Andrew Bloom

VIP

9

[9.8/10] Susie nails it. When Midge tells her she’s considering doing something reckless with the four minutes remaining on The Gordon Ford show, Susie tells her number one client to go for it. She tells her that she got into this thing by taking a stage nobody invited her to and saying things she wasn’t allowed to say. Why should today be different? Why shouldn’t the same boldness and hilarious honesty carry the day now?

And oh my lord does it.

“Four Minutes” is, like so many series finale, full of call backs and bookends. In the finale of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s first season, Midge and Joel are on the verge of getting back together. What stops the reunion is Joel hearing an underground “party record” of Midge’s confessional rant from the night he left her. He couldn't stand her spreading their private lives to strangers, and perhaps more damningly, he couldn't stand her being better at comedy than him.

Now, when he hears that Midge is going to be on The Gordon Ford Show, he is overjoyed for her, not jealous. And more to the point, without being asked, he tells her to talk about anything, about him, about the kids, about any part of the life he helped fracture, if only so that his sins can be further made fodder for something good and worthwhile. I’ve ragged on Joel a lot, but there may be no bigger sign of his growth and maturity than that.

Some echoes are not so happy. In the first episode, Midge hears Lenny’s rant about the meat grinder of stand-up and asks him in response if he loves it nonetheless. He gives her a shrug of resignation, a wry sort of acceptance that love it or hate it, this is the path he’s on. Here, Susie gives Lenny a plea when his life is disintegrating. She gives him an offer for help he sorely needs. Folks aware of the real life story know that Lenny is not far away from his untimely end. But when asked one final time, not in so many words, if he’ll accept the assistance it would take to pull out of this tailspin, all he offers is the same resigned shrug. It’s an underplayed but brutal affirmation that he’s as stuck on that path now as he was then.

Some lead to moments of honesty and vulnerability. The desperate phone call that pulled Midge away from work was having to bail Susie out of jail. It’s a meaningful reversal of the series’ beginning where it was Susie who got Midge out of the slammer. What led Susie there is continued raw feelings over Hedy, and having to dredge up that painful part of her life in order to get Midge the ticket to being in front of the camera she needs.

In the wake of that concession, which Midge now understands the gravity of, Susie (and Alex Borstein) gives arguably her best monologue in the entire series (give or take her eulogy for Nicky). When she talks about her relationship with Hedy, the plans they made that she let herself believe in, the love that they shared in a time and a place it wasn’t accepted or embraced, the heartbreak of seeing the woman she cared for pulled away from her, it is the most raw we’ve ever seen her. Her heartfelt confessional to her closest friend not only gives Borstein a time to shine as an actor, not only helps Midge understand what her manager did for her, but underscores the extra pain folks like Susie had to endure at a time where there were even more hurdles to finding love and acceptance that folks struggle with under the best of circumstances.

But the sacrifice is worth it because it works. Midge gets an invitation to appear on The Gordon Ford Show. The invitation is a bitter one. Gordon Ford resents Midge and Susie going around him to make this happen. But by god, it’s happening. And it leads to all sorts of great comedy and better grace notes for the cast of characters who made Mrs. Maisel feel so lively and hilarious for five seasons.

Dinah pulls off one last miracle, getting Midge the dress of her dreams for free for a mere mention of Bergdorf’s. (A far cry from when Midge had to struggle with a domineering boss to keep her job at a competing department store.) Zelda calls Rose to let her know about the show in secret, so as not to let Yanucz know she’s entangled with the Weissmans again. Archie and Imogene make it to the big show and take credit for dumping on ol’ Penny Pan from a cocktail party. Mrs. Moskowitz cuts through the elder Maisels’ monkeyshines and gets to the bottom of their grand plans.

Those grand plans are to, well, retire and spend the rest of their lives together. The epiphany arrives in an appropriately silly way, with a couple of choice falls in the shower and a sopping fur coat leading to some honest conversation. But in a season that started with the prospect of their divorce, there’s something adorable and endearing about Moishe retiring and giving up his business, the thing that represents the outward success he so cherishes, to revel in the inward success of a marriage to the woman he loves.

For a finale that is, quite understandably, full of sap, “Four Minutes” doesn’t skimp on the comedy. Susie and Dinah debating how to get a bucket across two buildings using a trained squirrel is a big laugh. Midge ranting to her fellow writers about deserving a few hours off without an array of pestering phone calls, only to find out it wasn’t them, is a very funny moment. And Abe and Rose frantically trying to explain to a series of unsympathetic cabbies during a shift change (relatable!) that through money, math tutoring, wedding rings, or magic whistles, they need to get to Rockefeller Center, is another one of the show’s great comic set pieces, with expert cinematography to match.

And yet, theirs might be the most touching moments in the finale. Rose’s schism from her husband and daughter in the first season stemmed from the sense that they were lying to her, that they were keeping the important things from her, that she wasn’t taken seriously. So when she has to find out Midge’s big news second-hand, Rose declares she’s not going thanks to this affront. It is merely the latest insult, the latest case of her being kept out of the loop by her “pathological liar” of a child.

Except, hilariously, Midge has enlisted everyone she knows, from Joel, to Shirley, to Zelda, to her fellow writers, to try to get the news to Rose. Wouldn’t you know it? Mrs. Weissman inadvertently left the darn phone off the hook. Nonetheless, she is touched that Midge went to such lengths to reach her, and it shows her how much her daughter does value and care about her.
Abe’s moment is much simpler. Midge tells him the news, and he’s confused about Midge’s references and colloquialisms and other things he just doesn’t understand. But what he does understand is that this is an achievement. He stops his all-important goings-on to tell her so and, even when the appearance isn’t going as planned, tells her how incredible what she’s accomplished is. It is a heartwarming follow-up to his hollowing epiphany of what he’d done wrong from the prior episode. And it is a tacit acknowledgment that, even if his daughter’s life doesn’t fit what he’d wanted or expected from her, it is no less extraordinary for it.

His pride carries extra resonance because Midge’s vaunted appearance isn’t going well. Gordon’s begrudging admittance of her to a spot on the show is not to perform her act; it’s to be interviewed as a writer. She is a “human interest” story. He will technically fulfill his wife’s request to have her on. But he also demeans her in the process, treating her like a sideshow and a curiosity rather than a comic.

She’s permitted to perform. She isn’t permitted to sit on the couch where the “real” guests go. He all but denies Midge her name, introducing only as “a Gordon Ford show writer”, and “our resident lady writer” before briefly providing only her first name, in contrast to the male writers who get their surnames as part of their introductions. And when she has the temerity to be funny during this neutered little segment? He throws to commercial because he can't stand her and Susie getting one over on him.

It is a brilliant exercise in frustration. Midge’s last stretch to glory in this finale is not a primrose path of triumph. It is another instance in which she must scratch and claw to get what she ought to have earned through talent and hard work alone. It is another example of her being punished for not doing things “the right way”, when that way contains every roadblock for people like her. It is one more time when succeeding at this means being bold and daring and a little dangerous, taking what you deserve because otherwise no one will give it to you.

That is the biggest bookend and parallel between The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s final bow and its opening salvo. Susie calls out that same fire that led Midge to the Gaslight to vent her frustrations on stage in the first place. Once again, Midge goes where she supposedly doesn’t belong, speaks when it’s not her turn to speak, because whether it’s liquid courage or simply the courage of her convictions, by god, she’s meant for this.

In one of those impossible, brilliant, writerly monologues, she tells it all again. She talks about being Jewish. She talks about being the child of two demanding parents. She talks about being left by her husband. She talks about being a mother. She talks about wanting fame and recognition for what she does. She talks about the challenges she’s faced as a woman, a comic, and someone who’s tried from day one to reconcile her life on stage with her life off of it.

At base, she talks about her life. With tremendous choices in lighting and direction, the show sells the enormity of this moment, the way this is the tipping point of her climb to fortune and fame, but also an intimate confessional, the truth behind her art that makes the comedy funnier and the confessions more piercing.

As I wrote in the series’ beginning, Seinfeld was not meant to be “a show about nothing.” It was intended to be a show about how comedians found material for their act. And in the same way, this moment in Mrs. Maisel is about the same thing. The performance that puts her on the map is not a riff on random nonsense or “put that on your plate”-style phoniness. It is about how, from her initial wedding toast, Midge has used her life as fodder to stand-up in front of the crowd and connect with her audience.

In a way, Midge’s whole life has led to this moment. She uses the events of the series, her challenges from being single again, the unique struggles of being a comedienne, her relationship with her kids and her relationship with her parents and her relationship with the ex-husband whose selfish deeds started this whole wild journey, to make up the set that becomes her crowning achievement. The trials and travails of the last three years and five seasons amounted to this: a set that kills, a truth that resonates, and a person less revealed than transformed, who’s come out of her original betrayal stronger and willing to seize what’s waiting on the other side of that window.

It’s beautiful and stirring and a magnificent capstone to all Midge was achieved. If there’s an element of wish fulfillment to it all, it’s that she’s so hilarious that even grumpy Gordon can't help but break down and admit he should have had her up there a long time ago. He does fire her, so she doesn’t get off scot-free. But in a parallel to Joan Rivers’ big break with Johnny Carson, she’s invited to the couch, a recognition of her talent and the fact that, whether he wanted her there or not, she was going to be a big star. It’s enough for Gordon to give her the benediction of announcing her name, a title drop for the series that could hardly come in a more satisfying way.

But other people knew before Gordon did. One of them was Lenny Bruce. Whether or not he’s there for her great success, he saw the star that she would become. It is downright lovely that the thought we leave Lenny with is not his sad passing, but rather the image of someone who had utter faith and confidence in Midge, with a fortune cookie fortune, spun into honest flattery, that gives her a boost via their sweet inside joke when she needs it most.

But the first person who knew was Susie. Season 5 teased discord between manager and client throughout. Our flash forwards suggested enmity between them that couldn't be resolved. And for all the talk of fame here as the ultimate goal, our semi-shocking glimpse of Midge in 2005 suggests a lonely life. Her parents have presumably passed on. Her kids clearly have mixed feelings with her. Joel is but a loving picture on a desk. All that's left, seemingly, is for Midge to wander through an opulent but empty living space, albeit one in a familiar part of town, that suggests she may be as isolated and aloof as Sophie Lennon became amid her success.

Except she isn’t. She retreats to her room, connects with a blissfully retired, tropically-residing Susie, and the two uproariously funny old vets crack each other up over Jeopardy and reincarnation across a continent. In the end, when the work together has ended, what’s left is their true friendship. And more importantly, Midge has what she was looking for the last time Susie was in a beachside locale -- someone who makes her laugh.

When Midge lost one partnership with Joel, she accidentally discovered another with Susie. And while the former fueled her, and eventually worked its way to being a worthy part of her life, it’s the latter that drove her, comforted, and sustained her.

What a lovely note to go out on for this series, which nailed the landing in a way few television shows do. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s final set is a glorious one, which pays due tribute to these rich characters, this colorful little ecosystem, and the journey that led them here. A small-time bar boss comes to manage the stars, a jilted housewife comes to be the groundbreaking entertainer she was always meant to become, and two people uncover a friendship that nourishes them even when the work fades away. To Amy Sherman-Palladino, to the talented creative team that brought this series to life over the past six years, to Midge and Susie -- thank you and goodnight.

[7.5/10] Ahsoka feels right. The vistas of Lothal feel of a piece with their animated rendition. The characters seem like themselves despite shifts in the performer and the medium. Their relationships feel genuine even though much has changed in the five years since we’ve seen them together.

Maybe that shouldn’t be a big surprise with Dave Filoni, impresario of the animated corner of Star Wars, both writing and directing “Master and Apprentice”, the series premiere. He is the title character’s co-creator and caretaker. He is the creator of Star Wars: Rebels, the show that Ahsoka is most clearly indebted to. And he is, for many, the keeper of the flame when it comes to the Galaxy Far Far Away.

But it was my biggest fear for this show. More than the plot, more than the lore, more than the latest chapter in the life of my favorite character in all of Star Wars, my concern was that translating all these characters, and their little corner of the universe, to live action and a different cast and a different era of the franchise would make everything feel wrong. Instead, we’re right at home. The rest is gravy.

And the gravy is good. Because these are not the colorful, if intense, adventures of the Ghost crew fans saw before. This is, or should be, a period of triumph for the onetime Rebels. They won! The Empire is torn asunder! Lothal is led with grace and a touch of wry sarcasm by Governor Azadi, with none other than Clancy Brown reprising the role! Huyang the lightsaber-crafting droid is still around and has most of his original parts!

Nonetheless, our heroes are hung up on old battles and older wounds. Ahsoka Tano is on a quest to track down Grand Admiral Thrawn, who hunted the Spectres in Rebels. Sabine Wren can’t bask in the afterglow of victory as a hero when she’s still mourning Ezra Bridger. And the two warriors have some lingering bad blood with one another after an attempt to become master and apprentice, true to the title, went wrong somewhere along the way.

With that, the first installment of Ahsoka is a surprisingly moody and meditative affair, one that works well for Star Wars. Sure, there's still a couple of crackerjack lightsaber fights to keep the casual fans engaged. But much of this one is focused on familiar characters reflecting on what’s been lost, what’s been broken, and what’s hard to fix. The end of Rebels was triumphant, but came with costs. To linger on those costs, and the new damage that's accumulated in their wake, is a bold choice from Filoni and company.

So is the decision to focus on Sabine here. Don’t get me wrong, Ahsoka has the chance to shine in the first installment of the show that bears her name. Her steady reclamation of a map to Thrawn, badass hack-and-slash on some interfering bounty droids, and freighted reunions with Hera and her former protege all vindicate why fans have latched onto the character. For her part, Rosario Dawson has settled into the role, bringing a certain solemnity that befits a more wizened and confident master, but also that subtle twinkle that Ashley Eckstei brings to the role.

And yet, the first outing for Ahsoka spends more time with Sabine’s perspective. It establishes her as a badass who’d rather rock her speeder with anti-authoritarian style than be honored for her heroics. It shows her grieving a lost comrade whose sacrifice still haunts her. It teases out an emotional distance and rebelliousness between her and her former mentor. And it closes with her using her artist’s eye to solve the puzzle du jour, and defend herself against a fearsome new enemy.

This is her hour, and while Sabine is older, more introverted, all the more wounded than the Mandalorian tagger fans met almost a decade ago, this opening salvo for the series is better for it.

My only qualms are with the threat du jour. Yet another Jedi not only survived the initial Jedi Purge, but has made it to the post-Return of the Jedi era without arousing the suspicions of Palpatine, Vader, Yoda, or Obi-Wan. Ray Stevenson brings a steady and quietly menacing air to Baylan Skoll, the former Jedi turned apparent mercenary, but there's enough rogue force-wielders running around already, thank you very much.

His apprentice holds her own against New Republic forces and Ahsoka’s own former apprentice, but is shrouded in mystery. She goes unidentified, which, in Star Wars land, means she’s secretly someone important (a version of Mara Jade from the “Legends” continuity?) or related to someone important (the child of, oh, let’s say Ventress). And I’m tired of such mystery boxes.

Throw in the fact that Morgan Elsbet, Ahsoka’s source and prisoner, turns out to be a Nightsister, and you have worrying signs that the series’ antagonists will be rehashing old material rather than moving the ball forward. The obvious “We just killed a major character! No for real you guys!” fakeout cliffhanger ending doesn’t inspire much confidence on that front either.

Nonetheless, what kept me invested in Rebels, and frankly all of Star Wars, despite plenty of questionable narrative choices, is the characters. The prospect of Ahsoka trying to train a non force-sensitive Mandalorian in the ways of the Jedi, or at least her brand of them, is a bold and fascinating choice.

But even more fascinating is two people who once believed in one another, having fallen apart, drifting back together over the chance to save someone they both care about. “Master and Apprentice” embraces, rather than shying away from, the sort of lived-in relationships that made the prior series so impactful in the past, and the broken bonds that make these reunions feel fragile, painful, and more than a little bitter in the present.

I am here for Hera the general trying to patch things up between old friends. I am here for Sabine holding onto her rebellious streak but carrying scars from what went wrong, in the Battle of Lothal and in her attempts to learn the ways of the Jedi. And I am here for Ahsoka, once the apprentice without a master, now the master without an apprentice, here to snuff out the embers of the last war and reclaim what was lost within it.

They all feel right. The rest can figure itself out.

[9.2/10] There are parts of Barbie that aren’t for me. I am a guy. A “Ken” to use the film’s own lingo. I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman. I don't know what it’s like to face those challenges myself. So much of the film is about that experience, both the idealized version that Barbieland represents, and the sometimes harsh reality of it our unwitting doll protagonist crashes into in the real world. I can appreciate some of those things secondhand, and even be compelled by them, but they’re not going to resonate with me the same way they will for someone who’s been through it.

There are parts of Barbie that are very much for me as a guy. As someone whose high school Xanga page used to autoplay “Push” by Matchbox 20, some of the comedic tweaks of masculinity hit a little too close to home. I’ve waxed rhapsodic about The Godfather ad nauseam. I’ve played music “at” girls I liked. And more seriously, in my wayward youth, I treated romantic partners like a solution to my problems rather than ends unto themselves. The film’s playful jabs, and its more serious critiques, are on point, and will resonate even if you’re the target of them.

There are parts of Barbie that are for me as someone who simply appreciates when a film has a distinctive look and feel all its own. Director/co-writer/three-for-three visionary Greta Gerwig and her collaborators construct an incredible world for their title character. Translating a doll’s playspace for the big screen could easily go terribly awry. But their realization of Barbieland is stunning in how vibrant and creative it feels. Everything from the layout of Barbie’s neighborhood, to the movements of the characters, to the texture of the ground give this unique realm a tremendous sense of place. The details big and small are a brilliant example of how to blend the realism of modern film with the bizarre but endearing unreality of such a specific setting.

