My other piece of advice is, and I say this as someone who hates Trump with a passion:

well when your customer service department pays minimum wage and has extremely high turnover by design like most CS departments in the country, and/or is outsourced so instead of training staff to help customers you’ve trained them to read from scripts (also by design as it frustrates customers into giving up instead…

Oh, Gideon’s absolutely going to follow Mando right to Ahsoka, and it’ll be the greatest mistake he’s ever made.

My guess is that due to the tracking beacon Mando leads him right to Ahsoka who is a much larger bag of blood for his experiments. Moff Gideon captures her and then Mando will have to team up with Bo-Katan, who wants her Darksaber back, and the New Republic to rescue Ahsoka for an epic end of season episode.

Unfortunately, despite your sarcasm, that’s pretty much what it boils down to — getting people to stop behaving like people, ie selfish, petty, entitled, arrogant, and cruel. Not because we’re *ALL* like that, but because it only takes a small number of us who *ARE* like that to ruin it for everybody else. Just like…

Her backstory is long, and without spoiling anything, I would just say that her morality and ethics have, well, evolved over time.

Lord forbid that Star Wars should come up with something new that hasn’t been seen before. Anyone would think that Tatooine is the only planet in the galaxy at this point.

Exactly. I generally liked (not loved) the sequel trilogy. But when this episode was over, I turned to my wife and said, “That 40-minute TV show was just better Star Wars than the last movie.”

Did folks really not like Howard’s episode last season? I thought it was one of the season’s strongest - she made an AT-ST feel foreboding and intimidating rather than the clumsy ‘chicken walkers’ they’ve always been portrayed as.

Naboo was the birthplace of Emperor Palpatine. Clearly the planet had many abilities that some consider to be... unnatural.

Gee, the first person from a species to join Starfleet (and hence, create a bridge between their people and the Federation, and who happened to be the son of the future ruler of that race to boot), and the first person from that species to become a ship captain. Nope, not seeing any way that a person like that would…

Well the idea of multiple biomes requires a just right planet (not too far from its star, not too close, with just the right time of core, etc.). Much more plausible that you have a teraformable planet that is just a hair too close (desert planet) or a hair too far (ice planet).

“I don’t think it should be necessary for a viewer to have watched every trilogy movie, every prior TV series in their entirety, and read all the comic books while having a passing knowledge of the various novels, simply in order to be able to watch a single episode of this show.”

It’s not.  So you’re all set.

The only three pieces of Star Wars media I’ve consumed are:

(Which just made me think - what? no one else did anything worthy of getting their name on a ship in 930 years..?)

Sackoff killed it. I also was also surprised to see Bryce Dallas directed this episode, I think it was a step up from the one she did last year. Also gotta love Baby Yoda’s face when he is having his Planet Earth(Trask?) moment.

I think it’s worth it, people couldn’t take the shift in tone and storytelling structure from SG1 and Atlantis, but I think it worked. Particularly as you get away from SG1 and Atlantis being on the air, Universe turns out to hold up and be pretty bingeable. Plus, if you buy into the characters and their growth…

I haven’t seen Firefly in forever, and I was unfamiliar with “the lost cause” back when I saw it, but I can’t think of how it embraces that myth any more than any other space opera about a ragtag group of rebels living on the fringe of an authoritarian society. Maybe the accents, but I took that as more of a western…

It failed, so did Cowboys & Aliens

The only Aliens built Earth trope that works is Stargate.  The aliens didn’t create humanity, they enslaved them and posed as gods, thus creating the mythos that we have today.