Catchy Name Needed

It's still Christmas Eve my time as I'm writing this, but it'll be Christmas Day by the time I post it, no doubt, so merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it - and I guess, happy Saturday to the rest of you!

(I'm totally going to have my sense of the days of the week messed up until after 2022 starts, I can tell already. Normally I work on Fridays but I'm off, and next week I'm working different days than I normally do, so I'm just accepting in advance that I'm gonna be confused.)

So even though we're not actually religious, we still celebrate Christmas at least in sort of a half-assed way - not as much as a way of avoiding the religious bits as just to make it less stressful. So today (meaning Christmas Eve) we stayed home, but tomorrow we're going over to my sister & bro-in-law's, but we're just having subs and stuff like that. (Rob seemed slightly put-out by this, and he got us a lasagne to have today at home - but I know he doesn't really want to be the one who cooks any more than P & I do!) And we're only doing sort of token gifts tomorrow. I have a bunch of FabFitFun leftovers I'm giving my sister, because I got several of those boxes this past year, and we got chocolates for the b-i-l, something we know he likes. Rob found a Mandalorian pillow somewhere! that was one of my surprise gifts, and there was a big bag of something heavy that's meant for tomorrow, he said. (I'm guessing it's Dollar Tree finds.) I have a Black Friday find for him - an electric wine-bottle opener - and his main gift is some gigantic (and literally ridiculously heavy) comic-book anthologies that he had asked for. (My main gift was getting my hair professionally cut and colored, because I said when I stopped working full-time that I wasn't going to have it colored any more. So making it my Christmas gift absolves me of having to feel guilty about going back on that.)

Rob had never seen Mean Girls, and I thought of it because of that one scene with the Christmas pageant, and so we watched that, earlier. I think he enjoyed it pretty well. I said it's really something you need to see anyway just to understand those "fetch" jokes, etc. (Then we watched part of Willow, also - and there was a little promo with Warwick Davis up about the new Willow show which apparently is going to be out sometime next year. I knew they were doing it but I didn't know what the ETA on it was.)

Sunday we think we're going to go see Licorice Pizza, and we are agreed we both want to see Spider-man again at some point. I guess that will probably have to be next weekend, since I'm working during the week. Rob is off all next week, so he may go see Nightmare Alley one of those days when I'm working, since I can't work up too much interest in that one.

I'm not really managing the daily thing here, but at least I'm posting, right?

(possible spoilers below, although I'm trying to be relatively careful)

Let's see, well, since I stay up really really late, I got to watch Hawkeye twice before I went to bed. I really liked the conversation between Kate & Yelena, that was funny. (That's not really a spoiler, as I see it, since if you're watching you already know Yelena's there from last week. And it was pretty much common knowledge that she was going to appear at some point, if you've been paying attention to Marvel fandom generally.)

I did kind of emit a little squeak, at least, about that picture at the end.

I've liked all the Marvel series this year, but I like Hawkeye enough that I'm thinking about whether I like it better than WandaVision. Maybe not, I liked WandaVision a lot, but I like Hawkeye a lot, too. Loki still reigns supreme, though. - And I guess Falcon & the Winter Soldier is at the bottom, although I liked it quite a bit, too. (I actually watched most of it a few days ago, as a matter of fact. I can't remember exactly what prompted me to do that.) What If...? kind of seems like a different class of thing because it's episodic (well, mostly) and animated. I can't think where I'd put it with the live-action ones, But I liked it a lot too.

Spider-man has never been my favorite Marvel thing, but we still have tickets to see No Way Home this weekend. (I don't dislike Spider-man, I just don't identify with him that much. Except Miles Morales, he's the exception there. In fact I think I've watched Into the Spider-verse like three times lately.) Even if I hated Spider-man, I'd probably still go see NWH because it's Marvel, and we know there's all kind of crossovers. You miss too much if you miss anything Avengers-related.

Here's something that's not about The Mandalorian! (Still Star Wars, but hey, I gotta write about something!)

I watched the Lego Star Wars Holiday Special, and it was pretty funny. I've never seen the old one.

I don't know if younger people understand this, but in 1978 you couldn't just tape things off the TV - I think that technology was probably in its infancy then, but normal people didn't start having VCRs and cable and stuff til the 80s. Something would be on at 8:00, say, on one of the maybe five channels we had at the time -- and if you didn't watch it then you were out of luck. You might not see it again for years. In fact, did they ever repeat the Star Wars Holiday Special at all? I just heard rumors about how terrible it was, later on.

Anyway, I had the vague idea that it had something to do with Life Day and Chewie's family, but that's about all I know about the original. I just looked on Wikipedia and it actually had Harvey Korman and Bea Arthur (I had no idea, but that is so very 70s, Harvey Korman was in everything).

There is some stuff about Life Day and Chewie's family in the new one, but there's also Rey attempting to train Finn, followed by a highly unlikely plot about Rey and BB8 jumping around in time to see various jedis and their padawans. Clearly that's not based on anything in the old one, since there was nothing but the original movie to jump to, at the time. It was silly, but it's Lego Star Wars, that's what you expect. Anyway, I enjoyed it. I've actually seen it twice, because Rob expressed a desire to watch something Christmassy, and I said, "Oh, I know something!" He liked it too.

