For more than a year, I’ve been working on rewatching all the Star Wars shows and movies in chronological order. I got a bit stalled on Andor because I finished the first season just in time for the second season, but then I wanted to go back and rewatch the whole series after that before moving on, but that took me a while because of all the stuff going on in my life. I finally got through that and on to the original trilogy of movies earlier this year, and I just finished The Mandalorian.

While Andor remains my favorite Star Wars thing, aside from the original movie, I’ve got a lot of appreciation for The Mandalorian, especially after rewatching.

For one thing, it was an interesting execution of the “big, strong man becomes responsible for something smaller and weaker” trope because it avoided a lot of the annoying cliches that tend to come with that trope. One big one was the sexist message that big, strong men aren’t expected to be competent at childcare. In most of the stories involving a man stuck with a baby, there’s humor milked from the man struggling with things like diapers and feeding. Usually, a woman (often the love interest) has to step in and help. But Din Djarin never seems to struggle with caring for Grogu. He just deals with it. He sometimes gets frustrated with the toddler-like behavior, but there’s never a sense of “oh dear, what am I, a man, supposed to do, since this is women’s work?” We even see other Mandalorian men as caregivers with their own foundling adopted kids. There’s also a good variety of reactions to Grogu. Yes, there are some women who go all gooey over him and coo over him, but there are also men who react that way. There are women who get protective of him and there are women who treat him like any other person, seemingly oblivious to the cuteness.

It also helps that we learn very early that Grogu isn’t at all helpless. He may not be extremely mobile and he’s pre-verbal, but he’s quite powerful in using the Force and can tame great beasts with the power of his mind. He protects Din almost as often as Din protects him.

That means we get the fun imagery of the big warrior dude looking after the small, cute creature without a lot of the questionable baggage that often goes with the trope.

Speaking of women, one thing I love about all the Star Wars TV series has been the dramatic expansion of the roles for women. I was a kid when the original movie came out, and it made for some heated neighborhood arguments about who got to be Leia when we played Star Wars, since she was the only girl who got to do anything. In rewatching the original trilogy recently, I was tracking the female characters, and in those movies there was Leia and one other woman who got to actually speak. The worst was The Empire Strikes Back, in which the other woman who got to speak was a flight controller who got one line. There was a slightly larger role for women in Return of the Jedi, since we had Leia, Mon Mothma, and then the slave girl in Jabba’s palace got to speak, but she spoke another language that wasn’t subtitled, so it doesn’t entirely count, as what she had to say was apparently so unimportant that it didn’t get translated for us. The special edition version also has the female-coded alien singer. But I doubt that girls playing Star Wars would have been happy with being the slave girl or Mon Mothma instead of Leia. There were barely any women even visible in the backgrounds. They just weren’t part of the fabric of the universe.

It was only slightly better in the prequels that came nearly two decades later. Padme had the Leia role as the woman who got to do something. Then there might be two more women who got to talk, but they still didn’t get to do much.

We got the big leap forward with the sequels that came a decade after that, with a female main character, plus Leia, plus a female villain for the first couple of movies, but it still wasn’t until the second sequel that there were more female characters who actually did something that mattered to the story.

As much as I love Rogue One, we were back to the woman who does something plus Mon Mothma for major characters, but at least we got some female pilots as part of the background (and some of them even had lines!). They had to do some finessing to fit with the original movie, so the female pilots all had to die to explain why there were none in the original movie, but enough men also died so that it wasn’t so obvious they were picking off the women.

But in the TV series, we finally have multiple women who actually get to do stuff. That really struck me in the season two finale of The Mandalorian, in which Din gathers his allies to rescue Grogu. The raid on the command ship involves Din and a crew of women. Most of the recurring characters who have names and get to do stuff are women. If you were playing The Mandalorian on the playground, it would be the girls who have plenty of roles to choose from while the boys would fight over who got to be Din and the rest would have to choose among the background Mandalorians or maybe Boba Fett (though at least there were male background Mandalorians, while there weren’t even any female background characters in the original trilogy).

I guess I shouldn’t complain too much about the role of women in Star Wars because that was the seed to my writing career. Since Leia was the only girl, I had to make up my own character to play when we were riding our bikes around the neighborhood, pretending they were X-wings and TIE fighters, and that led to me making up stories in my head about her, to the point those stories no longer had anything to do with Star Wars, and eventually I realized that if I wrote down those stories, I’d have a book, which led to me realizing that I could write a book (though it took me a while to actually finish one).

I also enjoy the worldbuilding the TV series format allows. It’s hard to fit in much detail about ordinary life and the people of the universe in a two-hour movie, but the series format allows us to visit different worlds and meet more people, including ordinary people, so that we can see what their lives are like. It’s funny how much lore they’ve spun out of Boba Fett, who was more a costume than a character in the original trilogy. He didn’t do much and barely spoke. But out of that costume they got the entire complex Mandalorian culture, as well as the backstory of the clones.

I don’t know when I’ll get around to seeing the new movie. It’s cold and rainy today (the heat wave didn’t last long), so not a day for either walking downtown to the vintage theater or driving to the nearby town that has a regular movie theater, plus it’s been a busy week and I’m catching up on work. Maybe I’ll have time during the week next week.