Television Review: Mandalorian Season Three

Daniela and I finished the third season of the Mandalorian last night, and I wanted to do a brief write up about it. Overall, we both had a blast with the show. Almost without exception, each episode kept itself rocketing along, full of visual spectacle, a great soundtrack, and some very nice action pieces, both on land and in space. The characters were fun, and it was a good time from start to finish.

(Well, almost. There was a random half episode focused on a character I really didn’t care about: a “recovering Imperial.” While it was interesting to see how they were treating people who used to work for the Empire, it was far from riveting, and ultimately didn’t do much for the show at all.)

Were there plot holes? Yes. Plenty of them. Did all of the characters’ decisions make sense? Nope, not really. Did I care? Again, not really. I mean, if you want to start dissecting a show like this, there’s really no stopping. It’s a culture based around people never taking off their helmets, and yet they somehow decide to have a big feast to celebrate something. I’m trying to picture how, exactly, that feast plays out. A bunch of people staring at food, with no one eating it? Everyone grabbing their food and then going off to eat by themselves in a very non-festive manner?

You can’t ask those questions. It would be like trying to analyze a roller coaster ride. The point isn’t to have it all make sense. (“Why am I on this ride? I get off where I got on. I go nowhere. I do nothing.”) The point is to have a fun time, and the Mandalorian does a super job of that.

This season continues the arc of Grogu and the Mandalorian, and it adds in a whole bunch of other Mandalorians for good measure, showing how they’re struggling to re-establish themselves in the universe. No need to give more of a description than that. If you’ve liked the first two seasons, you’ll like this.

If nothing else, this somehow proved (yet again) how big of a letdown Obi Wan and The Book of Boba Fett both were. The action sequences in those were often underwhelming, the plots felt padded to the extreme (so much so that Boba had to insert Mandalorian 2.5 into the middle of the show to make it reach its episode count), and they ultimately failed to deliver on the promises of what they could have been.

My biggest regret is that the show’s hampered by its budget, so it can’t really give us the planet-wide battles that are implied. Instead of a real army of Mandalorians, we see something like fifty. People keep attacking planets, but those planets are really nothing more than “a single city on that planet.” It would be like someone invading Earth, but really just focusing on Schenectady. (It’s also funny how many times they go to a planet to find someone, and find them . . . in the same city everyone’s always in. Maybe Schenectady’s a happening place?)

But there I go, thinking too much about it again. Don’t do that. Turn it on. Sit back. Enjoy. 8/10.

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