There are parts of Barbie that are for me as a lover of out there, postmodern camp. WIth that locale comes the wild cosmology of the film: a neat mishmash of a land of imagination crashing into the problems of modern life, of spritely cartoon characters finding unexpected cracks in their paradise, of goofy figures playing their roles to the hilt without a hint of irony, and of a wide-ranging satire that spoofs the gendered elements of society and the peculiar quirks of a toy box world at the same time. Bright colors, wild schemes, beachside battles, song-and-dance numbers, wide-eyed characters, undeniable weirdos, all wrapped in a candy-coated shell. If Barbie hadn't already dominated the box office, it would be destined to be a cult classic.

And as that box office take suggests, here are parts of Barbie that are for anyone. I’d argue they’re the most important parts. I may not know what it’s like to be a woman. But I know what it’s like to grow up. Beyond the gender critiques that swirl around the film, this is, first and foremost, a story about steadily realizing that the world is bigger, more challenging, and more complicated than the ones we perceived and imagined as children.

Through a nigh-magical bond with the young woman who played with her, our protagonist, Stereotypical Barbie, starts to think about death. She starts to feel existential dread. She deals with stress and fear and unease and even (gasp) cellulite. The most piercing aspect of Gerwig’s third feature is how it uses the doll’s awakening conceit to analogize both the humbling, terrifying broadening of perspective we get as we grow up, and the generational motion sickness we get from looking back at what enchanted us, what inspired us, when we were younger.

In that, Barbie is insightful. It is hilarious. It is delightful. It is inventive as all hell. And it is deeply profound.

What’s doubly impressive about all this is that the call is coming from inside the house. If Gerwig, for example, made a thinly-veiled “Malibu Stacy” movie, we’d praise it as subversive. Somehow, though, this is an official branded release that deconstructs and reconstructs the gender politics that Barbie reinforced and then evolved with, that satirizes the Mattel Corporation itself (headed here by one of Will Ferrell’s trademark manchildren characters), takes square aim at the patriarchy, and uses the existence of genitalia to symbolize self-actualization. To convince the powers that be to cosign such a transgressive take on a beloved icon is an achievement beyond the art itself.

How could the suits say no to talent like that though. With her Oscar-nominated pedigree, Gerwig brings the same reimagining virtuosity and millennial vanguard she showed off in Little Women. Margot Robbie simply is Barbie, embodying the blithely joyous icon, and then nailing the subtle and shattering changes that came as she slowly feels the weight of the world beyond her shores. Ryan Gosling nearly steals the show with his committedly weird, blithely blinkered, and yet somehow pathos-ridden take on Ken. Comedy vets like Kate McKinnon and Michael Cera bring wry laughs in perfect casting as “Weird Barbie” and just plain “Alan” respectively. And the diversity of the denizens in Barbie’s world is plus that aids in the sense that damn near everyone here is perfectly cast, no matter how big or small the role.

Despite its incredible successes, the film is not perfect. In places, it feels unfocused. Barbie strives to cover a lot of thematic ground in less than two hours. As a result, even though it remains stellar on a scene-to-scene basis, sometimes it comes off disjointed as a whole. While many of its criticisms are right on target, some feel like the male equivalent of “bitches be shoppin’”-style observations. That sense of caricature in some sequences fits the heightened tone of the film, but can seem comparatively shallow to the movie’s more incisive critiques and observations. Late in the film, those critiques and observations start arriving in what amounts to a few blunt spoken essays, rather than arising organically from the situation.

And yet, this is a film of great nuance. Despite the sense of Ken as a blithe, patriarchy promoting dope, the script has genuine sympathy for him, and even uses him to explore gendered marginalization in the context of Barbieland. It plays in the space of motherhood, examining the challenges and expectations that can drive parents and children apart but also the beauty and understanding that brings them back together. It manages to encompass nearly every part of the conversation around Barbie, while also internalizing them to one person’s journey of self-discovering in a way that feels surprisingly natural.

That comes from the sheer boldness and ambition of the story. A doll “malfunctioning” from her owner’s existential quandaries, barging into the real world and coming back shaken by it, with layers of meta commentary and Charlie Kaufman-esque recursive self-reflection, is a hell of a thing to try, let alone pull off with flying (mostly pink) colors the way Gerwig does.

What holds it all together is the way this story comes down to Barbie herself as a protagonist. After psychological tugs and troubles that are a metaphor for the growing, scary understanding we all develop over time, Barbie breaks down. She’s ready to give up in the face of it. She’s lifted up by someone who gives voice to the challenges and contradictions, but in the end, after this enlightenment, isn’t sure what she wants.

The conceit of making her creator a godlike figure, there to bless her and open doors for her, is one of the film’s canniest choices. In Rhea Perlman’s pitch perfect rendition of Barbie inventor Ruth Handler, Barbie has a mother, one who symbolizes the goal not just of feminism, but for all parents -- to try to make the lives of their children a little safer, a little kinder, a little better than theirs were.

So Ruth gives her child the gift of vision, a chance to see and feel the breadth of experiences that await her if she leaves the safety of Barbieland and a safe childhood view of the world, and trades it for the world of adulthood, with all of its terrors and pitfalls, but also a waterfall of joys, fellowship, and wonders. That closing sequence, set to Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?”, is the bravura crescendo of the film that surprised and moved me.

It is a cinematic showpiece to capture, well, life, and beyond that, the sublime, terrifying choice to embrace that complex array of experiences, good and bad, that await you. To accept that, to countenance the overwhelming scope of existence, knowing that it will overtake you and that it will end, is an act of profound courage, and a gobsmacking thing to successfully convey on the silver screen.

No matter who you are, you feel that plight. You feel that awe. You feel the spiritual catharsis of a doll who knowingly becomes a person, and scarier yet, a grown-up, with all that comes with both. You feel the hardship and hope of choosing to live in a messy and imperfect world and to be messy and imperfect. And that part of Barbie is for everyone.

[7.6/10] Ahsoka is doing a slow burn, and I can’t say that I mind. There are more teases and piece-moving than there are important plot developments, but that gives us time to get into the world and the story. The machinations of something as grandiose as the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn shouldn’t happen in a day. And something as emotionally potent as Ahsoka and Sabine reuniting as master and apprentice shouldn’t happen in a single episode. Taking the time to let these things simmer before they boil is a feature, not a bug.

Not that the cheekily-titled “Toil and Trouble” is lacking in narrative stakes or high-flying action. The latest clue as to Morgan Elsbet’s intentions leads Ahsoka and Hera to the shipyards of Corellia, where they uncover a host of ex-Imperials, still devoted to the cause, helping out their enemies with hyperdrives and other tech for the “Eye of Scion”.

The visit to Corellia serves a broader theme throughout the Mando-verse side of Star Wars -- that the transition from an Empire to a Republic is an awkward and irregular one. The “happy ever after” of Return of the Jedi gives way to lost causers, reactionary schemers, and in this case, people who profited off the old system who are just as ready to profit off the new one.

Peter Jacobson (of House M.D. fame) does a good job as the local shipyard functionary, trying to put our heroes off the scent and dissembling to keep his operation rolling. But he never comes off like a former Imp trying to raise the last vestiges of the Empire anew. Instead, he seems like someone willing to sell his wares to the highest bidder, whomever that may be. In the franchise’s continuing exploration of what it means to stamp out the embers of the last regime and build up the structure of the New Republic, it’s nice to acknowledge the problems caused by those simply out to make a buck, in line with The Last Jedi.

And it makes time for some action to keep the casual ans happy once more. We get another lightsaber fight, as Ahsoka makes quick work of the mooks in the control tower, bursts through a window with badass glory, and takes on a darksider and their assassin droid with sizzling aplomb. The sword fighting is crisp and clear, without too many cuts, and the choreography is exciting enough to hold your interest.

But this is really Hera’s coming out party. It’s a blast to see her flying with grace and dexterity in live action, as he chases down the ship headed to Morgan’s stronghold. The fancy darting through opposing fire throws her nimbleness at the controls. And what a debut for Chopper, her trust droid, who is as cantankerous, amusing, and potentially murderous as ever. The pair remain great, with a clear goal to place a tracker on the ship, some fun banter and gesticulating between them, and a nice display of their talents. Despite the deliberately placed plot movement, there's plenty of high octane moments here to keep the tempo up.

There's also some genuine intrigue on the villain side of the equation. Our mystery girl refers to Baylan as master, and seems to be genuinely ignorant of what this is all building towards. The episode reveals a new ally, a formidable foe who uses an Inquisitor’s lightsaber and can stand their ground against Ahsoka. And Morgan reveals the power of the map, lighting it up with her Nightsister magic and pointing the way to retrieving Thrawn. It’s all just breadcrumbs for now, but they’re compelling enough to whet your appetite for more.

More than that, Baylan gets a little shading in ways that make him a more interesting player. He derides Morgan’s theories about Thrawn’s location as fairy tales. He laments the possibility of killing Ahsoka, thinking it a shame to lose another Jedi with so few left. He seems steady, dignified, appropriately imbued with Jedi calm. And yet, he seems to desire unimaginable power, a sign of the fall of the dark side. While I’m impatient and, frankly, annoyed with Star Wars mystery boxes, I’m curious enough and satisfied enough with the early hints, to be on board waiting to find out what precisely Baylan’s deal is.

Despite all of this -- the latest rendition of the New Republic’s challenges, the action and excitement, the teases for our villains -- the main event here is the rekindling of the partnership between Ahsoka and Sabine.

I like the structure of how it plays out. You have Sabine’s closest ally, Hera, encouraging Ahsoka to take her on as an apprentice once more. You have Ahsoka’s closest ally, Huyang, encouraging Sabine to seek the path of a padawan once more. And you have both the former master and the former apprentice bucking at the idea, but eventually acquiescing when each realizes they’re ready.

You understand the distance that exists between them and why. The show does well to dramatize the ways in which Ahsoka is steady, thoughtful, and measured, as a Jedi Master might be, and also the ways in which Sabine is still recalcitrant, brash, and a little reckless, in the way a certain young togruta once was when she was a padawan.

Ahsoka is perceptive and deft, as her recovery of the attack droid in Sabine’s home reveals. Sabine is talented and capable, as her ability to retrieve the data from the droid’s head shows. But the near-explosion she causes when pushing the limits to retrieve it, and Ahsoka’s quiet but judgmental air, ably demonstrates why things fell apart.

But Hera and Huyang make the case that they need one another, for structure, for support, for purpose. They’re each too proud, and a little too burned from the last experience, to admit it, but their friends are right. Sabine gradually accepts it. A meaningful haircut is a trope, but also a good signifier that Sabine is done running away from her past, and ready to embrace the path she was on when the Ghost crew road high.

And Ahsoka speaks of both master and apprentice simply knowing they’re ready, the reason behind her reluctance to start anew. But when Sabine shows up, ready to take up her vocation once more, feeling more “her”, each of them lives up to that standard. It’s time to start again.

That start doesn’t happen overnight. I imagine they won’t magically be on the same page the whole time in episode three. It’s a process. A journey. A transition for both of them. But with a measured, even soulful rendition of their intertwining path, I’m willing to wait.

[7.9/10] The fashionable thing today is to complain about “filler” episodes. But you know what? I could watch Din Djarin and Bo-Katan Kryze go on planet-of-the-week adventures until the banthas come home.

Part of what sets The Mandalorian apart is that it has a real sense of place. I’d argue that it’s done the most to expand Star Wars’ iconography since the Original Trilogy. So it’s invariably cool to see a Quarren spaceship where the captain spends most of her time in a big tube of water. It is badass to watch a pair of Mandalorians have an honor duel where they jetpack and grappling hook their way into action. And it’s especially engrossing to see them two of them get pulled into the internecine problems of one very distinctive local world.

That world is Plazir-15, an independent system that, I swear to god, feels like a Star Wars riff on Disney World, particularly Epcot and Tomorrowland. The aesthetics of the people-mover, domed city, and shopping/entertainment wonderland, the musical yet insistent welcome, and the sense of colorful people having fun above while grimmer and more quotidian business goes down below, all give you the strange sense of the Mando Duo being asked to police the Happiest Place on Earth.

What better place to feature some of the show’s most eye-opening guest stars. Jack Black! Lizzo! Christopher Lloyd! It’s fun to see the former two hamming it up as a colorful royal family who takes a shine to Grogu and wants Din and Bo-Katan to help solve their droid problem. And Lloyd is always a welcome presence, with his grave functionary-turned-culprit role being well-suited to his talents. This show has introduced or revived so many personalities that make Star Wars feel like a richer and wilder place, and “Guns for Hire” is prime on that front.

Part of why I can enjoy world-expanding jaunts like this one, though, is that the intra-episode storytelling is solid. Bo-Katan and Din have a clear goal -- to meet up with Bo-Katan’s former cohort. The pair have a clear obstacle -- The Dutchess and Captain Bombardier want them to solve the droid issue as a diplomatic favor before they’ll grant our heroes access to their private Mandalorian security force. So we having a driving premise for the hour -- the two Mandalorians solving a mechanical mystery, and clear stakes for the mission -- whether or not Bo-Katan will be able to reunite with her old crew.

It doesn’t have to be complicated, but it gives this episode a momentum that not every episode, or show for that matter, manages to pull off.

The mystery itself is intriguing! A rash of droids acting up is concerning, and the footage of them going nuts is both amusing and a little scary. As with Obi-Wan hunting down Padme’s would-be assassin in Attack of the Clones, turning Star Wars characters into noir detectives is a winning play. Watching them get the lay of the land from Commissioner Helgait (should have known it was him from name alone), ask for answers from the Ugnaughts who maintain the droids, get into a chase with a rogue B2 Battle Droid, follow the clues to a droid bar, use science to detect the problem, and piece the identifying marks on the offending nano droids together to figure out whodunnit, makes for an exciting set of causes-and-effects as they work their way through the case.

The mission asks much of them. They have to be sharp enough to follow the clues where they lead. They have to be strong and crafty enough to take down a malfunctioning battle droid. But most importantly, they have to be personable and emotionally intelligent enough to get the help they want from the people who have the information they need.

That last part is my favorite part of the episode. When the duo meet the Ugnaughts, Bo-Katan is insistent and demanding. She’s used to using a warrior’s touch and a leader’s confidence to get what she wants. But Din knows from his time with Kuiil that her approach won’t work with this kind. Instead, Din is respectful, deferential, speaking in their terms, and gets the help they require to move forward. It’s a nice reflection of how his experiences have changed him, and give him the kind of ecumenical understanding that allows him to get by in a wild and wooly galaxy.

And yet, Din has his prejudices too. He doesn’t trust droids, given his experiences, and so he’s not much of a gentle soul when it comes time to pump them for information. But Bo-Katan is, and her approach to treat them with respect, and not paint all droids with the same brush, earns them the trust from the bartender that allows them to figure this thing out. It speaks to why the two make a good team, and how the pairing gives them complementary strengths and helps them cover for one another’s blindspots.

But apart from the plotting, I particularly like that the droids want to help. Again, this episode is a treat for longtime fans of the aliens and automatons that populate Star Wars. From the royal tables to the back alley bars of Plazir 15, there’s plenty of articulated rubber masks and distinctive robots as far as the eye can see. But “Guns for Hire” makes the point that these droids are not slaves with restraining bolts, as L3-37 from Solo might say.

They want to give something back after being created by “organics”. They view human lives as short and the requests made of them minor. They want to help, since they still want to be useful and fear being “scrapped.” It’s an interesting and original take on the droids, whose seeming sentience yet menial servitude has long been a “just don’t think too hard about it” aspect of Star Wars. Giving a pack of them agency, making them willing participants in this society, is a fascinating choice.

All that said, I find myself once again asking what The Mandalorian is trying to say this season. There is an anti-authoritarian, anti-legal, arguably anti-civilization streak that runs through the show’s third batch of episodes. Once again, we run into a society that seems paralyzed by the strictures of its government. (Is the “direct democracy” aspect a dig on California’s referendums? It would fit if Plazir-15 is a stand-in for Disneyland.) Once again, we see those involved with leadership treated like aloof or oblivious ninnies. Once again we see the attempts to rehabilitate and reconcile with those on the wrong side of history, like Commissioner Helgait, turn out to be unfixable bad guys simply waiting for their chance to regroup and strike again.

Something about all of this sits uneasy with me. Star Wars has always had an anti-authoritarian streak. That's the core of the rebels versus the Empire. And maybe this is all just to set up how the New Republic was a hollow institution to show how it was unable to see the First Order coming. But there’s something about the show’s targets, and the virtues it seems to want to champion, that feel disconcerting in ways I can't quite put my finger on.

Nonetheless, it’s neat to see them pin this kerfuffle on Helgait, who turns out to be a Separatist Lost Causer and true believer in Count Dooku. Seeing them earn the key to the city and their ticket to meeting Bo-Katan’s old friend is suitably triumphant.

So is Bo-Katan’s shaky but, in the end, satisfying return to her one-time followers. As I mentioned, her fight with Axe Woves (silly name, by the way) is well-directed by Yaddle herself, Bryce Dallas-Howard. And it’s cool to see Bo-Katan, having found both The Way and her way, reasserting her command in the hopes of bolstering the Mandalorians writ large.

My only complaint is that it feels a bit like she regains her position on a technicality. The crew is still miffed she doesn’t have the darksaber. Din’s argument that a cyborg ambushed him, and she beat the cyborg, so she rightfully owns the storied weapon feels strangely legalistic and out of step with Mandalorian norms.

Even if I don’t care for the logistics of it, I like the spirit behind this idea. Bo-Katan accepts Din. Her crew wants to reject him because he’s not of Mandalorian blood, but she affirms him as a keeper of The Creed and someone as true to their people as any by deed. And in turns, when they’re skeptical of her leadership, Din affirms her as the rightful heir to his blade. It shows not only the bond and mutual respect they’ve formed, but the kind of broader understanding they’ve developed in their travels and mind-expanding experiences.

I’d like to think that's the point of this season. These little side quests work wonderfully as single-serving adventures with neat locales, unique problems, and nice character moments. I’d take them for that reason alone. But when you add them up, they show two people whose perspective keeps broadening, who recognize that Ugnaughts, droids, Children of the Watch, and even their fellow Mandalorians are worthy of more understanding and respect than they might have thought before. That is the foundation of a pluralistic society, and perhaps, a better one for the people of Mandalore, wherever their new home lies.

