Series,  The Mandalorian

The Mandalorian Season 3 Premiere

Din Djarin and Grogu returns for another 8-episode long season of the Star Wars phenomenon, which generated a huge amount of hype around it. The first episode dropped of the new run, and it’s not as clever, as they thought it will be. Down below there are spoilers for the episode of course.

In the recap The Armorer tells Din, that he has to go to the mines of Mandalore to seek salvation for his sins. For me this felt a newly added information, I actually did not remeber her saying this back in that episode of The Book of Boba Fett. So this start felt already a little off to me. Then we get to see her making a helmet for a youngling who’s ready to say the words of the Creed. First it seems like an interesting ritual scene with a big mandalorian clan, then they get interupted by bad writing, alias a big ass monster comes out of the water and ruins the ceremony. It’s supposed to be a thrilling action piece, but because we watch random mandalorians fight with a random turtle like creature it felt boring, even with a good score (which is not composed by the amazing Ludwig Göransson). A few shots fire, even a flamethrower gets turned on, then our favourite mandalorian dad appeares and saves the day with his new, fancy starfighter. This opening felt like Favreau (who wrote this episode) had this cool idea of a ceremony or ritual, then he couldn’t write normal dialouge for it, so why not throw an action scene there, no one will notice. Yes, we will notice, especially after the monologues of Andor we will.

Anyway, Mando gets the quest (which was already told to us in the recap) to go to the mines of Mandalore. But no, he first visits good ol’ Greef Karga, who built a medival-like trading center from the scum town on Nevarro. His title now is High Magistrate. So he runs this so called “first free trading center of the Outer Rim”. Mando tells him, that he’s here for some help, but the discussion gets interupted by pirates wanting to get a drink in the local school, which was the bar before. A short gunfight plays down, then Mando tells Karga once again that he’s here for help, after the High Magistrate asks him to be marshall. He’s in really desperete need for someone to protect his town, I wonder who this protector will be? After wasting our time with playing sort of the same conversation again, Mando finally gets the remaining parts of IG-11, because it’s the only droid he’s trusting, and needs it help on Mandalore. He tries to fix the droid himself, but it goes rouge, and tries to kill Grogu. Din for some weird reason (especially after shooting the pirates so quickly and precisley) can’t shoot a half dead robot down, so another robot throws a bust of Greef Karga on the head of IG.

But Mando desperately needs the help of IG, so Karga suggests to go and see the best droidsmiths, the Anzellans, our little russian accent using friends from Rise of the Skywalker! After a few terrible jokes they settle on, that the hairy guys can fix the droid, if Mando gets the parts for it. So then he goes to see the broken Bo-Katan Kryze, who lost her faith in reclaiming the thrown of Mandalore. He asks the once-leader about the mines, and she says, that yes, there are suppose to be mines, so good luck finding them, and the episode ends there. There’s also a hyperspace jump at the start of the episode which features a few Purrgils, just to have some fan service from Rebels of course. And at the end, we have another boring action scene, which is a chase between meteors.

So to conclude this weeks episode: Mando needs to get a thing, so then he could go with that thing to get the other thing he needs. Yeah, sure great set up for the season! Or not. The two big CGI heavy action pieces look great, and they have some cool music under them, so I’m not taking that away from the show. Also the chemistry between Din and Grogu still works, it made me smile a couple of moments. But the overall writing, let that be plotwise or just simple dialouge feels bad, especially after the amazing writing work that was done on Andor. I still have some hope for the upcoming weeks, but this was a rocky road start for me.