Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

After writing about Better Call Saul supporting character Kim Wexler in my previous blog I watched a few more episodes and have a few more thoughts to share about her character arc.

First is the awareness that Kim is likely doomed. No, it's not anything in the story that shows her on a path to oblivion; it's meta-story logic. This is a prequel to Breaking Bad, and the character Kim is nowhere in that series. Do the math. Either the writers intend to introduce a continuity gap— unlikely— or Kim meets some end that writes her out of the story of Jimmy/Saul's character arc completely. It's like when watching the Star Wars franchise movie Rogue One, empathizing with the interesting characters introduced there... and realizing since none of them appear in Episode 4, they've all got to die by the end of the film.

Second, I have some concern that Kim is spinning out of control, losing her identity as the hard-working, by-the-books lawyer. It's because after Jimmy introduces her to one of his cons in episode 2.01 and she tells him "I can't ever do this again", she starts a con of her own in episode 2.06. Inspired by how Jimmy bilked a stock broker for $1,000 of booze at a bar, she starts hooking a mark on a phony tech company startup and calls in Jimmy to help her. They get the mark to write them a check for $10,000 to "invest" in their startup. Kim later tells Jimmy she doesn't want to cash the check but instead keep it as a souvenir; but still, it shows that Kim is on a downward path to being a fraudster like Jimmy. Possibly this sort of chicanery is her undoing that lets the writers write her out so she's a non-factor in the original series.

Third, in terms of the question I posed last blog, "Who/What's holding Kim back?" it seems more likely that douchebag Howard is not the villain. When Kim quits HHM to start her own practice in episode 2.08, Howard is understanding and congratulates her on making smart choices. Yeah, he's still douchey, but he seems sincere in wishing her well. And he forgives her remaining law school student debt owned by the company— a fairly significant move, as that debt was a major thing in Kim's mind holding her back from switching jobs when she was being mistreated. Of course, Howard rushes to curry favor with Mesa Bank, the new client she just landed, to prevent her from taking the account with her. It's Chuck, though, who goes full tilt to wrest Mesa out of her hands. That strengthens my belief that it's been Chuck all along who's thwarting her career to "show" her that Jimmy's bad.

Recently I watched episodes 4-5-6 in the first season of Better Call Saul. On the one hand, watching 3 "hours" at a time feels a bit like bingeing. On the other hand, these "hour" long shows are actually 42 minutes— the standard run length for a program that fits in a 60-minute slot with ads. Watching them largely without ads means I can watch 3 episodes in the time it used to take to finish 2. And watching TV for just two hours isn't bingeing. 😅

Anyway, bingeing-or-not-bingeing is not the main thing I wanted to write about here. It's my disappointment that the slow pace of the show across the first 3 episodes continues in the next 3 episodes. Yeah, we've seen some seeds of the to-be Saul get planted, like how Jimmy McGill first met members of the Salamanca drug gang— spoiler alert: he tried to con the gang leader's grandma with a staged traffic accident, and thing went sideways, badly— but it's just moving so slowly.

Episode 6, titled "Five-O" does get really interesting— but it does it by telling the backstory of supporting character Mike Ehrmantraut. It's like my frustration with the crappy writing of the Star Wars spinoff The Book of Boba Fett. The writers couldn't sustain a character-driven narrative around Fett, and they rescued the show by adding in The Mandalorian hero Din Djarin— or, as I dubbed the series at that point, Boba Fett Writes a Book About a More Interesting Character. Here it's Better Call Saul turning into Better Call a More Interesting Character: Mike.

Keep reading: Mike's fascinating back-story in Better Call Saul 1.06.

It's a few days late, but since I'm such a science fiction fan I figured I'd jump on the bandwagon of wishing everyone a happy May 4th.



( Confused? )

We're getting near the end of season 3 of The Mandalorian. After S3E7 there's only one more episode, the season finale, in the season. ...Which is a shame because the writers only found The Way after stumbling badly through the first half of the season.

In S3E7, "The Spies", Bo-Katan leads two now-united tribes of Mandalorians back to planet Mandalore to explore resettling it. She and main character Din Djarin, aka "Mando", lead an exploratory party down to the surface of the planet to find the Great Forge and scout for where they can build an outpost. With the epic space-western structure of the show (This Is The Way) it's predictable both good and bad things happen.

( Episode Spoilers )

Despite this being yet-another instance of sloppy writing this episode is otherwise strong and enjoyable. It'll be interesting to see how this gets wrapped up in the next episode, the season finale.

Season 3 of The Mandalorian has gotten off to a rocky start. The first two episodes suffered juvenile writing and seemed like fodder for Mystery Science Theater 3000. Late in ep. 2 the writers found their way back to laying out a classic epic storyline for the season but then backslid to cheesy, juvenile plotting in ep. 3. Ep. 4 was no better, and I felt it necessary to defend why I'm not ready to quit this series yet. Finally the writers have found their way— I mean, The Way— in ep. 5, "The Pirate".

The Pirate spins a classic Space Western style tale. ( Episode spoiler )

This is how you write a good show.

This Is The Way.

