The Mandalorian Discussion Thread (spoilers and such)

[bilateralrope]

I don't think the dark trooper was able to hurt Din much. Neither of them had weaponry that could reliably get through the others armor.

I think you're discounting the sort of pummeling that occurs when a body is thrown with great force. Getting face-punched by the Dark Trooper was probably an instance where the beskar helmet saved Dinn because the helmet was "braced" against the wall of the corridor and most of the force was probably transmitted through the helmet to the wall. However, the "throw Dinn around like a ragdoll" bits would be imparting a lot of force to Dinn's entire body, and the effects of starting/stopping movement (g forces) could do quite a bit of damage as blunt force trauma. Which is probably why Dinn's armor has a lot of padding. Also, I've heard a theory that Mandalorian armor makes use of inertia dampening technology to reduce impact forces and allow the wearer to survive falls, collisions, etc.

Pretty sure Dinn felt that fight - "oh, that's gonna hurt in the morning!" sort of thing.

Yes, that would get to him eventually. But I do wonder how many of the Dark Troopers Din would have been able to take out with the darksaber if they had broken through. That fight would not have been as one-sided as Gideon claimed.

It doesn't sound like the kind of thing he'd do for nothing, but she could always bribe him with a new ship and a home for his tribe. I imagine it would be preferable to living in the sewers of Nevarro.

A new home for his tribe should be easy. The hard parts would be finding them, then convincing them to come to a planet they think is cursed.

As for a new ship, that comes with being the figurehead for the planets government. Though he probably won't be able to go back to bounty hunting.

[Galvatron]

I'm not convinced that Din loves bounty hunting so much as it's something he's good at and gets paid well for. If he doesn't at the very least become a VIP on Mandalore after its liberation, I'm sure Boba Fett would offer him a place in his organization.

[Lord Revan]

She's already stolen two Imperial cruisers and clearly has plans to liberate Mandalore from whatever occupation forces remains there. She shouldn't need to win the darksaber in a duel if she can retake the planet militarily.

she shouldn't but people aren't always logical so winning the Darksaber in a duel would be seen as more powerful show of capability then a military victory due to symbolic reasons and as I said it might also be something Bo-Katan doubts about herself not something others doubt about her.

Without knowing what caused her to change her mind we can't really say what is the issue here.

[Knife]

She's already stolen two Imperial cruisers and clearly has plans to liberate Mandalore from whatever occupation forces remains there. She shouldn't need to win the darksaber in a duel if she can retake the planet militarily.

5 years post ROTJ, is there an Imp occupation? They just keep referring to a 'purge'. I assume Mandalore was just laid waste.

[LadyTevar]

She's already stolen two Imperial cruisers and clearly has plans to liberate Mandalore from whatever occupation forces remains there. She shouldn't need to win the darksaber in a duel if she can retake the planet militarily.

5 years post ROTJ, is there an Imp occupation? They just keep referring to a 'purge'. I assume Mandalore was just laid waste.

IIRC, in "Rebels" there's a episode that had the crew listening to a broadcast about Mandalore being BDZ'd.

[Galvatron]

If there's a significant Imperial remnant occupying Mandalore, you'd think the New Republic would have an interest in ousting them too.

If not, maybe the planet is simply under the control of Vichy Mandalorians (like Clan Saxon) and Bo-Katan is gearing up to overthrow them.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Clan_Saxon

If that's the case, the New Republic may regard the whole thing as an internal matter for them to sort out.

[Cykeisme]

Spoiler

Holy shit, post-Endor Luke Skywalker as everyone* imagined for the real-life decades since the RotJ movie was released!

Fanservice at its highest levels.. I'm surprised Disney even allowed this.

Dark Troopers from the Dark Forces game.. and come to think of it, Luke reminds me of how he was portrayed in Jedi Academy, too.

* By "everyone", I actually mean a tiny minority of people (including me) who basically consider Episodes 7-9 non-headcanon

[Patroklos]

*Yawn*

As usual, no challenge was resented to our protagonists, and there was never a setback to their plan. half the show was essentially them waltzing down the middle of hallways with people falling down around them as if they weren't there to begin with. And even worse, until Gideon returned to the bridge the protagonists didn't think there was a challenge either (and that's their fault anyway, they should have moved the cruiser to a safe place the second they had control of the bridge for a LOT of reasons). And then they just sidestep 99% of that challenge too. No one dies, no one is injured, nobody loses anything irreplaceable. It's all meaningless. Kill off assassin lady or Bo Katan's sidekick, they are both superfluous anyway. Do SOMETHING of weight and impact.

