Big budget SF and fantasy TV roam Netflix like the dinosaurs of old, roaring their supremacy. Disney’s The Mandalorian struts its space gunfighter stuff after the fall of the Empire, while the protagonists of Shadow and Bone fight uncanny beasts in The Fold – a magical vortex that rips an alternative steampunky Russia apart.
‘Ware! Spoilers Ahead!
The heroes, while in danger and fighting for their lives are not without their soft sides. The Mandalorian, Pedro Pascale – never removing his helmet in true Judge Dredd manner – has to take care of The Child, aka Baby Yoda, while simultaneously gunning down all threats to his existence as the cute little green one starts to discover his superpowers. Alina the Grisha (Jessie Mei Li), or to use our fave D&D term, “Magic User” discovers that she is the “Sun Summoner” who can close The Fold, and presumably return Ravka to a kind of shonky, serf-laden peace. Fortunately she has a bit of a recreational love triangle between her orphanage best pal Mel, who’s been conscripted into the army and sent off on a deadly mission into the hinterland, and hunky black-clad General Kirigan who clearly has taken a shine to her. Maybe I’m going a bit #MeToo, but the General is still a powerful older man taking advantage of his position, even if he seems to have been fast-tracked to top leadership in his late thirties.
Culture Wars
Both series try to be more PC than bygone TV – there’s plenty of intersectionality, The Dregs are a gang led by a disabled criminal mastermind, with a female PoC assassin, a bi mixed-race gunslinger and a podgy Indian fixer they hire to get them across The Fold in a train made out of rusty Meccano. The original Star Wars was famously white; The Mandalorian makes sure it has plenty of ethnically diverse people on all sides. The villain is Moff Gideon, Giancarlo Esposito given enough screentime to make his character slightly deeper than the average Evil Empire level boss. So he has to be balanced by Greef Karga (Carl Weathers), head of the local Bounty Hunter’s Guild, which clearly is a closed-shop trade union of sorts – although if you are expelled, they try to kill you; I hope Keir Starmer doesn’t get to hear of this, I’m sure he would prefer to have Corbynite Labour people wet-jobbed rather than just kick them out. Karga is Mando’s boss for freelance capture work, and attempts to have him whacked when he keeps The Child instead of letting the Empire use him for creepy biological experiments, but turns out to have a heart of gold. Underneath a pocketful of Beskar Metal, which saves his life when Mando shoots him in a small spaceship rage incident.
Their Destiny is Written
The high production values really do make these modern series more able to create entire fantasy worlds in ways that outshine the old chalk quarry planet and polystyrene sets of previous juve fodder like pre-reboot Dr. Who or Star Trek. We can thank the success of Game of Thrones for setting a marker down, as well as the vast improvements in CGI in recent years. Still, at the core of drama needs to be good writing: the last two series of Thrones saw a marked downturn in credibility because the two Davids weren’t up to the standard of George R.R. Martin. The Mandalorian clearly benefits from the loremastery and scripting of showrunner Dave Filoni. Shadow and Bone is weaker, and does suffer from its young adult romance element, which makes Alina the Chosen One a bit irritating at times.
With a flourish of my precognitive powers, I can tell you that Grogu – Baby Yoda – has a bit of Chosen Oneing in his future too. So once he and Alina do their stuff, Ravka, the Rim of the New Republic, Sunnydale or the Shire will be cleansed of immense evil and return to their pre-Lapsarian tea and cakes dullness.