The Mandalorian Now Embodies Disney’s Painful Struggle With Star Wars’ Identity

This Wednesday’s episode of The Mandalorian was a controversial one, given its slate of surprise cameos and its deviation from the main plotline of the series for most of its runtime. It’s a “side quest,” as these episodes are usually called, this one being an adventure where Din and Bo-Katan essentially acted as space cops solving a crime for Jack Black and Lizzo, rulers of a local planet. And the bad guy was Christopher Lloyd. Also Sasha Banks from the WWE was there. It was a whole thing.

The Mandalorian has gone from the singular best thing Disney Star Wars has produced to falling to second place behind Andor, and generating some confusion about what exactly this series is trying to be. My answer would be “too many things,” and really, I think at this point The Mandalorian represents Disney’s inability to really understand what they want to do with Star Wars. In the past two seasons of The Mandalorian alone, we have:

• Goofy, fun, one-off episodes like this with wild guest stars channeling Star Wars’ silliest past moments.
• The desire to still be directly connected to the original Skywalker saga with the appearance of Luke himself, plus some indications that a current plotline may lead to the sequel trilogy’s Palpatine cloning.
• A heavy influence, the majority of the show probably, to continue storylines from Dave Filoni’s animated saga by bringing characters and plotlines to live action. Bo-Katan in this season has effectively taken over as lead from Din himself.
• Through Filoni, reaching all the way back to the Expanded Universe to bring back characters like Thrawn despite chunks of that previously being declared non-canon.

Hell, I’m not convinced they won’t try to integrate the latest video game, Jedi Fallen Order, with a Cal Kestis appearance at some point.

More and more The Mandalorian feels like a central hub connected to four or five wildly different directions for the Disney Star Wars universe, often resulting in conflicting tones episode to episode, or even within singular episodes. Presently, it feels like Din’s story is practically over, with no Grogu to deliver anywhere, and giving up any potential claim to the throne of Mandalore by just handing over his darksaber. There are a lot of “plots” circling The Mandalorian now, but very few of them seem to involve Din or Grogu as anything but bodies to A) blast things or B) be cute.

I fundamentally think Disney just doesn’t quite know what to do with Star Wars from here. I think Dave Filoni knows what he wants to do, evolving his own personal Clone Wars/Rebels storylines with Mando plotlines, the Ahsoka show and the return of Thrawn. But that’s just a chunk of the universe, and the rest of it feels very directionless, outside of Andor being its own self-contained, extremely good thing. Why do you think there aren’t even movies anymore?

I think this is why The Mandalorian feels so weird right now, that’s it’s trying to be all these different things and spin-off all these different storylines and tones within one series. And that’s just too much to put on one show.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.