I love the horrible magic baby and fear for its safety

Baby yoga... you will always be a star...

God i’m just a filthy slut for narrative. As you might be able to tell now from reading this column, I just love to see a little story and crack it open to see all the guts and clockwork that make it work. I love using all the skills and knowledge I learned from many years of studying literary theory at university to make bold claims about the narrative structure of Gilmore Girls.

As a result, I’ve come to respect complicated and nuanced narratives, where story is told in a way closer to a spider weaving a web, or a space engineer constructing a rocket ship. Involved, genius stories, that subvert and surprise and stun. I’ve also enjoyed putting equal thought in the less ambitious, but still beautifully told stories, such as in genre television. Just because the tropes are recognisable, the format obvious, doesn’t mean we can’t still respect the elan and flair in how it was done. You know how Carrie Bradshaw’s column billboard says “Carrie Bradshaw knows good sex (and isn’t afraid to ask)”? Well, when this newsletter gets its billboard (any day now) it will say something like “Patrick Lenton knows good narratives (and isn’t afraid to dissect them).

So you can imagine my mild dismay and minor frustration when I tell you that The Mandalorian is a terribly written show, but also, impossibly, at the same time, utterly flawless.

“But Patrick, you handsome man, you gorgeous role model, that’s impossible”, I hear you say. “How could this possibly be?”

It’s because of the magic baby.

babby

Save the green, psychic cat

I’m being disingenuous - Baby Yoda, or Grogu, or “my beautiful green son”, whatever you want to call him, is actually one of the oldest narrative devices in the book. He’s a prime example of the save the cat format, where all we really needed in order to make Mando likeable enough to become our protagonist was getting him to rescue something cute and helpless. Baby Yoda, a cute babbling puppet was an easy fix.

But I just can’t get over how successful he is at this function - and how essential he is. The entire show was almost set up to fail - Din Djarin is a pretty ordinary protagonist. He’s gruff, a man of few words, like many other action protagonists. But, furthermore, we can’t see his face, and the majority of the people he hangs out with also wear helmets. Literally the robots in the Transformers cartoons are animated to have more expression than he does. Once you add in the fact that he suffers from a fairly defined lack of motivations or over-arching narrative desires, and that if you took away Grogu there’d be literally no reason for Mando to go on adventures, you realise that Baby Grogu isn’t just a good narrative trope, when it comes to The Mandalorian, he’s load bearing.

He represents almost the entirety of Mando’s character building - not only thing that makes us like him, that humanises (or Mandalorians) him underneath that helmet, but also provides almost all of Mando’s motivations and wants and needs. The only reason we watch this show is to see Mando take Grogu to various places, provide food and trinkets for him, and ultimately protect him. It’s the after-school pickup of scifi narratives (i’d say “with more violence” but have you ever been to an afterschool pickup?).

The rest of the show (particularly the latest season) has about as much narrative cohesion as the side plots that litter a role playing game, a never-ending montage of snoot-faced aliens asking Mando to pick something up or fight a weird big plant man - which makes me think that Grogu might be more than simply a cute device.

why every fan of The Mandalorian keeps tuning in

My disgusting boy

What is it about Grogu that works so well - is it simply a masterpiece of cute puppetry? Star Wars has had a bit of luck with cute little puppet things, so perhaps they’ve just managed to create the platonic ideal? I think there has to be more than that.

While I was pondering this tiny green man, I took my awful son Basil for a walk. Basil, for those not across the main characters in my life, is my rescue greyhound. He’s a long nervous weird guy who lives on our couch, and is slowly overcoming the trauma of his early racing life. I recently wrote about what it’s been like living with such an anxious, eccentric hound. As I wandered along the same streets we go down together every day, I watched him squat in his nightshirt like wee willy winky and promptly release a jet of urine all over his own feet. “This has given me the ick” I said out loud. A few seconds later, a loud truck rumbled past and he got scared, freezing in his tracks, only moving after I bent down and hugged him for a few minutes, his head nestled under my armpit.

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Basil is a scared dog. He is overwhelmed by the new world he has been unceremoniously launched into, lacking the context or brains to ever truly understand why these terrible things (trucks, not being allowed on the couch all the time, scary children) happen to him. Basil is also relatively helpless - he relies on me for pretty much everything. As a result, I don’t just love Basil - I feel responsible for him. Even when he’s being an utter shit, even when he’s embarrassing us by growling at my partners aunt, even when he’s freaking me out… that responsibility to him, that helplessness that only I can alleviate only deepens that investment.

If Basil could speak, he would also only say “no” on repeat.

stinky babby

Grogu, similarly, as cute and green and comedic as he can be, is also a similarly tragic figure. It’s not his CUTENESS that wins me over each time, it’s his vulnerability. Every time bad men get near him, every time he’s shot at or almost eaten, or hurt by scientists… I am filled with a kind of wild protective rage. I imagine that for many normal people, they would identify with this due to their human children. I don’t have human children, and furthermore, Basil is closer to Grogu’s circumstances - he’s a traumatised, somewhat tortured stinky baby who I have adopted, and now must protect with my life, and also clean with baby wipes after they have pissed wildly only themselves.

I think this is the trick here - it’s not just about saving the cat, it’s about making us fear for the cat, feel for protective for the cat.

Grogu’s circumstance tugs at my heartstrings, and means that I root wholeheartedly for Mando - because it doesn’t matter that he has no personality, no real character depth, no human face - because all he needs to do is protect my green boy, my magic baby. And that’s why this show is flawless, because I will tune in for every episode to make sure my special green magic son is safe from harm.