Star Wars fans will nitpick anything. It’s one of the worst things about the fandom, and often times one of the most prevalent. Even George Lucas himself nitpicked his own work. If he hadn’t, we’d never have seen the original trilogy Special Editions. But… What if all you can do is nitpick because the product is otherwise devoid of flaws? For me, that’s The Mandalorian Episode 1.
Fans have be clamoring for Star Wars to do something familiar, yet still different. The Force Awakens? Way too familiar. The Last Jedi? Way too different. Well guess what, Goldilocks? The Mandalorian is just right. The first episode gives us a healthy dose of familiarity. From the gritty aesthetic of the original trilogy (and, to some extent, Rogue One), to Stormtroopers, to the Mandalorian armor we’ve come to know and love, The Mandalorian, Episode 1 delivers. Yet, its setting is different, its characters different, and boy did it give us something unexpected at the end. So what is there to nitpick?
Nitpicking Star Wars: The Mandalorian Episode 1
So what is there to nitpick about The Mandalorian? For me, it’s the score. Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Göransson (Black Panther) is the man responsible for the show’s musical underpinnings. For the most part, the old-timey western score fits its video source material perfectly. (You can hear hints of it in the video above.) There were other times during The Mandalorian Episode 1, however, that I actually found the music distracting and overbearing. Some scenes were already poignant enough visually. Göransson’s score, to the contrary, seemed to be trying too hard to be heard.
Generally I very much enjoyed it, don’t get me wrong. I just think that, perhaps, Göransson got a little too excited. And who could blame him? The Mandalorian Episode 1 is the first of a first-ever production of live-action Star Wars television. It would be hard not to get overly impassioned being a part of that. Still… if that’s the only thing I can really think of to criticize? Well, I think we can safely say that turning The Mandalorian over to Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni is looking to be one of the best decisions Disney has made with Lucasfilm.
There’s no nitpicking that.
The Mandalorian now airs Fridays on Disney+. (There is one exception: it will air the 18th of December so as to not compete with the December 20th release of The Rise of Skywalker).
