Seen anything good on TV lately?

Picture: Disney/Lucasfilm

If there’s one thing we need now more than ever it’s escapism, though it's a matter of opinion as to whether we need the distractive interpretation of that phrase, or simply actual escape. But over the last few weeks, unexpected relief - for me, at least - has been available in the form of The Mandalorian on Disney+. This, for the uninitiated, is a live action Star Wars spinoff series, part of Disney’s ever-expanding universe of properties based on George Lucas’s original cinematic story arc. Now, I’m no sci-fi fanboy, and Bond aside, am fairly immune to Hollywood franchises. Star Wars might, though, be the exception, seeing as my history with the Skywalker saga goes back to that very first film when it opened at Christmas 1977, when I was ten. Even now, I can vividly remember my first experience of ‘surround sound’, as the Imperial cruiser contrived to appear from behind me at the Kingston Granada, its rumbling engines sounding long before the apparently vast model moved into sight. 

When The Mandalorian commenced on Disney’s streaming service last year, I was curious but not in any immediate rush to see it. Since Disney’s acquisition of the Star Wars brand, they’ve been busy commercialising it with spinoff films like Rogue One and Solo, to varying degrees of appeal. Not being a big fan of animation, either, I’d passed by the earlier animated series, like The Clone Wars, largely because I wasn’t all that interested in the Lucas ‘universe’. The Mandalorian, I was told, was different, so I dipped in. It’s premise was that of a ‘space Western’, built around the central character of a Mandalorian bounty hunter (occasionally referred to by his name Din Djarin, or, simply, ‘Mando’, and played by Pedro Pascal), an enigmatic loner somewhat styled after Clint Eastwood in The Man With No Name. In Season 1, he is hired by the mysterious ‘Client’ (wonderfully portrayed by German auteur Werner Herzog) to retrieve a ‘package’ on behalf of an unrevealed third party. This package turns out to be ‘The Child’, a tiny, impossibly cute infant-like creature that resembles Yoda from the main Star Wars canon. As Mando successfully collects the child, and sets out on bringing him to The Client, they begin to form something of a father-son bond, while battling numerous challenges - and with the little creature revealing a nascent affinity for mystical powers. At this stage, it was very much cowboys and Indians in space, but the second season, which concluded last Friday, has evolved with far greater connectivity to the mythology that Lucas first mapped out in the early 1970s.

Picture: Disney/Lucasfilm

I dipped in and out of the first season of The Mandalorian, not because it was bad (and certainly not because it was as tedious as the Star Trek: Picard spinoff on Amazon Prime), but because it was just a tad slow-burning. Mind you, you could say that about the first series of Breaking Bad, and look at how that ended up. But with The Mandalorian’s second season dropping in November, I gave it another go and became hooked. Showrunners Jon Favreau and uber-knowledgeable Star Wars nerd sidekick Dave Filoni have created the perfect form of escape, indeed producing a modern Western that, yes, sits in the Star Wars universe with all the sci-fi mystique that comes with the territory, but not resorting to the impenetrable psuedo-science that so many sci-fi shows can be guilty of. 

The added intrigue - and therefore the core attraction - is how they’ve moved The Mandalorian closer to the cinematic canon. That original film (now referred to as Episode IV: A New Hope) was, itself, a kind of homage to the Saturday morning movies Lucas enjoyed as a child, with its sword fights, princesses, Battle of Britain dogfights and even parallels to The Wizard of Oz. The Mandalorian has proven to be so much more than laser battles and a cast of odd-looking aliens (apparently co-existing in a fictional galaxy that just happens to share many similarities to our very real one, including humans…) with Season 2 knowingly peppered with characters and even physical settings familiar to anyone who has watched the parent films over the last four decades. Some references you’d miss without an encyclopaedic photographic knowledge of the canon, but some have been genuinely huge, and immensely entertaining as a result. 

Picture: Disney/Lucasfilm

Which brings me to the Season 2 finale - and prepare yourself for a MASSIVE spoiler alert if you haven’t seen it. Over the course of the previous seven episodes, the show had flirted with the canonic plot lines: for a start, The Client’s client was revealed to be Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito - you’ll know him as Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul’s principle baddie Gus Fring), who is obviously a no-gooder as he’s called “Moff” (some sort of title of badness from the old evil Empire), dresses a bit like Darth Vader, has access to his own Imperial space ships and a rather snazzy light sabre, and makes plenty of proto-panto villain statements. It also transpires that the reason he wants The Child - now revealed to be called ‘Grogu’ - is that he possesses a nursery talent for The Force, which Gideon sets out to tap into in order to draw out the Dark Side and kick things off all over again, a not too subtle reminder that Nazi-ism didn’t die in that Berlin bunker in 1945. 

