The Mandalorian: The Return (3x08)

In all, this season of The Mandalorian was pretty baffling. I've chose to just sort of... go with it, accept what we've been given instead of trying to question the shape of things too much.

Cons:

I don't really care about powerful, special, one-of-a-kind weapons, but I did think it was very odd that the Dark Saber met such a strange, unceremonious end. Mostly because symbolically, it was this whole big deal that Bo-Katan had earned it, and her place as the head of Mandalore or whatever. I actually think a more powerful symbol would be her giving the weapon away at some point just like Din did with her, thus confirming that the Mandalorians don't need a specific gadget or tool in order to be honorable and fierce leaders. Instead, the bad guy just destroys it, and all that buildup around who gets the sword just felt like wasted time in retrospect? I don't know. Sort of odd.

So, I obviously love any scene where Grogu and Din Djarin are fighting side by side, desperately protecting one another at all costs... but in watching this finale, this long, drawn-out action sequence with Moff Gideon's Beskar-wearing storm troopers going toe-to-toe with the Mandalorians, I kept thinking about last season's finale. How the action was all tied up in Grogu specifically. How he had been taken, and Din was doing anything he possibly could to get him back. And how in the end, he had to let him go. This time, it's just... there are bad guys in the room, and they're trying to kill everybody in front of them because they want control of this planet. Grogu doesn't seem to have any special significance to them at all. It would have been easy enough to adjust this: play up the fact that Grogu is a Jedi, or at least a Jedi in training. Play up the fact that he represents the enemy of Moff Gideon on two different accounts, both as a Mandalorian and as a Jedi. There could have been something there, and instead the peril felt by our main characters felt rather incidental to the actual goal of the villains.

Ultimately, I liked this episode quite a bit, which I'll talk about in a second, but since it's the end of the season, it really brings to focus all the strangeness with the pacing, and the lack of focus on our lead characters. Grogu and Din just kind of... happened to be around for a lot of shit that went down. Mando's dedication to his people is touching, but then in the end, even though Mandalore is reformed and habitable, Mando is just going off to keep being a bounty hunter, working for the New Republic on a freelance basis. It feels very... full circle, would be the nice way of saying it, but honestly it feels kind of odd that after a whole season, our characters aren't really up to anything new that we haven't seen from them before.

Pros:

So, I really liked the action! That's a good place to start. Not much to say about it, but there was a good mix of aerial fighting between various flying armored men, there were ships, there were one-on-one intense battles between Gideon and Djarin, and then later Gideon and Bo-Katan... there was Grogu pulling out some seriously cool Jedi flips to keep himself safe from various attackers. All of it was dynamic and interesting and at times legitimately stressful!

As much as I've struggled to understand the way they've positioned Bo-Katan's character as sort of the unofficial lead of this season, I loved the moment when she took over the Gideon fight and told Djarin to go save his kid. That was a good representation of what their dynamic is: she is fighting her political rival for control of her planet and its sacred significance to her people. And Din just wants to make sure Grogu is safe! It's his ultimate purpose. I love that.

For now, it appears that Moff Gideon is dead, but before his death, we did see that he was endeavoring to create clones of himself. While the clones were seemingly destroyed, this does leave open the possibility of other Gideons hanging about somewhere waiting to pop up and be evil later down the line! I absolutely loathed the final Star Wars movie with Palpatine coming back and all that stupid nonsense, but I guess I do appreciate how we get these hints here in this show of the path that will lead to those later movies; I am a sucker for some cinematic universe continuity.

Obviously the best part of the episode is that Din Djarin formally adopts Grogu as his son, making him Din Grogu! It makes me emotional just thinking about it. I love that Djarin wants to take him on as an apprentice, wants to honor Grogu's place among their people, but because he's not old enough to officially take on the creed (he can't speak for himself), he needs parental permission. When Din makes the offer, and the Armorer says "this is the way", I got a little misty-eyed. Now, with the potential to take contracts all set up with Teva, and a nice little cottage on Nevarro, this father and son duo can relax and adventure as they so choose!

I think ultimately what this season has given us is the opportunity for Din and Grogu to hang out and go on little episodic jaunts for as long as people want to keep watching the show. And I kind of like that. I like the idea of having a fun sorta cowboy space show about a helmet-wearing father and his little puppet son that I can just chill out with. The issue is, this show also seems to care about expanding the world and explaining the political structures of things, of setting up this series as a bridge between other Star Wars properties with which we are already familiar. Both are worthy goals. I'm just not sure how well they're being meshed together at this point. We'll see what happens next, when this show returns probably in like two years or something. All in all, this wasn't a "good" season of TV, but I still had an okay time!

8/10