Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

I binged into episode 4 of The Pacific right after watching episode 3, which was kind of a letdown. My hope was that the action would pick back up in ep. 4 and it'd thus be way better than the dead-end love story that filled most of ep. 3. Alas it was only a little better.

In episode 4, "Gloucester/Pavuvu/Banika", the marines redeploy from Australia to their next combat mission. Time for some action driven plot, right? Eh, no. This episode is one of those "War is Hell" war stories. But instead of doing it really, really well— like Saving Private Ryan did with its intense opening act, or like this show's small-screen brother Band of Brothers did with its excellent "Bastogne" episode, the "War is Hell" theme here falls flat.

It falls flat for two reasons. First, the writers fail the Writing 101 lesson of show, don't tell. Instead of crafting a story around how brutal the environment is and how the soldiers struggled with it, they mostly tell us it was brutal and a struggle. In fact a narrator (I think it's Tom Hanks) literally tells us over stock footage. Lame.

Second, the episode's viewpoint character, Pvt. Bob Leckie, is not sympathetic. From late in ep. 3 we know he really doesn't care to be in the war. But unlike what made the darkest episodes of Band of Brothers great, Leckie isn't even motivated to tough through it by wanting to protect his fellow marines. Not only does the episode not show show action to contextualize Leckie's struggle, they just show Leckie being despondent. He's got a viral sickness, he's depressed (or "shellshocked"), and he doesn't care about anything. While I sympathize with his plight, it's hard to sympathize with him as a character. The seven deadly words ("Why do I care about these characters?") started echoing in my head.

Leckie is sent to a field hospital on the island of Banika to clear up his virus and get him back on his feet. The second half of the episode is Leckie at the hospital. He finds himself assigned to a mental ward. The doctor in charge assures him it's because the regular wards are full and he's just taking the overflow, but the story drops a few hints that maybe he was sent there on purpose to suss out whether he's really sick or just malingering. Alas it's never made clear enough.

At the hospital Leckie works on building relationships with the doctor, the orderly, and one or two of the clearly mentally ill patients. This kind of feels like episode 3's dead-end love story all over again, in that at the end of ep. 4 Leckie ships out from the hospital. The writers just wasted another 30 minutes of air time starting subplots that will never go anywhere. Also, one of the mentally ill soldiers, I believe it's Gibson, is more sympathetic in his 1 minute of screen time than Leckie is in 60 minutes. Gibson's genuinely hurting, and it's impossible not to feel for him. Leckie, by contrast, just seems like a bit of a malingerer.

The premier episode of The Book of Boba Fett dropped December 29 on Disney+. We watched it last week, though It's taken me until now to write about it because I've been a bit "backblogged" after Hawaii and New Year retrospectives, and purposefully limited my posting to 3/day. And while I've been curious to watch this new series since it was announced as a spinoff of The Mandalorian in The Mandalorian's last episode a year ago, I haven't exactly been chomping at the bit for it. I was never one of those "OMG Boba Fett is the most awesomest character in Star Wars EVER!!1!" fan bois.



The Book of Boba Fett stars Temeura Morrison as Boba Fett, the titular famed bounty hunter, and Ming-Na Wen as Fennec Shand, an pan-galactic assassin who became a recurring character in The Mandalorian. Both are pictured above. The premier episode splits its focus between present day, picking up from a scene in The Mandalorian where Fett and Shand decide to set themselves up as crime lords in the fiefdom once ruled by Jabba the Hut, and flashbacks to Fett's past, with how he got from his last appearance in the movies (in Ep. VI, The Last Jedi) to today.

Overall the premier, entitled Stranger in a Strange Land, was "Enh" to me. I saw clear potential for it to get better— or not— in the next few episodes. Here are Five Things split between those that Worked and those which Did Not Work: [Spoilers marked as appropriate. Assume comments contain spoilers.]

1) The "Space Western" Setting [WORKED]
The Book of Boba Fett is styled in a "Space Western" setting like The Mandarian. Like Old West movies, norms and power structures are all local. The Empire has been defeated (mostly) though the reach of the Republic does not extend very far. Most worlds in the galaxy are ruled by whatever people or warlords live there. It's a narratively rich setting, and one that allows tight, focused stories of good vs. evil— or even evil vs. evil— to be told concisely.

