The Womandalorian: Genocide and B-e-e-e-w-b Armor

Baby Yoda devours the unborn!!!

Proud Mandalorian women forced to dance on the pole!!!

And I thought this season was going to be dull. 

I honestly hadn’t planned to revisit the Mandalorian before this season was over. After all, these days people tend to binge something like this, all at once, instead of watching it show by show. So, it makes more sense to wait until the season is in the can. 

In this case, I don’t think I can do that and stay in front of the power curve. Because Mando has been blowing up on Twitter.  

For the benefit of the three of you out there who haven’t been given a free Disney Plus subscription in order to boost their numbers, this season got off to a pretty dull start. The first stop was on Tatooine and Tatooine is fundamentally a dull place. Anakin was right, it’s just sand that’s all that’s really there. It’s a great place for getting out of but a silly place to return to if you want something interesting to happen.

Timothy Olyphant made for a fairly interesting character in the Marshall. However, the rest really wasn’t all that intriguing.  It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t all that engaging either. There was a big CGI Fight with a big CGI monster and seriously, no matter how well it’s done that hasn’t been interesting for 20 years. 

The second episode had more going for it. Here’s the plot; a frog-woman needed transportation to the planet her husband was on so he could fertilize her eggs. Please note, she’d already laid the eggs in a jar. And for reasons of MacGuffin science, her eggs couldn’t go into hyperspace and remain viable. In exchange for the trip, her husband would tell him where the Mandalorian colony is there. Fine. 

After the opening credits, Mando had a run-in with the space cops.  A couple of X-Wings pulled up on either side of him, and I have to say, it was a pretty good interpretation of an awkward traffic stop. You know damn good and well that your idiot stoner college roommate had torched one up in your car last night. And you are not certain, that you remembered to empty the Roach out of the ashtray. Mando had been running with his transponder off because his ship had been involved in a jailbreak against a New Republic prison barge. 

The more notorious (and pretty funny) bit was Baby Yoda and the Frog Lady’s eggs.  When BY first sees the eggs, he places his little puppet hand on the jar, and they sort of moved towards him. Giving you the impression that the little guy is in a peaceful and harmonic touch with all life in the universe. And then eats one of the eggs.  And he loved it! He kept going for them every chance he got like a 2-year-old circling the cookie jar. 

And Twitter completely lost its shit.  

“OMG!!! Baby Yoda is committing genocide on a kid’s show.”

“Do you know how upsetting this is to a woman undergoing in vitro fertilization!!!”

OK, as for the first the Frog Lady had made it explicitly clear, that the eggs were the last of her own personal bloodline. Not the very last ones in her entire species. Apparently, she’d been a career Frog Lady and hadn’t had time for kids until it was almost too late.  Naturally, this is everyone else’s problem including the Mandalorian’s.  

Not to be a total nerd here but given the number of (I can’t believe I have to stress this) unfertilized eggs, a certain amount of them were going to prove unviable. Clearly, the survival strategy that evolution had handed her species involves acceptable losses. Or they have a hell of an over population problem, in which case Baby Yoda was a bit of an unsung hero. Maybe he did know exactly what he was doing by eating the eggs. 

As for the second, anyone who has had a toddler in their life, could identify with the problem little hands stuffing whatever was available into their mouths. 

For crap sake it’s a TV show! Learn to tell the difference between a melodrama about a Frog Lady in space and real life.

The drama over the next show actually managed to be sillier. GamerGate hustler, Anita Sarkeesian, noticed that a 40-year-old woman wearing a helmet was still more attractive than she was. So, she complained about it on Twitter.

For those that don’t remember she’s the gaming expert that couldn’t tell the difference between Fallout and Doom. Basically, she’s a pop culture remora fish.  She’ll notice something is popular, then denounce it. The terrified SJW in charge of it will then bring her on board as a paid consultant. After her advice ruins whatever franchise, she’s been allegedly paid to improve (Witness, The Last of Us 2) she moves on. I guess she’s now heard about Star Wars for the first and decided maybe this is a thing. What she doesn’t seem to be aware of is that this is a team that is in a rebuilding year. It’s already been ruined by SJWs and the franchise is desperately trying to claw back a few fans. 

I think she’s going to have to go somewhere else because this time she got fan bombed. On the grounds that her objecting to boob armor was possibly the stupidest thing anybody had ever heard of in their lives. Admittedly, this is the year 2020 and all that means is that they probably hadn’t had their morning coffee yet when they read it.  

The 40-year-old woman in question is Katie Sackhoff.  She had voiced the character of Bo Katon in Star Wars the clone wars and Star Wars Rebels. 

Giving her the live action part was a pretty clever bit of fanservice that actually works. However, the obvious baggage is that they had to recreate Bo Katon’s appearance from the animated series. To include the aforementioned boob armor.

Things that I liked:

I liked the spider monsters in the ice cavern.  Perfect CGI (like the Krayt Dragon from the first episode) just isn’t interesting. Not anymore. But there was a certain degree of imperfection in the spider monsters’ design as well as their movement.  And the imperfections made them just a bit more realistic. 

Also, I liked the crane Walker in the harbor. It was a nice bit of background material consistent with established lore that had never really been worked with before. It made sense that there’d be more than just military applications for the technology. It helped make the world seemed just a bit more familiar and lived in. 

Things I didn’t like:

The time compression in the third episode. This season the first episode was 55 minutes and the second was 42 minutes, which is fine. But the third episode was only 36 minutes long. Obviously given the money that went into this production it’s not going to stay a Disney Plus exclusive forever. Eventually, it’s going to go on to other venues that are going to use commercials. Cool, I get it. But at 36 minutes it really did feel like 10 minutes’ worth of story had been chopped out of the show.  That is a LOT of supporting material out the airlock when it was probably only a 46-minute show, to begin with.  Everything felt rushed. Especially when you consider all the major plot elements that were introduced in that episode. 

The biggest being Bo Katon, the deposed Queen of Mandalore, has now entered the show.  We now know that the reason that Mando never takes his helmet off, is that he was raised in an extremist religious faction of the Mandalorians. Which is why Pablo Pascal is pissed off that everyone else gets to take their helmets off but not him. And finally, that Bo Katon is desperate to retrieve the Dark Saber from Moff Gideon. That was a lot of plot to pack into something that was barely over a half-hour. 

Next, The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special.

Pray for the Dark Herald.