TV Show Review – The Mandalorian Chapter 5

| by

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 and here’s episode 4.

Genre: Sci-fi/Fantasy

Premise: The Mandalorian gets stuck on Tatooine where he must help a young bounty hunter pursue a dangerous assassin.

About: This is Episode 5 of The Mandalorian. Only three episodes left! Star Wars trivia maven Dave Filoni is back in the driver’s seat. But unlike the pilot episode, he’s not just directing here, he’s writing too, making this the first episode not written by Jon Favreau.

Writer: Dave Filoni

Details: 30-35 minutes.

“Mando!”

I love the way Carl Weathers calls out to the Mandalorian. There’s something vocally pleasing about mimicking the way he says it.

But I’ll tell you what I don’t love.

Dave Filoni’s writing.

This episode is about what you’d expect from the Star Wars Trivia Guy. A jaunt down memory lane. Lots of old Star Wars lines and Star Wars spots. It’s a fan service party. I’m sorry but Filoni needs to be placed back in the cartoon side of Star wars. He works best in situations where he can give characters pink helmets and have everyone say, “I have a bad feeling about this” twice an episode.

I’m tempted to spend the next 2000 words ripping this episode apart, but I want to stay true to the purpose of these articles and focus on improving our television writing.

For those who didn’t see the episode, here’s a recap.

After Mando injures his ship in a space battle, he flies down for repairs on Tatooine! You know, from the original Star Wars! Once he lands, we meet the extremely cartoonish Rhea Pearlman who I know isn’t Rhea Pearlman but I’m going to call her Rhea Pearlman. Rhea Pealman is a space port mechanic or something. She tells Mando she can’t fix his ship without deniro and Mando doesn’t have any. Uh-oh. What’s a bounty hunter to do?

Mando leaves Baby Yoda and his viral memes in the ship to grab a beer at, you guessed it, the Cantina bar from Star Wars! There he meets Toro Calican. If that’s not a fan fiction Star Wars name, I don’t know what is. I bet I could find a better name on one of those Star Wars name generator websites. Actually, I’m going to test that theory. Hold on. ——- Back! Here’s the first one they gave me: Thes Lerann. Already better.

Toro Calican, played by someone who took his first acting class last week, is sitting in the exact seat where we first met Han Solo and even sits the same way Han Solo does!! Toro is a young bounty hunter who needs help with a bounty out by the Dune Sea (THE DUNE SEA!? WAIT, DIDN’T LUKE REFERENCE THE DUNE SEA IN THE ORIGINAL STAR WARS!?!?). He says he’ll split the payout with Mando, which will allow Mando to pay for his ship repairs and blow this joint.

They head out to the Dune Sea and get in a sniper battle with the assassin. Realizing they need to get closer, they wait til night and use flash-bang explosions to blind her gun site. This makes it so she can’t shoot them as they approach. Eventually they capture her and she smooth-talks Toto Barnacle into going after Mando. Fortunately, Mando sniffs it out and defeats Toto first. The end.

Oh, and then there’s a cliffhanger where we see a random character’s feet.

The big problem with this TV series right now is that the show doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. When you’re writing serialized television, you want to connect the episodes as much as possible. You want multiple characters pursuing multiple things. You want unresolved conflict between characters. You want overarching goals, immediate goals. You want new relationships to form, old ones to fall apart. You want conflict at every turn. And you want it all to exist within a giant web of connectedness. All of this helps your show feel like it has purpose.

So it’s strange that The Mandalorian is doing the opposite of all these things.

Each episode is singular. Not only in its mission, but with its characters. The press tour for this show focused on all of these actors who were going to be a part of this series. But so far, all of them are only getting one episode. It’s bizarre.

We continue to watch because we’re Star Wars fans and this is a new way to enjoy the franchise. But they need to get their bantha s%$# together. What is the ultimate goal of this show? There’s no big bad guy. There aren’t any real unresolved conflicts between Mando and other characters. Maybe Greef Carga, but come on. He’s had 5 minutes of screen time.

