SPOILER The Mandalorian Season 3 Recap and Review Thread

The only constant in the universe is that haters' gonna find a way to hate Star Wars.


Personally, I found the season to be refreshingly mani-faceted and jam-packed with interesting developments & explorations. Highlights for me included: everything on Pershing and the Empire Remnant; R5; repurposed battle droids and the droid bar; Nevarro improving and adding much-needed stakes & context; and all the great SW weirdness we got this time around. Cool

 

If by some off-chance Rangers of the New Republic gets revitalized, I'd love to see this concept explored more. Chapter 19 especially raised questions about how the New Republic was operating in a post-Imperial galaxy.

Now we just need Favreau to start having everyone call R5 "Skippy" and eventually build up to Luke Skywalker taking him as his first apprentice at the new Jedi Academy on Ossus.

 

R5 is such an underdog, and I love them to bits! <3

 

Entertaining and lore-expanding at its best, filled with unnecessary filler that didn't add anything to the characters at its worst. It's not the worst season of something I've seen, be it Star Wars, superheroes, or otherwise, but it's not the best either. I really liked the Mandalorian arc stuff, but I'm also burning out of it a bit. We've seen it in four shows pretty much, and it hasn't always felt consistent. And after ten years more or less, it's just...a lot.

But back to this show. I really liked the Navaro stuff, as it made me want to watch The Magnificent Seven again. The reeducation stuff felt out of place, particularly given where it ends and how it relates to the characters IMO, but I actually liked it a lot. It added a lot to the world of Star Wars. I just wish there was a way to incorporate it into the lore without it being an episode of The Mandalorian. Like, a short political thriller one-shot thing like Werewolf By Night or Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special for the MCU.

In terms of the villains, this season was pretty light on them overall, but I really wished Gideon hadn't returned. As I posted on a separate thread, I've become a lot less forgiving of villains in terms of their defeats. If they can't defeat our hero or force them into a draw due to their own skill and/or competence within the first two encounters (over two episodes/movies), I lose respect for them. Gideon lost to Din in both previous seasons, and again here. Now he just feels like a cartoon villain, someone who you laugh at losing, not one you fear. Not to mention that the focus on cloning felt wildly out of character for me. (Mostly because my own expectations and assumptions for the clone stuff related to Palpatine's return, not Gideon's new (IMO) obsession.)

Overall, this wasn't the best season, but I do have faith that it'll just be a middling season in an otherwise great show. If this is the worst season in the show's run, then we have little to worry about or fear!

 

Admitedly, this is pure speculation on my part but I suspect this season got rewritten a few times before (and maybe even after) filming began. I suspect that after Favreau had written his initial scripts for Season 3, a bunch of stuff happened which changed some things which may have necessitated some serious rewrites including:

• Lucasfilm's decision to green light a Boba Fett series.
• Gina Carano's firing and the subsequent announcement that Favreau's Rangers of the New Republic was being shelved.
• The Ahsoka series getting greenlit with Dave Filoni fleshing out his plans for what would become a live-action Rebels sequel.
• Jon Watts entering the picture with his ideas for yet another new series in the timeline, The Skeleton Crew.
• The decision (Jon's or from On High) that Grogu and Djarin needed to be reunite before Season 3.

 

Well said. I would add one additional 'pressure point' that Favreau the writer had to deal with: His own self-imposed screen time.

Episodes of the show were going to, more or less, average around 40 minutes. That meant there was a lot of "shifting around" adjustments to make in a short amount of time.

 

The last two episodes I think were among the best in the entire series. My problem with this season lies with the rest of the episodes in S3.

There were some enriching, story developing plots here and there but a lot of S3 just felt like fillers and that everything was loosely tied together at the last minute. Now I don’t mind fillers I see their use and not every moment can be action packed. However I feel like this season had more than necessary.

 

This season is about dotting some i-s and crossing some t-s, and finishing off some storybeats that was always more interesting as set-up/motivation than their eventually resolution, to make room for what comes next. And I am good with that.

This does, however, mean that the energy is lower through most of the season, (the Coruscant stuff excluded), and the tone varies wildly throughout. Again, I'm good with that.

We also get a more relaxed season, which breathes and has some fun with the universe, which is awesome.

The droid uprising story is very interesting, and could easily have been an episode of TCW, for instance.

The mysterious spider-crab-robot-thing on Mandalore was pure SciFi (and we get no explanation, which is great); the Mando survivors on the surface are a strong and interesting setting expansion; the Mecha-IG11 concept, the Anzelans, the plant-alien pirate king, and basically every droid this season is pure SW campy fun. Excellent!

The Coruscant side-story is marvelous and important to informing SW overall, full of suspense and tension, and with possible the strongest drama in SW TV to date.

Furthermore, is it just me or are the space/ship combat sequences just dynamite this season? Some of the best dogfighting and ship battles since the PT!

Mando 3? Yeah, I like me some of that, please

EDIT: Oh, and I forgot the most important thing; Ahmed Best!

EDIT 2: And the season elevates the team's tech proficiency, too. Never has TV CGI been this rich, daring, and seamless, and Favreau & Co. have absolutely mastered the Volume at this point; it's simultaneously subtly and fearlessly used, yet you hardly ever see it anywhere.

 

Just an FYI to Mandalorian fans:

Tomorrow, Wednesday, Jun 28, 2023, a new Disney Gallery comes out with a 'behind the scenes' look at the making of the individual episodes of Mando Season 3.

 

This new Star Wars Gallery gave me a much deeper appreciation of the season. I could listen to Jon and Dave talk about The Mandalorian all day!

 

I liked the season a lot. There's some issues and don't know if it's the best season but the show is overall still my favorite star wars show

 

I find all three seasons pretty close in quality and may like the third the best.

It definitely is the first season where there is no episode I'm left in a place of less than liking/skippable...see Scoundrels, see Ice Spiders.

 

I see this season as experimental at best. I still don't know what happened behind the scenes, but by this season going forward to Ahsoka, they have perfected the modelling and CGI for spaceships, space battles and everything including aerial scenes, which were smaller scale and as in music "chamber".
But as the all around happenings started to be bigger as well and looking a lot better as well, I guess they were on the edge of what they can acomplish and in this regard, they have succeeded.

My only problem with the season is the same and worse than in Ahsoka, writing/pacing issues and the overall narrative being a bit disjointed with weaker payoffs (the darksaber handover/destruction, entire Moff Gideon being ramped up for last two episodes, some of the things left hanging in the air, like Dr. Pershing's mental demise and all the foreshadowing and hints leading to a brief scene of Gideon clones, dying at the same time without utilizing them).

Long story short, this classic and old TV format didn't work for me, with the main narrative in the background with lot of sidequests leading up to it this season, as I didn't felt that the episodes in-between were seamlessly linked to the overall narrative. Someone mentioned the ice spiders, but that episode was fitting great on the road from Tatooine to that water planet, with all of the things that happened carrying over to the next episodes and had the feeling of continuity.
Maybe it's my personal preference, but Andor and Ahsoka work for me well and better in that regard.

Anyway, props for the ton of cool new designs as it looks like the art department has more fun with these smaller scale stories than they did on the movie front.

If I'll have to pick standout and best episode of the season and one of the best SW TV episodes overall, it was Din exploring the ruins of Mandalore and the capitol, encountering the vampire mech in the caverns.
I'd say that the original and more intimate format of Mandalorian is what always works for and in the series and maybe, with the supposed grander scale, they have bitten off a bigger piece to swallow.