And then Luke just walks through the Dark Troopers with all the nonchalance that made the battle droids of the Prequels non-entities as well. If Dark Troopers are no more effective than known decades-old battle droid technology what was the innovation? They obviously didn't fix the "my blasters are not working, so I will just stand here until he gets close enough to cut me down" programming. Shit, the IG droid was portrayed as far more dangerous than these things. So what's the point? What's the hook? I figured it would be force related in some way to present a challenge to whatever Jedi or Jediesque character was going to show up, but obviously not. Come to think of it, the fact that they are 100% droid works directly against the idea that BY was somehow instrumental to their creation.

And if Luke is still around being billy badass still while people like Gideon are out and about being not at all secretive regarding their existence, what the hell was he doing that was more important?

Good thing nobody on the crew decided to close any of the blast doors while they are being boarded. You know, the most obvious thing to do during a boarding. Why are all the dark troops in storage all the time on a ship obviously all about armed guards?

Luke looked better than the last iteration of Rogue One doppelgangers, but not good enough. I do wonder though why anyone is surprised to see him. When Ashoka originally told them to go to that artifact I just assumed Luke was out of the picture somehow. The fact is Luke was never a secret, he was an out front and famous member of the Alliance and everyone would know about him. So why did Ashoka not send Din straight to him, or at least mention that as an option? Shit, how do ANY of the protagonists not know about him themselves? Bobo has personal interactions with him. Cara is an Alliance/NR military veteran that surely knows his exploits. Din is a man of the world. Assassin lady is the same. The previous Emperor having been outed as a force user obviously being front-page news, and the story of Luke and Vader being a known thing, the idea that the galaxy at large would not be gaga for Jedis is ridiculous. This season would have just ended min-season if someone had looked up the receptionist number at the Jedi Temple.

On the plus side, I enjoyed the inner details of the cruiser we got to see. There is a secondary ventral launch bay (the one the stormtrooper falls through) and appears to be perpetually open. I wonder what its designed for purpose is given its size and that walkway running directly thorugh it.

[Batman]

That light cruiser seemed to be a lot bigger on the inside. And that launch tube was a lot narrower when launching TIEs than it was when our valiant heroes crashed the shuttle in it.
The Mando Ladies' blasters sounded a lot beefier than the Stormie carbines (just like Han's did back in the day) and looked a lot like the ones Sabine used in 'Rebels'.
Were those bridge monitors black and white?

[Grand Moff Yenchin]

BOBA FETT: You gotta be kidding me. Mandalore? The Empire turned that planet to glass.
It would be interesting why Bo Katan going through the pains of preparing that kind of firepower to retake a wasted land. With the Darksaber now in Din's hands likely there's gonna be a story arc on this in the future.

Is it me or the Beskar staff was shortened? It seemed kind of long when it was introduced, but when Din was wielding it it seemed that it was only about half his height.

The Luke scene was done beautifully. The music, the way it was portrayed. The way the story is handled I'm suspecting Grogu is probably going to be Luke's version of "There is another..." and in some way begin a new line of Jedi after the sequel.

After a season of repetitive "do this to get this and wow look at this" hopefully we get to see a more solid storyline next season.

[Batman]

Also, when the Dark Troopers came back on board, they claim was 'our ray shields are being breached'.
That was the...dorsal? Ventral? That big hole at the bottom docking bay. That was the atmosphere containment field. Why would ray shields figure into that?

[Galvatron]

BOBA FETT: You gotta be kidding me. Mandalore? The Empire turned that planet to glass.
It would be interesting why Bo Katan going through the pains of preparing that kind of firepower to retake a wasted land.

Mandalore was depicted as a wasteland with big domed cities as far back as TCW, but that probably doesn't matter to the people who regard it as their ancestral homeworld.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Mandalore

[bilateralrope]

If Dark Troopers are no more effective than known decades-old battle droid technology what was the innovation?

The one Din fought seemed quite resistant to everything Din threw at them until he managed to get the spear up its neck. But that still had him taking a pounding that I doubt he would have survived without his armor. Especially the part where his head got hammered into the wall.

