Peace 47

It was reported in some industry publication earlier in the week that he had declined the invitation, just like Aykroyd had. Most people assumed that since he has been open in recent interviews about how much the show stressed him out and filled him with anxiety when he was on it, that he made a reasoned choice not to subject himself to that again, now that he is a successful auteur. But his whole neighborhood recently burned down in the Palisades. His house was still standing, but pretty much everything around it was ashes. It looked so bad, I might assume he can’t live there right now, so who knows: maybe he didn’t participate in this because he has family issues to attend to around the fire cleanup. Like others, I’m more shocked about Dana, since he’s been so involved in the current season and seemed to be having fun with it. I hope that he is okay.

I did rewatch the Saturday Night movie yesterday, then watched the episode when they put it up on YouTube early Sunday morning. Watching the actual episode made me appreciate the movie more, in terms of all the infinite little details of the sketches that they got absolutely perfect in the movie. “Big Razor,” lol. It’s funny because it’s true. The very first sketch about English lessons is so dark and mercifully to the point (tells its joke and gets the hell out): it must have felt daring for network TV. As an aside, I just recently watched Mike O’Donahue (the other person in this sketch with Belushi) portrayed in both the Saturday Night movie and in the Will Forte movie about the National Lampoon co-founder, Douglas Kenney (even though the movie is pretty old at this point, I only just watched it), and then I read O’Donahue’s Wikipedia entry, and I’m still rather curious about O’Donahue in general. He seems to have been a rather mean person, but who knows how much the searing pain he lived with from his migraines, and the brain aneurysm that eventually got him, affected his brain chemistry and personality. But he wrote that first sketch and did a good job setting a tone for the show.

This sounds hella patronizing for me to say, but I was so proud of Robert DeNiro! He did such a good job delivering his lines. I had such a good time with this show. Because I am apparently a Mulaney stan who finds everything he does hilarious, I thought his sketch best captured the concept of putting on a “normal” show and a “normal” version of this sketch (centered around NYC peculiarities) with paying homage to all eras of the show as part of an anniversary special. Martin’s monologue, Streep finally getting in there and doing a sketch and Poehler/Fey with the crowd work, and Sabrina Carpenter working well with an older Paul Simon with a weaker voice at this point in his career (and also doing well in her sketch: she should host) were my other MVPs of the night. I had such a good time with this. I don’t know if I remember the 40th super well (Bill Murray doing the “love theme from Jaws” and Celebrity Jeopardy stand out) but I think I liked this one just as much, probably more.

It looks like one of the sets for the new show could be that bar that features in the trailer. I wonder how they will explain Frasier not going to Cheers? The trailer is giving me “Joey” vibes: as in, it doesn’t look great, but when you consider the talent involved, you hope. 🤷‍♀️

I actually liked this episode better than the first one. Tony Danza looks fab. He’s been around in pop culture forever, so I was thinking he was older than he actually is: he’s 72. I enjoy handbag YouTube as my escape indulgence. And I guess correspondingly, the outrageous/ fun/ funky/ trendy/ whatever fashion and handbags are my chief reason for watching this show. To that end, the JW Anderson pigeon clutch brought it. I mean, I do want to see some Fendi/ LV/ YSL/ Dior bags that I would actually drool over and aspire to buy (and have been a little disappointed on that front so far), but the pigeon clutch was fun for what it was. It suits Carrie’s vibe.

I was SO MAD about this (irrationally so, since I don’t care that much about this show or the characters). Seema needs this more? F off with that, Carrie. I didn’t know the Met Gala was a needs-based event. And for Charlotte to treat her best friend like that was doubly crappy. Carrie displayed remarkable patience with that dress situation. The designer was so unprofessional throughout the whole ordeal. But I get it, the designer is inexperienced in dealing with crises. I didn’t think the cape looked fantastic with the dress, but I did kind of like the “repurposed pain” concept. This show just isn’t very well written, though. Like, to everyone’s “unrelatable problems” point above: it’s not just about how rich and entitled these people are. It’s that nothing they do is even grounded in the reality of the wealth-drenched situations that they find themselves in. Carrie is sleeping with her podcast producer for casual sex only. That is so messy, and it seems weird that a woman of her age and life experience would be so blasé about it. It’s not about “giving away your power” as Miranda or Charlotte-as-Miranda said: it’s about: can Carrie fire this guy? (Presumably yes?) So no consideration as to how this ends, how she could get sued, how she could get publicly called out for being predatory if things were to go bad? I mean, I do get that this show is a friendship, relationship and sexual NYC fantasy, but then just give her a fun casual sex relationship with a neighbor so you don’t start thinking about how superficially this show is written.