[4.8/10] Stupid stupid stupid. Why does it always have to be the Borg? Why does it always have to be some random, shocking twist instead of just sticking to what you’ve built to through the prior eight episodes? Why must it be chock full of credulity-straining retcons and cheesy coincidences?

The plot twists here are dumb as hell. The whole biological Borg “seed” being implanted in Picard’s never-before-seen son retcon absolutely breaks my willing suspension of disbelief for how convenient it is. The Borg getting a biological assimilation upgrade that basically lets them flip a switch and assimilate everybody is a cheap bit. And god, the fact that it only affects people under 25 is such a convenient dodge to get the old crew in the driver’s seat.

If that weren’t enough, the nostalgia-pushing here is so blunt and obvious. Yes, it’s very cool to see the Enterprise-D again, to hear Majel Barrett’s voice as the computer again, and to see that set recreated with familiar faces standing on it, ready to go defend none other than the now-Admiral Shelby. But the method to get there is so unearned, so full of psychological and narrative gymnastics to arrive at this destination, that the warm feelings built from seven seasons of the old show are muted by this new one’s transparent attempt to invoke them to cover for its dumb twists and reheated conflicts.

This one’s not without its pleasures. Shaw sacrificing himself and calling Seven by her real name is a nice and well-earned moment. Data’s “I hope we die quickly!” declaration is a solid laugh. I’m glad to see Shelby in live action again and to get a reference to the USS Pulaski.

But this episode all but squanders the goodwill and good work the show’s managed to pull off over the course of season 3. After finding ways to channel high points and fond memories for the old show to tell new stories and move things forward, why are we back to Star Trek: Picard’s mind-numbing plot twists and threadbare nostalgia? What a waste of a fairly good build to this point.

[8.4/10] Hoo boy. This one hit close to home. And when you find yourself relating to Dennis Reynolds, you are getting old, getting deranged, or both. So not a good sign for yours truly.

But holy hell I felt this one. I don’t mind paying via a QR code or other modern changes. But boy, I do get perturbed that everything has its own app now. I do hate the byzantine process one must transverse in order to get customer service. And most of all, I feel that sense of not being mad at the person your dealing with, but being frustrated with a system that seems intentionally maddening, in my bones.

I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Frankly, it makes me worry that I’m an old crank who’s too sclerotic to adapt. For good or for ill though, Dennis’ frustrations when operating his car, buying tea, purchasing a phone, trying to get customer assistance, and any number of other small, seemingly insignificant tasks that leave him in a Kafkaesque nightmare is deeply, deeply relatable. As is the sense of trying to maintain your calm while needlessly frustrating parts of navigating simple tasks in everyday life pop up.

It’s a great showcase for Glenn Howerton. He does a great job of reacting to all the comic absurdities around him, while contributing some of his own. The episode asks a lot of him, with only amusing-but-brief cameos from the rest of the game. And Howerton is up to the challenge, Dennis has his own Falling Down-style adventure, and you buy every increasingly aggravating step of it.

I appreciate the little touches of the story. As is often the case with IASIP, there’s something amusing about how a member of The Gang generalizes a problem from the literal to the abstract. A clerk at a tea shop apologizes that “the system” won’t let her sell him tea without boba, while Dennis takes it to be a complaint about The System:tm: that seemingly acts from above to make his life miserable. (Think Frank feeling hot and complaining about “the climate” in the #MeToo episode.)

But what really puts this one over the top is the bonkers ending. I love the show getting weird and impressionistic for Dennis’ confrontation with the car company CEO. There’s something that feels very clockwork about it. The Roxette song makes a hilarious return after Dennis listening to it in the car to provide the soundtrack to his strange liminal encounter. The very tagline “Listen to Your Heart” has layers of meaning, from Dennis gently pulling out his erstwhile tormentor’s actual heart, to the whole thing being a reaction to a diagnosis of high blood pressure. Even Dennis crushing the heart into a diamond seems like a tie into the rest of the Gang’s scheme to put coal in a pressure cooker.

And even as the ending is caked in irony and humor, I kind of like it as a bizarre and outre, yet cathartic rendition of how many folks feel about trying to resolve their problems with the tiny but accumulating problems of the day-to-day. It’s insane, but by god, you kinda feel it.

Plus, I love love love the reveal that this was all an internal fantasy from Dennis to help him process his stressed out feelings and manually lower his blood pressure in a way that, against all odds, actually works! It’s a big swing, and I’m normally resistant to “It was all a dream” endings, but this one clicks within the general tone of the show’s bolder outings and the confines of the episode. I particularly love the Keyser Soze-like nature of Dennis’ dream, and all the repeating faces and motifs he sees on the way out are doled out perfectly.

Overall, this is a hell of a high note for the season to go out on. Creative, ambitious, and different. Now I just have to worry about having common cause with Dennis Reynolds. Uh oh.

[7.8/10] Let's address the elephant in the room first. I don't love the fact that Jack turns out to be Picard's son. The long lost offspring is a big cliché, and Wrath of Khan influences or not, I could probably do without it.

That said, I like how Star Trek: Picard uses it here. The bad guys want Picard and the Titan to turn Jack over. It prompts one of those classic, Next Generation-style moral dilemmas that were always so fascinating. Do you hand him over to the bad guys because, true to that Wrath of Khan homage, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and there's 500 crew members at risk? Or do you stand your ground because, scoundrel or not, this young man deserves a fair trial and a chance at rehabilitation rather than swift judgment and likely a summary execution.

This is Star Trek, so we pretty much know how it's going to go down. But seeing Picard explore the issue, get to know this kid, see if there's a way out of this situation through guile or diplomacy, is some classic TNG-esque stuff. Sure, it's all magnified with the grittiness and bombast of modern television, but I appreciate that this is, at base, the kind of boardroom debate where the philosophical meets the practical that was the lifeblood of the old show.

So was the personal getting in the way of all this. I appreciate how Picard elides the questions of this young man's parentage because he already knows the answer in his heart and doesn't want to confront it. But I love how all it takes is one look from Beverly, a soft exchange of expressions that shows they still have the intuitive shorthand of twenty years ago, and he can deny the truth no longer. This is his son, a son as reckless but valiant as they once were, and by god, they're going to protect him.

For all the added pomp and circumstance, that's the core of this one, and for that reason alone, borrowing the rhythms that made The Next Generation famous, this is one of my favorite outings from Star Trek: Picard yet, despite the questionable cliché at the heart of the story.

[8.5/10] Somewhere along the line, Crosshair became one of the most interesting characters not just in The Bad Batch, but in Star Wars as a whole. He’s a clone, which is always a good start. But he’s one who’s genuinely loyal to the Empire. Republic? Empire? Either way, they’re taking orders from the bosses. That's what they’ve been trained for. Bred for. In his mind, the rest of the Bad Batch are the traitors, for deciding to walk away from something they’ve been loyal to since they were born and leaving him behind. He’s the hero in his own mind, staying a steadfast part of the organization and institutions they’ve sacrificed so much to protect.

Only now, he’s realizing that the Empire doesn’t return that loyalty. Lieutenant Nolan is a good avatar for that. He’s plainly racist against clones, using the term itself with a sneer. More to the point, he clearly views them as chattel. When pressed on his reluctance to work with clone troopers, he gripes about not wanting to employ “used equipment.” One of the thematic throughlines this season is how the powers-that-be within the Empire don’t see the clone troopers as people, just tools to be discarded once they’re no longer useful.

Crosshair clearly dislikes Nolan, and even in his stoicism, seems a bit put out by his brothers being forcibly retired. But he’s a good soldier. He follows orders.

That makes it meaningful when he meets someone who doesn’t. Commander Mayday is a fascinating person, a clone trooper who’s been practically exiled to a remote outpost to protect cargo he’s not even allowed to know about. He’s the poster child for Imperial neglect. He’s an experienced soldier reduced to guard dog duty. All of his men have died, and nobody seems to care. All of his equipment is outdated and not up to the job, but the Empire ignores his requests for replacements. His request for reinforcements was met thirty-six days late. And Lt. Nolan in particular treats him like scum, disdaining the clone for simply existing, demanding a deference he hasn’t earned despite his rank, and ordering him on unreasonable missions.

The dynamic is clear, and interesting. Nolan represents the worst of the Empire: prejudice, cruelty, sneering injustice at every turn. And Mayday represents the tragedy of the clones following the war, someone discarded and treated as disposable, useful only for ferrying along the toys for the next wave of soldiers. This the institution Crosshair is loyal to, the thing he fights for unquestioningly.

Until he spends time with Mayday in a frozen wasteland. Separate and apart from all the stellar thematic and character work going on here, the work of the directors and animators soars in this one. The ice-ridden outpost comes with a real sense of place. You understand the desolation of where Mayday has been stranded all this time, the inherent threat that comes from traversing the freezing temperatures and harsh environment, and the lack of care it evinces to subject anyone to this. The low lights, sparse score, and gray landscape convey in a visceral way how grim the conditions that people like Nolan have uncaringly subjected the clone troopers to are.

The expedition to recover some crates from the local rebels gives Crosshair and Mayday a chance to bond. Crosshair is steady as ever, while Mayday stops just short of being openly insubordinate. Mayday’s sarcasm and cynicism make for a good contrast with Crosshair’s dry wit, and their adventure to retrieve the boxes brings them closer together through the bond that forms from braving adversity together. The mission is a harsh one, full of traps and threats and environmental dangers. It’s one they’re undermanned for too, something Nolan doesn’t care about, but which pushes them to rely on one another even more.

There’s a nice throughline for how they treat one another. Crosshair has internalized Imperial principles, and so decries fallen soldiers as dead weight. And yet, when he inadvertently steps on a pressure mine, Mayday is a bit snarky, but goes to some trouble and risk to defuse it and help save Crosshair’s life (using improvised tools, since the Empire hasn’t given him what he needs, of course). It shows the esprit de corps of the clone troopers, even among those who don’t see eye to eye, with the sort of loyalty the Imperials don't share, the kind of loyalty Crosshair once shared with the rest of Clone Force 99.

And in the end, he returns the favor. There’s some nice setup and payoff as what starts as a low rumble, builds to a large crack, and finally into an avalanche that threatens to bury both of them. Despite Mayday being injured in the mission, and Crosshair being better-positioned to make it himself if he left Mayday behind, Crosshair has internalized Mayday’s perspective. There’s power in his choice to rescue Mayday when he doesn’t have to, to put his own life on the line to save one of his brothers. It’s a sign of his viewpoint starting to change, of his recognition of the need of the clones to look out for one another since their superiors certainly won’t be doing it.

It’s a sharp contrast with Lt. Nolan. When the clones make it back by the skin of their teeth, clearly injured from the attempt, there’s zero concern from their commanding officer. All he does is excoriate them for failing to recover the cargo, armor for the stormtroopers who will replace them, in an ironic twist. And he refuses to call a medic for Mayday, calling it a waste of resources. Mayday and Crosshair will risk their lives for one another. Nolan won’t even offer basic treatment. The disparity in the views on the value of clone life couldn't be more stark, and makes for a thematic throughline that presents the angel and the devil on Crosshair’s shoulders.

Finally, he’s had enough. Even obedient, loyal Crosshair can't stand this. He recognizes the Empire’s misdeeds, if not in their tactics across the galaxy, then certainly in the way they treat him and those he’s fought with. After all they’ve done, all they’ve lost and sacrificed in the name of protecting this institution, they don’t get so much as a thank you, and worse yet, are treated as the expendable afterbirth of the Empire’s emergence.

So he kills the shitheel then and there. It’s a powerful move, one that seals Crosshair’s fate to some degree, but also affirms a change of heart. What do you do when you realize the thing you’ve been loyal to your whole life isn’t worth that loyalty? When it treats you like chewed up gum stuck to the side of a star destroyer’s hull? If you’re a soldier like Crosshair, you fight back. You return the harsh consequences doled out by racist cowards in stuffed uniforms. And maybe, just maybe, you accept that your friends were right all along.

[7.6/10] It’s nice to be someplace truly far, far away for the first time in a while. The sense that this is another galaxy, untouched by the Empire or the Republic or all the other particular trappings of the Star Wars we know and love is exhilarating. It’s rare that this franchise can promise something like that anymore, so it’s cool to see our first glimpse at where Thrawn and Ezra have been all this time.

And while I’m the type of person who tends to focus more on the storytelling and performance, I have to tip my hat to the show’s visual stylists. I love the look of just about everything out in Meridia. The purrgil graveyard planet is haunting. The wastelands of Meridia look appropriately barren and desolate. The Great Mothers of the Nightsister Clan have a look and a diction that befits the trio as the Weird sisters of the Star Wars set.

The shopworn, jury-rigged look of Thrawn’s ship and his stormtroopers is almost startling in how it conveys how this unflappable strategist and his charges have had to scrape and scrap to survive. The howler mount that Sabine rides feels endearing in its expressions but also sufficiently animalistic not to seem like a cartoony cheat. The Notti (the little turtle guys) have that charming muppet feel to them in their gait and their movements, and their little nomad camp has a real sense of place. The CGI gets a little too conspicuous in a few spots, but on the whole, this is the kind of art direction and character design that helped make Star Wars famous.

And that’s especially important here. I’m not someone in it for the aesthetics, but coming to a brand new realm, giving it a lived-in look and feel all its own, making it seem genuinely different and even desperate compared to the worlds we know, helps sell the way that Ezra and Thrawn have been stuck at the end of the universe all this time. Baylan Skoll describes it as a land of madness and folktales, and it earns that description with what we see of it here.

Speaking of which, apart from the visuals, Baylan may be my favorite part of this one! We haven't fully gotten his motivations yet, but I like the hints we get in that direction. The idea that the Empire and the Rebellion, the Jedi and the Sith, keep rising and falling in a great cycle, and he wants to stop it, is a fascinating impulse for an antagonist. There’s a meta quality to it, and Ray Stevenson sells the hell out of the tease. The notion that there’s some unique power out in this distant land, one that calls to him to help “break the wheel” as another aspiring power-seeker once put it, is intriguing as all get out.

Of course, there’s Thrawn. It’s nice to see Lars Mikkelsen get to reprise his role from Rebels in live action. That adds some degree of continuity, even as Mikkelsen looks more like Elon Musk than the sharp-feature Chiss from the show. The efforts to bring the red-eyed, blue-skinned figure into live action is a little unconvincing, but Thrawn has the right air about him, which counts for a lot. And the sense that he’s more than ready to be freed, having suffered quite a bit out here, even if he doesn’t show it, draws out a quiet desperation beneath his unflappable disposition.

I appreciate Sabine’s single-minded focus on finding Ezra, but also the sideways fashion in which she does it. Her battle with the bandits is pretty darn cool, even if it’s empty calories. Her brushing off the howler for bailing on her, only to develop a quickfire “good boy” friendship with it warms my animal-loving heart. And her showing kindness to the little turtle guys, connecting with them over her symbol, and following them to Ezra is downright delightful. I swear to god, it feels like something out of the Ewok movies.

Of course, there’s the reunion with Ezra himself. While not pitch perfect, I do love the playful air about their first meeting in years. They always had that kind of vibe, and while you don’t quite get the familiarity between them, that can be chalked up to the years apart. Eman Esfandi’s Ezra feels right, capturing the Space Aladdin vibe the animated original had, but also the wry sensibility that made him an enjoyable character to spend time with.

There’s a wisp of melancholy to this whole thing, with Sabine just wanting to be happy for once without thinking about all the crud and abandonment issues that got her here and more hardship yet to come, and Ezra talking about his excitement to go home that might not be in the offing. It appropriately tempers their reunion, and I like the low key approach to something theoretically so momentous.

We don’t get much of Ahsoka here in the show called Ahsoka. But the little snippet we get of her journey in the belly of a whale (hello, uh, Jonah and the Whale fans?), is a pleasant scene. Her reflecting on Sabine’s choice, and the Huyang giving us the first verbal utterance of the “long, long time ago” intro crawl are both nice moments.

Overall, this is an episode that pulls some big rabbits out of its hat, but does so well. Like much of the show so far, there’s as much build toward the big things to come as there are major developments in the here and now. But “Far, Far Away” delivered on some of the big things it had to deliver on, which is an encouraging sign.

[7.5/10] It’s frickin’ Anakin! Look, I fully admit that, as a teaser at least, this is total empty fanservice. It’s the kind of thing I tend to rail against. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t gasp a little when I realized that Ahsoka had washed up in the World Between Worlds. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a touch giddy to hear Anakin call his former apprentice “Snips.” I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t joyful to see AAhsoska turn around, say “Master?” and see none other than Sky Guy standing before her.

Is it completely and utterly cheap? My god yes. But it also totally worked on me, so I’m loath to complain.

Oh yeah, and there’s a bunch of other major happenings too. Our good guy force-users go toe-to-toe with the bad guy force-users. Huyang gets into some fisticuffs of his own. Ahsoka sort of dies. (Presumably she’s just out temporarily and will pop back to life once she goes on a spirit quest with Anakin). Sabine switches sides (again, at least temporarily/a little). Hera and Phoenix Squadron come to help. Morgan Elsbeth and her allies (seemingly) successfully launch themselves into the Unknown Regions. For folks who’ve been complaining about pace, some big deal shit goes down here.

But here’s my favorite part of it all -- a philosophical disagreement between Ahsoka and Sabine. If it comes to it, Ahsoka wants to destroy the map. Better to prevent Thrawn from returning and reigniting the war. But Sabine is unwilling to give up their only chance to potentially save Ezra, even if it means potentially allowing a villain to come back. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s a debate between fighting what we hate and saving what we love.

You can see both sides of it. For Ahsoka, who saw the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire, the commitment to stopping a formidable opponent like Thrawn from restarting it all is unquestioned. For Sabine, whose only family is Ezra, the possibility of stranding him and both being alone forever is unthinkable. There’s no easy answers, and how each feels is based on who they are, which makes the disagreement between them feel legitimate.

