So Far ‘The Mandalorian’ Season Three Has Been Blah

Famed astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson says he always keeps old books in his library. He does it to see what people thought of the world around them in their time. DeGrasse Tyson also likes to see what all these “experts” got wrong in their predictions for the future.

At the midway point of season three of The Mandalorian, I’m not quite ready to say that I was wrong in my prediction, but at times during the season, it wasn’t looking great.

But I’m not necessarily alone in my dire predictions for this season and what the audience is expecting from this Star Wars spinoff. The first episode, The Apostate, was the lowest rated in the history of the series on Rotten Tomato with a 79 percent score. It was also the least-watched episode in The Mandalorian’s history, with only 1.5 million viewers one week after its release.

Having said that, The Apostate was the worst episode of the season so far. It was like telling someone they’re going on a trip to Walt Disney World, and then you have to watch 30 minutes of them packing. We were heading to Mandalore but had to pack up all the usual suspects first and pirates for some reason. We took viewers from Luke Skywalker taking down Moff Gideon’s ship to an episode about an up-and-coming trading post. Huh? How is that even in the plot?

Episode two, The Mines of Mandalore, finally gave the audience everything we could have wanted. It had the mythology of Mandalore and Din Djarin fighting for his life with the help of Bo-Katan. The ultimate moment of the episode, and the first half of the season, was when Bo-Katan had to save Djarin from the Living Waters and came face-to-face with a Mythosaur.

The Convert may be the most controversial in the history of The Mandalorian, especially to the fans. Many hated it, calling it filler as the storyline shifted from Grogu and Din Djarin to Dr. Pershing and Elia Kane. This episode was reminiscent of Andor but felt out of place in The Mandalorian. In the end, it left more questions than answers.

This week’s episode, The Foundling, was, by far, the shortest, but it gave us the greatest reward. We learned that Grogu was present at the burning of the Jedi Temple at the end of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. 

Grogu was saved by Jedi Master Kelleran Beq, played by actor Ahmed Best. It was Best the much-maligned Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Hopefully, saving, Baby Yoda will get Star Wars fans off his back.

The Mandalorian, so far, has been…okay. Not great, but not bad. With four more episodes in the season, there are still some questions the show needs to answer: What more will we learn about Grogu’s past? Where was he before he was kidnapped in season one and what happened to Kelleran Beq?

Will Bo-Katan continue to walk the ancient ways of the Mandalorian? Will Din Djarin and his clan return to Mandalore? And where is the Dr. Pershing storyline going?

It seems like Dithatarin has been a secondary player in his show this season. Let’s move the actual Mandalorian back to the front of his show. Hopefully, we’ll start getting some satisfying answers soon. Show-runner Jon Favreau has already promised a fourth season, so hopefully, he doesn’t delay our gratitude until then. Or maybe The Mandalorian will get caught up in CEO Bob Iger’s purge of the Star Wars universe, and we’ll never know.

And maybe, like the book in DeGrasse Tyson’s library, I’ll be proven wrong and have to write a full apology. But for now, at least, my prediction looks pretty good.

Disclaimer: The opinions addressed in this article are the writer’s and may not reflect the sentiments of Disney Fanatic as a whole.