I have similar complicated feelings about the scene and while I will also definitely take it at face value as an “awww” scene (and I would not trade the happy ending for anything different), I think that the adoption might have been better set up as more of an emotional climax to the whole season. As has been noted on this board multiple times, Djarin (or Din, or whatever we are calling him) has been studiously avoiding referring to Grogu as his son, even as everyone around him did so in S2 and S3 (going all the way back to Ahsoka saying that Djarin is like a father to Grogu, and Djarin having no response whatsoever to that, as he holds Grogu super close because he doesn’t want to give him up to her …. 😭). I think a through line that could have better bridged the journey to Djarin verbalizing his role was some outward acknowledgement to anyone this season (Bo, Armorer, Paz, Greef … R5, literally anyone) that in S1-S2, he couldn’t dare to think of himself as Grogu’s forever father because the situation was temporary (a continuation of the emotional beat in S2’s “The Tragedy,” when he is on his ship, trying to talk Grogu (and himself) into the idea that they need to part ways). After it stopped being temporary, Djarin was then an apostate, so maybe he didn’t want to think about officially bringing Grogu into a dishonored family and back-burnered the thought, or maybe he didn’t fully get that Grogu was claiming him as “dad” and not just “Mandalorian tutor” when Grogu returned from Luke). Then, after redemption, maybe he opted to focus on getting Nevarro straightened out as a safe place for the Mandalorians (where their children “could play in the sun”), so the status quo of being Grogu’s legal guardian was good enough until the finale, when it abruptly wasn’t. So then there is the actual adoption scene. Djarin reminds the Armorer that Grogu’s parent (singular) can give permission for apprenticeship. By saying that, I think Djarin obviously already knows that he is it—the singular parent, and there should be no revelation. The Armorer deliberately misunderstands him, referring to imaginary, far-off, possibly dead parents (plural), I think obviously to get Djarin to finally say the words for himself—that he is Grogu’s dad. (Her emphatic “This is the Way” definitely read as, “it’s about damn time” — cue Duchess Lizzo). And there, I would have liked just a little dialogue to acknowledge that while this is the first time he may have said it, it has never been hard to feel. I certainly did not care about the Darksaber as an item of lore, but I did kind of care about it in the context of what it was set up to represent vis-a-vis Djarin in The Book of Boba Fett. He couldn’t wield it properly because of (basically) clinical depression over (1) losing his kid and (2) losing his connection to … his culture, the creed, his place in the world, etc. He got the kid back and handled the Darksaber a little better, but there was certainly no mastery of it. So the hero of the story didn’t symbolically conquer whatever fears or reservations the Darksaber represented in the story. And it’s not that he needed to successfully have done that, but by handing it over, there was no reckoning with it.

I don’t think Deanna was particularly well-served as a character in this story at all, but I will say that one moment in this episode that did serve her well was that it was she who reminded Geordi, Data and Bev that they really had no choice but to fire on the cube and let their loved ones die. It was an echo of her officer’s exam in TNG, where her final test was to order Geordi to his death. I’m not sure if it was intentional, but it made me respect the strong “Commander Troi” who knows what needs to be done. Tough situation for Beverly that she had to be the one to fire weapons and (presumably at that moment) kill her own kid. A bit earlier, when Geordi was so impressed with her firing skills and she said she had picked some stuff up over 20 years, I was a little disappointed that her response didn’t involve the fact that she had command of that very ship on multiple occasions and retained her command rating for funsies because she was just that awesome. I will forever love you, TNG Beverly, whom I sadly didn’t really see at all this season, what with the lying, and the willingness to do war crimes and the medical malpractice and ….

One thing I just heard highlighted on a podcast (which I didn’t notice when I watched) is that when Ragnar is being baptized the second time on Mandalore, the Armorer changes the wording of the vows slightly: before, it included an oath not to remove your helmet, and this time, it did not. That would be an interesting development if the epic battle that they all engaged in together against the common enemy evolved the thinking on “what it means to be Mandalorian.” I kind of wish that they had more explicitly explored that theme this season, but it’s an interesting possible point for the future.

They did that kind of AI training with Mark Hamill on the currently airing Star Wars shows on Disney+. Even though Mark is still alive and could have done the voicework for Luke Skywalker, they just used Mark’s prior work (I think audiobook recordings) to generate the lines that they wanted Luke to say in the shows, then used a stand-in and CGI for his body. I had just assumed that they did that for Majel’s voice here. I had no idea she put so much work into preserving her voice before this tech was even developed.

