The season finale of The Mandalorian dropped early Friday morning, and once again, the internet is a minefield of major spoilers. This isn’t the first time I’ve railed against people being selfish by tweeting out major plot points before the majority of the audience has had a chance to even wake up, but I now realize though that asking people to change their individual behavior is like asking Baby Yoda to stop eating unfertilized eggs. They simply can’t and won’t.
So, like many things, we need to work towards systemic change and that’s to get Disney to start dropping their new shows at a more reasonable viewing time.
Right now, Mandalorian episodes drop at 3am on Friday morning. No one but the most dedicated fans are prioritizing early morning viewings. Still, it’s enough people that spoilers leak on line, and worst of all, start trending on social media. Just take a glance at Twitter’s trends bar, which is impossible to ignore. All the muting in the world isn’t going to fix the platform itself littering the right rail of their desktop experience with Star Wars related trends. Now, I know people will say, just stay off social media, but that’s not doable, especially through the course of the entire season.
All Disney needs to do to fix this is spoiler problem to drop episodes on Friday nights, so people at least have a fighting chance to experience the show without knowing every little thing in advance.
Plus, there’s a major added benefit to dropping episodes at a time when more people are likely to engage in live viewing. Like HBO did with Game of Thrones, we could again experience the joy of a collective viewing experience. Right now, sports are really the only thing we all watch together and at the same time. The Mandalorian could have been the next big collective viewing phenomenon, but alas, it didn’t work out that.
It could be that Disney is afraid of their streaming service crashing if too many people try to access an episode at the same time. To that, I respectfully urge them to get their technical act together because I don’t want to have to be dealing with this mess when The Falcon and Winter Solider drops.
There’s a massive slate of Marvel and Star Wars shows coming that the platform announced just earlier this month. Many of them have been working under the cover of secrecy to keep plot points from leaking out. The element of surprise is huge, and Disney is risking blowing those massive reveals because they drop the episode in the middle of the night. Because of that, gifs are going to be flooding the internet long before most people actually see it, ruining all the careful planning that went into the making of the show.
Please, Disney+, just drop episodes on Friday night! People will log on, they will watch and they will all tweet about how good it was, how bad it was or how surprising it was. And, best of all, they’ll be doing it together.