I finally went ahead and rewatched season 1 and saw season 2 for the first time. It’s alright. It’s not great, but it’s decent as casual entertainment. I like the whole premise of a wandering warrior in the vein of Yojimbo and the Dollars trilogy. Where the show loses me, though, is its central conflict of the Empire trying to capture Grogu to harvest his midichlorians to create…Snoke? Or the Palpatine clone, maybe? Either way, it’s not an appealing central conflict for me, and there’s only so much you can do with that concept in a serialized show. Season 3 will probably move away from that, though.

I also think the show is often frustratingly vague about the state of the galaxy. I want to actually see the New Republic in some onscreen media, but we’ve only been given fleeting glimpses so far. I get that they’re setting the story on the anarchic frontier like Spaghetti Westerns, but since Spaghetti Westerns are set in an actual time and place in history, we already know the historical context. But with Mandalorian, our information about the galaxy during this time period is tantalizingly sparse.