(And Wikipedia also said that in fact, no, they did NOT ever repeat the show on broadcast TV or anywhere else, for many years. I think you can get hold of it these days, now that it's nostalgia and not quite such an embarrassment.)

(And it also said that it aired in November 1978, not December, so I would have been in my dorm room in Austin, and we didn't have a TV there. You had to go downstairs to watch TV. I bet if I'd gone down there it would have been on, because Star Wars was pretty much a religion at the time I was in college - at least for the geeks - but I don't think I was even aware that the show was airing at the time.)


HOLIDAILIES

Part 1 is here.



SPOILERS    SPOILERS    SPOILERS    SPOILERS    SPOILERS    SPOILERS    SPOILERS   

(and I mean it for real, this time!)


So (continuing where we left off) Din has taken out the dark troopers, at least for the moment. The four women, meanwhile, are kicking stormtrooper ass, not too surprisingly given what we already know about their abilities. Din gets to the brig and Moff Gideon is there, with the Darksaber held over Grogu. Gideon pretends he's going to yield and Din pretends to buy that, but then, of course, they fight. (I didn't mention it earlier, but it was conveniently mentioned earlier - I started to say by Bo-Katan but I've re-watched since I wrote that and I think it was Koska - that the Darksaber can cut through almost anything, EXCEPT beskar. Was that canon before this episode? I don't pretend to be an expert on this stuff.) So Din has a big advantage there, and he wins pretty easily, really - Darksaber or no Darksaber. Cara has already said that she wants Gideon alive, to take back to the Republic - I assume that's why Din doesn't kill him. And Gideon conveniently forgets to mention all the political stuff about the Darksaber and Mandalore. He saves that part to gloat about in front of Bo-Katan, I guess.

So on the bridge, while they're having an argument about politics - Bo-Katan has to win the Darksaber in combat, blah blah - alarms start going off. Remember those droids that went out the airlock? Well, I guess they're self-propelled, because they're coming back. It looked to me like there were a couple of dozen of them, so the five warriors on the bridge are kind of screwed. (Remember that Din in his armor could barely beat one of them.) The dark troopers divide into two groups, once of which immediately starts trying to pound their way into the bridge - I said it reminded me of Rock'em Sock'em Robots.

But then... an X-wing appears. Just the one. Cara makes a sarcastic comment - "We're saved." Personally, I was thinking, "Oh, it can't be." (I was going, Luke? Ezra? Mace? Carson?) But the ship lands, and there's definitely a Jedi inside it, invisible under a dark cloak. Green lightsaber. He - or she - tears through the first batch of dark troopers. Grogu, who has been looking kind of despondent up to this point, perks up the minute the ship lands. Clearly he knows who it is - he's got his hand on the screen, like he's communing with them through the monitor. We've got to assume this is whoever he contacted on Tython. The Jedi comes up the elevator and polishes off the second set of dark troopers at the entrance to the bridge. (Just uses the Force to crush the last one, it's pretty spectacular. In fact the whole thing is very reminiscent of the Darth Vader scene at the end of Rogue One.)

Nobody wants to let the Jedi in, except Din, who's taking his cues from Grogu, I imagine. Din opens the door anyway. The Jedi comes in, sheaths the lightsaber, puts his hood back, and at this point I not-quite-yelled OH MY GOD (but it was pretty loud, and it was like 3 in the morning at the time), because as you probably know by now if you're reading this, it's Luke, CGI'd back 40 years or so. Now in retrospect, of course it was Luke - the X-wing, the green saber, the shots of a glove - but in the moment I wasn't sure. In some of the shots it looked like it could be a woman. And I didn't really think they'd go there with the CGI de-aging, but they did, and I have to admit it looked pretty good, in most of the shots.

Nobody even asks the guy what his name is. (In fact, I don't think anybody but Din and Luke say a word during this conversation.) Din says are you a Jedi, and Luke says Grogo wants Din's permission to go, and several million people around the world start bawling, although I actually did not, which was kind of a surprise to me - I'm a notorious crier. I did shriek, I'm pretty sure, when R2-D2 came around the corner. Din takes off his helmet AGAIN - twice in one season! - and the baby pats his face, and ok, well, maybe a tear or two leaked out, here, but if it did I wasn't even aware of it at the time. Grogu seems reassured by R2-D2's presence. Could he have known him at the Jedi temple?

And there's a lot of eye-contact going on while they're on the way out, and the minute the elevator door shuts, it cuts to black. It's over. Almost.

There's a new end-credits theme. As I noted on Twitter the other day, I love the regular end-credits theme and I always listen to the whole thing. So I wasn't in any danger of missing THE SURPRISE CODA, something they've never done before. (I may have shrieked again when that started, though. I'm not sure.)

Two suns, big round building, most Star Wars fans know what that means - it's Jabba's (former) palace, apparently now run by Bib Fortuna. It's not the party palace it used to be, but there's still a little crowd there, and the guards and the inevitable Twi'lek slave girl. Suddenly Fennec comes in shooting, takes down the guards and anybody else who looks like they might object, frees the slave girl - and Boba Fett comes down the stairs behind her. Bib tries to be smooth, he's all, "Hey dude, long time no see," but Boba just shoots him. And then he tips the body out of the big throne-like chair and sits there himself. With Fennec behind him, swilling spatchka.

