"The Mandalorian" is not much of a quote generator aside from "This is the way," the spartan refrain of Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his warrior Tribe. But one arrogant line from the third season finale, "The Return," stands out enough to mean something: "Mandalorians are weak once they lose their trinkets."
The re-emerged Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito) pompously declares this once he's battered his foe Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sackhoff) into what he assumes is submission.
To him, this is the moral of their story, evoked by crushing the legendary Darksaber in her hand. From what he knows of Mandalorian tradition, only a person who possesses the weapon has the right to rule. Without it, he thinks she's nothing. But the Imperial warlord isn't privy to the road that brought her to this showdown.
Most of Bo-Katan's third-season victories were claimed without Darksaber in her hand. She earns the respect of The Tribe, people she once wrote off as zealots, by leading a party to save one of their children and commanding successful missions against dishonorable enemies.
Then Bo-Katan earns back the leadership of the mercenaries who once followed her by taking on her former ally Axe Woves (Simon Kassianides) in single combat. While partly powered by jet packs, it's primarily hand-to-hand, and she proves to be a better fighter.
Moff Gideon only overcomes Bo-Katan, and Din Djarin before she shows up, because he's wearing supercharged armor made of Beskar alloy. But our Mando joins Bo-Katan without his weapons – as does Grogu, without the robot walker made from the remains of IG-11. Together, and with a huge helping of the Force, thanks to Grogu, they take on Moff Gideon and survive. They aren't the ones who deal the death blow, though.
That honor goes to Axe, who stays behind in the Imperial cruiser the mercenaries jacked at one time long enough to crash it into the base Moff Gideon built on their home planet, abandoning ship before impact. He sacrifices his biggest trinket to win the battle, concluding this season's Mandalore storyline.
Factions reunited and the Great Forge re-lit, Mandalore once again belongs to Mandalorians. But the third season sure did drag us through a whole lot of trinkets to get us to this point, the effect of which was to shortchange the live-action development of Bo-Katan's mythology, and that's a shame.
The character fans got to know in "The Clone Wars" and "Star Wars: Rebels" deserves better. Sackhoff, who voiced Bo-Katan in those animated series before playing her in this one, does a compelling job with what she's given, which only makes us want more of her.
A common and perhaps main gripe about these eight 2023 episodes is that "The Mandalorian" has strayed too far afield from what drew people to the series in the first place: the winning combination of Pascal's Mando and Grogu.
In a season where TV's reluctant if protective daddy seems to be everywhere, placing him in a supporting role in service of developing an entire planetary culture's mythos seems unwise.
Series creator Jon Favreau couldn't have known the extent to which "The Last of Us" would further blow up the popularity of his star when he and his co-producers plotted this season. Also, nobody ever specified that "The Mandalorian" had to only be about his bounty hunter or that it's obligated to remain the same weekly adventure show that it used to be.
But it's one thing to explore and broaden a character's biography by making a season's arc more serialized and another to use half of a short season's episodes as a highly trafficked jump point for other concepts and shows.
Moff Gideon's line gets it backward, figuratively speaking – it's the Mandalorians that make the trinkets, not the other way around. As this site and others have pointed out, the success of "The Mandalorian" inspired Disney to place it in service of multiple agendas. It's a spinoff machine, although the best episode of the first of those, "The Book of Boba Fett," was actually a "Mandalorian" chapter.
In a season where Pascal seems to be everywhere, placing him in a supporting role [to] an entire planetary culture's mythos seems unwise.
That tactic didn't quite work as well when Favreau pulled away from the main action in the third season for a lengthy side trip to Coruscant to check in on ex-Imperial geneticist Dr. Pershing (Omid Abtahi) and have him cross paths with Elia Kane (Katy O'Brian). The narrative reasons for this are left unclear until the second to last episode when Moff Gideon returns – with clones, packed in water, that are easily drained to death by Din Djarin shattering their tanks. Pershing, for his part, doesn't re-emerge.
From a franchise strategy angle, this is an effort to fortify the links between the fall of the Empire and the surge of The First Order era. That makes it explainable, but not satisfying.
In such a short TV season, "The Mandalorian" could have trained its focus on Bo-Katan's revival from losing everything to regaining her homeworld and reuniting her people. Many would still complain about the Din Djarin and Baby Yoda having to share that spotlight with a lesser-known Mandalorian.
Still, one stable, ongoing subplot is better than throwing dissonance into that storyline's flow by interrupting it with subplots that don't apparently relate to the main mission.
Sackhoff ably handled the expansion of a challenging role, walking a particularly treacherous way between canon-devoted wonks scrutinizing her character's evolution and audiences meeting her afresh in this series. Helpfully she already has the hearts of the "Battlestar Galactica" faithful who loved her as Starbuck and may perhaps appreciate the way her physicality wasn't wasted here. Her aptitude and charisma also made her under usage more prominent.
Mandalorian culture, we're told in brief reminiscences from Bo-Katan and The Armorer (Emily Swallow), is a rich and proud culture weakened by infighting and scattered across the stars. Season 3 ends with a small portion of its people reunited in a grandly staged gathering that holds the spiritual punch of bolting one more slat into place along that franchise bridge. The lesson voiced by Bo-Katan is one of cohesion: "Mandalorians are stronger together."
Lady Kryze, we salute your greatness and hope future seasons apply that wisdom.
In the meantime, many must have been pleased to see how Mando and Grogu wound up. Din Djarin adopted The Kid, who is now officially an apprentice known as Din Grogu, and will never stop being Baby Yoda in our hearts
With Mandalore resettled, the pair zip over to the Alliance outpost to rendezvous with their X-Wing pilot buddy Carson Teva (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee), who agrees to work with Din Djarin as an unofficial contractor to track down rogue Imperials. In exchange, the bounty hunter claims an IG assassin droid head that's in the base's bar.
Cut to Nevarro, where Greef Karga (Carl Weathers) presents bounty hunter father and Force-wielding son with a cabin and land where they can lay low when they aren't saving the galaxy. In turn, Mando gifts the people of Nevarro City a newly reprogrammed IG-11 as its marshal.
"The Return" closes with Din Djarin watching Din Grogu levitate a frog from the pond in front of their cabin, ending with a hint that the tale is circling back to the simpler way it used to be. That's all many people asked of "The Mandalorian," and shouldn't be too much.
