A Good Finale To A Bad Season

Well, we know where the budget for The Mandalorian’s third season went. It appears a good chunk of it was saved for the finale, which was a step up in quality across the board, but especially in terms of choreography during the epic fight scenes. While much of this season’s action felt cheap and stilted, ‘The Return’ had a bunch of really epic, awesome confrontations between Mando, the Mandalorians and Moff Gideon’s forces. Din Djarin finally remembered he was a badass warrior—it just took him all season to get back to the character fans fell in love with in the beginning.

This is the puzzling and frustrating thing about The Mandalorian’s Season 3 finale. In so many ways I really loved it, but it’s held back from greatness by the really, deeply lackluster season that preceded it.

A few of the things that I disliked about Season 3:

• Mando was basically incompetent the entire season. None of the badass fighting skills that we’ve seen in past seasons (including The Book Of Boba Fett) made an appearance and then—all of a sudden—he was taking down bad guys like John Wick in the season finale.
• The Mandalorians were similarly presented as fairly incompetent, especially on their new, monster-filled planet where they just let dragons make off with their kids and kept running out of jetpack fuel.
• Fight choreography has been awful. Even the final scene in Episode 7 where Paz Vizsla was killed featured a bunch of bad guys just standing there firing. Nobody taking cover, or hovering in the air, or even just kneeling to make it look cool.
• Too much filler. Having weird bottle episodes like Episode 3 with the clone scientist or Episode 6 with the Scooby Doo stuff and the cameos just felt so tonally bizarre. It’s one thing to have a side-quest with Mando hunting down a bounty and being a badass, but Lizzo? And did we really need an entire episode to establish that Elia Kane was a spy for the Empire?
• The quality was all over the place. Really weird dialogue, stilted deliveries from a lot of the actors, some bizarre prop and costume choices, sloppy editing—if you go back and watch Season 1, you’ll see just how much more consistent the quality was.
• I like Bo-Katan but I admit, I really do miss some of the older cast members like Cara Dune and Migs Mayfeld.

In any case, this episode wrapped up a lot in a short, 38-minute runtime. We get the epic battle between the Mandalorians and Gideon’s forces, which was awesome. Axe Woves pulls a very similar maneuver to Holdo in The Last Jedi but it actually made sense, was even more badass and he managed to do it while A) staying alive himself and B) not acting like a complete jerk about everything.

While Mando got the majority of awesome fight scenes, Grogu had his own moments, helping fight off the Praetorian guard and then using the Force to save Bo-Katan, himself and Din Djarin from the explosion. This was a direct call-back to him saving them from the fire-troopers in Season 1, but this time the conflagration was much bigger and he didn’t pass out immediately afterward. Just plopped down onto his butt. He is growing in The Force, clearly.

I did like that it took teamwork to bring down Gideon, whose Beskar suit is honestly one of the coolest in all of Star Wars. Not as iconic as Vader’s, but in many ways I think it’s actually a lot slicker and more practical. I’m less sure how to feel about him just crushing the Darksaber like it was a twig. Kind of an odd end to the fabled blade, though perhaps fitting. I’m still making up my mind about that.

Is Gideon dead? That’s less certain. Is anyone ever truly dead in Star Wars? We saw him get caught by the flames, but he was in his armor and we never saw a body. That’s either an important detail or it isn’t. We shall see in Season 4.

Speaking of Season 4, I almost wish there wasn’t one. In the end, Mando adopts Grogu so that he can become a Mandalorian apprentice. The new dad then goes and gets a good job, working as a cleaner for the New Republic hunting down Imperials. Then he gets a nice new house and the episode wraps up on him sitting on his porch, watching his kid play in the yard. There’s even a Looney Tunes-style circle that closes in on the sweet moment that makes it feel even more like the end of the entire series, not just the season.

But while the show hasn’t been officially renewed, we do know that creators Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni have already been working on the scripts and want to keep making the show as long as possible. I sincerely doubt that Disney has any plans to cancel one of their biggest hits.

Still, it felt like a reset. The end of an arc. Maybe Season 4 will just be a series of one-off adventures with Din Grogu and Din Djarin hunting down Imperials and other bounties, with all the epic Mandalore and Moff Gideon stuff shoved aside. I’d be okay with that.

Three other important points:

• There were no spies. After last week’s episode, everyone started theorizing that either Axe or the Armorer or maybe the new Mandalorians they meet on the planet would be double agents working for Gideon. If that’s the case, none of them were revealed in the finale.
• Mando didn’t die! I was getting worried last week that this was their plan and that he’d die and Bo-Katan or Grogu would become the titular Mandalorian going forward, but he survived and is off living the dream on Navarro with his kid.
• No post-credits scene! This was a surprise. I really thought we’d get a glimpse of Thrawn, or maybe just Moff Gideon rising from the ashes. Something. In some ways, the lack of a post-credits scene makes this feel even more like a series finale.

All told, a very enjoyable season finale but one that comes after so much fluff and subpar material that it feels a bit like a letdown in spite of itself. Season 3 was a wasted opportunity to do a lot more, but it spun its wheels for most of the season and only really got to the good stuff in the final two episodes.

Next up: Ahsoka in August and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor—the new video game sequel to Fallen Order—next week. Hopefully both will be really great.

What did you think of the Season 3 finale? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.