The Mandalorian feels like true vintage Star Wars

The debut episode suggests the series will be both far, far away from and comfortingly true to the franchise

The Mandalorian.
(Image credit: Francois Duhamel; Copyright 2018 Lucasfilm LTD)

Werner Herzog — the legendary German director who plays a client of the title character in The Mandalorian — has "never seen a Star Wars film, but it doesn't matter," he told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year. I'm inclined to agree with him; aside from a few moments of inside baseball and that big reveal at the end, staged like The Creation of Adam, the first episode of The Mandalorian seems to exist in a galaxy far, far away from the more familiar movie franchise.

Some of that is simply logistics. The Mandalorian character lives on the galactic frontier, where he makes increasingly meager money bounty hunting. Set between the end of Star Wars' original trilogy and the beginning of The Force Awakens, the heroes we know and love are far away and out of sight (there is no cryptic mention of any "Skywalker" here). The Mandalorian even loses John Williams' iconic compositions, which have defined the Star Wars universe for decades, opting for a wholly inventive score by Ludwig Göransson. It was not just because of the locale that I was wondering where are we? almost as soon as the show began.

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Jeva Lange

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.