2) Rich Visuals [WORKED, mostly]
It's obvious in almost every scene that the producers have poured a lot of money into making this series good. ...Or at least look good. The set design and costuming are great, the special effects look great (with 1-2 arguable exceptions). You really feel like you're on desert planet with a mood that some new danger could lurk around any corner.

3) Dialogue Between the Actors [WORKED]
One thing that works better than The Mandalorian is that there are two lead actors here. They play off each other well in dialogue, adding a delicious comedy element through witty side banter. They basically trash-talk the action and the minor characters. What a relief that they're not both playing the straight man 100% of the time, like everyone in Mando had to do.

There were two particular scenes where I liked their witty repartee. ( Read more... )

4) Morrison as a Physical Badass [DID NOT WORK]
Temeura Morrison has great physical presence. When he stops and stares, his glower can melt the paint off a wall. But he's a 61 year old man. He doesn't move fast or nimbly. This conflicts with the characterization of Boba Fett as the most feared bounty hunter in the galaxy. Yeah, they could put in stunt men for the fighting scenes, but they kind of... don't. I think the director, the famed Robert Rodriguez— whose early films I absolutely loved— wanted to keep the camera shots up close and personal in most of the scenes. Subbing in a stunt man every time the action starts would mean too many scenes shot from far away or from contrived camera angles where you don't see the star's face.

Curiously, Ming-Na Wen is a physical badass. She played one in her recurring role in the Mandalorian... and, of course, in her starring role as elite agent Melinda May in Agents of Shield. Wen is the kind of actress who can do martial arts scenes credibly, handing over only the most dangerous stuff to a stunt double. The director seems to underuse her talent, though. I think he soft-pedals her capability so she doesn't run circles around Morrison.

5) "Why Do I Care About This Story?" [DID NOT WORK— yet]

A story's got to have some reason for the audience to care about it to keep them engaged. In The Mandalorian that was the narrative arc introduced in the first episode when Mando found "Baby Yoda" and decided it would be his mission to protect the child and deliver him to appropriate foster parents. A show just about Mando being a badass & hunting people for bounties would've gotten old quickly. ...And that's even with actor Pedro Pascal being a credible physical badass. (Plus, with him being religious about keeping his helmet on, they could always stick a stunt double in there and we wouldn't know.) The action scenes in Boba Fett frankly suck so far compared to those in The Mandalorian.

Shoot-em-up action isn't going to carry this show very far. In fact it's already played out and FAILED in the shield-fighting scene at the episode's climax. The story of two warlords taking over some dusty backwater planet isn't going to hold interested too much longer, either. Stories about one evil vs. another lose interest fast. So the showrunners really need to come up with a reason we like these characters and want to see the rest of their story.

Hawk and I recently finished watching season 5 of The Sopranos. The 11th episode (out of 13), "The Test Dream", left us wondering if the season was going to run off the rails.

"The Test Dream" is dominated by a 20 minute dream sequence. Well, the episode's Wikipedia page says 20 minutes, but to us it felt a lot longer because it was unfocused. Tony is having a feverish dream that involves elements of flashback to childhood experience as well as omniscient understanding (or imagining?) of recent events he did not witness. There's also a vision of something he'd like to happen.

Look, I get it that IRL people do have dreams, and flashbacks are a common enough storytelling device. This exercise in using flashbacks has multiple problems, though.

• For one, it runs too long. It makes the episode dangerously like a "clips episode"— one of the major tells for when a show has jumped the shark. And this is not the first tell that The Sopranos is at risk of jumping the shark.
• Two, this prolonged dream sequence is confusing to viewers. After every cut we're left unsure if the next scene is real or a hallucination. Done once, maybe twice, it's fun. Done 7 times in a row it's just tedious.
• Three, the prolonged dream sequence does little to add to Tony's character or advance the plot. When Tony had a fever dream in the season 2 finale it was a) shorter and b) was the point where he connected the dots of evidence to recognize that one of the guys in his squad was a rat.

After this episode Hawk uttered the Seven Deadly Words.

"I don't care about these characters anymore."