Mando season 3

[Ruin Explorer]

He is now! But why is he Din Grogu, rather than Grogu Djarin?

Right what the hell?

Is Din literally the ONLY Mandalorian with his name that way around? I know Paz Vizsla (machinegun-guy), for example, is firstname surname, pretty sure literally all other named Mandalorians are. Maybe it's specific to adoptions rather than born family?

No clarification on who the other spies from last episode were. (I hope the sickly Mandalorians that the Armorer conspicuously ferried back to the fleet were evacuated safely before Axe crashed the cruiser.)

This whole episode featured a lot of "Hmmm" of that kind, where Favreau had clearly decided the audience would just accept something, rather than actually telling a story that made sense and had internal consistency. Another obvious example being that Bo-Katan knew Grogu was in trouble, and Din needed to save him when she clobbered Darth Fring Moff Gideon. She had literally no way to know that, given she'd just spotted Din getting his ass handed to him, from literally 300 yards away, and jetpacked in. I guess it was a classic case of "You know this because you are psychic". All they had to do was put in one line, like Din going "GROGU!" after she arrived, but nope, the Favreau ain't having that! Economy of storytelling even if it makes the story no longer fully make sense!!!

I note that the storyboards showed this episode made some fairly big changes from the initial plan, given they show Axe Woves getting into a TIE Interceptor (which appears to be onboard the cruiser, somehow), and escaping in that whilst the cruiser (and other ships) are destroyed by the TIEs (and god knows what happened to them - they're not lightspeed-capable - maybe one of them phoned another Imperial Warlord to come pick them up?) still in orbit.

So that means the entire resolution of the battle, which relied on Woves dropping a ship on them, was something they decided on after the storyboards/planning were done.

The ship was a lot less destructive than I expected too - mostly just flames, not thousands of tons of debris - I guess they hadn't pre-budgeted for a more spectacular ending. Maybe it still had enough integrity that it just sort of got jammed in the hole? It wasn't going very fast.

The only really surprising thing here was breaking the Darksaber, esp. as it was so casual and out-of-nowhere - it was a good character moment though, because it showed Gideon didn't "get it". And this being Star Wars it can certainly potentially get fixed.

Talking of not "getting it" though, Gideon is a clone-maker who "died" but was wearing amazing armour and no body was found so they have like multiple avenues to bring him back, which surprised me a bit - I thought we'd at least get a body for this Gideon.

Talking of armour, too, slightly surprised that the Praetorian Guard were taken down with a blaster given that their armour is canon blaster-proof - I guess perhaps back in this period it wasn't?

Fun episode nothing to dramatic in terms of speculation.

No Thrawn as some people speculated.

Yeah and the end of the episode was constructed in such way that if this was the last ever episode of The Mandalorian, or the last for several years, that would make sense, which is not what I expected.

I think I expected "This threat is ended, here is a hint of a new threat". But it went out of its way to avoid that, and brought the droid that literally no-one but Favreau gives only single solitary shake of a lamb's tail about.

 

[Zardnaar]

Right what the hell?

Is Din literally the ONLY Mandalorian with his name that way around? I know Paz Vizsla (machinegun-guy), for example, is firstname surname, pretty sure literally all other named Mandalorians are. Maybe it's specific to adoptions rather than born family?

This whole episode featured a lot of "Hmmm" of that kind, where Favreau had clearly decided the audience would just accept something, rather than actually telling a story that made sense and had internal consistency. Another obvious example being that Bo-Katan knew Grogu was in trouble, and Din needed to save him when she clobbered Darth Fring Moff Gideon. She had literally no way to know that, given she'd just spotted Din getting his ass handed to him, from literally 300 yards away, and jetpacked in. I guess it was a classic case of "You know this because you are psychic". All they had to do was put in one line, like Din going "GROGU!" after she arrived, but nope, the Favreau ain't having that! Economy of storytelling even if it makes the story no longer fully make sense!!!

I note that the storyboards showed this episode made some fairly big changes from the initial plan, given they show Axe Woves getting into a TIE Interceptor (which appears to be onboard the cruiser, somehow), and escaping in that whilst the cruiser (and other ships) are destroyed by the TIEs (and god knows what happened to them - they're not lightspeed-capable - maybe one of them phoned another Imperial Warlord to come pick them up?) still in orbit.