For context, the events of The Mandalorian are set five years after Return Of The Jedi, with Gideon a remnant of the old evil Empire that was supposedly destroyed in the final chapter of the original trilogy (and, as we know from the final three, returns a couple of space decades later…). The next cryptic reference was the re-introduction of the bounty hunter Boba Fett, a pivotal figure (and, plotwise, divisive) from the original films who supposedly met a grisly end in Jedi. At the end of the Season 2 finale it was revealed that Fett would return in something called The Book Of Boba Fett, which has subsequently been revealed to be one of 11 new Star Wars spinoff projects being prepared for Disney+.

But the gobsmack of all gobsmacks came in the form of a hooded figure arriving in the nick of time to save Mando and his chums from a platoon of ultra-ruthless droid Stormtroopers, wielding a green light sabre in, apparently, an enigmatically leather gloved hand. No, not Alvin Stardust (though his would be an excellent Star Wars character name) but Luke Skywalker. Luke bloody Skywalker!!!  Though a digital replication of Mark Hamill’s character from The Return Of The Jedi (which was made 37 years ago), such is the technology now that it was indistinguishable from the real thing. Hamill - who cutely reacted to his cameo by tweeting with a deadpan "Seen anything good on TV lately?" - provided the voice.

Picture: Twitter/@HamillHimself

Skywalker’s appearance in the finale was as satisfying as it was arc-completing. We see him rescue Grogu from Gideon’s intentions, and take him off to a place of safety (though aficionados have suggested that 'Baby Yoda' has a grim future, as we discover in The Last Jedi when Kylo Ren goes mad and wipes out any remaining Jedi he can find. I hope you’re keeping up). There is a moment of genuine emotional heft as Mando reluctantly hands over the infant (who is around my current age in human years) to the Jedi, in a brilliantly played out scene between Pascal and the cute little green Christmas-sales-bonanza-for-Disney puppet. But it sealed the point that, cynical and snearing as people can be towards sci-fi and the fans who obsess over every detail, a show could be every bit as entertaining and engaging as anything regarded by culture snobs as more worthy.

For that, Favreau must be given huge credit, as well as Filoni and the impressive array of directors, including Bryce Dallas Howard, Ron Howard’s daughter. As The Galleries accompanying series of behind-the-scenes documentaries reveals, Favreau and his team have had a vast array of creative and technical resources at their disposal to make The Mandalorian as sumptuous a series of short shows every bit as elaborate as the cinematic Star Wars productions. George Lucas’s original film was pre-dated by his creation of Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects shop that still serves the Star Wars factory (and many other film and TV productions) with state-of-the-art techniques that, frankly, boggle the mind when seen in application. But unlike some of the newer Star Wars films, Favreau explains that the special effects are only part of the blend with live action, actors and real sets, a palette that adds to the enjoyment of The Mandalorian, and elevates it above being just another yarn. Given these assets now at Disney’s disposal, too, the benchmark has been set high for the aforementioned slew of spin-offs, including the Fett series, to be executive produced by Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni and acclaimed cult director Robert Rodriguez, and released next December. The others from Lucasfilm will include Ahsoka, featuring Katee Sackhoff’s Mandalorian Jedi character of the same name; Rangers Of The New Republic, another Mandalorian spin-off; the Rogue One offshoot Andor; and Obi-Wan Kenobi, a standalone series in which Ewan McGregor will reprise his role from the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

Picture: Disney/Lucasfilm

Taking the bigger picture, there’s every reason to fear a corporation like Disney taking over a franchise like Star Wars in this way. The arch fans will settle for nothing less than extreme quality control, while parents will simply fear their bank accounts being drained by all the merchandising. Being a streaming service with, clearly, enormous resources, Disney+ can probably do anything they want to, but if the new series are anything like The Mandalorian, and the attention to detail, story development, scripting and its place in the Star Wars universe that Favreau & Co have applied, even the most neutral viewer will find something to capture their interest, as Lucas’s original film did for me 43 years ago.