Why did Jack have implants or cybernetic at all, since wasn’t the whole point of this organic assimilation (starting with Jack’s 20-something (lololol) generation) that implants weren’t necessary, due to the encoding of Picard’s DNA (which Jack already had), and Jack could therefore communicate with the Borg without implants? I also don’t understand how Jack took over Sydney earlier this season of his own free will when it was stated again this episode that he was just a transmitter and conduit for Borg instructions, not really an initiator of instructions himself, but I may be parsing that one too closely. I totally didn’t understand what was happening at the end. Was the ship flying through an atmosphere inside the Borg cube? There needed to be life support in the cube, so did the Enterprise just fly through a force field to get inside there and move around? But I had no expectations for the plot in this episode based on the previous 9, so I was just taking in the characters and kind of giggling at the rest.

I was wondering why Jack’s position was as a “special counselor” on the bridge. Isn’t any useful training he has in the medical field, or perhaps something like logistics? I wish he had gone to medical school before the start of this season to make his nepotism-fueled career track a bit more plausible. And does he have the rank of ensign? I don’t really understand ranks, but I thought it was Academy grads that got those types of rankings, and enlisted like O’Brien got different titles? I don’t really think of Orlando as a pop culture reference. People have been visiting the same European cities for hundreds of years for entertainment and culture, so I could see the same being true of certain American cities. It was just supposed to sound mundane to us after Riker names imaginary celestial wonders, but has Troi even ever spent that much time on Earth? It would probably be exotic to her. It was very magnanimous of Jean-Luc to absolve Beverly of any and all guilt right before he thought he was going to die. At this point, I’m with you on the “why not assume that they are together?” train, since I was a massive Crusher/Picard shipper back in the day and I “choose my own adventure” of happiness if they’re not going to tell me otherwise, and I don’t think Laris needs to be mixed up with all this mess the Crusher-Picards have going on. If she posted on the AITA space subreddit about this situation, all the commenters would be like “red flags everywhere that he’s still in love with his old girlfriend and now they’re coparenting a kid together, run, girl!”

This episode looked expensive. It was a cute little touch at the start that they changed the Star Trek stinger to a Borg-infested one with glitching music. With that post-credits scene with Q, I guess they are going all-in on Jack Crusher as the future. Resistance is futile. They must want to do their Jack stories before Ed Speleers hits retirement age. (Sorry, had to get one last joke in for the good of the order.) I was hoping the Titan’s rechristening would include a refit involving light switches and warmer lighting, but no dice. It is hard to snark on an episode that ends with a classic poker game (obviously meant to evoke “All Good Things …”) and that lovable, lovable cast (who were good in all their scenes), although I did have to chuckle at the fact that as literally as one can possibly express, the power of love and hugs saved the day here (via Deanna and Picard), which is fine, it’s a nice message. I also had to laugh a little that Jean-Luc said that Jack changed his life, as they showed flashbacks of their great(?) times together over the past … several trauma-filled days. I have just watched 2 season/ series finales in the past 24 hours that ended happily, which is a trend I can get behind. I’m so glad no one died this episode. P.S.: I am surprised at no Janeway cameo for all the times they mentioned her this season and how she couldn’t be gotten to.

Yeah, you just never know, so it’s so nice to have an unqualified happy ending. It actually threw me at first that there were no loose ends or post-credit threats (I didn’t trust it!), since I can’t remember the last show I watched where things ended completely happily. It harkens back both to S1 when Omera suggested that Djarin stay in their community and raise “his boy” (where he clearly had a little bit of longing for some sort of more peaceful existence) and Djarin’s speech earlier this season about why they should help Nevarro (so that their children can freely “play in the sun”). It’s also so nice that when you think back to season 1, when Greef Karga was going to kill Djarin, that they have come so far, are such good friends and that he was the last character we left before the house scene.

I’m pretty sure that I saw R5 in the N-1 Starfighter at the end. That Praetorian Guard fight with Djarin and Grogu was my favorite fight choreography of the episode. The way they had Grogu meaningfully helping Djarin defeat those guys (swiping away the lasso thing or shielding them both when Djarin got knocked down) really made them feel like a great team, especially when we learned last week that 1 Mandalorian likely cannot defeat 3 guards on their own. I’m just glad that Djarin and Grogu ended up with their happily ever after. That’s all I really wanted from this show. And if they do have some fun little S4 adventures or get pulled into the intended eventual movie, there is a setup for them to just go back to doing their thang on Nevarro when it’s all it over.