They are clearly far more durable than anything in stormtrooper armor. Only going down to people with rare equipment and/or abilities. Against the average people the Empire would want to kill, they would be more effective than stormtroopers.

Come to think of it, the fact that they are 100% droid works directly against the idea that BY was somehow instrumental to their creation.

Why would you think that the forces used to capture Grogu somehow needed him to create them ?

The scene with the tanks already made it clear that his blood was necessary for something else.

Also, when the Dark Troopers came back on board, they claim was 'our ray shields are being breached'.
That was the...dorsal? Ventral? That big hole at the bottom docking bay. That was the atmosphere containment field. Why would ray shields figure into that?

Looking at the display showed them still outside the ship at that point. So I'm thinking that the ray shield was further out.

[Galvatron]

I wonder how long Bo-Katan has been assembling a fleet. She now has at least one Arquitens-class and one Gozanti-class cruiser in addition to whatever other ships she's managed to acquire.

[Patroklos]

If Dark Troopers are no more effective than known decades-old battle droid technology what was the innovation?

The one Din fought seemed quite resistant to everything Din threw at them until he managed to get the spear up its neck. But that still had him taking a pounding that I doubt he would have survived without his armor. Especially the part where his head got hammered into the wall.

That's not the point. The Empire already has access to all manor of battle droid. For decades. At the very least the IG series which we see lay waste to whole companies of stormtroopers per scene in season one. I see nothing new about these things other than they fly (I think some CW ones could fly too), and nothing at all linking them to BY which was the whole point of trying to acquire him (I might be wrong on that one, the rest stands).

And this episode shows multiple of these being destroyed by their own reflected blaster fire. Near the end of the Luke sequence, you actually see one get disabled by luke throwing the head of another at it at visibly trackable non-impressive speed. So they are vulnerable to normal blasters, slow kinetics, and of course lightsabers.

I am not impressed by the blast door battering because there is no reason every battle droid wouldn't be that strong. It does demonstrate they do have strength though. Until you remember they couldn't break through their own normal storage room door or the windows of that door in short order. I realize those windows were are not glass, but they sure as hell are not blast doors either.

This also devalues Luke for future stores if the Dark Troopers are at the top of that threat continuum. If the best of the bad guys have to offer relative to the good guys is this, there is no credible threat to be posed to base a story off of. I have no interest in reading/watching stores of Luke walking down hallways effortlessly destroying third-act villians like first act mooks. It is as boring as watching Bo Katan/every-one else in this series nonchalantly do the same in every scene. Which is as boring as watching Kenobi and/or Anakin do the same to battle droids for three feature-length movies.

They are clearly far more durable than anything in stormtrooper armor. Only going down to people with rare equipment and/or abilities. Against the average people the Empire would want to kill, they would be more effective than stormtroopers.

We see exactly one non-space wizard encounter, and that guy had plot armor along with his magic armor. If the range is between that and the stormtroopers of this series, that is an infinite range of possibilities you can draw zero conclusions from.

And note Din walked away from that fight unharmed (as his fight with Gideon shows). So however brutal some of those blows from the Dark Trooper looked, in the end they were the equivalent of a smack by a feather pillow story-wise.

If these things were supposed to be impressive they needed to do something impressive. Like kill off some of these rando good guy sidekicks. At this point, Din's entourage will be 50 deep the way he keeps collecting secondary characters, all of whom are better than any enemy they encounter.

The only sort of party member they killed off was a whole season ago, and he wasn't a fighter so it doesn't validate the threat. If you want to count the IG he had the opposite effect, he killed so many on his way out you wonder why the good guys ever gave the remnant a second thought.

Come to think of it, the fact that they are 100% droid works directly against the idea that BY was somehow instrumental to their creation.

Why would you think that the forces used to capture Grogu somehow needed him to create them ?

The scene with the tanks already made it clear that his blood was necessary for something else.[/quote]

I took the guys in the tanks to be a step to the Dark Troopers.

And another note. We have had two season finale encounters with the big bad. In both he loses without any cost to the good guys. This is saterday morning cartoon inspiration, not gritty Western.

[Galvatron]

The dark troopers are just droids though. Why would the bodies in the tanks be related to them? Is it so hard to accept that this show is telling the backstory of Snoke and the First Order (if not the Sith Eternal's efforts at creating a new body for Palpatine)?

