I'm inclined to agree with KHAAAAAAAN!!, very rarely other than the Darth Vader reveal do we get a particularly emotional Luke; even when he was complaining about power converters he had a pretty neutral cadence. The monotone can also be attributed to a large amount of time following the Jedi teaching on detachment, serenity, and neutrality as well. It's a light dosage of Copium, but only just.

 

Some of me is a bit cynical - I couldn't stop thinking during the Luke and Grogu segments that we were essentially watching something entirely fake - a series of stunt doubles, with computerized expressions and voices, aping out a conversation with a puppet in front of a green screen.

 

This has been really great Star Wars. Call in fan service if you want, but I feel fully serviced.

 

I will say I think Grogu’s movements were a bit... twitchy.

 

Anyone else wonder just what the fuck the Pykes are even doing moving Spice across Tatooine's surface like that? What's the point? Tatooine is a truck-stop for that shit, not the market they need to actually sell it. So why is it ever offloaded from their ships in the first place, much less carted around the desert in trains and on speeders? It should be sitting nice and safe in a cargo hold while the ship is refueled and the crew takes a break before taking off for some planet that actually has enough people and money to buy the product. This is the equivalent of a long-haul trucker stopping to refuel, then unloading his cargo and moving it around the truck stop on golf carts, only to load it back up and leave afterward. Shit makes no sense. At most, they should be off-loading Spice into big, heavily guarded warehouses next to the Spaceport to sit in secure storage until another ship comes along to smuggle it elsewhere.

That and did anyone else think they made Luke out to be a manipulative dick at the end there with that stupid ultimatum to Grogu and demand for an immediate answer? I was already irritated that they've kept the attachment rules from the Old Order in this version of Luke's New Jedi Order (one of the best parts of Luke's Jedi in Legends was how they ditched that crap and moved on as more grounded, normal people who happened to have powers), and then he goes and pulls that manipulative bullshit on a traumatized kid? Luke had no right to do any of that, had no right to do anything with Din's gift except deliver it as promised. If he wanted to try to convince Grogu to give it up later as part of learning to let go of attachments, then fine, but what they ended up doing was just ham-fisted and ridiculous.

 

I had the same issue, personally.

I can maybe see Ashoka cling to old Jedi doctrine by default in order to play this role, but Luke? Luke was never brought up like that, and even when he became a Jedi he never gave up his own attachments nor felt the need to.

I knew that they'd have to reunite Grogu with Mando at some point, but I was hoping his training with Luke might amount to something more than this, considering getting him there was almost a full season's worth of progress.

 

It made perfect sense to me. Raw spice needs to be refined in a chemical lab before it can be used as a drug and these dudes were delivering it to a local Tatooine lab/distributor. Did you not notice that there were two Pykes paying for the raw spice and two delivering?

Yes, I did think it was a bit of a dick move. But they need to get Luke from OT Luke to ST Luke somehow, and I rather they do it onscreen than off. This is technically what Yoda / the Jedi texts taught him and he's a newbie at trying to pass it on. Perhaps he'll realize the error of the Jedi ways next episode, or perhaps it will take him until Ben before he sees the philosophy is flawed.

The animatronic puppet Grogu is never going to look as fluid in its movements as the CGI Grogu. Even a 5 million dollar one. I love Lucasfilm's continued dedication to practical effects personally, and there would be a fuckton of outrage if they suddenly started doing everything CGI again a la prequels.

 

I had a similar mentality, but I like to think that people had those kinds of thoughts about actors when first exposed to theater. All acting is artificial to some extent, so I wasn't too hung up on it. I think there's a good chance we're going to see a lot more Deepfake in the future which will be harder and harder to identify.

 

Oh, I noticed that it was two groups from the same syndicate working a deal in hostile territory out the back of a car for no reason. Firstly, that point still doesn't address why they are moving anything overland, which is literally the least efficient, least secure method available to them, and is the only way the locals would be able to interfere. Secondly, they clearly have turf that's already securely theirs on Tatooine, so if they need to refine it in a lab (which is not actually a given, since no one's explained the exact nature of the Spice they're moving) why don't they have that lab right next to the spaceport for easy trans-shipment? Better yet, why don't they have that lab on some station somewhere in deep space where there is zero possibility of being interfered with by disgruntled locals? Neither of those solutions are difficult, especially in Star Wars.

