Originally published at: I found "The Mandalorian" season 2.5's Boba Fett sub-plot distracting but Cad Bane was worth it | Boing Boing
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A fistful of credits
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Bringing back Corey Burton to do the voice was key to me to making Cad work. While I would have been ok with a more recognizable face (my dream was Chow Yun Fat) part of what made Cad work so well in animation was Burton’s sublime performance. He made what to me originally was an over the top pastiche of Lee Van Cleef into something sinister and vile.
Now that it’s all done I will admit as one of the shows biggest cheer leaders around here, overall it didn’t fully achieve the greatness I hope it would. Some great stuff (I really enjoyed the flashbacks) but the level of quality between the Mando/Grogu eps and the Boba centric ones were night and day. I almost wish Mando wasn’t even brought back this season as he was just so Boba’s own episodes would have been treated kinder. If there is to be a second book of Boba, then perhaps things will improve. Until then, bring on Ahsoka, ObiWan and Mando s3.
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Was Cad Bane worth it?
It was just Moar Callbacks. He apparently was from the animated series, but you still have to make him relevant in this series (which he wasn’t). He was just a Western callback [to non-animated fans, a simple, blatant appropriation at that] and a SWCW callback [to animated fans], who shows up, has some unexplained history with Boba Fett, and is rather quickly dispatched by Boba Fett. There is a termination but no closure. Then, Baby Grogu shows up, having picked “Mandalorian” over “Jedi”! So, Grogu picked weird face-hiding cult of vigilante violence and not weird theocratic religion that fetishizes their telekinesis. Yay?
Plus, can we talk about the final laser battle? First I learn: when you are fighting at a massive disadvantage, here’s what you do: leave cover and go to the center of the road and start trying to fire in all directions at once. Then, versus 2 gigantic, force-field-shielded, robot droids that have 4 powerful laser-cannons (each), don’t worry! They apparently “must” close to point blank distance first, and even then, they will always miss!
Exactly— it’s not that the callbacks are bad per se, it’s that there’s nothing but callbacks. Lucas, in some bullshit, pseudo-doc made during Episode I sagely talks about the “poetry” of the callbacks: it’s nothing but uninspired repetition because the well has run dry.
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What? In a whole sprawling series that is at its core nothing but call backs to what has come before? Why I never!
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I had chuckle at the beginning of the episode when Fennec Shand overconfidently proclaimed that they had all possible avenues of enemy attack covered and there was no way the Pikes could take them by surprise.
Sure thing. They have a galaxy-spanning criminal empire and you’ve got like seven people spread out across an entire city, with a vague but unconfirmed hope that some space ranchers show up as backup. They must be shaking in their boots.
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As Seinfeld taught us about Good Naked/Bad Naked, this sprawling franchise amply demonstrates that there are Good Callbacks and Bad Callbacks.
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I enjoyed the flashbacks…really liked the tusken plot up untilthey just needlessly killed them off. This entire show felt like it was created just for episodes 5 and 6 plus the return of Grogu. This show did such a bad job of telling a Boba story that I completely forgot about the Rancor, in the end, I was really hoping Fennec or Bane would have killed Boba as they were far more interesting characters. I really liked some episodes of this show, but they had no cohesive plot holding it together.
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Fett and Djarin aren’t the brilliant tacticians i thought they were, if all your blasters aren’t penetrating force fields then it seems the solution is to continue firing at the impenetrable force fields while rolling out the way a bit or ducking behind some boxes. Well a bunch of stuff happened i suppose - so that’s what a Rancor can do when let loose which was fun to watch and for all the talk of Cad Bane he got a bit cocky with his monologuing didn’t he? Much like Oberyn did when fighting The Mountain. Just all kind of unsatisfying really and to me those cyborg bikers feels like they’ve come from an entirely different universe and seem so out of place.
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Bacta tank for the win!!
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at a certain point it seems boba should just be fighting from inside the tank, dragging it around wherever he goes, popping his head out to make a clean shot.
( i will fully admit tuning out around episode 3, so forgive me if i invented something that actually happened )
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Well with Favreau on board why not just make a Mark One Ironman Bacta suit?
If you do want to see anything, just watch 5 and 6 and then the cliff hanger you are left with can be easily figured out.
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Mods. The people riding around on Vespa-equivalents heavily into body modification are canonically called “mods”. sighs
The different universe you’re thinking of is a long long way into the future, in a galaxy far far away.
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Different genre maybe, it’s like somebody copy and pasted them straight from Cyberpunk 2077.
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I want to know what the song in the mid-credits was. My google-fu wasn’t up to the task.
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It was notable they gave the shaggy one-armed mod chick as much time as they did and hid Shand and Fett for the bulk of the episode.
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Those were some good Mando episodes…agree the rest of the season can be skipped. The first two episodes started a slow paced but decent boba flashback series but the show never established a plot beyond that.
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