The Mandalorian And The Implicit Promise

      Science fiction and genre fiction generally tell stories with a clear conflict between good and evil.  Good typically triumphs.  There's usually a hero and a villain, "good guys" and "bad guys," and the good side succeeds.  Some genres modify these basics: evil wins in most horror fiction (if good wins, it's a thriller instead), noir detective stories blur the lines between good and evil to a greater or lesser degree, and satire often inverts the trope.

      Strip it down to the basics and you're left with the kinds of stories that poets sung to appreciative audiences in Ancient Greece: Heracles takes on impossible odds and succeeds; Odysseus returns home by perseverance and wit; the all-too-human gods struggle among themselves.  (Most ensemble-cast SF and other genre fiction closely models the Greco-Roman pantheon, from Star Trek to Mission: Impossible to Firefly* and The Expanse.  Wagon Train and Rawhide are at least partial fits to this model.)

      The Mandalorian hews to type, with good results.  The initial Star Wars films were meant to recall the old movie serials, filled with action and derring-do and ending on a note of triumph.  But they fell short in one significant way: there was a new episode of the serial every week.  Star Wars came along in large lumps at long intervals; that's how movies work.  The episodic serial moved to TV, with storytelling conventions -- and budgets -- that owed more to radio drama than film.

      Or it did.  Modern digital effects have made much of the sweep and action of movie-making affordable for the small screen and The Mandalorian (and associated series) has pushed it as far as possible.  The result has gone full circle: the movie serial is back!  Grander than most TV; perhaps not always quite as overwhelming as longer, bigger-budget feature films, but bursting with larger-than-life excitement.

     All fiction makes a promise to the audience in the opening scenes.  Successful fiction fulfills that promise in an emotionally satisfying manner.

      Tam and I started on the most recent season of The Mandalorian over the weekend.  We're enjoying it.
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* Firefly is notable for giving us both Ares and Athena, though the Hephaestus analog of the series is notable for being "lamed" by youth, inexperience and gender instead of physical disability. Zeus, Hermes, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite and possibly Poseidon fill out the cast.  This way of looking at such stories makes the casting of war-wounded James Doohan as Scotty on Star Trek doubly meaningful, not only the "Scots engineer" trope of nautical fiction but the lamed artificer of the gods.