{"id":19982,"date":"2020-12-13T09:29:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-13T14:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/?p=19982"},"modified":"2020-12-13T13:10:12","modified_gmt":"2020-12-13T18:10:12","slug":"falling-skies-and-the-mandalorian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/?p=19982","title":{"rendered":"Falling Skies, and The Mandalorian"},"content":{"rendered":"<hr>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1200\" height=\"771\" src=\"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/mandalorian.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-19983\" srcset=\"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/mandalorian.jpg 1200w, https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/mandalorian-300x193.jpg 300w, https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/mandalorian-768x493.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>As you can see, it usually takes me a while to get around to watching things. &#8220;The Mandalorian&#8221; just started its second season. &#8220;Falling Skies&#8221; premiered in 2011 and ran for five seasons. Some people seem to stay up to date on what&#8217;s being released, and they watch things when they&#8217;re new. I can&#8217;t imagine how they do their research on new releases and where to stream what. If there&#8217;s a one-stop source for this information, I&#8217;ve never been able to find it. I&#8217;m aware of web sites such as <a href=\"https:\/\/decider.com\/what-to-watch\/\">The Decider<\/a>, but 99 percent of it is the sort of thing that I never watch &#8212; here-and-now stuff, suburban stuff, brainless sitcoms, zombie stuff, teen romance, and all that.<\/p>\n<p>I knew about &#8220;The Mandalorian&#8221; when it was new. But I didn&#8217;t sign up for Disney+ until recently, partly because it was hard to justify yet another streaming service, and partly because Baby Yoda was so cutesie that I thought the series was aimed at the 12 and under set. But I was wrong about that. I watched the first episode of the first season of &#8220;The Mandalorian&#8221; last night, and it was a very enjoyable return to the Star Wars world, which I think is the greatest cinematic saga of our lives.<\/p>\n<p>Still, Baby Yoda <em>does<\/em> seem a bit cutesie. But otherwise it&#8217;s a beautifully produced trip back into the Star Wars world. Good writing and good production (including good audio production) does, after all, make a huge difference in watchability and our willingness to suspend disbelief, as the first six or seven seasons of Game of Thrones showed. I&#8217;m always grateful for good audio production in which we actually can hear and understand the dialogue. In &#8220;The Mandalorian,&#8221; a <em>diminuendo<\/em> in the music often precedes the dialogue. Noisy soundtracks with dialogue submerged in roaring background sounds and dreadful music have stopped me from watching a good many movies and series. After all, it&#8217;s the writing that makes a good story, and dialogue is critical. I found &#8220;The Expanse&#8221; impossible to follow because its soundtrack was deafening and incomprehensible.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Falling Skies&#8221; is an alien invasion post-apocalyptic series. Though I&#8217;d probably give it only a B, it&#8217;s good enough that I&#8217;ve watched the first season. Steven Spielberg was an executive producer. I detect his influence in the series&#8217; emphasis on family, as opposed to the usual same-old same-old emphasis on romance. Much can be done with plots about groups of people banding together and facing extreme threats. I&#8217;d give &#8220;Battlestar Galactica&#8221; an A+ for that. &#8220;Falling Skies&#8221; is no &#8220;Battlestar Galactica,&#8221; but it&#8217;s comfortably above what I call the threshold of watchability. &#8220;Falling Skies&#8221; is on HBO Max.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1200\" height=\"817\" src=\"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/falling-skies.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-19984\" srcset=\"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/falling-skies.jpg 1200w, https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/falling-skies-300x204.jpg 300w, https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/falling-skies-768x523.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As you can see, it usually takes me a while to get around to watching things. &#8220;The Mandalorian&#8221; just started its second season. &#8220;Falling Skies&#8221; premiered in 2011 and ran for five seasons. Some people seem to stay up to date on what&#8217;s being released, and they watch things when they&#8217;re new. I can&#8217;t imagine &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/?p=19982\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Falling Skies, and The Mandalorian&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19982"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19982\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19997,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19982\/revisions\/19997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}