Oh, man. Just after season 3 of The Mandalorian escaped the MST3K parody-ready juvenile writing of S3E1 and seemed to set up an epic story progression in S3E2, along comes S3E3 and throws it all away. 🙄 Chapter 19, "The Convert", reverts to amateur writing with loose ends and unearned plot points. It also commits the grave mistake The Book of Boba Fett and Andor did when they split their stories with side plots that involved different main characters. With TBoBF, at least, that other main character was interesting— it was The Mandalorian! See Boba Fett S1E5: No Boba Fett and The Book of Boba Fett S1E6: Boba Fett Writes a Book About Somebody Else. Alas this series is already about Mando, so switching viewpoint to someone else is a step down.

( Meanwhile, on Coruscant... (episode spoilers) )

...Okay, so is that side story now over? If so, what was the point of it? What was Elia's goal? Is she now the main character of the side story? Is she evil for good's sake or evil for evil's sake? These are bad questions to have to be asking at this point in the story.

Oh, and the title, "The Convert"? That refers to the plot with the actual main character, Din Djarin, who's only given a few minutes of screen time in this episode. He and Bo-Katan go back to the Mandalorian covert in exile. Din Djarin is redeemed, and Bo-Katan, having also bathed in the sacred waters, is forgiven for her helmet-taking-off ways. ...Nevermind that she was part of the ruling family in political feuds that probably caused the destruction of their whole planet, she's now absolved of going helmetless in public. This is The Way.

This short sequence with the Mandalorian covert also surfaces numerous unearned plot points. A few of them:

• How do they eat? There's no food. They're on a deserted desert planet and have no space ship.


• How did they even get there? They have no space ship and there's no space port.


• How do they get technology— and fuel— for the Armorer to build things with her forge? They're on a deserted desert planet with no food, no supplies, and no transportation.

Again, this story feels like an roleplaying adventure written by a 12 year old... with an army of set dressers and special effects people to make it look like a million bucks.

A few weeks ago we started watching season 3 of The Mandalorian. It's TV we've been looking forward to ever since the second half of that other Star Wars series, The Book of Boba Fett, turned into Boba Fett Writes a Book About a Someone More Interesting. Here are my thoughts after watching the first 2 episodes.

The Mandalorian definitely has strengths going for it. Din Djarin, the title character, is a genuinely interesting character... even if the face mask thing does have actor Pedro Pascal seeming to phone in 99% of his performance. A number of the recurring characters are interesting, too. Then there's CGI costar Grogu, aka "Baby Yoda". I have hopes we might see him develop this season into something more than a MacGuffin dressed in a potato sack.

Production values remain strong. It's obvious even when the writing gets cheap (see below) that the show still have a lot of budget. The crew, artists, and animators continue doing a fantastic job.

The setting continues to be a great canvas for storytelling. The "Space Western" genre provides an outer rim of the galaxy where every planet is different and danger lurks around every corner. BTW, space-western isn't just my term for it. It's a known category within writing, and showrunner Jon Favreau has said in interviews that his idea was to create a Star Wars story that was like the Old West.

So, with all these positives, what's not to like? You knew there was a "but" coming.

Mandalorian Science Theater 3000

The "but" is the writing. The first two episodes of Mandalorian are just cheesy. I sat there on the sofa offering a sarcastic running commentary like I was Joel and the 'bots.



What's so cheesy about eps. 1 and 2? Here's a partial list of things I spontaneously ragged on the show for, spoiler protected as it reveals plot points:

( Episode 1 spoilers, MST3K-style )

Episode 2: coming later, as this is getting too long.

One thing that struck me as I started watching Andor, the latest Star Wars spinoff streaming on Disney+, is, "OMG, the Irish have colonized the galaxy!" At least one-third of the characters speak with obvious Northern Ireland brogues. Most of the rest have other various British Isles accents, including a lot that sound to my ears like northern English. It all felt quite familiar, though, because I've been hearing the same accents throughout the 4½ seasons of Game of Thrones I've watched so far. The mid rim is the North, and the Lannisters are the Empire! 😂

The obvious explanation, of course, is that these shows are produced in the UK with actors largely cast from the UK. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. While it sounds strange to my American ears, it's no stranger than Brits wondering why every other damn fantasy/scifi show they watch has most of its characters speaking with US accents. It is a bit disorienting in GoT, though, that some of the actors' accents wax and wane. For example, Petyr Baelish spoke with a flat, Home Counties accent in seasons 1-3; in seasons 4-5 he's got a noticeable brogue.

An interesting fact I read years ago is that English accents were a deliberate part of the original Star Wars trilogy. George Lucas intentionally cast English actors in most of the roles as imperial officers and US actors in most of the roles as rebels. He wanted to play to American audiences a sense of the American Revolution, that scrappy American rebels were fighting for their freedom from heavy-handed rule by the British Empire.

Recently I watched episodes 3-4 of the newest Star Wars spinoff, Andor. After the very slow start in eps. 1-2 the tempo really picked up in the next two episodes.

