The Mandalorian

The cinematography, creature work (both CGI and practical), and the action direction in “The Marshal” are all excellent: sweeping, exciting, and gorgeous to look at. ... The adventure story was compelling as well.

Far from resting on its laurels, though, if the balance of Season 2 can match the promise of this first episode, it's still easy to have a good feeling about this.

This first episode in the second season is a great example of how the series can work across scale—it can be intimate when it's two characters exchanging information in a vast open landscape, and it can also be massive with action scenes worthy of IMAX.

The result was, for a little show, easily its biggest and perhaps most purely entertaining episode to date.

The great thing about Favreau’s approach is that he doesn’t get bogged down in the needlessly complex plotting that blights so much prestige TV – and, for that matter, recent Star Wars films. Instead, he carves a sharp through-line through the story. The action proceeds briskly. ... Series one was the best Star Wars in decades. And, on this evidence, series two is shaping up to be even better.

If this involves a little too much recycling of the series’ own tropes – the narrative is a supersized remake of season one’s second episode – that doesn’t matter much when the special effects are so impressive and when Olyphant’s naughty cheek is such a good odd-couple fit with the deadpan monomania of Pedro Pascal, who continues to give his lead performance its nuance without the use of any facial expressions.

It’s a strong first episode, a case study for the things that make The Mandalorian such a consistently entertaining series. Chief among those is its economical approach to storytelling.

It’s a show that keeps threatening to lose one of those demographics—to become too much of an echo of things done better before or err on the other side and alienate the fanbase. The season premiere of “The Mandalorian” promises an even more confident threading of that needle.

While the season premiere feels like a story even the show has already tackled in its scant eight episodes, the show’s stripped-down space adventures are still here in fine form.

The opener is fun, sure, and features Timothy Olyphant in all his glorious swagger, but one can't help but feel like this series is only a hologram of what it could be. It's fine, but it's still not great.

Despite a panoply of familiar Mandalorian ingredients – countless Star Wars nods, plot twists, and, of course, Ludwig Göransson’s Emmy-winning score, used less sparingly here than in season one – “The Marshal” fails to congeal them into something greater. When it comes to washing Rise of Skywalker’s taste from our mouths, however, The Mandalorian is the perfect Listerine.

“The Mandalorian” isn’t as efficient as it used to be.