So that means the entire resolution of the battle, which relied on Woves dropping a ship on them, was something they decided on after the storyboards/planning were done.

The ship was a lot less destructive than I expected too - mostly just flames, not thousands of tons of debris - I guess they hadn't pre-budgeted for a more spectacular ending. Maybe it still had enough integrity that it just sort of got jammed in the hole? It wasn't going very fast.

The only really surprising thing here was breaking the Darksaber, esp. as it was so casual and out-of-nowhere - it was a good character moment though, because it showed Gideon didn't "get it". And this being Star Wars it can certainly potentially get fixed.

Talking of not "getting it" though, Gideon is a clone-maker who "died" but was wearing amazing armour and no body was found so they have like multiple avenues to bring him back, which surprised me a bit - I thought we'd at least get a body for this Gideon.

Talking of armour, too, slightly surprised that the Praetorian Guard were taken down with a blaster given that their armour is canon blaster-proof - I guess perhaps back in this period it wasn't?



Yeah and the end of the episode was constructed in such way that if this was the last ever episode of The Mandalorian, or the last for several years, that would make sense, which is not what I expected.

I think I expected "This threat is ended, here is a hint of a new threat". But it went out of its way to avoid that, and brought the droid that literally no-one but Favreau gives only single solitary shake of a lamb's tail about.

I'm guessing they're saving Thrawn for Ahsoka.

The one hint for S4 is Grogu using the force waking the Mythosaur.

 

[Ryujin]

If that's the last episode of the last season of "The Mandalorian", then it's a satisfying one. It does leave things open for the future, though. It also shows that the only thing worse than a Mandalorian with a jet pack, is literally anyone else with a jet pack.

 

[Stalker0]

A very solid finale. Only nitpick I had was Gideon "handling this himself" with the mandolorian, as he has always seemed a more behind his troops kind of boss. However, he did bring the guard, and nothing like a super big gun (or power armor in this case) to make a cautious man get a little reckless.

I appreciated that ultimately it wasn't Bo that took down Gideon but all 3 of them together. That fits with the new theme for Mandalore "time to get away from this solo crap, we need to work together to win", and prevents the transition of Din to Bo that people were fearful of.

Clearly Gideon could come back in clone form, we will see.

I'll note that the ceremony did NOT involve the line "and I will never remove my helmet", so that's a big deal.

Seems like a solid ending to the show if it needs it. They could spin off Bo and Mandalore as its own thing or leave it for Din to go to periodically, or just bring it back in the movie if they need to.


Its funny that in some ways this season was just like the Mandolorians themselves, full of promise and potential but wasting away without purpose, flirting from one thing to another.....until finally a central purpose (retaking mandalore) brought everything together.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Economy of storytelling even if it makes the story no longer fully make sense!!!

It kinda feels almost like this is a trend in current movies.
Maybe we're just getting old and the average movie and TV enjoyer has moved on. They just fill in the gaps, just as we fill in the gap between someone saying he's going somewhere and a cut later him being there. But now we just fill in the plot. "How did she know?" "Must have told him between a cut." As we get better at this, at one point we'll have movies that start with, say, a lone men complaining about his loneliness, a big firefight between the men in heavy armor fighting an army of robots, and then another cut with him and his family and telling his children how he the alien warship made poof when he delivered the code. We won't ask what code, what warship, we'll applaud at the amazing spectacle we saw and how well the guy acted as lone loner, turning into a fighter and eventually a good parent.

Excuse my rambling. Where were we? Are you movie kids still on my lawn?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

The reveal of the Gideon clones and his plan for them was a bit... well, pointless. Okay, here the are, let's blow them up, by the way, they were force sensitive, and now I am really angry that I didn't acutally send my troopers to hunt you down and instead decided to wait around so my enemy had to go through my clones to get to me

I guess they could still come up later if a writer wants to. Maybe it turns out that one Force-Sensitive Gideon clone was already awake and had mind-controlled the original to fake his own death, forseeing Gideons failure against the Mandalorians.

Personally I kinda hope that they come back as the apparent evolved bad guy only to be executed by Thrawn for being an untrustworthy traitor to the Imperial Cause.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Maybe we're just getting old and the average movie and TV enjoyer has moved on.