What’s more, we find out that Sabine’s family on Mandalore, whom we met back in Rebels, perished sometime between then and now. It’s easy to guess that they were obliterated in Moff Gideon’s assault. But regardless of the exact details, Baylan perceives that, at a minimum,, Sabine feels that it happened because Ahsoka didn’t trust her. The show has hinted at what caused a falling out between them, but this is the first time we’ve come to understand the root of why.

Not for nothing, I liked Baylan a lot here. His intentions are still rather cryptic, something that frustrated me about the antagonist in the Obi-Wan show. But he’s a legitimate foe for Ahsoka, one who paints her with the same brush as her former master, has lost his faith in the Jedi, and who seems to genuinely believe that unleashing the evil of Thrawn will somehow be for the greater good. Maybe it’s the writing. Maybe it’s just Ray Stevenson’s presence. But whatever the reason, he’s one of the cooler bad guys we’ve had in a while.

These are also some top notch lightsaber fights here. The weakest of them is Sabine vs. Shin, but even there, you have some intrigue that comes from the “Mandalorian tactics vs. Jedi tactics” showdown. Something about the unsteadiness but indefatigable quality of Sabine in the fight against a superior foe made me think of the ending to The Force Awakens.

But both of Ahsoka’s fights are pretty darn cool. I love the Raiders of the Lost Ark quality of Ahsoka’s fight with Marrok, where he goes wild with his Inquisitor blade, only to get sliced by Ahsoka with a single slash. Plus what the hell is he! The mist escaping from his suit with an odd shriek just raises more questions!

The piece de resistance, though, is the fight between Ahsoka and Baylan. There’s a level of control, a steady mastery between them that’s evident which makes their skirmish aces. It’s not the frantic slinging of blades, but rather a more controlled duel, that steadily devolves into wilder tactics as the stalemate becomes shaky, and the goal to retrieve the map becomes more important. The intervention of both these masters’ apprentices hits the right notes, and provides an excuse for why Ahsoka is bested.

The most fascinating part may be the way Baylan talks down Sabine from destroying the map. There is a very Palpatine quality to his temptation of Lady Wren, right down to a meaningful utterance of “Do it.” like Palpy, he plays on the emotional wants of his quarry, manipulating her based on her attachment to Ezra in a way that gives the bad guys the key to achieving their goal, so long as she can come along for the ride and perhaps save her dear friend in the process. Much of the show to date has been a battle for Sabine’s soul in one form or another, and seeing this latest shift marks a major, probably regrettable, but certainly understandable turning point for her.

Otherwise, it’s nice to see Ahsoka pulling the trigger on some big things after three episodes of setup. The confrontation between Hera (in the Ghost, no less!) and Phoenix Squadron versus Morgan’s massive hyperspace launcher comes with cool visuals, and young Jacen giving us the closest thing we get to an “I have a bad feeling about this.” Major shit goes down, and it’s easy to salivate over what comes next.

First and foremost though, it means a reunion, however temporary, between Ahsoka and Anakin, presumably with advice on training a recalcitrant apprentice, an earned return to the world of the living, and stars willing, some measure of peace and certainty in where to go next.

[7.4/10] I appreciate the meta-gag of Dee admitting she doesn’t really know what a satire is, because it works on multiple levels. It works to highlight how folks with backwards material hide behind the fig leaf that something is a “satire”. It pokes fun at the squishiness of the term. And it’s especially amusing since “Risk E. Rat’s Pizza and Amusement Center” is itself a satire of out of touch people pining for “the good old days” without acknowledging that a lot of the changes they lament happened for good reason.

I’ll admit that the episode is more of a “smile at the cleverness” outing for The Gang than one full of laugh out loud gags, but I still appreciate it. Mac whinging about the lack of dangerous weapons and faux-drugs available to kids at the ticket counter is gentle but still pointed. While a little blunt, I also like his time out psychology session as a satire on guilt and shame based discipline, which comes with extra potency since Mac was a self-hating gay man for a long time.

Dee and Frank’s search for the clues that get you a meeting with Risk E. Rat himself was a nice opportunity to spoof the dated humor of Franks time and Dee’s childhood. I especially like the Dee material, because she's the only member of the group who’s kind of in the middle. She criticizes the domestic abuse humor Frank enjoyed as horrible, but still tries to defend the ethnic stereotype humor of her childhood as somehow alright. It’s a well-observed bit on how it’s easy to look back with derision on the blindspots of old while we try to excuse our own. And the most I laughed at was at their misunderstanding and attempts to dirty up the “jalapeno business” joke.

Dennis and Charlie’s story leans into a lot of the same material, but it’s good. Their steady realization that pretty much every member of the Fun Time Pizza Band knockoff was some kind of unfortunate stereotype or trope, while trying to justify their appreciation for it, is a solid bit. And across all the stories, their disregard for safety is a laugh.

My favorite part is the great jumpcut from The Gang’s quest to return things to how they were before to an utter shitshow of pain and misery. Frankly, I worry this episode will be a little too subtle for some, with folks taking Mac's speech in particular as a valid criticism rather than a sign of his own messed up upbringing. But the fact that their plan ends in total disaster is about as strong a rebuke as the writers can offer to their viewpoint without having some character be a mouthpiece, so I’m good with it.

Overall, the theme of misguided good-ol’-days-ery through the conceit of a Chuck E. Cheese equivalent is a good foundation for the episode,and a collection of good observations and strong capper makes this one a winner.

[9.0/10] The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel already answered the question in some ways. How far would Susie go for Midge? How much will she push to break through those “brick walls” (or glass ceilings)? Is it just business between them, or is there something deeper, more personal that merits going further than she would for anyone else?

The answer came, in so many ways, in “The Testi-rostial”. But it doesn’t hurt to see it again in the present. Midge and Susie have tried everything they can to get Midge booked on The Gordon Ford show. Midge nudged Danny Stevens in such a novel yet funny direction that he tried to poach her. Susie staged a coup to get Mike the producer slot. Here, Midge even pens a sketch for Princess Margaret herself that is tasteful but funny, and absolutely kills in a must-win night for the creative team. And it’s still not enough.

So she makes the titular “plea” to Susie -- use your history with Gordon Ford’s wife, Hedy to get me on the show. Midge doesn’t know what she’s asking exactly. She knows it’s an end run around the gatekeepers who would hold her back from stardom. But she doesn’t understand why this is such a big ask for Susie, and in her defense, Susie doesn’t explain and doesn’t want to explain.

In the end, though, she acquiesces. Susie goes to Hedy and asks her to convince Gordon to jettison his rule and book Midge. She talks to the person she least wants to speak to in the world, someone who hurt her, someone she absolutely does not want to owe anything to, let alone ask for a personal favor from. Hedy herself acknowledges how hard this must be for “Susan.” And by god, the last thing Susie wants is the indignity of having to brook Hedy’s suspicions that her relationship with Midge is something more than professional.

But she does it anyway, because it is more than professional, though not in the way Hedy might think. Susie loves Midge. She wants to support Midge. She wants to break down those barriers together. This is her way of expressing it, in doing something much harder than “hopping over dicks” or haranguing talent bookers. It is, more than fixing Midge’s future Hawaiian wedding, the ultimate sign that when push comes to shove, Susie would do anything for her client, or at least this client.

Because she recognized something in Midge, something that Abe is just now starting to recognize in his daughter. When he sits down to dinner with his pal Gabe, and two more men of letters, Arthur and Henry, he is morose, shaken, unengaged with the Algonquin Table banter and intellectual debate of his contemporaries. His world has been shattered by the simple realization -- he’s done it all wrong.

It’s a long, writerly scene, filled with the kind of introspective and philosophical dialogue that could be ponderous in less deft hands. But the crux of it is simple. Here are four older white men, born of the 1800s, rattled by the constant change around them, trying to make peace with it all and realizing, to their creeping horror, that they may have had the wrong view of the world, of their lives, of their children, this whole time.

It’s a bracing thought. We too live in a time of what feels like epochal change to us in the same way it feels to every generation. There is still something harrowing about Abe’s epiphany, one steadily shared by his dining companions. Here are the educated cosmopolitan men, those expected by 1960s society to not only understand how the world works but be the masters of it. It is their jobs, in the eyes of the community and social hierarchy, to be the builders and caretakers of this great civilization.

Only, to Abe’s hollowing dismay, he sees his granddaughter upsetting all of his biases and expectations and, to his credit, it rocks him. He took his son Noah to Columbia, and never considered doing the same for Miriam. He acknowledges that she bought the place that they now live, borne on the backs of her courage and determination. He recognizes a fearlessness in her that he not only didn’t nurture, but doesn’t understand where it came from. (And even in the throes of his realization, can't countenance that she may have gotten it from his Match-Making Mafia combatant of a wife.)

There is an order, a way the world is supposed to work, that has been passed down from Abe by his father and his father and his father. But not to the daughter who disrupts that and makes him understand how the entire system upon which he’s built his life, the entire dynamic and dichotomy that undergirded his worldview, can be dead wrong, and his brave, persevering daughter, who succeeded despite him not because of him, is the living proof.

In the early stretch of Mrs. Maisel, one of the breakthroughs came in Abe understanding why Midge couldn't go back to Joel. It was the beginning of Abe seeing his daughter. Truly seeing her. And now, through her daughter, he sees her ever more clearly, so clearly that, in Tony Shaloub’s best performance on the show, he’s disturbed and disquieted to think about what he missed, and how he got this whole damn thing wrong.

A visit back to her alma mater with her old college comrades sells how close Midge came to sinking into the life her father would have constructed for her. The collegiate scenes are as vivid and fun as any in the show, with witty bon mots and rapid-fire gags as fit for any table. But they’re also a reminder to Midge that, as much fun as these old friends are, as fondly as she remembers her college days, as much as her former pals admire what she’s accomplished, they’re still a part of that world and don’t quite get that stand-up is her career now, not just a detour until she returns to orbit.

That's what she says to Susie in her Grand Central plea to leverage her relationship with Hedy Ford. She accepts having been the good soldier and trusting the process, but wants to make the final push. She acknowledges that it’s a little selfish, but that she wants more. In truth, Midge is a little unfair. Because she agrees that Susie has gone to the mattresses for her time and time again, but questions how far they can go together if Susie won’t go to the absolute limit to help her succeed.

It’s a little more understandable, though, both because Midge doesn’t know the gravity of what she’s asking of Susie and because we’ve seen what happened at the Jack Paar showcase. Susie protests that if Midge does succeed, she won’t want it to be tainted by having had to call in personal favors. But Midge has tried playing fair. She’s tried working twice as hard and being twice as funny for half the money. And it still hasn’t gotten her where she wants to be on talent and hard work alone. So if the playing field is titled against her for reasons beyond her control, why not use whatever arrows are in their quiver, fair or not?

Because most of all, Midge doesn’t want this to be something she did for a few years before settling back down into the staid life her mother and father had been preparing her for all those years. The show teases some of the good times between her and Joel, and as sweet as those were, as fondly as they both look back on them before things went sour, Midge wants more than that now. And in a way her father is just now starting to understand, she has the courage of her convictions to go out and get it.

When Midge opens up a “Letter to her future self” that she wrote in college, it contains only one word -- “don’t.” Maybe we’ll get the context in a flashback in the series finale, something to put a capstone on the thematic throughline of an unexpected boost into feminist rebellion that began the series. Or maybe we won’t. But for now at least, there’s only one other place that word is used.

When Hedy compliments Midge on the sketch she wrote for Prince Margaret, Midge is deferential, accepting her role as the impetus for the idea but crediting the rest of the writing staff for making it funny. Hedy admonishes her with the same word. Don’t. Don’t eschew credit. Don’t cast aside your laurels. Take them. Take them in a world where even the people who love you, well intentioned though they may be, won’t acknowledge them otherwise.

Don’t sell yourself short. Don’t settle for less than you are. Don’t give in to the expectations to simply play the part that's expected. Don’t stop until you’ve done what you set out to do. Maybe it’s just some teenage pablum scrawled into an old coke bottle. Or maybe, somewhere deep down, Midge already knew.

[8.0/10] “The Solitary Clone” plays like a throwback to the days of The Clone Wars series. I used to accuse TCW of “video game plotting.” On a regular basis, some combination of Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Ashoka would fight some goons, then probably some bigger goons, then a few genuinely challenging enemies, before going toe-to-toe with the final boss of the episode. As much as I enjoyed the show, I got tired of that formula in its early seasons.

In a sense “The Solitary Clone” is just that. When infiltrating a planet to rescue a kidnapped superior, Crosshair and none other than the long missing Commander Cody lead the mission. They mow down a series of nigh-useless B1 battle droids, before having to contend with some mildly more challenging droidekas, then they have a legitimately harrowing fight with a few droid commandos of the sort that gave Ahsoka fits at the beginning of The Clone Wars, before taking out a strategy droid and facing down their target’s captor.

The action is exciting, with losses (albeit of barely-named “regs”) that show the costs of the assault, and some genuinely clever tactics at play. In particular, Crosshair’s use of reflective pucks, and the ensuing struggle within a spiral staircase, is some of the most claustrophobic, well-directed action The Bad Batch has offered this season. But the general shape of the way the battle escalates would be familiar to anyone who’s been watching Commander Cody since he appeared in The Clone Wars pilot movie.

But I take that to be the point here. Because even though the rhythms are the same, the context is very different, and I think The Bad Batch wants its viewers, especially the longtime fans, to contemplate that. Watching clone troopers fight through a bunch of battle droids on a Separatist planet where they’ve taken an opposing leader hostage is meat and potatoes, rah-rah stuff. But now the situation is different.

The government the soldiers are fighting for isn’t the Republic; it’s the Empire. The Separatists aren’t aggressors attacking our heroes; they’re an independent system that just wants to remain independent and avoid being gobbled up by the Empire. Many of the faces are the same. The overall progression of the fight is the same. But everything here feels off, to where who to root for, versus who the perspective characters are, isn’t as clear as it once was.

That's a feature, not a bug. Cody is doing what he’s always done. He listens to the orders of his generals. He battles his way through wave after wave of battle droids. He reaches the enemy target and gets them at a disadvantage.

Yet, that's where things are different. Governor Tawni Ames is a reasonable person. Her motives to protect her people from Imperial overreach are sympathetic. She is not a warmonger. In fact, she joined Mina Bonteri, a Separatist Senator, and a group of Republic Senators, in proposing a peace accord that was rejected by Palpatine. Bonteri was part of an episode called “Heroes on Both Sides”, crossing paths with the heroes of The Clone Wars and teaching Ahsoka in particular that the war wasn’t as cut and dry as “good vs. evil”, but that there were well-intentioned Separatists who had their own fair points and legitimate grievances to bear.

Now, Cody gets the same lesson. He recognizes her as someone else who lived through the horrors of that war, and persuades her to let the hostage go without a fight lest their actions this day result in more bloody conflict. In effect, he recognizes that despite his orders, Governor Ames is not a bad guy. He wants a peaceful, diplomatic solution to this, and manages to achieve it by laying down his arms and promising her that if she works with him on this, this can all stop without anyone else having to die for it. With the word of a fellow traveler as a bond, she agrees.

And Crosshair kills her.

You know it’s coming, and it still hurts a little. We know from last season’s finale that Crosshair is a true believer, not even needing the control ship to continue the path that he was set on during the Clone Wars. He has his orders. He follows them. It’s not his to question why. The Empire is the inheritor of the Republic, and thus the institution he owes fealty to. That's it. That's all it ever was. He does what’s asked of him.

But Cody can’t. There’s a grim tone that spills over Dessex as the Empire descends on the once-independent world. The skittering residents seem even more concerned as the stormtroopers show up to take their world by force and make an example out of them. Cody can’t abide it. He can’t abide the Imperial general breaking the promise Cody made to Governor Ames. He can’t abide Crosshair’s cold willingness to execute those orders, and the Governor, without a second thought. He is the latest trooper to cross paths with Crosshair and decide to go AWOL.

The reasons are clear. He tells Crosshair that there’s a difference between clones and droids, and it rings true, despite the comparisons Star Wars animation has drawn between the two over the years. Clones do make real choices, and they have to live with them. Cody still thought he was fighting for the good guys. But the game has changed, and after such a craven display, the familiar becomes foreign, and what you used to do unquestioningly suddenly becomes a moral compromise you can no longer stand. Cody’s the same, but the world’s different, and he has to act on that difference.

So true to the title, Crosshair is once again left alone. Even the other regs won’t sit with him. Anyone he has a bond with, even a passing acquaintance with, seems to have taken a different path. The world is the same to him, and maybe it is. Maybe we were just as wrong for rooting for one side over the other rather than recognizing the abiding message of The Clone Wars and, to some extent, the whole Prequel Trilogy. To the extent there’s anything but, this was a senseless war, and it didn’t matter whom you were cheering for, because the same forces were pulling the strings on both sides, they served to benefit from it, and everyone else, even those fighting for the right reasons, were sullied by it.

That's a hard lesson, especially for what is ostensibly an all-ages program. But it seems to be increasingly the purview of The Bad Batch. This series carries on the legacy of the show that spawned it, through the eyes of one of the heroes turned villains, ordered to kill the heroes turned villains, and finds himself ostracized and isolated for it.

[7.8/10] This is going to sound a little odd, but the bulk of “The Convert” felt more like an episode of Andor than it did of The Mandalorian. I’m not complaining though. One of the things I like about the other show is that it gives us a look at people’s lives away from the movers and shakers of the galaxy. The sense of place of the Star Wars galaxy improves when you get to witness how normal people live their lives, where the world acts upon them more than they act upon it. Which is all to say that I wouldn’t necessarily have asked for an episode on the life and times of Dr. Pershing, but I’m glad we got it anyway.

I like it as a slice of life story. One of the big questions that's been underexplored in Star Wars is a simple but important one -- what do we do with all the ex-Imperials? The new canon has plenty of examples of former Imps who decided to break good: Iden Versio in Battlefront II, Yeager in Resistance, Sinjir in the Aftermath Trilogy. But few folks who tried to just become regular folks in the regular world. Pershing’s participation in the amnesty program, the humdrum life that he leads, and his desire to finish his work, all bring this down to a smaller, more personal scale that makes a onetime operator for the bad guys sympathetic in an intimate, down-to-earth way you don’t often get in an operatic franchise. It’s a breath of fresh air, honestly.

