My Grouse With the Mandalorian

I’m sick of this show. I keep watching this show.

1. That Fucking Helmet

There’s no point casting Pedro Pascal if you’re not going to show us his face. I’ve only ever seen Pedro Pascal before in Narcos, and he was expressive and very watchable – far more than his co-star. But in this show, it could be anyone under that helmet and we wouldn’t know the difference.

To make things worse, his voice is helmet-ized as well, a tinny sound that makes him even less relatable. The filmmakers have cleverly played Grogu as a super-cute, super-expressive counter-balance, along with the comic Amy Sedaris – but that’s become insufficient and stale now. And Grogu doesn’t speak at all… so there’s that.

I get the appeal of the helmet – for a ten-year old. When I was a kid, I had many Star Wars action figures. My favourites by far were Boba Fett and the Biker Scout from ROTJ – because their helmets and suits were just so cool. But a child playing with those dolls can make up rich characters and story in his or her head, which is very different from seeing those same dolls on screen.

A recent episode hammered home the the “helmet problem”: There’s a scene where a group of Mandalorians is talking to each other to discuss the rescue of a boy kidnapped by a giant beast. The scene was god-awful. Devoid of any tension, any weight – because there are no faces and hence no acting. Just human-shaped beings making voices and nodding.

Think back on the three scenes to date in which Dinn has removed his helmet, and you realise that those scenes had 100x more impact than every other scene of his to date.

2. Dinn is in a Cult

A recent scene shows what daily life is like for the Mandalorian “covert” (the faction of which Dinn is a part). A little boy is shown undergoing some kind of ceremony, and an adult man gives him a helmet and solemnly intones: “From this day forth, you will never remove your helmet”. The scene is played like a moving rite of passage, but it’s child abuse. A child being groomed by adults into covering his face… for the rest of his life. And if he does show his face, they will shun him. Uh huh. A cult. Bo Katan even calls it that back in season 2, but somehow that’s gotten lost. Instead the cult is being celebrated.

The Dinn character has a slight “passive protagonist” problem in this context too (if you’ve read Robert McKee’s amazing book “Story”, you’ll know what I mean). The cult is happening to him, abusing him – and he’s going along with it, he doesn’t realise it, he’s desperate for their approval, his actions are reactions to that.

How cool would the following storyline be instead:

Dinn rejoins the covert, but after witnessing how they treat the “younglings”, thinks back to his own childhood, and starts to have misgivings. This might not be “the way” after all. He finally realises he was raised by a cult, and he doesn’t have to take it any more. When it becomes apparent that they expect Grogu to follow suit, he says no – he’s not going to do that to Grogu. He fights off the cult with Grogu, and removes the helmet – it becomes just a piece of armour he uses during battle. They are happy and have many adventures together…

3. Laconic Male Protagonist Cliche

As if the helmet wasn’t bad enough, the filmmakers also chose to make Dinn a man of few words. Sure, there are still men like this in real life. But I don’t want to see them on screen any more. It’s 2023 and surely we all understand enough about how it’s healthy for men to have a full range of human emotions to have well-rounded male characters. Whenever Dinn addresses Grogu as “Hey kid”, I cringe.

4. Default Male

A pet peeve of mine with the men (it’s invariably men) who make sci-fi film and TV, is that for all their imagination, they still see men as the default living being. And so practically every alien, animal and android is male. You have unlimited creative choices, yet you can’t think beyond that? (I don’t buy the “they’re just addressing it has ‘he’, it could be anything, it might not even have a sex” argument. You need to radically question that – why is he the default for an anthropomorphized character. It is part and parcel of the same patriarchal view that sees men as the default and women as “other”.) Compare and contrast this with Monstress, where nearly every character is female – and what a refreshing thing that is.

5. Miscellaneous

What the fuck was that recent episode set in the mines of Mandalore? It was pitch-dark and I couldn’t see a damn thing. “Maybe if I turn off all the lights”, I thought. Nope! Just a dark screen with vague shapes moving around. For practically the entire episode. Did not one person bring this up during production? (There’s a funny story – possibly apocryphal but still funny and makes a good point – about the filming of the “Helm’s Deep” battle in the Lord of the Rings. The battle takes place at night, but it’s shot with enough lighting that you can see what is going on. The cast joked with the cinematographer, “Where’s the light coming from, Andrew?” To which he replied, “From the same place the music is coming from.”)

Mandalore is a hop skip and a jump away for anyone? And none of the Mandalorians went there to see if this “curse” thing was true?

How do Dinn and Grogu use the restroom on that Naboo starfighter? There’s a “this is the way” joke in there somewhere…