What Is The Mandalorian’s Grogu Endgame?

Look, I love Grogu. You love Grogu. We all love Grogu. But the longer The Mandalorian goes on, a show that Jon Favreau has said does not really have an end in sight, I do have to wonder where they’re taking the former Baby Yoda, given the events of the past two seasons.

For a while, the main “questline” of The Mandalorian made sense. Protect Grogu and get him to the Jedi where they could develop his Force powers. That culminated in the (in)famous season 2 finale in which a digital post-ROTJ Luke Skywalker showed up to personally train Grogu at his newly formed Jedi Academy.

But the show quickly understood that Grogu couldn’t be written out, as if that was ever the plan in the first place, so that idea was killed off in of all places, The Book of Boba Fett, where its standalone Mando episodes had Grogu actively rejecting Jedi training after learning how to do some backflips, and choosing instead to return to The Mandalorian and learn the ways of…the Mandalorians.

Now we are in season 3 and Grogu is doing Mandalorian training, which is exactly as goofy as it sounds. The little chicken nugget is doing backflips through the air and shooting Mandalorian preteens with paintball darts. He’s already gotten Beskar chainmail before this, and now he’s gotten a Beskar chestplate that doesn’t fit him. We get a lengthy explanation about why, despite being a Mandalorian Foundling in training, he’s not wearing a helmet yet, because he’s too young to “speak the Creed” which is a requisite for wearing the helmet. Though we’ve heard him start to babble a bit, so he may actually talk soon.

What…is the endgame here? The logical endpoint of Mandalorian training is that you have to eventually put on a helmet and never take it off again except when you eat or sleep by yourself. Take it off and you have to go all the way to bombed-out Mandalore and swim with Mythosaurs in order to redeem yourself. So are we headed toward Grogu eventually talking and speaking the Creed and getting a tiny little Mandalorian helmet with cut-outs for his ears?

The way the show gets around this, I suppose, is Grogu’s incredibly slow aging process, where he’s already 50+ years old, as said in the pilot, and he’s essentially still a baby. Maybe more like a human six year-old. We don’t know exactly when the “Yoda species” stops being babies, but Yoda, being “old,” was reportedly 900 years old when he died. The events of The Mandalorian take place 25 years before The Force Awakens so yeah, I think there’s some time where Grogu is still a babbling baby who no one is going to force into a helmet.

But what is the endgame here? I’m not really seeing a cohesive point to this third season of The Mandalorian right now. I thought that there was sort of a new Grogu quest where at one point, they talked about finding others of his species, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. Now, if anything is going on, we appear to be working on storylines leading to the cloning of the Emperor, possibly, and then definitely the arrival of Thrawn, who will probably be the Big Bad across the shared Mando and Ahsoka series. But in episode 4, we’ve barely made any moves in that direction, and it’s unclear how exactly Grogu fits into any of this other than as sort of side character now in Foundling training.

If anything, I think Bo-Katan’s storyline has been more interesting than Mando and Grogu’s development in season 3, as we see her “redeemed” as a true Mandalorian, witnessing a real Mythosaur and perhaps on the path to justice for Mandalore and becoming its leader once again eventually, now that there is an actual somewhat sizable Mandalorian clan to manage. Mando and Grogu are sort of just…around right now, side characters in their own show, which is odd.

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