The Mandalorian is entertaining not just for what it shows, but for what it only hints at. We never saw Din Djarin’s face until the end of Season 1, which made the reveal in the season finale all the more powerful. We saw Grogu go on all sorts of adventures without knowing where he came from, which made his Season 3 flashback prologue years later exciting.
In the second episode of Season 3, we caught a hint of another thrilling sight... but that hint might be all we ever see. Fans may be disappointed, but the reasoning is sound.
One of the season’s main themes was faith, and our heroes’ relationship to it. Din sought to be forgiven by the Children of the Watch, while Bo-Katan Kryze grew to doubt her own preconceived notions about the group, which she’d once dismissed as a “zealous cult.”
In Episode 2, Bo-Katan had to dive into the living waters of Mandalore’s mines to save Din Djarin, and while underwater she came face to face with a creature so mythical it’s in the name: a mythosaur. We never saw the creature, just a monstrous eye, but it was enough to make Bo-Katan doubt everything she thought she knew.
In an episode of Disney Gallery about the making of Season 3, co-showrunner Dave Filoni discussed the reveal, and why he felt showing the entire creature wasn’t a good idea.
“The mythosaur moment for her is a moment of faith where she sees something that should be impossible, and she is asked to believe in it,” Filoni said. “If the creature gets up out of the water and reveals itself, it’s just way too obvious. It has to be something isolated, something only she sees. She has to make a choice: do I trust my eyes? Did I really see that? Is that really possible?”
While this is a good insight into Bo-Katan’s nature and spiritual awakening, it’s bad news for fans who wanted to see the mythosaur rise up and truly fulfill the prophecy the Armorer mentioned in The Book of Boba Fett. But again, this is an example of The Mandalorian being stronger for what it doesn’t show. We, like Bo-Katan, have to ask ourselves if that moment was real.
The Mandalorian is streaming on Disney+.