I'd think that except shows that do join all the dots get praised heavily, and not just by our generation, but Zoomers too. And a lot of the most popular older stuff with Zoomers is the most meticulous. I think it's mostly just that there's a current bunch of people making a lot of TV/movies who learned a certain approach and aren't getting much negative feedback so are continuing with it.

The reveal of the Gideon clones and his plan for them was a bit... well, pointless. Okay, here the are, let's blow them up, by the way, they were force sensitive, and now I am really angry that I didn't acutally send my troopers to hunt you down and instead decided to wait around so my enemy had to go through my clones to get to me

Yeah that was almost funny.

I was like "Huh, as I DM I've certainly felt the way Gideon does here!".

It was like classic "my adventure got completely short-circuited by the PCs!". Carefully created this special threat, even hyped it up in a villain monologue, and ooooopsy, the PCs managed to just completely negate it without even really meaning to. "Oh this room is full of clones! Was anyone expecting that?" "Nope, I guess we'd better deal with them though!".

I also felt like Mando knowing how to casually explode the clones was bizarrely out-of-character. He's never been shown to be a tech-whiz before, but he found completely unfamiliar cloning equipment (presumably essentially medical in nature) and just knew exactly how to efficiently fiddle with it and make all the tanks explode, within what, a 60-120 seconds?

I see the storyboard had him shooting at the console that controlled the clone-tanks, which would have been wildly more in-character and I wonder why they didn't go with that?

I was hoping that "Moff Gideon" was going to use a Force power and then we'd realize that actually the guy in the black armour is another Gideon clone, and the real Gideon is still out there, but they didn't do that. Chekov's Gideon remains unfired.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I'd think that except shows that do join all the dots get praised heavily, and not just by our generation, but Zoomers too. And a lot of the most popular older stuff with Zoomers is the most meticulous. I think it's mostly just that there's a current bunch of people making a lot of TV/movies who learned a certain approach and aren't getting much negative feedback so are continuing with it.

Yeah that was almost funny.

I was like "Huh, as I DM I've certainly felt the way Gideon does here!".

It was like classic "my adventure got completely short-circuited by the PCs!". Carefully created this special threat, even hyped it up in a villain monologue, and ooooopsy, the PCs managed to just completely negate it without even really meaning to. "Oh this room is full of clones! Was anyone expecting that?" "Nope, I guess we'd better deal with them though!".

Yeah, that sounds famililar. "Oh, right, if the players do it like that they can just walk past all that. Oops.
I kinda feel stuff like that keeps my tension high as DM. (Though I am kinda more tense before than during the game.)

I also felt like Mando knowing how to casually explode the clones was bizarrely out-of-character. He's never been shown to be a tech-whiz before, but he found completely unfamiliar cloning equipment (presumably essentially medical in nature) and just knew exactly how to efficiently fiddle with it and make all the tanks explode, within what, a 60-120 seconds?

I see the storyboard had him shooting at the console that controlled the clone-tanks, which would have been wildly more in-character and I wonder why they didn't go with that?

I didn't really worry about that, but it is a honored tradition in Star Wars that shooting out consoles always does exactly what yo uwant - need the door closed for good, shoot the door console. Need it open for good? Shoot the door console. Keep the hacking and fancy stuff to the droids.

 

[Maxperson]

He is now! But why is he Din Grogu, rather than Grogu Djarin?

No Thrawn as some people speculated.

Fun jetpack fight.

Given how much flight time those jetpacks gave this fight, that dragon must literally hunt on the other side of that planet in order for the Mandos to run out of fuel chasing it to its nest.

I don’t think anyone was expecting the darksaber to get destroyed. That was a bit of a surprise!

I read an article where one of the guys who wears Din Djarin's armor said that some fans would be upset/disappointed by the finale. I'm guessing that he was referring to the end of the Darksaber.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I didn't really worry about that, but it is a honored tradition in Star Wars that shooting out consoles always does exactly what yo uwant - need the door closed for good, shoot the door console. Need it open for good? Shoot the door console. Keep the hacking and fancy stuff to the droids.

That's the thing, though!

Like, why change it from shooting the console to him carefully hacking it? Why not have him shoot it, or demand that the droid come back and hack it? The scene with the cop rat droids was very cute, especially when one fell off the platform when the droid blasted off.