Cut to black, and a card:

THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT
Coming December 2021


Incidentally, Rob was already in bed during all this - our apartment has pretty good soundproofing, so apparently I didn't wake him up in my excitement. I left him a note that said, "If you don't want to be spoiled for the Mandalorian, watch it immediately, because I'm not going to be able to restrain myself." (And he did.)

I repeat, SPOILERS, not for the new episode but for last week.

Well, it's almost midnight on Thursday and that means The Mandalorian finale is on in a couple of hours, and since I haven't talked about this past week's episode yet, I might as well do that a little. It was really good. It might have been the best episode yet, in that it really hung together as a narrative and was like a little bitty action movie, really, part Fury Road and part Inglourious Basterds (so I'm told, I haven't ever actually seen the latter - I really need to do that). It pretty much redeemed the character of Mayfeld, which I don't think anybody who saw the episode The Prisoner from last year expected at all, and we actually got to see Pedro's face for more than a hot second, and there was, amazingly, no Baby Yoda whatsoever, other than that he got mentioned a few times, and I didn't even mind that, to my surprise.

The episode was called The Believer, but it was pretty vague about who it was talking about. My theory is that that was deliberate. The character who was most a believer was the Imperial captain, but we don't really care about him, it's more about the other two. Mando is working himself up to believing in family again, maybe, and Mayfeld, the ex-Imperial who had clearly stopped believing in the Empire quite a while back, is maybe getting some sort of belief system to replace that one. Something like that.

The other characters were relegated to background status here. We got to see the inside of Slave One, which was interesting, and Boba's repaired armor, and Fennec and Cara seemed to bond a little - apparently mostly because they both like to shoot things. So it was both lots of fun and really well-done, and I'm not sure it's really my favorite episode ever (I haven't put much thought into that question, I'll have to come back to that) but it's certainly one of the best, overall.

This one was short - thirty-odd minutes, I think? The new one is reportedly something like fifty-seven minutes - "a movie of the week!" Rob said when I told him that. I'm trying to keep my expectations in check for the finale. Jedi? Evil Baby Yoda? The guesses are all over the place. I have no idea, which is kind of cool. (I really don't want Evil Grogu, but I doubt Favreau and Filoni are going to listen to me. And it's too late now, in any case.)

SPOILERS BELOW!! for The Mandalorian Chapter 14.

I said the other day that I was still processing last week's episode, but I've processed and I've watched several videos from various people, and I think I'm ready to talk.

These days, I habitually watch several different YouTubers who discuss everything Star Wars, but one that's new to me that I've really been enjoying is Star Wars Explained's After Show that they've been doing every week. It's really long so I don't always watch the whole thing, but they have a lot of good fannish discussion about such things as: what Jedi was Grogu communing with on Tython? The expectation, since there's only two episodes left in the season (!!), is that whoever it is may swoop in at the last moment in Chapter 16 and save the day. The leading contenders seem to be either Ezra or Luke - and then if it's Luke, how do they do that? There's a faction in favor of Sebastian Stan playing Luke, here - and there's also the "Mace Windu is alive!!!!" contingent. (I don't see why Mace can't be alive - yeah, Palpatine threw him out a window and everything, but he's a Jedi, they survive weird shit ALL THE TIME. If Maul can get cut in half and still be alive, Mace certainly can be.) Apparently Sam Jackson has said hell yeah, he'd like to play Mace again, so there's that.

Honestly, I don't particularly have a horse in the race, as far as who I want it to be. With this show, it's hard to predict what they're going to do. I mean, who expected a Boba Fett/Fennec Shand/Mando team-up? I was never a huge Boba Fett fan - I was the "wrong" age, which is what I always say about Star Wars. I loved it, but I was 17 when the first movie came out and 20 for Empire, I was too old for toys (or I sure thought I was, anyway). I get the feeling that a lot of the people who loved Boba Fett from the first are partly that way because they were younger than me and they had the Boba Fett toys. But I do find his character arc pretty interesting, just the same. And man, they let him go berzerker on those Stormtroopers. (I was unsurprised at the end to find out that Robert Rodriguez directed this one. It definitely looked like his style.)


(That reminds me, I forgot when I was talking about Chapter 13 to mention the presence of Michael Biehn, who I completely did not recognize. That man used to be a god if you were into, like, early James Cameron movies - Terminator and Aliens and stuff. Nice to see him, but I was hoping he'd have a role where he was around longer!)


ADDENDUM - this is what I put in the Holidailies blurb (almost a spoiler in itself, but I guess not quite):
With an episode name like that, you know what to expect, I guess. (I did have to explain to Rob who the weird scarred guy who wanted his armor back was!)

I need to make a tag for, like, Mel's middle-of-the-night opinions, or something like that. When I write this stuff before bed, it's gets very stream-of-consciousness. (I'll try to at least go back and clean up the typos when I wake up!)