I love the fact that he genuinely thought he was doing some good. He had a understandable, personal reason for getting into cloning and genetic engineering. He wants to continue his work, and is willing to break the rules to do it because he seems to genuinely believe it could help the New Republic, and to him that's what matters most of all.

Well, that and a friendship that blossoms and helps make him feel seen and at home in uncomfortable circumstances. One of the things I like about “The Convert” is that it shows how Pershing is worn down by his situation. There’s something downright Office Space-esque about his rigid, cubicle-centered work life. His living quarters are bland and gray. He has freedom to go to the public event in the square, but for all the vaunted freedom of the New Republic, there’s still rules in place, particularly for those less-than-trusted former members of the Empire. When Pershing’s monotony is only broken by sycophantic aristocrats fawning over his Ted Talk, you can understand why he wants to color outside the lines.

Well that and the fact that he’s encouraged by someone who seems to get him in a way few others do. I’ll confess that I barely remember Elia Kane from prior episodes of The Mandalorian, but I like how she’s used here. She seems like a kindred spirit, one who encourages Pershing, who helps him, who gives him a case of the yellow travel biscuits he misses, and who treats him like a human being, not a curiosity. After subsisting in a world of cruelty, rank, and rigid expectation, someone who would help him to cut loose and be his own person is a trope, but a heartening one.

Which makes it seem extra cruel and unjust when Kane turns out to be working for the Amnesty enforcement group, and that her whole friendship and encouragement of Pershing turned out to be a case of entrapment. She seems to have ulterior motives -- Pershing knowing too much about Gideon’s work, perhaps. But the simple fact of Pershing trying to do good, being led into breaking the rules to do it, and punished for it by the person who talked him into it feels harsh and unfair in a palpable way.

The New Republic is supposed to be a paradise, or at least an improvement on the uncaring oppression that existed before. “The Convert” posits that it might be for some people, but that many who lived through the age of the Empire are as penned in now as they were then, that different ways of wearing people down emerge, even if they’re wrapped in a smile and a gentle reassurance rather than in open cruelty and jackboots.

Therein lies the connection between the main story of “The Convert”, featuring Dr. Pershing’s new life and his sad fall, with the bookends of Din and Bo Katan escaping from an Imperial warlord’s forces and reconnecting with the enclave of the Children of the Watch.

Because there are two converts here, each who have markedly different experiences and find themselves in very different spaces. Pershing is converted from the Empire to the New Republic. Bo Katan is converted from her ambivalence toward her people’s traditions to The Way.

Pershing finds that his supposed friend is, in fact, a turncoat who just wanted to trap him and use the Empire’s tools to wipe his mind away. Bo Katan finds that Din is an honorable man, who sticks his neck out to protect her and her home, when he didn’t have to. Pershing is stuck in an impersonal world, where he’s driven by droids, counseled by droids, policed by droids. Bo Katan finds a place where she is ultimately welcomed by her fellow men and women, with real human beings who bring her into the fold.

Most of all, Dr. Pershing comes to a place where he is theoretically welcome and a citizen, but where he’s kept at arm’s length, restricted, continually judged and nudged into being something other than what he is or wants to be. At the same time, Bo Katan walks in as a skeptic and an outsider to the Children of the Watch, but simply by having been cleansed in the same living waters and not removed her helmet, she is not only accepted and embraced by her fellow Mandalorians, but also granted the freedom to leave without questions if she so desires. There is a freedom and an acceptance that distinguishes them, despite their theoretically similar positions.

That's heady stuff, the kind of intimate worldbuilding and social comparisons that are more the provenance of Cassian Andor’s show than Din Djarin’s. Nonetheless, I’m please to see The Mandalorian take a page out of its sister series’ book, and give us a look at the corners of the Star Wars galaxy, and the kind of people and experiences, that aren’t normally in focus.

[8.5/10] I’m tempted to call Poker Face a show for actors. So much of glossy television today is plot-driven, prompting fans to think through twists and speculate about what game-changing development will shock them yet. Poker Face, by contrast, mostly gives away the game at the top. There’s still twists, but you generally get a sense for who dies, how they bit it, and who killed them in the first act.

And yet, you could defensibly call this a writer’s show. Despite Poker Face being a bit of a procedural, it is, true to creator Rian Johnson’s ethos, one with clever clockwork spins on the formula, with ways to surprise and delight the audience through narrative alone. There’s poetry in these scripts, and it jumps off the screen.

But at the same time, you could also fairly call this a cinematographer’s show. The camera moves aren’t always showy, but there’s a classical elegance to the framings, and smart use of lighting to help heighten the mood and show off these worn corners of the world that Charlie inhabits. And sometimes, you even get flashier, bravura sequences like Laura’s descent into madness here. It’s an impressionistic set piece, where Arthur’s creations come to life to haunt her into madness, and demonstrate that, despite her proclamations, the past can hurt you. The stop motion phantasmagoria, red tint, fisheye lens, and other showier moves are the kind of thing a less stylistically sharp series couldn't pull off so well.

But at the end of the day, I still think this is an actor's show, because ultimately Poker Face is about the characters. That benefits the writers, and in a way even the cinematographers. But it thrives on creating these single serving protagonists and antagonists, and making these stories matter with so little time to get them off the ground and into our hearts requires performers who can bring them to life with layers and authenticity.

On that measure, “The Orpheus Syndrome” may be Poker Face’s greatest outing yet, because it’s just virtuoso performance after virtuoso performance.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Cherry Jones in anything before, but holy hell is she good here! One of the trickiest things to pull off as an actor is someone who’s presenting one emotion but feeling another, and even blending the truth and the lie together in real time. Her rendition of Laura, the head of a famous film company who’s offed her two collaborators, is incredible in the way she’s able to to present someone who’s genuinely regretful about this and wants her former partners to understand, but who is also gleeful in being able to get away with it.

What’s interesting is that you can believe both parts of it. You can buy that she’s genuinely sad it’s come to this, that she has to kill to preserve her life, that she has to hurt people she oves in the process. But you can also see the scheming side of her, the one that's ready to put on the performance of the grieving widow, of the person glad to give an old friend some peace, when in reality she was the cause of their demise with mercenary uses for their leftovers. There’s so many layers to it. Particularly when she has her breakdown, and all the emotions she’s been suppressing in the act come back to haunt her, she is downright remarkable. If she doesn’t get a guest actress Emmy, then something is seriously wrong.

But Nick Nolte is fantastic too. He’s developed a cottage industry of playing this softly broken men in everything from this to The Mandalorian to the American remake of Broadchurch. His take on Arthur, a special effects visionary and a man haunted by the sense that he killed a young actress by pushing her too hard on a challenging scene, is vivid and affecting. He has that wry old m an energy, bolstered by the gravel in Nolte’s voice, of someone who’s tired to make peace with what happened, but finds it still eating away at him despite the facade.

Of course, Charlie can see past the facade. By this point, I take Natasha Lyonne’s superb acting for granted, but the way Charlie’s able to ingratiate herself into the life of someone like Arthur, or the basement-dwelling employee at the film company, without it ever feeling contrived or forced, is a tribute to Lyonne’s talents. Her easy rapport with Arthur, and commiserating over having lost someone and wondering if you could have done something different, makes for a winning dynamic between the two.

Along the way you have Luis Guzman playing a good-natured but kind of bumbling member of the old crew, who’s another one of those below-the-line good people that Charlie finds herself gravitating toward. Guzman is charming, unassuming, and funny. And none other than Tim Russ (Voyager’s Tuvok) has a small but significant role as Laura’s husband Max, whose final look damns her with disgust over what she did, with his lived-in performance making a lot out of a little.

What she did was turn off the red light that allowed the young starlet to signal that something was wrong on the shoot. This whole ploy turns out to be a means to cover that up, burn the footage that Max and eventually Arthur discovered implicating her in the death that Arhtur had blamed himself for all these years. It is an appropriately cinematic reveal, with an appropriate bit of comeuppance as the incriminating footage is projected onto the screen showing off the forty years of work the trio did together at an anniversary celebration.

The weight of it all slowly unravels Laura. I love her crumbling on the stage of what’s supposed to be her triumph, something that Jones sells like gangbusters. Every villain has their reasons, and there’s something comprehensible and compelling, if not forgivable, of the sense that she was left to do the dirty work to make these men able to live their dreams as boy geniuses. It steeps her motivations in something recognizable and relatable, even as her actions are extreme, grounding an operatic story in real emotion and resentments.

That’s what makes her literal and figurative fall so nightmarish yet invigorating. Laura is the queen of rationalization and compartmentalization, the one who did what needed to be done while her collaborators captured their dreams on celluloid. Only now, with them gone, those dreams have come back to life, curdled into phantasms from her past that can no longer be contained, and eventually drive her to madness and death.

That final, cinematic end wouldn’t have so much power without the performers who sell that dynamic, the remorse, the facade, the cracks in the foundation that amass until emotion and terror come spilling out together as Arthur’s symbolic penitence works its magic on Laura. Poker Face belongs to the entire creative team, who like the episode’s characters, work together to bring this all to life. But in an episode like “The Orpheus Syndrome” the tremendous acting that sells the layers upon layers of guilt and self-justification and recrimination that swirl among these individuals, is what brings the series to a high water mark.

[8.2/10] Politics and intrigue -- what more can you ask for?

It’s funny liking Prequel era politics. When The Phantom Menace came out, most fans dozed our way through the Senate scenes. But the member of the Galactic Senate debating the fate of the clones seems more personal and real. We know how this turns out, of course. We know that Clone Troopers are (seemingly) not in use by the Empire around the time of the Original Trilogy, with strong indications there’s a conscript army instead. So we know Vice Admiral Rampart’s bill goes through at some point.

Still, the debate here comes with a certain charge given the subject matter. And the fact that, as one of the clones proclaims, they just want to keep fighting rather than be rendered obsolete, makes the tragedy of that fate all the more potent.

I’ll confess, I don’t necessarily understand why a conscript army is better for the Emperor than a clone army. Maybe the idea is that too many clones have been going AWOL or questioning orders, to where Palpatine and Vader are worried about unleashing wave after wave of highly trained soldiers who might choose to turn against them and join that rash of insurgencies. The pretextual arguments made on the floor of the Senate have the patina of plausibility and respectability. Either way, though, the bad guys pushing through the bill in the Senate, while saying all the right things but stalling on actually taking care of the clones after the end of their service is downright despicable.

I think that's the thing I appreciate most about “Clone Conspiracy”. The political angles here are interesting, and the intrigue of hidden assassins and none other than Captain Rex rescuing rogue clones is very cool. But I’m most compelled by the idea of how the Empire treats the clone troopers now that they ‘ve served their purpose.

On an in-universe level, it pays off the many times in The Clone Wars various clone troopers wondered what they would do after the war. The question of what rapidly-aging men bred for battle will do with themselves when the conflict ends in an undeniably fascinating and pathos-ridden one. Seeing the animated corner of Star Wars confront the question head on, with clones wanting to keep fulfilling their purpose, or struggling to imagine a life with a pension and the freedom to do whatever they want, feels like a moving continuation of themes the franchise has been batting around for a while now.

Out-of-universe though, it reflects how we treat veterans in the real world, with genuine, even more potent questions of how we put fellow human beings through war zones and then expect them to come home and go back to normal life. Debates over funding, questions of who represents the troopers, the political cudgel the issue becomes all have resonance for real life issues.

“Clone Conspiracy” is smart to focus its story on one clone, named Slip, as our perspective character. He represents someone willing to just go along with the way of things, until his pal is killed for threatening to speak out. His desire to get out, willingness to challenge the status quo and the treatment of his brothers, and inevitable but tragic death, make him a good fulcrum for the tale (no pun intended).

This is also a good time to bring back Senator Chuchi. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to see Bail Organa, and even Senator Pamlo again. But returning more political allies who have roots in the series’ predecessor, fighting for the rights of the clones within the system, starting to realize the rot that's set in within the political apparatus, and suddenly discovering the web of murder and malfeasance afoot builds on what we know about her and resets it for the Imperial era. She’s a little naive, but noble and brave, which are good character traits for someone in her role in the story.

The mysteries and reveals “Clone Conspiracy” has to offer are tops as well. I appreciate seeing Rex again, and the turn that he’s helping rogue clones escape unscathed, which is on brand. (And him presumably hanging at the Martez sisters’ garage is a nice touch.) The mystery of the sniper taking out clone agitators is a good one. For the record, my money was on Fennec Shand, but I like the idea that Rampart is employing a new line of off-the-books clones to do his dirty work, which opens up more mysteries to come. The cloak and dagger elements of this one are just as good.

Overall, this is The Bad Batch at its narrative peak, weaving together the personal, the political, and the paranoid thriller elements into one thematically potent and narratively exciting installment. I enjoy the episodic adventures of the series, and the parts that center squarely on the titular crew of unique clone troopers. But it’s also nice when the show gets broader in scope, touching on the highest of political rungs, the first wisps of the rebellion, the backroom misdealings and terrible murders that fuel the Empire, and at the center of all of it, the living souls, treated as obsolete technology, who suffer the most after giving so much.

[8.0/10] There are two sequences in Oppenheimer that are a metonym for the rest of the film. Early on, a young J. Robert Oppenheimer is given a hard time by his teacher, essentially punishing him for his human struggles by denying him the chance to see a lecture from his hero. So Oppenheimer, filled with frustration and a chance bit of inspiration, fills his professor’s apple with an injection of cyanide. He does the deed coldly and methodically, attends the lecture, and doesn’t seem the slightest bit perturbed that he’s essentially committed an act of attempted murder on someone who made his life miserable.

But when he wakes up in the morning, he is wracked with guilt and stricken with an urgency to undo what he’s done. He rushes to steal back the apple before the worst consequences of his choices take hold, something made all the more desperate when it’s his hero, Neils Bohr, not his jerk teacher, who’s about to take a bite. Spurred by his regrets, he snatches it out of Bohr’s hand before it can do its damage.

It’s a microcosm for how to account for Oppenheimer’s behavior for the building of the first atomic bomb. For so much of the film, he is single-minded to the point of being myopic on achieving his goal. To him, the United States needs nuclear weapons, and they need them now, because the Nazis are building them. Hitler and his goons are threatening Oppenheimer’s fellow Jews, and if he can help stop them, use his physics to prevent the Third Reich from gaining the upper hand, he feels he has a responsibility to do so.

So he ignores his good friend and fellow Jewish physicist, Rabi, who tells Oppenheimer he doesn’t want to participate in something that would wreak death upon the world. He dismisses the growing contingent of his Los Alamos workforce concerned about the ethics of what they’re building. He brushes off his colleagues from Chicago who want him to tell the American leadership not to act. He is full of justifications and rationalizations.

There is something workmanlike, methodical about his goal to produce the atomic bomb. He gently raises the objections of his colleagues, but presents himself as a vessel for communicating the views of others rather than injecting his own opinions. He is a man with a job to do, deadlines to meet, villains to defeat. And even when Germany is defeated, he’s still under orders, still anxious to see his work come to fruition, practically pacing when the day of the bombings arrives.

Only then, at his moment of triumph, once the job is done, he feels naught but the blood on his hands, the rot in his souls, the feeling that had been tucked away into a dark corner until the job was complete. The most bravura sequence in the film sees him in the moment of his greatest triumph, being cheered on by his fellow scientists, reveling in their victory, whilst being haunted by the gravity of what he hath wrought.

The sound, the light, the visions of blighted flesh and communities turn to ash, overwhelm his senses and drown out the singing of his praises. His ra-ra speech seems awkward and uncomfortable -- lacking in genuine fervor from someone whose emotional reckoning with what he’s done hits on a delay, like the time-displaced sound wave from his own bomb. Only after he’s done it, does he feel it, and start to wish he could take it back.

It is the apple again, a piece of nature poisoned, only now amplified in magnitude beyond comprehension. And it is the peculiar psyche of this astonishing man, suddenly made to feel the weight of destruction and history, wondering what he’s unleashed upon the world.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan has the audience feel that weight too. Clocking in at over three hours, Oppenheimer plays appropriately epic, not just as the story of the creation of the atomic bomb, but encompassing the life of its father that serves as a prelude, the regretful aftermath that leads him beyond that seminal moment, and the public clashes that consumed his life afterward.

In that, Nolan and company hit a number of the standard biopic beats. The early portions breeze through relationships and foundational experiences that, while specific to Oppenheimer, will feel familiar to anyone who’s seen a cinematic accounting of a historical figure. Grand speeches are given. Famous faces are introduced with suitable fanfare. The names of notable people and places are dropped with the freighted, portentous importance of an MCU post-credit scene.

And yet, there is a greater artfulness to what Nolan and his collaborators set out to do that sets Oppenheimer above its standard prestige comparators. Some of that is the pure aesthetics. If ever there were an argument for big screen viewing, it is the film’s grand atomic test -- a wash of light, columns of all-consuming flame, the straightjacket of silence that envelops all gazing upon it, and the sonic boom that punctures the moment. Theatrical viewing is a boon, maybe even necessary, to feel the full strength of that awe.

At the same time, Nolan’s team goes for more impressionsitic sequences amid their otherwise stately production. The aforementioned victory celebration gone awry is an achievement in using the cinematic form to contrast the external mask with the internal state. The way the trappings of the nuclear explosion intrude on Oppenheimer’s interrogation proves a creative way to show how the bombings haunt him as he struggles to reconcile his past fervor with his present regret. And in a similar vein, the transposition of his ex, depicted in full passionate lovemaking as his infidelity is laid bare on the public record, foregrounds the guilt and the anger between him and his wife in visceral terms.

There’s also more formal creativity at play. Beyond the nonlinear presentation, that juxtaposes past and present in canny ways, Oppenheimer offers not one but two frame stories. One is fission, the recollections that turn out to be part of Oppenheimer’s adversarial hearing on the renewal of his security clearance. The other is fusion, with still more recountings channeled through the Senate confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s colleague and erstwhile admirer.

