The Mandalorian

[Donald]

Are all the stormtroopers regular Empire or a some/all of them new recruits stuck in the armor with little to no training? If the Empire is on it's last legs, they're probably hurting for troops and take whoever they can get.

[ZeroBG82]

Well aware of that but the thing is that the Empire is a threat in the show and they just walked through the bad guys this episode like it was nothing. Of course the bad guys have to loose but the cargo moment was stupid and the thing is that it seemed the Mandos didn't even need Din to take the ship. Contrast this to the time they'd been pinned down in the bar. Sure they killed a bunch of them but the bad guys still got some good hits in. The only thing the Empire managed to do was shoot Din and he got back up like it was nothing. You can't have stakes when the heroes (or guest characters) have god mode on.

Even in the OT, the Empire was only ever a real threat if it was Vader, or in sheer numbers. They were scary because they were huge, and could bring volume. While our heroes are usually either a small group, or just one lone Mando.

I think four trained Mandalorians SHOULD wipe the floor with Stormtroopers. Particularly when one of them is Din Djarin, who we've seen fighting a fair bit and has plenty of experience in addition to being raised and trained by a warrior culture, and one of the others is Bo-Katan Kryze, who is a veteran of at least two major wars, in addition to being the leader of a militaristic warrior society.

Might be different if we were talking Deathtroopers, or Royal Guards. The kind of soldier that should be the Empire's true elite. But these are basically just grunts, on a standard issue freight detail, and caught by surprise.

[Hiromi]

The Stormtroopers were holding that final corridor pretty well, keeping the blast doors partially shut for cover and laying down heavy suppressing fire with full auto weapons, Beskar just happens to be really good

[PwrdOn]

Even in the OT, the Empire was only ever a real threat if it was Vader, or in sheer numbers. They were scary because they were huge, and could bring volume. While our heroes are usually either a small group, or just one lone Mando.

I think four trained Mandalorians SHOULD wipe the floor with Stormtroopers. Particularly when one of them is Din Djarin, who we've seen fighting a fair bit and has plenty of experience in addition to being raised and trained by a warrior culture, and one of the others is Bo-Katan Kryze, who is a veteran of at least two major wars, in addition to being the leader of a militaristic warrior society.

Might be different if we were talking Deathtroopers, or Royal Guards. The kind of soldier that should be the Empire's true elite. But these are basically just grunts, on a standard issue freight detail, and caught by surprise.

Yeah but it's not like the Mandalorians were really using any kind of special tactics or even making full use out of all of their gadgets, they were basically just taking cover and actually hitting their targets, something that stormtroopers never seem capable of doing. And by this point, stormtrooper ineptitude is such a meme that just about nothing can ever make them seem threatening, but what's puzzling is why they keep coming up with all these different trooper variations like "oooh this special elite stormtrooper is gonna be a total badass unlike the regular guys...oh look he just got his ass kicked as easily as the rest of them." What they really need to do is come up with some more enemies for the main characters to fight besides the usual troopers and random aliens, the action scenes aren't really exciting anymore when we know our heroes are just gonna steamroll the bad guys with no tension whatsoever.

[godisawesome]

Stormtroopers have the sad aspect of having so many people in love with the idea of them as the inept henchmen that even when a writer wants to treat them as competent enough (where it’s supposed to at least make you genuinely scary, bold, or daring to cut through them), someone else will come along later, crack a joke, undermine whatever work you did to make them decent enough for your purposes, and arguably devalue whatever impressive feats you had the heroes do earlier.

They’re like ninjas in comics - vacillating between dangerous enough to make them seem professional and formidable, and being a meme of faceless henchmen for whom heroes measure their skill by quantity of kills, not quality.

Din assailing the Client’s bunker to rescue the Child? They’re competent enough at only a dozen or so it’s an impressive feat on his part and he has to use as much of his arsenal as he can.

Din and the Nite Owls storming a ship with dozens upon dozens of stormies? They’re paper people who might as well be plinking targets.

Luckily... the Empire was so large I like to think that Stormtrooper detachments are notoriously inconsistent - high class and professional soldier fighting alongside penal legions and Ra’s cannon fodder - and that their usage is so focused on their numbers that even skilled troopers are spent outrageously by intelligent commanders - thus Vader and Tarkin using skilled 501st members to herd the heroes back to the Falcon and to the Rebel Base sot hey can track them, even though it requires quite a lot of dead meat.

(I was also hoping that the ST would follow the pattern set by TFA of the FO’s forces - stormies and officers like Hux - being competent *enough* to be a leaner and meaner successor of the Empire... but then TLJ happened, and the FO became even more the Empire 2.0, memes about being losers included.)

[Frontier]

I think this show is probably the most in-universe acknowledgement I've seen of how incompetent Stormtroopers usually end up being.

[DurararaFTW]

I think this show is probably the most in-universe acknowledgement I've seen of how incompetent Stormtroopers usually end up being.

It's just the next step up from Rebels. In Rebels the Stormtroopers didn't get it quite this badly but a TIE or AT-ST, or even a lone Star Destroyer wouldn't be treated as a massive threat like this show does.

[PwrdOn]

I think this show is probably the most in-universe acknowledgement I've seen of how incompetent Stormtroopers usually end up being.

It is still pretty annoying when they are treated as a joke in-universe though. Like if you ever play Jedi Fallen Order, the stormtroopers spend that entire game freaking out about scared they to face you, and that actually trips you up a bit because it almost makes you feel sorry for them.