And if, for some bizarre nonsensical reason, they need to have refining labs in the middle of hostile territory, why the hell wouldn't they be using light freighters to move it to and from? It would be much faster and waaay more secure. Instead what they're doing feels like what you would get if you asked someone who has zero idea how drug smuggling and distribution actually works to describe it.

So as long as they assassinate his character gradually and on-screen, it's all good? The only reason I've been able to enjoy anything about The Mandalorian and BoBF so far is that they seem to have been pretty much completely ignoring the existence of the Sequels. Not contradicting them, but not leaning into them either. Every time I see something recognizably reminiscent of those films (like the under-construction temple in this episode), a good chunk of my enjoyment withers and dies. If that's really the route the showrunners are going with this, then I'm done with all of this crap. I would rather have no Star Wars at all than have more Sequel Star Wars.

 

As someone who has lived in Baltimore for half their life, and has seen major deals going down in broad daylight, in the middle of the fucking street, out of the back of beat up Chevys, yes this is exactly how most drug smuggling and distribution is done. The whole armored cars being escorted by cartel thugs with uzi's thing that you see in every crime drama is pure fantasy.

I don't really know what you're mad about now. First it was being upset that they decided Luke should be following Yoda's OT/prequel teachings, and now it is a beef with Luke's ST philosophy, where he rejects those teachings and feels the Jedi need to end? Both of these events are canon, so it makes sense that they need to bridge the gap.

While we will thankfully probably never see the ST characters again and good riddance, you can't write series that are made to bridge the gaps between Original Era and Sequel Era without acknowledging the Sequels exist. Sorry.

 

Sure, that's exactly how it's done... in rich urbanized countries/areas that are the primary market for recreational drugs. Tatooine is not that, not by a long shot, which makes it baffling that they're doing things this way. The whole point of an illegal narcotics smuggling operation is to get the product to a place where there's a whole lot of customers with disposable income for you to fleece. The Star Wars equivalent of your example of Baltimore would be somewhere like Corellia or Coruscant, rich planets with huge urban populations. Tatooine is the Star Wars equivalent of somewhere like Somalia: a dirt-poor, fractious, third-world mess of a failed state where the only people who can afford imported recreational drugs are warlords and maybe some of the local petty clan chiefs.

Sure you can. They've been doing it just fine so far. They don't need to actively contradict the Sequels when they can just ignore them entirely. So long as they end these shows well before the Sequels' timeframe, you can still handwave it as "oh, well there's still twenty years between the end of this and the beginning of that, so somewhere in between is where the leadup to the Sequels happened."

On an unrelated, but totally relevant note, this made me smile:

 

I want a proper SW sequel (sequel to the sequels I guess) where 'adult' (or at least a little older) Grogu is the protagonist.

 

That characterization is so completely off the mark my man. I feel like you're employing your headcanon here, not canon. While places like Anchorhead or the moisture farm areas might be backwaters, Tatooine has a significant urban population. Mos Eisley and Mos Espa are supposed to be huge cities, and poor people in urban areas (especially urban areas where crime is rampant) buy a literal fuckton of recreational drugs.

Mos Eisley:



Mos Espa:



The Mos Pelgo territories are almost directly between the two cities on a route through the Northern Dune sea, and mostly ungoverned (beyond Cobb Vanth), making it a perfect spot to hide away your meth lab or drug deal locale.

I would legitimately love that. Throw it 300ish years in the future when he's an adult. And bring back the Yuuzhan Vong.

 

The total population for the entire planet of Tatooine, in both Legends and Canon, is listed as 200,000 people. Since you referenced Baltimore earlier, for comparison's sake the City of Baltimore lists its population as ~585,000 - almost three times the population of all of Tatooine. The Baltimore Metro Area has a population of ~2,844,000, more than 14x the total planetary population of Tatooine. And that figure for Tatooine includes both the Tuskens and the Jawas as well.

Further, Tatooine's Canon article on Wookieepedia lists eleven major cities. Now, Canon says nothing about the actual demographic breakdown of Tatooine, but if we hop over to the Legends article and use its percentage figures, then 5% are Jawas and 5% are Tusken, meaning the remainder of roughly 180,000 is split between the eleven major settlements and various homesteads/moisture farms. Being conservative, lets estimate that another 10% are rural homesteaders, and the remaining 160,000 live in the settlements.

