***As the second season of The Mandalorian rapidly approaches, it’s time to take a look back at the foundation laid by the first season. This is “Rob Watches The Mandalorian.”***

By Rob Siebert
Fanboy Wonder

This opening scene is, of course, our tone-setter. And once of the best I’ve ever seen. As far as space westerns go, you can’t do much better than this. Our lone gunman walks into a saloon, finds trouble, and has to shoot his way out. Everything is perfect.

For whatever reason, when I think of The Mandalorian the first thing that comes to mind is that poor guy getting cut in half by the door. Maybe it’s because, like the series itself the whole thing is so damn smooth and cool.

So why is this snow planet not Hoth? Because, as Admiral Piett told us in The Empire Strikes Back, “The Hoth system is supposed to be devoid of human forms.” Originally I was miffed that a later episode took us back to the friggin’ Mos Eisley Cantina, but we couldn’t go to some random bar on Hoth. Whoops…

That’s a problem Star Wars creators are running into these days. The more films and TV shows that are made, the harder it is to make all these planets feel distinct and different. A lot of the worlds in the sequel trilogy, for instance, look alike.

Our blue friend, who I don’t believe has a name, is played by SNL alum Horatio Sanz. I knew I recognized him from somewhere…

Is this the first time we’ve seen a bounty puck? There certainly weren’t any in the movies.

Practically every Star Wars project has to do the cantina. Or at least some version of a cantina. Some setting where aliens from various different worlds come together for a drink or a party or the like. In this episode alone we get two of them. At least The Mandalorian had the guts to take a stab at the Mos Eisley Cantina, the cantina setting, later on.

I love that the client, the guy that hires Mando and really gets the plot moving, is part of this tiny little faction of Imperials, complete with a few beat-up looking stormtroopers. It’s a great bit of world-building. It’s one thing for Mando to say the Empire is gone. It’s another thing for us to actually see what it’s been reduced to.

Whenever I watch the scene with Mando trying to ride the Blurg and talking with little Kuiil, I always think of the prequels. If the prequels had blended practical and CGI effects as seamlessly as The Mandalorian, people would talk about them in such a different light. They’d still be badly written, but at least they wouldn’t look like giant video games.

In writing this, I at one point had in my notes, “I’m happy they didn’t give him a quirky droid sidekick.” A character like K-2SO in Rogue One or L3-37 in Solo. That’s another Star Wars trope people have to be mindful of going forward.

Then I realized, “Oh wait, they did give him a quirky droid sidekick.” It’s just that IG-11 isn’t around the whole time.

I do like IG-11, largely because his presence in the climactic shoot-out sequence explains how IG-88 works. In The Empire Strikes Back, IG-88 was essentially just a tall prop that stood next to Boba Fett and the other bounty hunters. It couldn’t have been on screen for more than a second or two. But like many a bit player in Star Wars, it gained a cult following. But of course, we never got to see the IG-88 in action. We were never meant to. As such, I always wondered how this tall, seemingly cumbersome, ridid-looking robot was supposed to do the same job as Boba Fett…

Turns out, these IG droids may be all of those things. But they’re also fast, and make for a hell of an action scene!

Email Rob at primaryignition@yahoo.com, or check us out on Twitter.