[LadyTevar]

The guys in the tanks were steps towards the Dark Troopers. The Good Doctor says that there was a Phase One and a Phase Two with cybernetically enhanced humans, but with these they fixed the problem by "Getting rid of the human element". So, guys in tanks were probably the Phase Two who didn't survive implantation...

... or were they steps towards getting Palpatine a Force-Sensitive body back?
Reye's father was a 'son' of Palpatine, but who says he wasn't cloned, and maybe those who cloned him used Force-Sensitive people's blood to insure they'd have enough Midiclorians?

There's some deep stuff here. Maybe we'll find out more, maybe not. There's several different shows that might give us more detail. "Ahsoka". "The Rangers". Hell, even "The Bad Batch" might have hints

[Patroklos]

The dark troopers are just droids though. Why would the bodies in the tanks be related to them? Is it so hard to accept that this show is telling the backstory of Snoke and the First Order (if not the Sith Eternal's efforts at creating a new body for Palpatine)?

Your guess is as good as mine. All we have right now is the guys in the tanks were a dark trooper program, and they were using BY's blood for whatever that program entailed. Then a few episodes later we get the next phase dark trooper.

The link and confusion is warranted.

Perhaps they abandoned using BYs blood in the dark trooper program entirely and that's how we got these unimpressive droids. But then you have to ask yourself: If they had some Palpatine linked-clone project running concurrently, why were they mucking about with some low-level infantry project wasting an obviously limited and contested resource on it over the interests of an immortal God emperor?

And yes, it's hard to accept because everything ST-related is poison. The show needs to avoid it like the plague it is and so far has, at least overt links. But if they do decide to shoot themselves in the face, I will only ask the same thing I asked of the ST and that it couldn't deliver; that it makes sense.

In any case what would have been a cooler and more interesting enemy for the show? Reskinned battle droids of no particular note, or said augmented humans with some low-level force capabilities? Especially with the good guys getting access to their own force users? Something that could make Luke's return actually impressive rather than him just doing the same thing his dad did in the prequels to zero dramatic effect.

[Galvatron]

But Grogu was being used as a blood donor by a clone engineer. Moff Gideon even said: "This child is extremely gifted and has been blessed with rare properties that have the potential to bring order back to the galaxy."

The foreshadowing is obvious.

[Cykeisme]

With regards to some points that were brought up here today, I did indeed find it disappointing (since the first season) that a low-level gritty story about characters who aren't big-name heroes still portrays stormtroopers as completely ineffective mooks.

If they'd portrayed them as competent shock troops that give "normal" people a run for their money, the stakes would be higher. Like, if 3-4 of them gave Din a bit of trouble, then they could use 5-10 stormtroopers as a significant threat he needs to tactically out-think, or avoid detection.

Instead, as they are, they're entirely unthreatening.. little more than worthless trash mobs. Meeting 20+ of them just means that the characters get to score more kills.

In fact, you sort of get the idea that they're outright subhuman, and if you gave a blaster to the average person from real-world Earth with a bit of firearms experience (or even without), they would probably easily clean out of an Imperial military base of a company of 100+ stormtroopers.

Arguably this was to keep the action fast moving and cool looking, but watching 10+ stormtroopers get blaster by a named character strolling down the middle of a hallway with no cover actually stops looking cool when it happens over and over again.. it becomes a chore to watch.

[Knife]

I think it would be nice to address that in the show. They kind have a little, in that the armor of Storm Troopers is complete shit. Literally breaks apart with Melee weapons hits. All they have to do is show unarmored Troopers somewhere being more loyal than trained. Perhaps the idea of having highly trained soldiers above loyal soldiers represents more of a threat to the Empire than legions of loyal but incompetent's brown shirts in white armor.

[Galvatron]

It doesn't help that any time the stormtroopers actually get the drop on our heroes, they have this bizarre habit of yelling "freeze!" in the middle of a firefight and then getting themselves blasted for it.

[Patroklos]

I think it would be nice to address that in the show. They kind have a little, in that the armor of Storm Troopers is complete shit. Literally breaks apart with Melee weapons hits. All they have to do is show unarmored Troopers somewhere being more loyal than trained. Perhaps the idea of having highly trained soldiers above loyal soldiers represents more of a threat to the Empire than legions of loyal but incompetent's brown shirts in white armor.