Ep. 3 is an action-thriller style story with a run-and-gun battle between Cass, the protagonist, and the security forces he ran afoul of in earlier episodes. Ep. 3 also brings to a reasonable conclusion to the confusing "Lord of the Flies" flashback sequence in an alien language with no subtitles. We at least come to understand who Cass is, who Maarva as his mother is, and why he's still looking for his sister.

Ep. 3 also connects Cass's personal storyline to the story of the resistance. This is more fully fleshed out in ep. 4, where the story turns from action-thriller to action-adventure. Cass meets new allies and struggles with accepting a purpose larger than himself.

There are still dangling plot elements at the end of ep. 4. Parts of Cass's background have been hinted at as being crucially important... but it's been left unclear what they are. In particular, where did he develop the Jason Bourne-like skills he occasionally remembers to use? Did he spend a few years in a juvenile prison? Toughen up from a few years of forced labor? Was he a black-ops soldier of some kind? Those are a lot of disparate possibilities to leave dangling. What happened to his mother, his friends, and his long-lost sister after the brute squad in ep. 3? Plus, there's the completed subplot with the corporate security team members. Was that just a lot of time spent on characters we'll never see again, or will they come back around into the story again? Overall this story is nowhere near as tightly written as The Mandalorian but at least it's better than The Book of Boba Fett— and yes, that's damning it with faint praise.

Goddammit. I do not want to write this blog. I have been putting off this blog entry for over a week. But now I am making myself do the distasteful task of writing it to get it off my backlog. What's so wrong? We watched the season 1 finale of The Book of Boba Fett last week. In a word, it sucked.

What sucked about it was the poor writing. And when I say "poor writing" I mean crummy, downright amateurish writing.

It was obvious all season that writing was not this team's strong suit. The first 3 episodes jumped back and forth between 2 narratives, Boba Fett's time among the Tuskens recovering from his ignominious supposed death in the original movie trilogy, and the present day when he sets himself up as a warlord on Tatooine. Just about the time the Tusken story started to really pull together, it was over. The Tuskens were dead. And just as the present-day story sorta began to come together in episode 4 the writers switched over to writing about Din Djarin "The Mandalorian" in episodes 5 and 6. Boba Fett appeared in all of, like, one scene, with throwaway dialogue, in his own titular show.

Then the writers dropped a complete turd of poor writing in the form of episode 7.

Early in the episode we're treated to clunky exposition from various characters. It's clunky because it's so obvious... as is the "irony" that part of what they say in their exposition is immediately shown to be inaccurate as another character comes bursting through the door with contradictory news. It's like, "Hello, stupid TV tropes!" Seriously, do the writers think this is the 1950s, when audiences are buying TVs for the first time and only have 3 networks of programming to choose from? These jokes are decades past their sell-by dates for still being funny.

Then there's the other 2/3 of the episode. Oh. Em. Gee.
( Episode 7 spoilers... )

The answer to all these rhetorical questions I've raised is "Because weak writing". All the stuff that didn't make any logical sense within the parameters of the story happened when it did because it made emotional sense. The writers knew how long the episode needed to be, what scenes they wanted to have in it, and just wrote whatever nonsense was necessary to string it all together to fill the allotted time.

Space-Horse Opera

In the past I've characterized The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett as Space Westerns. This is a fine category to be in. Westerns and Scifi are known and respected genres. Space Western is the crossover between them. The Mandalorian was an excellent Space Western. Firefly years ago was an excellent Space Western.

With this final episode the series degenerated to a Space-Horse Opera. That's a combination of Space Opera and Horse Opera. Neither of those are good categories. Both disparagingly indicate that the writers give up a core component of the other genres— their gritty realism within the norms of historical or sci-fi settings— and replace it with nonsense devices and plot holes to achieve cheap emotional plays.

Moreover, this series fails in virtually any category because it doesn't develop sympathetic main characters.

Writing 101: Characters Matter

It's taught in Writing 101 that a story can be about three things: the Setting, the Plot, and the Characters. Of these, Setting is the hardest; it requires strong Plot to develop meaningfully. Plot can carry a story for a while, but to be truly engaging and to rise above simplistic themes like "shoot-'em-up"... or "porn"... it's got to have interesting Characters. Thus to be good, stories have got to develop characters the audience cares about.

Within the range of character development there are two basic arcs. A) a character overcomes long odds through skill and determination. B) a character grows emotionally. In both cases the character has to be sympathetic. (A) has to have more redeeming qualities than the foe or challenge s/he overcomes, otherwise the audience won't care. (B) can start out rough but develops appealing qualities. The Mandalorian did both A and B. On the surface each episode had an Arc A; the whole season had a long-running Arc B. Arc B is what made it a good story.

I warned in TBoBF episode 1 that the series was failing to make its characters compelling. It only started to achieve that for the title character in episode 4— right before it made him irrelevant for episodes 5-6 and frankly an idiot in episode 7. And in Fennec Shand, portrayed by the otherwise capable actress Ming-na Wen, there was pretty much nothing but wasted potential. Ultimately the series failed with characterization. The main characters never became appealing people, and the little the was accomplished with showing them overcoming challenges was undone by the ridiculously lame plot devices in the finale.