The tangle of the two gives the film leeway to play the contrast and compare game wherever necessary when it wants to put two meaningful moments side-by-side. It allows Nolan and his team to disorient the audience, lose them in the timeline to where the tumult of events washes over you. And it allows him to hide the ball, bringing the two storylines into jaw-dropping clarity right when it will have the greatest impact.

The choice to tell Oppenheimer’s story in color and Stauss’ part in black and white helps distinguish them so the viewer can keep some track. But it also helps code that we’re seeing these events through each’s differing perspective. That helps color their different takes on what happened, and shield the twist that Stauss is not one of Oppenheimer’s defenders suffering unfortunate guilt by association, but rather a bitter, resentful and conniving rival, prepared to throw Oppenheimer under the bus to feather his own nest.

Therein lies the grand turn and irony of the film. When Oppenheimer is willing to do the dirty work of powerful men without question, he is given everything he asks for. They build towns in the desert. They give him billions in resources. They push through his security clearance despite his occasional dalliances with communism and, worse yet for the times, with communists.

But when his conscience reemerges and he is a hindrance, not a help, to the cause of nuclear weaponry, men like Strauss turn that same infrastructure against him. He is dragged down by those jealous and scornful of his refusal to keep helping. He is written off by the President who championed him. He is torn asunder by forces greater than himself that, as none other than Einstein warns him, are ready to minimize and punish him once he’s no longer useful. And worse yet, Oppenheimer wants it; he thinks he deserves it.

There is something elemental, even Shakespearean in that. And yet, the grandest flaw of the film is that you do not always feel it.

Oppenheimer has its pitfalls. The film is remarkably brisk for a three-hour runtime, but you can sometimes feel Nolan trying to cram anything and everything into his feature, whether it’s truly essential or not, because it fascinates him. At moments, particularly after the big turn, we don’t need to be so deep in the weeds. Likewise, the script indulges in some of the corniest biopic tropes, from a Senate staffer casually dropping the name JFK, to the same staffer delivering a Sorkinesque speech about doing the right thing and matters bigger than one politician’s aspirations.

But the biggest of them is that despite Oppenheimer centering itself on one man’s growing guilt, questioning, and eventual self-flagellation, it often feels cold, lacking in feelling. Perhaps that’s appropriate for one anchored on scientists who are irregular around the margins, but who can be clinical in their work. The thing about Nolan’s filmography is that he’s often better at crafting characters who feel like avatars for big ideas than he is at developing them as three-dimensional people.

The same affliction permeates this movie, with the sweep of history and provocative notions about responsibility, myopia, urgency, and regret keenly felt, but the emotions of its central players, so key to the film, not always coming through with as much visceral clarity.

And yet, if there’s something that helps cover for that, it’s the downright relentless pace of the film. Part of how Oppenheimer makes the time fly by is the fact that it never stops. Clock the dialogue scenes. There’s barely a moment between retorts. There is a continual chugging in the film, conveying the urgent need to complete this task and the restlessness in Oppenheimer’s thoughts and history that led to it. The same goes for the score, which pounds, rich with sonic beauty and the ticking of geiger counters, making the broad jump across years culminating in the bomb’s deployment feel like one grand movement.

Until it stops. Two-thirds of the way through the film, the pace suddenly slackens. The score drops away. Freed from the irresistible pull of the mission for once, both Oppenheimer and the audience are given a chance to stop and reflect, and it’s then that the gravity of what’s been done truly starts to sink in. The way Nolan uses the pacing of his film to drive its central change of heart is masterful.

Because then it picks up again. Between the machinations of Stauss in his committee hearing, and the futile maneuvering of Oppenheimer and his allies before the body sent to rob him of his security clearance, and with it, his credibility, the rhythm kicks up anew, selling the controlled chaos that ensues to match the controlled chaos that preceded it. But in between is that quiet moment of clarity.

The rub of Oppenheimer is that the eponymous protagonist wants his punishment, no matter how unjust the source of it, because he wants to atone for his sins. He believes that, contrary to the warnings that the chance to destroy the world is near zero, he’s set off the chain reaction that will invite the apocalypse. He hopes this will be his penance, his chance to pay for his sins.

Because that’s the other sequence that serves as the metonym for Oppenheimer. Once he told his tempestuous lover, Jean Tatlock, that he would always answer. Then, when his life took a different turn, with a wife and children, he told her he couldn’t anymore. And in the absence of his intervention, she killed herself, her worst demons spiraling out toward destruction.

That is the reason Oppenheimer acts so swiftly and so gravely in trying to put a stop to this hell he has unleashed upon the world. Because he knows, in ways personal and devastating, what happens when he sits by and doesn’t intervene to stop the worst from happening, to blame yourself for the blood that’s spilt when you could have stepped in but instead shut yourself off. He has felt that loss, and in his post-Hiroshima activism, he feels it once more.

What if you didn’t get to the apple in time? What if you couldn’t stop what you’d started? What if the best and worst of your nature caught up to you at once? For a troubled world, much as for a troubled friend, J. Robert Oppenheimer fears that it’s already too late.

[7.9/10] Another winning episode. My favorite part of this one is how the audience’s sympathies shift with Charlie’s. (Or, at least, they do if you’re anything like me.)

At first, you love Irene and Joyce, even before you know their history. They are the bad girls of the nursing home which is, somehow, much cooler than it sounds. The two of them smoking weed, playing their boombox in the rec room, and otherwise causing trouble in a fairly safe and staid environment makes them adorable. I don’t know what it is about seniors acting like rebellious teenagers that's so much fun, but it’s infectious. So when you see their great friendship and mischievous attitude together, you’re nigh-instantly on their side.

By gum, they’re resourceful too! This may be the most clever (or at least elaborate) murder scheme we’ve gotten in the show so far. The combination of the cleverness of their zoo alibi and the vitals monitor switcheroo, and the physical dedication of Irene’s two story climb and enduring a taser, displays both their ingenuity and dedication to taking out this mysterious man.

So when Charlie bumps into them, it feels like kismet. They seem like old souls, meant to become pals. There’s something about their rebellious attitude and general resourcefulness that makes you think Charlie could become Irene and/or Joyce given another few decades. Their rapport is easy, and running gags like Charlie mining the lost and found add bits of joy to the proceedings.

The shit soon gets serious though. The notion of them as hippies who were not only imprisoned for thirty years for their youthful rebellion, but with Irene being maimed by a gunshot to the back while running away makes you not just like these women, but sympathize with them. Their story is a tragedy, and an injustice. I discerned pretty easily that Gabriel, their resistance movement’s leader, had sold them out. But hearing their story makes you understand why they wanted to kill him, and makes it seem like righteous vengeance for decades of their life and the use of Irene’s body parts.

What I didn’t peg, however, is that Gabriel was, depending on your point-of-view, the good guy in the situation. The twist that he wasn't just saving his own skin, but rather was trying to stop them from blowing up a bunch of teenagers, turns everything upside down, for the audience and for Charlie. Suddenly, Gabriel is the (at least more) sympathetic one, and these women seem like monsters, especially as their hits escalate. Charlie realizing, “Oh wait, you’re the assholes” at roughly the same time the viewer does is a cool move. I’d wondered if this would be the episode where Charlie allows the murder to go unsolved, but the change in the moral complexion of the situation means we stay on track here.

Speaking of which, I love the elements of this one apart from the main murder mystery. Charlie suddenly having a friend who owes her a favor in the FBI is a good chit for the show to cash in and a later date, and Simon Helberg plays well off of Natasha Lyonne as a more strait-laced agent of “the man” who nonetheless recognizes her instincts. Likewise, I appreciate Poker Face paying tribute to Murder She Wrote with Charlie consulting “The Fletchers”, a group of murder-mystery enthusiasts, to help piece together how Joyce and Irene might have done it.
Not for nothing, the performances here are absolutely excellent. Part of why you get on board with Irene and Joyce is the gleeful, lived-in dynamic the two display with one another. A big part of why you sympathize with them is the grave way they recount their time in the underground, and the horrors that befell them thanks to the feds. And even Gabriel’s monologue about not regretting what he did, but wanting their forgiveness is acted near-perfectly. Judith Light, S. Epatha Merkerson, and Reed Birney all kill it, if you’ll pardon the expression.

My one complaint is that things get a little cartoony from there. The two women deciding to blow up their irksome busybody of a fellow resident with her own instapot is a solid enough callback to them planning to use pressure cookers to bomb a model U.N. meeting. But the fight between the deadly duo and Charlie can't seem to find the right balance between intense and comical, and the exploding golf cart feels like a bridge too far. I get the idea that the show wants to convey the depths of their murderous streak here, but it comes as too much.

Still, this is one of the most enjoyable episodes of an already enjoyable show, with great performances to lead the way, and some truly memorable characters, even if they break Charlie’s and our hearts by the time the credits roll.

[7.8/10] The finale of X-Men isn’t perfect. In an ideal world, it would be a two-part episode, with enough time and scope to sum up this ambitious, if hot-and-cold series. But as it is, “Graduation Day” is a roundly satisfying finale for the show. It allows the conflict that has driven from the series to froth to a boil, and then pivots everything back between two men at opposite sides of the ideological dispute at the core of it, and the found family Professor Xavier has built over the past seventy-five episodes.

It comes back to Henry Gyrich, one of the heads of the Mutant Control Agency who started out giving our heroes trouble. It comes back to whether the mutant should try to peacefully coexist with a human population full of people who fear and resent them, or whether they should rise up and carve out something for themselves. It comes back to the friendship between Charles and Magnus. And it comes back to the growth the members of Xavier’s team have shown since Jubilee first arrived at the mansion.

And it’s also the culmination of so much that has been running through the show since it started. I love that it starts with what is essentially a referendum on whether mutants are a menace to be contained (or worse eliminated), or a collection of individuals no more inherently good or evil than any of us. Gyrich twisting the events of the series into a series of invectives and bad faith interpretations of mutants as terrorists shows the insidiousness of prejudice. It leads people to misinterpret noble events as building blocks in some terrible conspiracy that indicts all its participants.

And on the other end is Professor Xavier, spreading his message of shared understanding, being a voice for a maligned people and championing the good that his team has done, the building blocks of community between humanity and mutant kind they represent. And for his troubles, he is nearly killed.

In truth, putting Xavier on death’s door is kind of a cliche. But I love what “Graduation Day” builds out of it. True to the title, it forces the X-Men to figure out what to do without their fearless leader. The show touched on this same idea in season 2, but it’s still interesting to see Cyclops, Jean, and Wolverine be forced to wonder “What would Xavier do?” when it’s a question that seems permanent rather than temporary. Weighing their natural combativeness and desire for vengeance for their leader, against that same leader’s message of peace is a conflict rich with meaning.

At the same time, I love it as a flashpoint for mutants across the world to wonder if the time has come to rise up. I was compelled by one of the Genoshan mutants who said, basically, that if someone as wealthy, famous, human in form, and known for his message of peace cannot avoid persecution, what chance do the rest of them have to be treated with dignity and equality? There’s a grim irony to all of this -- that it’s an unfortunate incident that transpires while Xavier makes a plea for peace and understanding that convinces his fellow mutant that plea is too naive to be worth listening to.

I’ve been listening to the Revolutions podcast from Mike Duncan, and it’s hard not to draw parallels to real life revolutionary movements. Seeing strong mutant demonstrations across the globe in response to a belief that there’s no way forward with the existing regime has the character of any number of popular uprisings throughout history. The notion of one inflammatory event setting off an explosion of long-simmering resentment and a growing list of grievances, is a familiar one.

Granted, I do have some qualms with the idea that all of these disparate mutant groups across the globe would be united in their desire to have Magneto as their revolutionary leader. And it reduces things to a sort of Great Man:tm: theory of history that I bristle against a bit. But it's also in keeping with the spirit of the show, which personifies massive social movements and ideas so that they’re more accessible to a younger audience. To that end, making Magneto the figurehead of the mutant urge to reject or even conquer humanity makes a ton of sense.

Separate and apart from the politics of it, I like the simple but powerful dilemma it starts up. A fight among the X-Men faithful reveals a convenient but important fact -- Magneto’s powers can heighten psychic brainwaves. Is that a little silly? Sure. But it’s well within acceptable tolerances for this fantastical show. The chance epiphany during a fight between him and Jena Grey helps give it a layer of plausibility, as does the whole “The brain runs on electric pulses, so your electromagnetism powers would have an effect” thing.

It’s important because Earthly medicine cannot help Charles in his beleaguered state, but Shi’ar technology might. The catch is that thus far, only Professor X’s psychic link to Lilandre has been able to contract their alien pals across galaxies. But what do you know! Magneto’s powers could allow him to boost Charalels’ abilities to reach the SHi’ar despite Professor X’s coma.

It’s convenient as all hell. But I still like it for a simple reason. It forces Magneto to choose between the cause he’s pursued for his whole life, and the friend he’s cherished for almost as long. The people are incensed. They’re ready to buy into his philosophy of mutant superiority, that the time is right to strike back at the humans who revile them, subjugate them or at least carve out a place of their own, before the humans try to eradicate us. It’s all that he’s wanted since we met him.

And he’s willing to cast it all aside, or at least put it on hold for the time being, knowing this moment might never come again, because he loves his friend.

That is a powerful statement on the goodness within Magnus, despite his combative and unaccommodating ways. And it’s a testament to his devotion to his friend, despite their philosophical differences. I’ve grown a bit colder over the years. I’ve become more sensitive to the fine line between accepting that reasonable minds can differ and accommodating repugnant beliefs to everyone’s detriment. (Don’t worry, I’m not planning to don a distinctive helmet and develop magnetic powers.) But it’s hard not to be moved by Magneto setting aside his differences with Dear Charles and sacrificing the chance to achieve his dreams in order to protect his friend when he needs it most.

Of course, it works. But X-Men makes much out of those tenuous moments where it looks like hep may not arrive until too late. In those fearful minutes, Chaarales gives one last benediction to his students, a tribute to who they are and what they’ve achieved in the time that we’ve been with them.

Some are more profound than others. Xavier’s slime about Rogue not being able to touch anyone and yet having touched them all is a hollow bromide. Storm being able to be both fearsome and gentle is a hoary cliche. But you know what? Given the heightened tenor of the moment and the soft sincerity of Cedric Smith’s delivery, it all works better than it has any right to on paper.

And some of what he says is pitch perfect. Again, it’s a bit obvious, but him noting Wolverine as a man with a savage anger but a heart of gold, and a loner who found a family, puts a nice pin in his character journey over the course of the series -- the most fleshed out one of the show. Him speaking about the hope he feels for the future when he sees Jubilee is heartening. Him quoting literature back to Hank is pitch perfect. And him calling Cyclops his surrogate son, one he’s deeply proud of, tugged at my heartstrings, even though I’m not the biggest fan of Scott.

I am a big fan of Morph though! And I’m glad that as part of the full circle sensibility of this episode, they take time to not only have Morph play an important role in helping to calm the masses by impersonating the Professor, but for him to receive his own blessing and affirmation from Xavier as well. His journey is one of my favorites, and it’s nice to see him get a little closure and catharsis in this final outing.

With that, the show has its cake and eats it too. I assume there were network prohibitions on outright killing off Professor X. But “Graduation Day” delivers the closest equivalent it can muster, essentially saying that he’ll have to be away forever in order to survive. Suddenly, the X-Men are in the hands of, well, the X-Men. He’s taught them all he can. It’s their time now. Time to carry on his ideals and vision of a brighter future for mutant kind and humanity in the way he would want. With his final words, they, and we, can trust they’re ready for such an awesome responsibility.

And so closes one of the seminal television series of my childhood. I’ll confess, despite my praise here, I walk away from the show a little disappointed. As a kid, I thought of this show as so sophisticated and bold. As an adult, I see much more the undeniable ambition that nonetheless runs around on shaggy story structure and oodles of melodrama.

But these are still the canonical versions of these iconic characters for me. Its reach exceeded its grasp on more than one occasion, but the series didn’t hold back on the moral and personal complexities at the heart of the X-Men’s essential predicament. I admire it as much for the show it was trying to be as the show it was, even if the latter left something to be desired now and then. No matter its successes and failures along the way, X-Men goes out on a high note, one that exemplifies the ideas the show strived to explore, and the figures whose struggles and breakthroughs brought them to life.

[7.2/10] This one started a bit slow, but picked up steam as it went (and, as it got more demented). The episode was kind of all over the place, but found another gear in the endgame and had some creative direction that bumped it up a notch by the time the credits rolled.

In truth, IASIP has done the battle of the sexes angle before to better effect. That fact notwithstanding, it’s nice to see the likes of The Waitress, Artemis, Gail the Snail, and the McPoyle brothers back in the fold. In some way, this one felt a bit like a throwback to the show’s earlier, shaggier days, which has a charm all its own.

I do appreciate the sports movie humor of the guys distracting the girls during their bowling match, only for the girls to turn the tables and push the boys’ buttons during the next frame. I particularly liked Gail getting into Mac’s head by convincing him to try to prove he has finesse and not just strength, and the Waitress messing with Charlie’s natural talent by making him think about what he’s doing.

Honestly, the rivalry between Dee and Dennis over women’s sport didn’t do much for me. It’s been done before, and while there’s some amusement to be had from Dennis trying to get in his sister’s head, and the Waitress tricking him into messing with his bowling hand, it’s a bit of a cliche.

That said, this one won me over by the end. Maybe it’s the ludicrousness of Frank’s chili cheese fry conspiracy. But honestly, credit to director Megan Ganz and the production team, because my favorite parts of this one were the more cinematic sequences that departed from the show’s usual naturalistic style.

The McPoyles’ “unspeakable” tragedy being shot like a melodramatic art film was glorious. The contrast between the mundaneness of a chili fry-related mishap and the over-the-top mawkishness of the presentation was fantastic. Likewise, as much as I wasn’t particularly invested in the Dee vs. Dennis rivalry, the shot selection and editing choices as Dee found her focus and sent the ball flying into the pins to win the day had me holding my breath with anticipation. The fact that her great triumph ends in anticlimax is a good gag too.