While there are no hard numbers for how many people live in Mos Eisley or Mos Espa, we can infer a lot from those pictures you posted. First, I live in a town of about 1,000 people next to a hill. When cresting that hill, I get a fairly similar view of the town compared to that picture of Mos Eisley, and the two look almost identical in size. For Mos Espa, its very similar in physical size to the nearest large town to me, which has a population of about 12,000. These places are not huge urban areas, they are small backwater towns in the middle of galactic nowhere.

Hell, the only reason they qualify for being called "cities" is that they're on a barely-populated dustball at the ass end of the Outer Rim (it's sort of like how a person who's spent their whole life in rural North Dakota might consider Bismarck to be a bustling metropolis, with its whopping 70,000-odd residents). The only reason anyone even goes to Tatooine is the fact that a tertiary hyperlane starting in Hutt Space and ending on the Corellian Run passes near by, making it a nice quiet pit stop far off the normal patrol routes for shady characters to land, refuel and repair.

 

Something worth considering is that with the New Republic out there and spreading out into areas that had previously been relatively uncontrolled, it's possible that the Pykes have had to switch up their strategies and move operations into new territories. We saw that they are monitoring traffic into the system (that is, if they weren't just acting as an escort to a civilian transport), so potentially the Pykes are doing a sort of shell game where they will ship spice into one port then transport it across the surface to another port to ship it out.

Though I do agree that the showrunners could do a better job at giving out exposition about why things are happening the way they are.

 

No, it is not split evenly. The population of Mos Eisley is supposed to be 40,000 to 60,000. Mos Espa is supposed to be the larger city. They are not backwater towns. Almost all of Tatooine's population is condensed into those two cities. For example Anchorhead is only 700 people. Pretty much the entire planet apart from those two centers is supposed to be wasteland.

 

Where are you getting those numbers from? Nothing I've been able to find gives any population numbers at all for any town on Tatooine.

 

It comes from Legends Galactic Census entries, which basically carried over to Canon as is, because all the listed Canon populations are the same (where they exist).

Edit: I'm actually not certain what the Legends/Canon status of the Galaxy Guides are that lists most of the census and societal information for all the various Star Wars locales. They were made as roleplay game supplements for the movies, and serve as the basis for most of the EU.

Edit2: I think it should also be noted that almost all the societal info we have comes from prequel era or 0 BBY. Like... Mando Mos Espa looks massive compared to the Mos Espa of the prequels, indicating that there has been significant population increases here over time.

 

Huh, well I see the figure you cited for Mos Eisley on its Legends article, but it's conspicuously absent on its Canon article. Mos Espa has no population info listed for either continuity.

In any case, if we assume those figures are Canon, we're still only talking about Large Towns/Small Cities. Ones that happen to be on a dirt-poor planet that is solidly in the category of whatever the galactic equivalent of "Third World" would be. That's a very promising locale for drug manufacture or transport, but not for sales. There's just not enough money there to make it worth the time and effort to import and distribute Spice from offworld. Logically the only thing they're likely to be doing with Spice in any kind of quantity is manufacture (which doesn't happen on Tatooine), refining (which may or may not even be necessary, depending on the Spice in question), or transshipment.

And as was pointed out in the episode, in Mos Eisley, anything goes. if you have the credits and the muscle, you can do whatever you want there with no oversight from the authorities (assuming there even are any authorities there, which is not a given). Mos Eisley has plenty of room and a busy spaceport, meaning that if you want to transship things or refine things on planet for some reason, you can do it all in a central location in the city, no muss, no fuss.

There's simply no need to move anything over land. There effectively is no law on Tatooine, the closest equivalent being literal crime lords, so this cloak-and-dagger, sneak-around-the-desert shit is just random and pointless. Everyone on the planet already knows what the Pykes do anyway, so it's not like they're hiding anything. All they're doing is nonsensically endangering their people and their profit to move stuff around the desert that doesn't ever need to be moved away from the spaceport.

 

Fuck I love this sort of nerd debate. Honestly this is great to witness.