So that new episode of #TheMandalorian...

...bit of a mess, huh?

I guess I’m MandoPosting here. Aiight, here we go.

Recap

Okay, so in S1 Mando takes a job to bring in a bounty and he meets Grogu (call sign: Baby Yoda.) He gets paid, then turns around and rescues Grogu from the guys who hired him. He spends three more episodes running around the galaxy and accidentally making friends, casually making enemies, and even elevating the pulse of a hot single mom on a shrimp planet.

He gets back in touch with the Mandalorian Armorer who tells him that his new quest is to take Grogu to his own people. Boom! S2 storyline secure. He does this, while also addressing the fallout of many episodes of season 1. The planet of Nevarro is on the rise, Boba Fett is back from the dead, Fennec Shand is working for him, Asohka Tano is out there, and on and on. Apparently a lot of characters and elements from the Star Wars cartoons made it into this season, so yay.

It culminated with a shocking turn of events: Moff Gideon, the Big Bad of the show, kidnaps Grogu and destroys Mando’s ship. However, Boba Fett can’t help but feel super duty-bound to Mando, so he gives him a ride in Slave-1 to help him out. He grabs a crack team of Strong Female Characters and they rescue Grogu from Moff Gideon, with a little help from none other than Luke Skywalker himself.

(This scene blew everyone’s mind, including Kathleen Kennedy’s, who was so mad that she started directly meddling with The Mandalorian, including firing Gina Carano under the flimsiest of excuses. But I digress.)

S2 wrapped up with Mando saying bye to Grogu, taking off his helmet, defeating Gideon, obtaining the Darksaber, and heading into S3 with a brief detour into Boba Fett’s story. (See my writeup of that show here.) The main story of S3 would likely focus on the retaking of Mandalore and the resolution of the issue of rulership.

But then The Book of Boba Fett happened, and screwed all that up. Disney meddled, the story got hijacked, Grogu ended up back with Mando, and now he’s training a tiny Mandalorian Jedi.

Big. Heavy. Sigh. This story isn’t really progressing now, outside of Mando’s personal quest for penitence.

Summary

So now we get into the long-awaited S3, and we’re treated to an opening scene with the Armorer making a helmet for a foundling. This feels like a flashback, as the foundling could easily be Din Djarin as a child. He starts to utter the Creed, making his covenant to the Mandalorian Way, but the ceremony is interrupted by a giant monster.

(My initial guess was that there would be a technicality in Din Djarin’s Creed and since he never finished it, he never truly broke his covenants, which seemed like a cheap way of getting around the problem, but par for the course in present-day Disney stories.)

But no! This isn’t a flashback, it’s current, and Mando shows up in his new Naboo fighter spaceship. He uses his torpedoes to kill the big bad monster. Then he tells the Armorer that he found evidence Mandalore hasn’t been destroyed, and he can atone for taking off his helmet if the Living Waters are still intact.

Okay. Cool. We have a setup. We’re going somewhere.

We get a weird scene where Mando is taking a nap in his ship at hyperspeed, and Grogu looks out the window to see…hyperspeed squids in space? Or something? We don’t get a clear answer. Mando goes to Nevarro, which is now a thriving metropolis, and he meets with Greef Karga to get some resources for his trip to Mandalore, only OH NO, Karga has a problem and needs some help.

Mando helps him by shooting some bad guys. Then he tells Karga that he needs the remains of IG-11 so he can go to Mandalore and search for the wells of Living Waters.

OKAY. PROBLEM HERE.

IG-11 is destroyed. He self-destructed, destructingly. Completely gone. The entire point of his self-destruct device was to keep his tech out of enemy hands, ergo a thorough self-destruction would necessarily destroy his computer core. But nope! We put his pieces back together and booted him up and he’s completely operational! He’s just bent on killing Grogu again.

Mando tries to shoot the revived IG-11 but suddenly his marksmanship is garbage, mere minutes after he smoked four baddies with four shots. He takes IG-11 to some micro-mechanic aliens and they tell him they can rebuild IG-11 if Mando brings them a new “memory circuit.”

Wouldn’t this mean…that Mando would basically be bringing them a part to make an entirely new robot? At the point, why not just GET A DIFFERENT ROBOT?

This is indicative of the larger problem with Disney’s writing lately, where characters don’t really get to change because change means conclusions, and conclusions means phasing out, and phasing out means no more merch. So they’ve gotta keep everything going in perpetuity, in stasis, without enduring too much progression or alteration along the way.

We’re gonna get IG-11 back so we can have a Taika Waititi robot in the Mandalorian for future seasons. Hell with good new characters, just keep killing and resurrecting the ones we have, forever!

Ugh. Back on track.

Mando leaves to find the circuit for his robot. He crosses paths with some evil pirates in space, related to the four that he smoked on Nevarro. He smokes five more of them, only to end up bantering with their Super Pirate Leader, a guy who looks like Chewbacca had sex with a Hutt and then got covered in boogery hair (or hairy boogers, it’s hard to tell.)

Whoops, better go to hyper space so we can fight that guy in a future episode!

We’ll stop off real quick on some other planet with a Mandalorian castle on it. Pay a short visit to Bo-Katan, who’s just…sitting there on a throne somewhere, being sad, doing nothing. “The others took the ship we stole, and I’m not in charge anymore, you have the Darksaber, go do whatever you want,” she mopes.

“Okay,” he says, and leaves five minutes later.

That’s more or less the end of the episode, and I’ve gotta say…what the hell? This felt like a bunch of clips strung together, not a solid season premiere.

Conclusion

In S1, we got a coherent, single story: bounty hunter does some bounty hunting, turns in his bounty, takes another job, it’s complicated, he fights his way through, and in the end he does something out of the norm because the job wasn’t what he thought it was.

In S2, he chases down a lead that sends him back to Tatooine in search of other Mandalorians, but instead he finds the man who currently owns Boba Fett’s armor. He can get the armor back if he helps the town and the local Tusken tribes with a Krayt dragon problem. He solves that problem and rides off into the sunset.

Now in S3, what…we more or less get a recap of his episode in Book of Boba Fett, showing that he’s on the outs with The Armorer…then he checks out Nevarro, he needs IG-88, he pisses off some pirates…he visits Bo-Katan, she’s pissed at him…Grogu sees some squids in space…there’s barely a through-line stringing this story together. Why? WTF is going on?

I have a fair amount of confidence in Favreau and Filoni. I’m willing to cut them some slack because of how solid S1 was and how great S2 was. But the Boba Fett show was disastrous and this one here is off to a rough start. If the studio is meddling with their one good remaining product, they’re going to crash the only thing left they have going for them.

We’ll see what next week brings.