Overall, this one took a while to hook me, but once it got a little more creative than “remember these familiar characters” and the standard “guys vs. girls” setup, it got me back on board.

[8.2/10] Let’s start with the big news here. Midge is a success! Susie is a success! So much of this show has been about the two of them fighting and scraping and working their way to the middle, let alone the top. So having the show do one 60 Minutes flash forward that confirms yes, all their hard work and struggle paid off, that they were able to make it, is a little disorienting to just come out of nowhere like this, but also heartening to see. The little sops like Midge having been involved with Paul Simon and Susie managing George Carlin and Midge having a Lenny Bruce-likeshade of controversy at Carnegie Hall are all cute and rousing futures for them.

But there’s also a touch of sadness to it all, because despite all their success, despite the status of things in the present (er, the past, bear with me here!) where Midge instinctively trusts Susie, something happens in the future to break them apart. And at the same time, there’s clearly some tension between Mide and her daughter, Esther, with Midge’s declaration that she did it all “for the children” ringing a false note that seems poised to be explored in more depth given how the season opened. Midge had the career she always dreamed of, but it seemed to come at cost, which is the kind of storytelling I always appreciate.

And hey, while it’s played for laughs, it’s not crazy to imagine Esther having issues when she’s basically being raised by Zelda and her new boyfriend, who none of the Maisels know despite the fact that he carries Midge’s kids to school. The kids have never been a big part of the show, so again, giving them a voice through grown up Esther, and highlighting, however comically, the way they’re treated like afterthoughts is an interesting tack for the series to take.

But returning to the 1960s, it’s a blast seeing Midge’s first day of work as a writer for the Gordon Ford show. The creative team does a nice job of quickly establishing the Gordon Ford show as its own little ecosystem, where people are skeptical of the new girl, the boss quitting smoking causing ripples for everyone, the bigtime producer is loathed by his staffers, and the all-male writing room has codes and procedures and superstitions and beliefs about what’s funny that they’re not inclined to share and which border on the absurd.

Watching poor Midge do her best to navigate that, and her own absurdities over picking a proper “sitting dress”, makes her as sympathetic as ever. It’s easy to relate to her as the new kid in town, worrying that you might be in over your head, knowing what works for you but struggling to get it accepted by the people used to their way of doing things, and not wanting to be seen as the fly in the ointment. The show does a nice job of highlighting the sort of sexism Midge faces, both subtle and overt, while also framing many of her struggles as a universal experience of starting a new job. The dialogue is crisp, the characters are vivid, and this new corner of the Mrs. Maisel world comes immediately with a sense of place and a new challenge for our hero.

That said, as much as this one feels like a bit of a launch for the new overarching plot and setting for the season, much of this one is more devoted to comedy. Case-in-point, I don’t know that we really needed a return engagement from Sylvio, the seemingly adulterous suitor Midge ditched who’s played by Gilmore Girls alum Milo Ventimiglia. I imagine Jess fans were pleased to learn that his 1960s doppelganger is not, in fact, a cheater, but rather invited Midge over when his wife and he were separated, and now all he wants to do is apologize. That said, the pursuit between the two of them through the New York subway system, replete with offended straphangers and justifiably suspicious cops is a hoot. The chase and banter between them is worth the odd detour.

Likewise, the subplot about Abe going to lunch with a bigwig theater producer who ends up coming onto him starts out pretty strange, but turns into a laugh riot. It’s rare that Abe gets to play so sweet and oblivious, but his flustered affect with a hand on his leg from the heiress apparent is a hoot, him replicating the move on Gabe to see if he misread it is a bigger laugh still, and him pulling it on Rose while they discuss it clinically and check that it’s an appropriate hour for sexual congress absolutely split my sides. As worldly as Abe and Rose are, they’re also a touch provincial, and so the pair experiencing this whole silly interlude and being completely flustered by it is both hilarious and kind of adorable.

The same goes for Rose’s continuing stand-off with the Match-Making Mafia. Here, they’ve seemingly gone too far -- burning down her beloved Tea Room from which she conducts business. (Candidly, I wouldn’t be shocked if at least some of this turns out to be plain old bad luck, but it’s fun to see Rose’s wheels spinning.) Her call to her son, where she asks if he can sic the CIA on her for enemies in the same tone as though she’s asking if he can watch the house while they’re on vacation, makes for a very funny juxtaposition. I’ve occasionally slated writer/director Daniel Palladino for his broader comedy (and Abe’s boss’ sneeze fest is pretty corny), but there’s a ton of big laughs here, and it helps you remember why this show is so enjoyable from moment to moment.

Speaking of which, my favorite part of this one (other than the glimpse into Midge and Susie’s future) is watching Midge walk the line between trying to fit in and trying to stand up for her material. You can see her wanting to be friendly and not rock the boat. When Gordon Ford herself asks how the rest of the writers are treating her (with a seductive eye no less) she lies and says it’s going terrific. She disclaims immediately that she’s a jinx or an x-factor, and wants to be “one of the boys” to some extent.

But at the same time, she sticks up for her jokes, elbowing her way in when she has to, and pushing back on one of the other writers (who’s coded as being a bit outside of the 1960s norm himself) when he questions her humor. And as always, Midge deals with her issues on stage, talking about the experience at her club in characteristically funny terms, while also using the line her colleagues rejected and getting a big laugh. I’m not big on fourth-wall breaks, but something about her “I knew that was funny” aside just works.

The only thing I continue to struggle with here is Joel. I’ve beat this drum since season 1, so I won’t belabor the point, but the guy’s just not interesting on his own. Him being shitty and blaming Midge for Mei leaving him doesn’t help make him likable, even if you can understand him going through a tough time. And as much as it speaks well of Midge, her filling his fridge with casseroles points things in a direction I’m not fond of.

Still, all that said, this episode gives us an exciting look into what lies ahead for future “living legend” Midge Maisel, launches her into a new job with aplomb, and brings plenty of laughs on the side to keep things moving. Joel’s unenjoyable exploits are more than worth suffering through briefly in exchange for that.

[7.5/10] Could The Bad Batch be headed for its endgame? It seems unlikely. There’s a ton of irons left in the fire, from the bad blood with Cid, to the newly-introduced Dr. Hemlock and his experiments at an Imperial cloning facility, to the Empire hunting Omega, and so on and so on. Could you tie all of those things up in three episodes? Sure, but it would take a lot, and feel like tamping something down when it’s just getting started.

Still, the disappointing Star Wars Resistance shut down after only two seasons, despite having some loose threads still waving in the wind. And more to the point, Phee taking Clone Force 99 to Pabu, an island paradise far away from the Empire’s notice, seems like a legitimate possible endpoint for our heroes. The planet purportedly has no resources that would lead outsiders to bother them, and welcomes refugees to its shores who want to live a different sort of life. With questions from Phee about whether Omega might need a more stable environment, and such a welcoming environment from the jump, this could be where the Bad Batch chooses to settle down permanently, ending their adventures with a certain happy ever after as recompense for years and years of war.

Granted, it seems pretty clear that Omega’s presence is going to bring the Empire to Pabu’s shores eventually. But in the meantime, I like the fact that the first half of this episode is as much about atmosphere as anything. It’s about painting Pabu as a wonderful place apart. Omega finds a friend her own age, something Phee underlines as important. Hunter contemplates whether this is a place he could be a father to her, give her the kind of peace away from dangerous missions with duplicitous lowlifes like Cid that she deserves. Wrecker seems to get on with the town Mayor, suggesting a friendly partnership (and full stomach) that he could get used to. And Tech and Phee seem to be melting a little bit beyond their cordial relationship, with Phee emphasizing how much she must like them to bring them here. There’s a communal, peaceful air to all of this.

Much of that owes to the sheer atmosphere crafted by the animators, directors, and other craftspeople at play here. Pabu feels like a warm paradise, with gorgeous vistas, sunlight landscapes, and attention to detail in the homes and implements of the people of Pabu. You get, on an instinctual level, why someone would want to stay here, beyond the explicit warm welcome and other thematic beats here. It’s a real tribute to the slow pace and soothing rhythms the show adopts to underscore that fact.

Of course, it can’t all be peaceful in Star Wars. So naturally, there’s a tidal wave coming. I’ll admit to finding it super convenient that there just so happens to be a tidal wave right when The Bad Batch shows up, but I’m willing to forgive the contrivance of it. The ensuing set piece is good. Omega is in danger when sailing on her friend’s boat, which creates some peril for them to escape and race to shore, while Hunter springs into action to rescue them. Tech and Phee helping the villagers from below the retaining wall requires some ingenuity and teamwork, which is always good. And Wrecker carrying the town’s resident old man up before it’s too late, and rescuing the mayor, is a nice beat for him too.

Again, much of this plays as a touch too convenient, but you can see why the Bad Batch would be valuable to the community, to help rescue and rebuild, and you can see why they might want to settle down in such a supportive community, which promises the possibility of freedom from the fight they’ve been having for so long. I don’t know if it’ll last. The lucrative prospect of more adventures, more dramatics, more episodes, and more subscribers seems to augur in favor of the contrary. But with all the time spent on making this a potential destination for Omega, Hunter, Wrecker, and Tech, you could be forgiven for thinking The Bad Batch might be listing toward The End.

[7.6/10] It’s nice to see the Zillo Beast back! More and more of season 2 feels like a sequel to The Clone Wars (more so than even Rebels did). The exact results of Palpatine’s instructions to have the Zillo Beast cloned were one of the loose ends from the prior series, so it’s nice to see some answers here. The Emperor did, in fact, manage to clone the Beast with the help of Kaminoan technology and other amoral mad scientists. Given the size of the operation and the number of ships, it looks like they succeeded in cloning it more than once, and there’s a secret project to try to use its blaster-resistant skin for armor plating. Very cool to get some payoff to something that started back in 2010.

(As an aside, I could have sworn we’ve seen the Zillo Beast brought back before “Metamorphosis”, but it turns out I was just remembering an episode of Lego Star Wars All Stars! A lot of the non-canon T.V. series are fun, but they can jumble your memory of what happened in the main timeline. The same thing happened when I was sure that Andor and K2-S0 had crossed over into one of the animated shows, and was again, accidentally recalling one of the Lego series.)

This episode had a very Alien vibe, with our heroes trapped in an enclosed space with a lurking monster, with a lot of gradual escalation in tension and a spooky atmosphere. The atmosphere was actually my favorite part of this one. I’d half-guessed it might be the Zillo Beast after a bit, so its appearance wasn’t a big shock. But the director, writer, and composer all do a good job presenting an air of eeriness about the derelict imperial transport where the beast ate everyone. The show captures the horror vibes of the encounter, and follows the JAWS principle of heightening the anticipation, and the terror, by only showing you glimpses of the creature and signs of the damage it can do long before you see the full thing in action.

The ensuing confrontation loses a little steam once the beast breaks out of the ship. Longtime fans have seen the creature rampage on skyscrapers before, and it seems comparatively easy for the Imperials to recapture it this time. (Though maybe the coning process made it mildly more docile? Who knows.) But there’s still plenty of good fireworks in the efforts to escape both the beast’s maw and the Empire attacking.

I’m most intrigued by the developments for the bigger story arcs wending their way through the series. For one thing, it’s nice to see the tension between Cid and the Bad Batch escalate after she didn’t help rescue them. Between that and the warning from the shady racing guy, I’ll bet she comes through in the clutch for the team in a big moment to prove that there’s some loyalty there, but it provides good reason for conflict between Clone Force 99 and their own shady benefactor, so I dig it.

On a broader scale, we get some new wrinkles in the cloning conspiracy and a new antagonist. I’m a fan of Jimmi Simpson, so it’s nice to see him aboard as Dr. Hemlock, the malevolent scientist who seems to be behind the secret cloning projects.. The fact that these projects exist leads to plenty of intriguing questions like what exactly they’re doing beyond the markless Clone Troopers we met in “Clone Conspiracy” and the Zillo beast. (The tall, glowy-helmeted troopers suggest something further.) The desire to hide the cloning project to exert greater control over it is interesting and on brand, and even (sigh) sets up Palpatine trying to clone himself. And the fact that the former Kaminoan Prime Minister tells Dr. Hemlock that the way to get Nala Se to cooperate is by using Omega sets up a future confrontation between the Empire and the Bad Batch, which I appreciate.

All-in-all, this one does a nice job of picking up one of the loose threads from The Clone Wars in a nicely scary sort of way, while also successfully introducing some new characters and machinations that will no doubt be a major part of our protagonists’ future.

[7.8/10] I really liked this one. I’ll admit, I wasn't relishing our first Phee episode. And in truth, while Wanda Sykes is fine here, she hasn’t fully adjusted to the different demands of voice acting. But I’m increasingly on board with Phee. The idea of a treasure hunter/pirate, one focused on old legends and interested in taking jaunts to uncharted worlds, is a good ingredient to toss in the stew of The Bad Batch. Her cocksure attitude, Hondo-like pirate’s pride in plunder, and voice of experience and confidence makes her a good match for the comparatively straight and narrow Clone Force 99. (There’s a few shades of Mika Grey from Star Wars Resistance there too.)

The setup is also just plain cool here. Omega finding a random compass on a dump world that leads them to a set of coordinates and what seems to be an ancient dungeon holding a legendary treasure is a thrilling plot. Appropriate for a Lucasfilm production, there’s an Indiana Jones quality to this here, with our heroes spelunking through a cave with puzzles and booby traps with the chance to pluck some ballyhooed artifact in the process. Likewise, it also recalls Jedi: Fallen Order, with the creative puzzle-solving in an ancient underground cave, to the point that I started to wonder if this would turn out to be some sort of Zeffo enclave.

I actually appreciate the fact that, to my knowledge at least, the cave they found isn’t from the Zeffo or the old republic or anything like that, but is instead an original planet, maze, and treasure. While the pacing here can be a little slow in places, that lets the tension build as our heroes get separated and have to make their way through plenty of tricky and potentially deadly challenges.

I love the twist, though! The fact that the mysterious “heart of the mountain” isn’t just some bauble, but a lock keeping in place a deadly colossus is weird and unexpected in the best way. The way it rises from the ground and starts destroying the countryside like some malevolent quadruped is jaw-dropping. Nothing sells the sense of, “Despite seeming sure of herself, Phee and everyone who follows her is in over their head right now” than such a wild development that throws everyone out of whack. The imagery and stakes are huge, and augmented by the cave-dwelling creature who chooses that moment to attack them as well.

Everything, of course, turns out alright. The air of intrigue is great, but also comes with the emotional undercurrent of Hunter’s skepticism of Phee, while Omega seems increasingly admiring of the pirate professional. That makes it meaningful when Phee is in danger trying to retrieve the heart of the mountain, only for Hunter to reach out the hand to save her. And Omega’s shine and Hunter’s doubts about her are at least partly quelled and vindicated by her giving up the jewel, no matter how lucrative it is, so that the lock can be put in place again.

Overall, this episode has some of the best atmosphere, and also the most awe-inspiring imagery of The Bad Batch so far. I can’t deny that I, like Hunter, was skeptical about Phee walking in, but after an adventure like this one, I’m much more optimistic about her presence on the show.

[7.7/10] I’ll admit that I’ve found Ahsoka a little on the stoic side since this show started. I put it down as her having been through some things since we last saw her in Rebels, that would cause anyone to shut down a little bit. You could see it as her emulating the centered Jedi masters whom she knew in her time in the Order. I just kind of accepted it as her having evolved as a character, which is fair, even if I missed the more wry and playful version of the character.

“Shadow Warrior” is a breath of fresh air, then, because it shows us that Ahsoka isn’t stoic. She was haunted. And with the guidance of her old master, she’s able to find some peace, and in the process, bring back the more open-hearted Jedi we all grew attached to so long ago.

That’s right! We’re doing a wild vision quest episode, baby! I am a sucker for these, from the Mortis arc in The Clone Wars, to Ezra and Kanan’s Jedi Temple experiences on Lothal in Rebels, to Rey’s Sith temple vision in The Last Jedi, to Anakin’s haunting view of his future in the 2D Clone Wars, to Luke’s journey through the cave in The Empire Strikes Back.

What sets Star Wars apart from most other mainstream space-based franchises is that there’s a spiritual element. Leaning into that, with inventive, impressionistic sequences that use the more imaginative side of filmmaking to convey big interior journeys is one of the Galaxy Far Far Away’s finest features. The one in “Shadow Warrior” is no exception.

Some of that is the simple pleasure of seeing memorable moments from The Clone Wars rendered in live action for the first time. It is a thrill to see none other than Hayden Christensen decked out in the Clone Wars costume, teamed up with Ahsoka as we knew her through the battles against the Separatists. My wife pointed out that this is an affirmation of those adventures, something that confirms them as canon and part of the overarching saga, even for folks who think animation is beneath them for whatever reason. The flesh-and-blood Anakin recreating those moments, even in a liminal space, helps make them real for some folks.

And by god, it’s also just plain cool. Seeing live action (if somewhat fanciful) renditions of the early Clone Wars battles, the Siege of Mandalore, Ahsoka herself in her days as a Padawan has is exciting as all hell. The lightsaber fights are well done, with echoes of past battles for each of the combatants. And most of all, the use of fog as a motif, with flashes of Vader in Anakin’s presence and gait helps sell the themes at play here beyond the pure cool factor.

That theme is simple, but powerful -- is Ahsoka a product of her master, a mere weapon of war, or is there something more to her? Over and over again, Anakin tells Ahsoka to fight: for a cause, for her safety, for her life. He offers excuses and justifications for the need to stop being keepers of the peace and begin to become warriors in battle. He tempts her, to give into the idea that Baylan Skoll was right, and hers is a legacy of death and destruction.

And you can understand why that’s the haunting thought she labors under. Much of Rebels grappled with her guilt over what happened to her master. But “Shadow Warrior” is about her guilt over what her master has done, what she might have inherited from him, if she is fit to pass on what she’s learned, as Yoda once instructed Luke, or if she is fruit of a poisonous free, better to shrivel and die than plant seeds for another generation.