And that’s another issue with the show. Every drama I’ve ever known has been in that 48 to 60 minute length. The reason for that is that dramas are about character and it takes time to develop characters. You have to experience them in a lot of different situations and witness a lot of their conversations in order to connect with them. We’re not doing any of that. When you combine that approach with these short individualized [side] quests, the experience feels as empty as talking to a droid.

It’s funny because one of the things I was worried about going into this series was whether Star Wars could work as a “talking heads” show. Yet here I am now begging for more talking heads. If we’re not invested in multiple character storylines in a show, we’re eventually going to tune out. Focusing on a single hero’s storyline is a feature game. This is television.

Okay, back to Filoni. Everything in this episode from the characters to the dialogue was cheesy and cartoonish. However, if you look back at the original Star Wars, you could argue that it’s cheesy and cartoonish as well. A major storyline in the second film is a man hunched over in a tiny hut talking to a green frog creature who speaks backwards. But the original Star Wars is still a thousand times better than this episode. So there’s a clear line between good cheesy and cartoonish and bad cheesy and cartoonish. Where is that line and how do you know if you’ve crossed it?

I think it’s a matter of degree.

If you create overly goofy characters, it’s hard to rein them in to anything approaching authenticity. The two characters Filoni introduced into this episode were Toto Barnacle and Rhea Pearlman. Rhea is WAAAAAY over the top. And Toto is WAAAAAY cheesy.

Interestingly, they’d probably work well in a cartoon. Cartoons embrace exaggeration whereas live action requires a sense of grounded-ness. Cartoon characters don’t possess the necessary depth to make you believe that they exist outside of the moments we see them. For example, can you imagine an average day with the Rhea Pearlman character? Of course not. She wasn’t constructed to exist in real life. She was constructed to bounce off the walls and give Mando dime store life lessons in five minutes of screen time. If you want characters who feel like real people (or real aliens!) you need to think of them beyond the scenes that you write for them.

And, actually, a great exercise is to sit down and write a typical day that your character goes through. Once you’re forced to think about the mundane moments of your character’s life, that’s when you really start to understand them. Filoni clearly hasn’t done that. And that’s why Toto sounds so cliche. You can’t get original lines out of a cartoon character. You only find original dialogue through a fully lived life.

That friend of yours who always seems to come up with the funniest most original observations – that didn’t come out of nowhere. His extensive life experiences shaped his reality and, over time, all of that built into a unique world view. It’s the same thing with characters. The more you know about them, the deeper the well there is to pull dialogue from. The less you know about them, the more you’ll rely on cliches. This is a monster point so I want to stress it:

The majority of generic and/or cliche dialogue comes from a lack of understanding of the characters speaking. The more you know about someone, the more specific their lines will be, moving you further and further away from cliche.

If there’s one thing I want you to take away from this misadventure, it’s the importance of character in television. Spend more time coming up with your characters. Try to get to know their pasts as much as possible. Think about the relationships of your characters in your show. Make them complicated and interesting and full of unresolved conflict. Think about their individual storyline throughout the season and think about how it will weave in and out of other characters’ storylines. And think about the arcs of your supporting characters. In features, it’s all about the hero. But in TV, everybody needs to arc and so everybody needs to be on their own difficult journey. That’s not happening in The Mandlorian, and if it doesn’t start happening soon, this show is in major trouble.

[x] What the hell did I just watch?

[ ] wasn’t for me

[ ] worth the stream

[ ] impressive

[ ] genius

What I learned: One of the reasons I’m not a huge Stranger Things fan is that, like The Mandalorian, they depend too much on fan service. Everything is a reference to something else. I like it when writers do the hard work and come up with fresh ideas. However, the one thing Stranger Things has over The Mandalorian is that it cares a lot more about character development. There’s a real desire to get to know what makes those characters tick that I’m not seeing in this show. You can only get by for so long on plot in TV. Sooner or later, you have to let us into multiple characters’ lives.

What I learned 2: Singular POV doesn’t work well in television. The Mandalorian is a Singular POV TV show. We see every scene through the hero’s eyes. The reason this is so hampering is because television depends heavily on great characters and if we’re limiting the point of view to just one person, we’ll only get to know the other characters through the limited point of view of our hero’s eyes. I mean even Star Wars cuts around to different points of view and that’s a feature. This is a strange choice that’s slowly killing the show.