#899. The Mandalorian, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”

Hmm. Let’s maybe get back a little more into blogging (last year is the first one I missed on this particular one since I started it back in 2002!). If I manage to keep this up, this’ll be a brief look at the highlights of what I’ve watched recently, hopefully on a weekly basis.

So this past week I finally saw the first two seasons of The Mandalorian. I’m really behind. I know this. This is a show that until a few weeks ago only existed on Disney+. Except for Paramount+ (and its predecessor CBS All Access) I haven’t really participated in the streaming future. I have spent most of my life without cable TV, too. I view it like that. 

So I finally got to watch it because someone decided to release those seasons in physical media. I got them on Blu-ray, which is itself a format I didn’t participate in until the pandemic started. But I’ve been catching up on that, too. I now have dozens of movies and TV shows on these slightly smaller, smoother, more visually detailed discs. The first one I got was, and also the impetus for, Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, the directorial reimagining of the third film in the series, an attempt to finally make it respectable.

Not really the subject of this discussion. Anyway.

I didn’t really have an urge to watch any of the Star Wars TV shows. I’m a fan of the movies. Pretty much all of them. Modern Star Wars fans and I diverge on a lot of points. They like the cartoons, Rogue One…I don’t. I knew all about the Baby Yoda phenomenon. Kind of hard to avoid. I figured that was probably good enough.

Then this opportunity arose. So I dove in. The absolute best I can say is that it’s really interesting to watch familiar Star Wars elements sort of remixed. I mean, this is clearly (unlike, say, Rogue One) Star Wars. By the second season they’re clearly leaning more heavily into the connective material.

Let’s move on.

I’ve watched every episode of Star Trek. All of them. (Prodigy now being on Netflix, this will change for the foreseeable future.) I’ve followed and enjoyed each new show to varying degrees (Prodigy least, so kind of fortuitous). 

This being said, last year the best new episode in decades (since the end of Enterprise) happened, and in the series most capable of achieving the necessary episodic format to reach it. Which is to say, Strange New Worlds.

The episode is “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” (which you might have been able to guess from the title of this post). It features a character who’s been a regular in the series from the start, a descendant of Khan, being forced in the most literal way possible, to confront her ancestry. 

The whole episode is magical. La’an herself had already been a favorite of mine (as much as it pains her to think of them I love to hear her say “Gorn,” and she was by far the best element of the fantasy episode in the first season, when I truly noticed her for the first time). How she plays off Kirk, and how the episode leans into Kirk himself, interprets him (kind of how Grogu cleverly depicts Yoda’s quip to Luke all those years ago, about he could possibly be so big eating the way he did), which for a character who has existed for some sixty years and this is the third incarnation of him, that’s a special kind of breakthrough.

But yeah, it also dives deeply into Star Trek lore, by giving us a glimpse into Khan’s origins, and La’an’s continuing efforts to reconcile her lineage. The whole experience is, as I may have mentioned, perfect, for all the reasons I’ve touched on and many more besides. It’s the most richly articulated episodes in franchise history, and yeah, one of the best. I have a whole blog dedicated to the franchise, and I have painstakingly detailed the new classics as I’ve talked about all those episodes, classics in Star Trek having become harder to identify the older it’s gotten.

This one goes leagues beyond most of them. And it baffles me that nobody seems to recognize this. So I try to talk about it here and there. I just happened to watch it again, which is why I’m writing about it here now.

I’ve been a fan of Star Wars and Star Trek most of my life, so it’s always nice to know there’s still new stuff worth talking about all these many years later, past the formative material. That’s not a sentiment that gets expressed enough, not these days. I’ve tried most of my blogging experience to counteract that, so it’s fitting to reiterate the point when trying to get back into the swing of it.