The problem is that by the look of their equipment and ships and their behavior any time there is not a protagonist in the room with them they are not incompetent. With the exception of the moment it's time to dodge or shoot, the entire Imperial apparatus is portrayed as professional with all of their stuff immaculately maintained and functional. Unless you can come up with a reason all these talentless recruits can operate high-end military hardware but have a special stupid in the specific case of ground combat its a glaring plot contrivance. To further complicate things we have the TIEs. We see them flown amazingly well (crazy maneuvers through tight spaces) up to the moment it's time for them to suck for the convenience of the plot.

People like Gideon are not exactly portrayed as someone tolerant of incompetence, and he uses these troops for important missions that he obviously thinks have a chance of being accomplished. His own personal safety largely relies on them. You can't have it both ways.

It's just a writing problem, for whatever reason they can't or won't come up with clever or interesting ways to get the heros out of the problems they set for them. It's understandable, it's much easier to tie a knot than to untie and that is the nature of the medium. It is, however, what separates a good story from throwaway trash.

[Galvatron]

I wonder how much what we're seeing is actually based on the ISB's portrayal in the old EU like what Timothy Zahn wrote in his novel, Allegiance.

Spoiler

MARCROSS’S INFORMATION, AS USUAL, TURNED OUT to be correct. Six days after the Teardrop massacre an ISB tactical unit arrived aboard the Reprisal.

They arrived in force, too: ten full squads, including officers, troopers, droids, even their own intel analysis group. More disturbing to LaRone were the two squads of stormtroopers who came with them.

“Which means that whatever they do—shoot up another town, or worse—they’ll be wearing our armor, which means the whole stormtrooper corps will get the blame for it,” he warned Quiller and Grave as the three of them gazed down from the observation walkway into Hangar Bay 5. The ISB people had brought a strange assortment of vehicles with them, from light freighters to old and outmoded military transports and even a dilapidated pleasure yacht.

“Not that we’re not blamed for everything anyway,” Quiller added with an edge of bitterness. “Comes from our always catching the tough ones.”

“Which comes from our being the Empire’s finest,” Grave countered with a touch of pride. “We certainly have better transports than these clowns.”

“What, you mean those?” Quiller asked, pointing at the cluster of ships below them. “Don’t you believe it, buddy, not for a minute. That Suwantek TL-1800, for instance—see those crimp marks on the engine nozzles?”

“Which one are we talking about?” LaRone asked, frowning at the unfamiliar designs.

“That flat, angular job with the oversized sublight engines,” Quiller said, pointing. “Usually the 1800’s a piece of junk—holds together okay, but it’s slow, badly armed, and poorly shielded. The nav computer glitches a lot, too.”

“Sounds perfect for the ISB,” Grave murmured. “Let’s turn ’em loose and let ’em get lost.”

“Like I said, don’t believe it,” Quiller said. “Those engines have been upgraded probably six ways from Imperial Center, and odds are everything else beneath the plating has, too. Ditto for the rest of the ships.”

“You suppose they run under false IDs?” LaRone asked.

Quiller snorted. “They probably have whole racks full of them,” he said. “We may be the Empire’s finest, but you’d never know it when ISB gets up from the budget table.”

I don't know who said it, but I seem to recall the ISB once being described as akin to the Waffen-SS of Nazi Germany.

[Patroklos]

For the equivalency you are looking for the SA is a closer match. The actual stormtrooper corps would be the Waffen-SS.

I also don't think the ISB is what you are thinking of. They were law enforcement and intelligence organization, not field formations, and not particularly prolific. COMPFORCE was COMPNOR's ersatz military stand-in and known for displaying all the traits we see on screen when protagonists are around.

Also, for this COMPFORCE waltzing around as stormtrooper thing to work there is an assumption that COMPNOR is the majority of the Imperial remnant. Or at least the stakeholders and equities of the stormtroopers themselves are not a part of the remnant in any powerful way. I see no reason why that would be the case, especially since COMPNOR in general, and COMPFORCE in particular, was looked down on by the rest of the Imperial state apparatus as a bunch of no-talent wannabes.

I also think COMPNOR zealots, ISB or COMPFORCE, would be insulted to pretend to be anything other than themselves. They hated the conventional military as much as the conventional military hated them, hence their plan to duplicate and replace them.

And no I don not give a shit about any retconning the new canon has been up to.