#but they're finally reuniting and its going to be fucking terrible

[eremin0109]

God GOD can you imagine Y8 pulling the most heartwrenching Y0 parallel by making Kiryu die in Majima's arms and Haruka arriving just a second too late, holding her dad's face in her hands and just sobbing uncontrollably. "You're just sleeping, right, Uncle Kiryu? It's okay, you can rest now" and that finally pushes Majima over the edge as he lets his own tears fall, clutching Kiryu's increasingly cold body by one hand while the other gently strokes Haruka's hair, holding both of them close with strength he doesn't have.

[leofrith]

I saw that a lot of people hated the latest Mando episode but I'm not sure why? It didn't seem to contribute much to the story, like I'm unsure how it developed the characters or relationships, but I wasn't thinking "man this is terrible"

i mean. i think you pretty well answered your own question since the whole point of a show, a movie, a book, whatever is to tell a story of some kind. even episodes that qualify as "filler" will contribute to the story in some way, even if it's not in service of the Big Main Plot. whether in terms of character development or the development of relationships between said characters, filler episodes do serve a purpose, just not in a show that has 8 episode seasons that range anywhere from only 33 minutes to an hour, in which there has been more time and attention paid to meaningless action set pieces than, i dunno, actually developing the characters in any way?

and i disagree with you in saying that this episode didn't contribute anything to the story because it did! din has now given the darksaber to bo-katan! something that was previously established as being impossible because it must be won in battle! but hey, here's a stupid loophole we just came up with to justify wrapping up the "din as a reluctant leader" plot line in the most boring fucking way possible (also, we basically lifted it from rebels. sorry!! we don't do originality here).

honestly, it's really not just about this last episode. this episode was fucking bad, but for me it's just the final straw after a season (more like two, because s2 as a whole wasn't this bad imo but it still wasn't much to write home about either) of mostly awful, incoherent writing. it was 45 minutes of shiny colours and celebrity cameos that felt made to distract viewers from the fact that they have no fucking idea what they're doing with this show (and they have explicitly confirmed that they don't).

pretty well every remaining plot thread from last season has now been resolved in the most boring, narratively incoherent ways possible. din and grogu are separated? let's reunite them on a totally different show between seasons instead of actually exploring how their time apart affects them in any way that is remotely interesting!! gideon has been arrested by the new republic? no!! he actually escaped off screen almost immediately and who knows when we'll actually address that!! din has the darksaber but doesn't want it and bo-katan does want the darksaber but refuses to take it? we've just made up this insane loophole about how bo-katan saved din which means the darksaber should be hers, rather than exploring any of din's internal conflict as a leader or his external conflict with bo-katan over that title. etc etc.

they're even dragging out things that have already been resolved!! like din's dislike of droids, which was ostensibly resolved at the end of season one when ig-11 saved his life, but for some reason came back even stronger than we've ever really seen it in this episode. and for what? the comedic value of watching him kick droids and drop zingers such as "you had me at battle droids"? this show is incapable of resolving any of its plot lines in a satisfying way and is now retreading things that have already been addressed. and they're doing it with a $15 million per episode budget. there are people who are starving, jon.

i'm not even going to get into how shitty the politics of the show are because other people have already articulated that in ways far better than i am capable of, and i also really don't expect amazing political commentary from star wars to begin with. but they apparently can't even manage the low, low expectation of "show that tells a coherent story" for fuck's sake. because the whole show is just a product placement for toys and merch and other star wars shows. so i don't know what i expected.

[sharkneto]

pretending for a second that theoretical TUA S4 is going to be real, any predictions you wanna share about it whether its stuff you want or stuff you just think is gonna happen?

This feels like the perfect time to finally get around to answering this, with our now non-hypothetical S4 on the way!

I haven't thought too much about S4, just sort of rotating things in my head, microwaving them. The two thoughts I've really had are:

I want Abigail to be terrible. I want her to be even worse than Reggie. We can have a twist where she's kind and we think she's good with the Umbrellas but then BAM! she's been manipulating them the whole time. None of this "Oh, Reggie used to be such a good person before he was twisted by his grief to get his dead wife back", "oh, Abigail is Good and if only she hadn't been trapped in a box the Umbrellas would have had such a better life". No! I need her to be fucking evil. Please.

I'm really open to whatever the Umbrellas are doing with their New Normal Lives. They're bumbling along, they're figuring it out. I hope they're in contact with one another. What I want that to be for Five is a nice montage of him having no fucking clue what to do. Bouncing between siblings, trying hobbies, trying to figure out how he fits in the world as a 58-year-old-13-year-old, and failing badly at it. Around this, he's drinking. His liver may not see 14, it's a real problem. But like, how does a man that's lived the life Five has had just... Stop? Klaus said it S1, he's "addicted to the apocalypse", and I think it's more Five doesn't know how to live without the apocalypse, as much as he'd rather otherwise. Where I think this settles is eventually him finding a new purpose in investigating the monopoly Reggie seems to have over every industry in the world - he needs something and he doesn't trust Reggie.

A tangent of the above, the thing that Cannot Happen is Five in high school. I'm sorry to those of you who like those fics, that concept, you do you but I fucking hate it. It makes me so uncomfortable. I will riot if they do a "haha! he's a kid so he's in school!". He is a 58-year-old man, just give him his GED and be done with it. I'll beg, if that will help make this not happen. The flip side of this that I dislike but don't viscerally hate is Five doing some normal, adult job and no one is blinking an eye that he's a kid. Let there be an actual consequence to the fact he's a kid, because that is genuinely a very traumatizing thing to have have happened to him and it deserves at least some acknowledgement for how much that would fucking suck.

Adding an unplanned part four, in that I think it would be interesting if Allison is the only one still with her powers (until they do some whatever to get their powers back because there's no way they go an entire season with no powers). She's going to have a redemption, reunite with the siblings. I think there's going to be some Realizations on her end that she is not in the perfect life she thought she was when she got Ray and Claire - she's changed both their contexts and lives, there is going to be things that aren't Quite Right to the versions of them she knows. She loves them, they're real, but they are Different.

We're in uncharted territory with S4, no comic book we can read for the season to be very loosely based off of. It could be literally anything. But neat you wanted the few thoughts I've had about it :)