7 April



Still entirely failing to finish essay on Brian of Morbius. Maybe tomorrow.

Walk across suspension bridge and around the edge of Leigh Woods. Man still selling coffee from a booth but I didn’t have my wallet with me. The bridge is operating a one-way only policy for pedestrians. (You cross on the the left and walk back on the right). This seemed to work fine.

The Mandalorian really works very well. It is quite continuity heavy: nearly all the aliens are identifiable from other iterations of the Star Wars franchise. We even see a Loth-Cat in one of the bars: is this the first instance of a concept being introduced in a cartoon and promoted to live-action?

“Everyone knows” that Boba Fett wears Mandalorian battle armour, but I don’t know when this was established. It is not mentioned on screen in Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi. The Mandalorians feature heavily in plot arcs in the Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons. (I don’t recall “they can’t ever take their helmets off” being part of the plot, though.) And of course, the whole impact of episode 1 and 2 depends on knowing who the Little Guy looks like. But it seems to me that the Mandalorian — much more than Clone Wars or even Rise of Skywalker — would make sense on its own terms if you had no previous knowledge of Star Wars. A space western, complete with a Fist Full of Dollars theme. A universe full of aliens, where space travel is routine. There has obviously recently been some kind of civil war, and something called The Empire has come to an end.

I like the way it takes such a long time to get where it is going. Considering the amount of Plot one has to remember in Game of Picard it is refreshing to spend a whole episode in watching the hero walking through the desert and fighting an egg-laying space-rhinoceros. I assume that it will intersect more heavily with the Mythos in later episodes.

I finally ordered the new computer I have been about to order for six months; Apple are happy to deliver it almost instantly.

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