[Frontier]

It is still pretty annoying when they are treated as a joke in-universe though. Like if you ever play Jedi Fallen Order, the stormtroopers spend that entire game freaking out about scared they to face you, and that actually trips you up a bit because it almost makes you feel sorry for them.

Kind of like the Battle Droids by the end of Clone Wars .

[SuperiorIronman]

Stormtroopers aren't incompetent though. The films never portrayed them as being **** ups. They're a bit disinterested in what's going on with high command but nowhere in the OT are they incompetent. Even the jokes about the aim stems from ANH where it's a complete misunderstanding of a plot-point in that they're letting them escape to follow the heroes to Yavin. Yeah the teddy bears are a bit much but anybody whose played Battlefront 2 knows how frustrating it is gunning for Ewoks so I get it even if the imagery is a bit silly.

Like I don't like the portrayal here because it does a complete 180 on how they've been portrayed in the show up to this point. The troopers guarding Baby Yoda in season 1 make sense. The armor is dirty, broken in places, and it's actually missing parts (some troopers lack belt boxes, thermal detonators, armor is cracking in areas) so one should expect they're not the best equipped. But when Gideon's men show up with clean and fully assembled gear, Din is backed into a corner. Even after IG-11 shows up they still have to escape because they can't take a whole unit. They're constantly fleeing because despite how skilled they are in fighting them, they can't fight all of them. The lava tunnel is a big moment since they'd all get killed and or loose the child. The threat is real. And even when it's not even the Empire at the helm we get a sense of danger from even the equipment. The AT-ST requires traps and barricades to bring down. It's not something they can just easily shoot.

Here they're a bunch of morons who can't take four people. Like Beskar doesn't even cover the whole body. For a group who laid siege to Mandalore on basically nothing it's baffling they're not better equipped here or get better hits in.

[Derek Metaltron]

Kind of like the Battle Droids by the end of Clone Wars .

I always felt sorry for Battle Droids though because they literally have no say in their lives. Many of them can’t even communicate like the Droidekas. But they were probably more the patsies of the Clone Wars than anyone else was.

[godisawesome]

Stormtroopers aren't incompetent though. The films never portrayed them as being **** ups. They're a bit disinterested in what's going on with high command but nowhere in the OT are they incompetent. Even the jokes about the aim stems from ANH where it's a complete misunderstanding of a plot-point in that they're letting them escape to follow the heroes to Yavin. Yeah the teddy bears are a bit much but anybody whose played Battlefront 2 knows how frustrating it is gunning for Ewoks so I get it even if the imagery is a bit silly.

Like I don't like the portrayal here because it does a complete 180 on how they've been portrayed in the show up to this point. The troopers guarding Baby Yoda in season 1 make sense. The armor is dirty, broken in places, and it's actually missing parts (some troopers lack belt boxes, thermal detonators, armor is cracking in areas) so one should expect they're not the best equipped. But when Gideon's men show up with clean and fully assembled gear, Din is backed into a corner. Even after IG-11 shows up they still have to escape because they can't take a whole unit. They're constantly fleeing because despite how skilled they are in fighting them, they can't fight all of them. The lava tunnel is a big moment since they'd all get killed and or loose the child. The threat is real. And even when it's not even the Empire at the helm we get a sense of danger from even the equipment. The AT-ST requires traps and barricades to bring down. It's not something they can just easily shoot.

Here they're a bunch of morons who can't take four people. Like Beskar doesn't even cover the whole body. For a group who laid siege to Mandalore on basically nothing it's baffling they're not better equipped here or get better hits in.

That’ what I mean by how it kind of depends on the tone of the action scene the writer wants to go with, and there’s no zeal to pursue consistency about it from episode to episode... though previous media have also shown it just kind of applies to all armies. There were som episodes of TCW that actually sought to make the droids more competent, and since the purpose in this episode is to make the Mandos look nigh-unstoppable, it bears remembering that a whole bunch of Mandos got dropper just as easily in TCW whenever the story needed them to.

I think we can safely chock this up to conventional storytelling inconsistencies with henchmen that just happens to have an unfortunately tongue in cheek recurring gag thrown into it as well.

Not everybody’s Greg Weisman on a superhero show, trying to make even bargain bin henchmen competent enough from episode to episode. Heck, even Greg Weisman wasn’t immune to embracing the memes when he was on Season One of Rebels.

[Frontier]

I always felt sorry for Battle Droids though because they literally have no say in their lives. Many of them can’t even communicate like the Droidekas. But they were probably more the patsies of the Clone Wars than anyone else was.

Yeah, they kind of go into it in that episode of Rebels where Rex goes up against some remnant Battle Droids and realize they were both being used during the war. Heck, Order 66 basically turned the Clones into Droids when it came to the Jedi.

[MyriVerse]

Rank and file Stormtroopers were almost never shown as very competent in the films. They're either mind trick victims, can't hit the broadside of a planet, and/or can't take proper cover from the rain. And like ninjas, the more of them you have, the less competent they became. The special Stormtroopers fared better.

Anyway, I'm not feeling this season as much as last season. Nothing has been as entertaining this year. Mando's kind of dull, and Baby Yoda isn't nearly as charming. I really hope things improve.

[CliffHanger2]

The Stormtroopers were holding that final corridor pretty well, keeping the blast doors partially shut for cover and laying down heavy suppressing fire with full auto weapons, Beskar just happens to be really good

Yeah the troopers were about to win albeit kamikaze style. If Mando didn't have the beskar his team would have been done.