Ultimately, Anakin’s lesson is a rebuke of that idea. His invitations are a feint, something meant to test Ahsoka, not tempt her. He encourages her to fight, to kill, to give into the darker instincts that once overwhelmed him. Instead she stops, given every opportunity to take out years of ill-feelings on a man who’s caused such a mix of joy and pain. It is a tribute to what Yoda once said to his last student, that the Force is for knowledge and defense, never for attack.

And most importantly, it allows Ahsoka to reconcile her memory of her master, to recognize that there is both good and bad in him, and thus both good and bad in her. Dave Filoni himself once remarked that the Dark Side and the Light are not something one simply becomes or turns to; it’s something you must choose to be every day. Through this quest, taking her through the past and the dark thoughts of the mistakes she’s made and the man destined to become a monster she learned under, Ahsoka is able to make peace with what she’s done and what she’s taken from him, and to choose the Light once more.

I love the way it opens up something in her. I love the way she smiles and embraces Jacen. I love the way she jokes around with Huyang in a way we haven't seen so far in this show. I love how, rather than hunting down relics and slicing up droids and fighting other Force-users, Ahsoka figures a way to her pupil through communing with creatures who represent the natural world. I love the wry way she responds to Huyang’s question of how she knows the purrgils will take her to Sabine with a dry, “No idea” and a coy smile, a sign of the whimsy and recklessness that she also shared with her master. This is a different Ahsoka than the one we’ve seen to date, one more lively, more warm, more free.

My only gripe is that the business apart from Ahsoka isn’t nearly as good. It’s nice that Jacen can hear the World Between Worlds or whatever liminal space Ahsoka is in, and particularly nice that Hera trusts and listens to him. But man, I am so over children inheriting Force powers from their parents in this franchise, especially when their parents are legacy characters.

Likewise, it’s nice that Hera continues to search for her dear friends, but the trajectory of the hunt is predictable, and much of the conversations among those who are searching for Ahsoka and Sabine are pretty flat. The “New Republic Government is a bunch of wusses who don’t get what we’re doing” routine is already a little tiresome. (Hello Aftermath fans!) And while there’s a little fun to be had from Carson putting off the Fleet Commander who comes to take Hera in, it feels a little perfunctory as a distraction from Ahsoka’s space whale routine.

Still, I’m on board with it all, if only because it buttresses the most touching and thoughtful episode of Ahsoka we’ve had so far. This is a story of a child soldier wondering if she’s irrevocably broken, if the darkness that infected her master has been passed down to her, if there’s hope for a future she could help shape. What she finds is that she, and he, and those who might come after, have more of the light in him than Ahsoka knew, and now it’s okay for her to let it out.

[7.4/10] “Time to Fly” had a real A New Hope vibe. You have the blast-shielded lightsaber training, the fancy shooting when the bad guys attack your ship, and the sneaking into the enemy stronghold. I’m not sure if there’s a particular point to it beyond casting Ahsoka as a wizened Obi-Wan type, and Sabine as a young Luke type, but it’s an interesting motif nonetheless.

I’m also noticing a pattern with Ahsoka through its first three episodes. There tend to be quiet, meditative parts, and then louder, action-y parts. And I like the loud stuff, but I tend to love the quieter stuff.

Case in point, I’m pretty sure I could watch a show that was just Sabine’s Jedi training, without a larger threat. The session where Ahsoka tries to draw the force out of her, using a blinded training exercise to spur Sabine to rely on her other senses, is compelling as all get out. Their conversation about using The Force, and how it requires some talent but flows through all living things, replete with a coffee cup attempt, is the sort of thing I’m here for. Hearing different perspectives on this thing that binds the universe together, hearing both sides of the teacher/pupil struggle, is fascinating.

My theory is that Sabine will develop force abilities when it matters most, but honestly, I’d be just as happy if she never did. Having a Jedi without Force abilities, who carries on the spirit and the training beyond the magic, is a cool idea. And we have too many force-sensitives running around canon anyway. Huyang speaking matter-of-factly about her not having much in the way of talent with his dry delivery is a laugh, but Ahsoka striving to train her despite that is heartening.

I’m also a fan of Hera’s scenes here. The idea of the New Republic demilitarizing, and that causing frustration for the people who fought in the Rebellion is a theme that’s been with Star Wars since The Force Awakens. It’s interesting to see it in action here, especially since Mon Mothma seems torn between her personal loyalty to Hera from their joint efforts during the war, and her political obligations to democracy and other government commitments. (Hello other folks who read the Aftermath trilogy.)

Hera running into bureaucracy and a skeptical senate who thinks this mission is personal not practical adds to that thread nicely. Plus hey, for anyone who watched Star Wars Resistance, it’s kind of a hoot that the jerky senator who gives Hera the business is the father of the main character from that show. It’s also nice to see Jacen in live action, already aspiring to be a Jedi and getting into trouble. I doubt it’ll be the focus of the show, but I’d be interested to see more of the relationship between Hera and her son.

The big set piece here, though, is a dogfight with Shin Hati and the other baddies. The best part of it for me is the banter between Ahsoka, Sabine, and Huyang, and the parallels to Episode IV. (I practically expected Ahsoka to say, “Don’t get cocky” when Sabine took out some enemy fighters.) Here’s the thing, though. I’ve watched a lot of Star Wars, and I’ll admit that most of the dogfights blend together for me, this one included.

That said, there’s two parts that stand out. One is Ahsoka doing a frickin’ mid-battle spacewalk. Don’t think too hard about the logistics of it, but holy hell that is badass. Seeing her fend off the blasts with her lightsabers and flip from wing to fuselage was thrilling as all hell. In the same vein, the first live action appearance of the purrgils (space whales) was a treat, and a nice sign that we’re (presumably) getting closer to Ezra and Thrawn.

The other teases are fine. It’s already pretty obvious that Morgan Elsbeth is building a hyperspace launcher to wherever Thrawn is. The fact that it follows purrgil lanes is a nice enough detail, but I’m not compelled by the steady plot movement as much as I am the character exploration.

Still, the character exploration remains nice; the world-building is good, and even the action sequences I’m more indifferent to have some real high points. Ahsoka keeps building, and I’ continue to be interested to see where it’s going.

[8.0/10] Now that’s more like it! I would never have asked for IASIP to return to one of its most iconic bits with the Dennis System. But turning it around with the “Sinned” system to attract men was a hilarious inversion.

I enjoyed the hilarity of Dennis turning the whole thing into a weird Oedipal complex approach. But honestly, the best humor came from Mac and Dee being tota dunces about it, and Dennis’ increasing frustration and frantic efforts to cover for their duncery in both the explanation and execution. Something about an uptight stiff having to deal with blithe idiots just tickles my funny bone, and that was this to a tee.

I especially love how oblivious Mac was to the reveal that Dennis is, in fact, “Johnny,” the mysterious suitor who is signaling Mac through anal beads, as a ploy to get Mac out of the house. The whole thing is wonderful comic nonsense.

The bit with Charlie trying to turn Frank into a master chess player through vibrations was good too. It’s an amusingly deranged homage to the recent kerfuffle involving Magnus Carlsen. There’s a nice synchronicity between Mac’s situation and Charlie’s “ingenious” plan to beat a grandmaster. And I got a kick out of Dennis only getting on board when he realizes she can get his jollies out of using someone else like a puppet.

I’ll admit, I’m pretty well over the Uncle Jack humor at this point, and so his return isn't welcome/ But my god,the physical acting from Danny DeVito is outstanding. He really goes for broke here. The broken buzzer routine has the rhythms of a Looney Tunes cartoon, and DeVito is more than up to the challenge.

Overall, this is the clear stand out of the season so far, with the humor, storytelling, and characters clicking on all cylinders.

[9.5/10] Is Susie Myerson a friend to the people in her life, or just a mercenary business woman? In the far off, distant year of 1990, combined roast/testimonial by the famed Friar’s Club suggests it’s the latter. The jokes are about her being tough as nails. The stories are about her being a Machiavellian (and persistent) bullshitter and ballbreaker. She’s being championed for these things, even as she’s being softly slated for them, and hearing her whole life’s professional accomplishments laid out in lionizing yet debasing detail seems to lead to nothing but disinterest from the now veteran entertainment legend.

The roast is a fun device. Not only does it allow the producers to bring back Gilmore Girls vets like Sean Gunn and Danny Strong, but it provides the show an excuse to jump around the timeline, giving us glimpses of Susie’s life, and by extension, those in her orbit, long past the main story’s late 1950s/early 1960s timeframe.

Many of those stories are fun, but paint Susie in the light of a manager who took a no-nonsense, “by any means necessary” approach to her job. During the famous triple crown, she pays off caddies, harangues execs, and invents sitcoms on the fly to make three major deals in one day.
When an entitled young hack of an actor demands the world from her, she reads him the riot act and tells him to fuck off. Rumors even fly that she bilked Harry Drake out of his clients when he wasn’t all there. The fellow showbiz muckety-mucks busting her chops seem to admire all of this, but the version of Susie they’re celebrating is slimy, abrasive, and something of a con artist.

And yet, for once, the truth is softer. She did inherit all of Harry Drake's big clients. But not because she got him to sign them over while he was delirious or paid off his daughter. Instead, Harry wanted her to have them because she was the one person he could trust. He saw the way she went the extra mile for Midge, kept her on the right path, and wanted the same for the stars who stayed loyal to him.

Before then, she thanks him for recognizing something in her and helping her get on her feet. Afterwards, she’s the only one who stays by his bedside while he’s dying. And if that weren’t enough, she pretends to be his daughter, not out of some selfish plot to take his business, but to grant him one last measure of kindness and peace in his final moments. The Susy Myerson people don’t know, the part of her life that doesn’t make headlines, are moments like that where she shows appreciation and care for the people who’ve helped make her a success.

Thankfully, that incudes Dinah! One of the small but joyous happy endings The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel offers in its final season is for her, who ends up not only becoming a manager with Susie’s mentorship, but running her whole east coast operation. On a personal level though, she also goes above and beyond a business relationship, to recognize when Dinah is being physically abused and send her goons after the culprit, while also giving Dinah the day off and the time and money to be able to rest and recover. People joke about her mob connections, but she does these things out of kindness. Whatever her faults, she goes out of her way for people, and isn’t just using them to further herself, even the underlings and also-rans with whom she could get away with it.

That same attitude, of course, extends to Midge. In a 1973 Hawiian wedding that Midge wants to break off, Susie tries to draw lines. She’s having a beautiful time and loves the peace and quiet of it all. Professional problems? You got it, Midge. But this is personal. It has to stop somewhere.

Except it doesn’t. It’s Susie who has to explain to the latest celebrity beau why he’s being left at the altar. It’s Susie who has to tell Grand Funk Railroad that their name is confusing and they won’t be playing tonight. It’s Susie who has to endure a comical scene where Abe and Rose go on about how expensive the cake they bought their daughter was. This goes beyond being a manager. This goes beyond business. This is the act of someone who cares.

And I guess, I have to begrudgingly admit, that also includes Joel. He is one of Susie’s greatest challengers here. After noting that she’s in with the mafia, and being wise enough from his dad’s operations to know there’s a second set of books, he’ll do anything to stop the mob from “owning” Midge. So what does he do? He offers himself instead, letting them get their hooks in his nightclub business by way of “financing” in exchange for leaving Midge alone.

Now let’s be real here. This is a stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid plan. It works (more or less) because this is, despite some raunchiness, a generally bright and warmhearted show. But god help me, the answer to someone you love being in the mob is not to get your family in deeper with the mob. We like Frank and Nicky, so we’re apt to buy that they’re men of their word. But in reality, even the gilded reality of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, making deals with the mafia only ends badly for everyone. It’s a dumb solution to a problem that ought to, by all accounts, only make things worse.

And yet, taken in the aspirational tone of the show, this is Joel’s greatest redemption. I still don’t love the guy. I still find him kind of grating and entitled in his own way most of the time. But for someone who didn’t appreciate what he had with Midge, and who didn’t seem to respect her or the life they’d built or her talents as a stand-up, this is an act of him throwing himself in front of this bullet train so that he can protect her, and ensure that she can pursue her career free and clear of the mob’s influence, and not for nothing, the noblest thing he’s ever done.

Maybe that’s the answer for Susie and an improved, if not exactly enlightened Joel. He’s an obnoxious jerk much of the time, but when it counts most, when he has a chance to show he cares about Midge in a way he didn’t when they broke up, he not only seizes it but stays quiet about it for decades so as not to burden her.

With that, Joel is what breaks up Susie and Midge. The prison sentence we learned about a couple episodes back turns out to be the product of an FBI sting for his mob ties. Many of these flash forwards have prompted the audience to ask what could possibly break up Midge and Susie after all they’ve been through. The answer is satisfying. Whatever their issues, Midge cares about Joel. Her seeing him go to jail for her, to help cover for a problem Susie got into, would be a final straw, something big enough and harsh enough that it would change how Midge saw her manager.

It made Susie look more like George from The Gordon Ford Show. Most of this episode is about the future, but the one detail that advances the story in the present is Susie helping stage a coup to get George ousted (and with him, the rule against employees appearing on the show) and get Mike installed as the new producer. The smoking gun is George sitting on Gordon’s network contract so that he can feather his own nest. For all his gladhanding, for all he plucked Gordon from obscurity, he was just using the guy to further himself, putting his needs before his clients.

That's what Midge effectively accuses Susie of. And Susie has things to answer for. I like that several things that have been floating around in the background of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel come to the forefront here. I wondered all through last season how getting in with the mob would come back to bite Susie. Well, now it gets the partner of her number one client sent to jail. It sees Susie kicking thirty percent of Midge’s earnings to the mafia rather than to her. Even Susie’s seemingly pointless gambling problem comes back! With the suggestion that she’s forcing Midge to take tough casino gigs to settle her debts and square up with the wiseguys who own them.

Midge throws it all out there, accusing Susie of doing something worse than lying to her -- using her. When Susie tries to say they’re friends, Midge kicks it back in her face, chalking up the first time Susie ever used that phrase with her as a dodge, a sop, another con from a master of manipulation. In a fiery back-and-forth worthy of being compared to the Gilmore Girls’ “Friday Night's Alright for Fighting” family blow-up, the worst view of Susie comes from the person who arguably knows her best, which makes it sting all the more.

And still, when we return to the Testi-Rostial, something changes. Midge offers a video greeting. And in it, with the time to reflect and reminisce, she realizes that whatever their problems, Susie was always there for her. She was the person who went above and beyond to look after Midge not just as a business associate, but as someone who cared. She saw something in Midge, like Harry saw in her, and helped that fire burn hotter and brighter until the world could ignore it no longer. She fixed wedding disasters and staged talk show coups to clear the way, and rescued Midge’s third favorite hat. These are not the acts of a user; they’re the act of a friend.

But there’s something more too. Susie has seemed ambivalent to so much celebration, barely tolerating this dog and pony show. Only, Midge’s video has power. It is part apology, part expression of gratitude, but also part a recognition of something there that neither of them necessarily realized. When Midge couldn't go through with the wedding, she said that her beaus couldn't make her laugh. She’s cycled through boyfriends and husbands like chewing gum, looking for genuine love. And yet, years later, when she’s celebrating her manager, she talks about how Susie always did make her laugh, how Susie, in deeds not in words, showed her so much of that love. It’s a quiet sign of a quiet truth.

Susie isn’t a craven showbiz snake who treats her clients like expendable meal tickets and her supporters like stepping stones. She’s always been the one who recognizes the human beings beyond the business. And for Midge especially, she’s been more than a friend. She’s been a partner.

[7.5/10] Sometimes it’s nice to have a Bad Batch episode with a simple premise. Clone Force 99 is stranded on a planet that resembles the American West (replete with a twangy score to drive home the atmosphere.) They’re stranded there when a random ship-jacker steals the Marauder. They have to make it to the nearest town with a long distance communications array, and the titular crossing means weathering storms, rampaging beasts (a la The Lion King), and eventually a cave-in that traps them in a neighboring mine.

This is a survival story. The stakes are clear; the threats are apparent, and the detail of the rock croppings containing a valuable but highly combustible substance adds an outsized twist to a story that might otherwise not quite feel like Star Wars. Our heroes are trapped. They don’t have their ship. They don’t have the ability to call for help. And they don’t even have Echo to help them figure their way out of a jam.

It’s that last part though that makes up the emotional undercurrent of The Crossing. I’m glad that for all the practical challenges the episode introduces, there’s also the psychological challenge of Omega coping with change, and bristling at Tech’s seeming indifference to it. They get huffy with one another, but also help one another get out of trouble, and find common ground in a way that allows them to find a way forward -- as a team and out of the cavern.

For Omega, it means adopting some of Tech’s attitude that change is a fact of life, and there’s nothing about it they can’t withstand. While she’s initially gloomy about losing Echo, losing the Marauder, and feeling like her family is falling apart to some degree (especially with bickering between Tech and Wrecker), she also comes to understand Tech’s viewpoint. His equanimity about all this is a sign of his faith in their family, not a lack of care about it. I appreciate dramatizing that faith with how he trusts Omega to mine the combustible element on her own in a way the protective Hunter and Wrecker don’t.

At the same time, Tech bends to Omega a bit, understanding how she feels. I could be overreaching here, but I think the show means to present Tech as neurodivergent. I particularly like his comment that just because he doesn’t express his feelings in the same way others do doesn’t mean he doesn’t have them. And with Omega’s prompting, he empathizes, stops and processes what losses like Echo and Crosshair mean to him. He lets himself feel the hardship of change a bit, see things from the comparatively inexperienced Omega’s perspective, and it brings them closer together.

That blend between practical problem solving and character-focused resolving personal issues within the team is good writing, particularly when it reflects the psychological consequences of a major change in the show’s lineup. It’s good for The Bad Batch to take that sort of shift seriously, and I’m interested to see how the show resolves (or at least progresses) the stranding situation in the next episode. Is it possible that the person who stole the Marauder ends up joining the team, filling the space left by Echo? I’m curious to find out.