When it launched earlier this week, Disney+ resurfaced a whole slew of original shows you ignored when you were younger, plus acclaimed original titles like Double Teamed and basically every Marvel movie. The most-discussed thing so far, however, has been a long-contentious scene in Star Wars: A New Hope: the one in which a young Harrison Ford has his feet up in a cantina on the Outer Rim, just vibing, when he then must shoot a green man named Greedo in the chest. There’s an errant “MACLUNKEY” in it now, and this is not the first time George Lucas has changed the scene. Allow Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens to explain:
As they go, the teaser promo for the second season of Justified—a show that ran for six seasons on variations of this scene and Timothy Olyphant’s sickeningly good looks—is a pretty great homage to the “Han shot first” scene. There’s dim lighting, a properly seedy setting, sufficiently charming misdirection, and a perfectly executed knowing smirk. Plus there’s a fugitive who looks jumpy when compared to that impossible situational poise which always seems to have come at the expense of everything else in a gunslinger’s life—by now, 13 episodes in, we know that Raylan is a liability to the department, is terrible at actual marshal work, rents a studio apartment above a bar, and needs one of either ice cream or whiskey to deal with being estranged from his wife. But damn if he can’t shoot and look smooth doing it.
Justified has been on my mind since Ringer chief content officer Sean Fennessey described The Mandalorian as “Justified with blasters” shortly after the new show’s Tuesday release.
As a person who loves Justified deeply, this checks out. Within minutes, The Mandalorian has invited you into a shabby dive bar where two poachers are, in full view of everyone, about to carve up another paying customer, because that’s the sort of thing that can happen in this universe. Before delivering his first line of dialogue, “Mando” (that’s our guy) smashes a stein over the big one’s head, then lassos and shoots the smaller one. That first line, to his actual quarry, with his hand on his blaster, is “I can bring you in hot or I can bring you in cold.” It reminded me of the Justified pilot, when Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins)—an old coal buddy of Raylan’s who’s wandered off the straight and narrow into armed robbery and white nationalism—asks whether Raylan would really shoot him, given the chance. Raylan adjusts his 10-gallon, coolly puts his blazer back on, and turns to leave. “You make me pull, I’ll put you down.” Mando didn’t get a chance to say this before decommissioning the bounty droid at the end of The Mandalorian premiere, but he certainly thought it loudly, and yes, that is the exact kind of passionless, principled killer shit that I get out of bed for.
Like Raylan, Mando also doesn’t seem to have much interest in things he doesn’t get paid to do, like administrative duties, or making interpersonal connections. But the most noticeable commonality between The Mandalorian and Justified is the tone—the long gaps of silence for blank stares to fill with meaning, the wide shots that communicate emptiness and despair, the wear on everything that communicates “this is a hard life, but someone’s gotta live it.” A Western is as much about societal decline as it is about survival and cool-sounding one-liners, and the lead should be a stone wall on which to project all of that. You get the sense that Raylan’s superpower might be that he never looks as bad as he feels, and Mando, well, hasn’t taken his helmet off yet.
“I’m trying to evoke the aesthetics of not just the original trilogy, but the first film,” series developer Jon Favreau said of crafting the show’s mood, in a recent interview. “Not just the first film, but the first act of the first film. What was it like on Tatooine? What was going on in that cantina? That has fascinated me since I was a child, and I love the idea of the darker, freakier side of Star Wars, the Mad Max aspect of Star Wars.”
Because we all might die without proper fan service, there’s a baby Yoda now. So The Mandalorian may already be difficult to care about as something more than an installment that exists solely to set up the next installment. But there are still many enjoyable things about it, and also it’s a Disney show with spaceships and giant sea slugs, so it doesn’t need to be Citizen Kane. It might, however, be the next great TV Western. “Darker,” and “freakier” sounds good. “The Mad Max aspect of Star Wars” sounds good. “You’ll Never Leave Ryloth Alive” would be better.
