that I simply do not have.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I think that was done quite a ways back.

Irrelevant to the point.

Irrelevant to the point.

Irrelevant to the point.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

There is no requirement for Luke to save the day.
Nor for the adoption to be Luke.
Nor is there any for the adoption to exist at all.

It's fiction. It can go anywhere they want.

But the main point wasn't that Luke exists. It's that if Luke shows up to swing sabers, nothing else at that moment has any attention - whatever show you were watching is now the "Luke's swinging sabers!" show.

Cheers,
Jayson