After watching this latest episode, I had to remind myself what made this show good in the first place.

Season 1 was compelling for many reasons:

It was the first live-action Star Wars show
It showed us a much smaller-scale, simple story set in the Star Wars galaxy, which felt unique at the time
It depicted this gritty, lawless, wild-west/frontier atmosphere that gave off similar vibes to the Original Trilogy
The over-arching plot was simple and effective: ruthless bounty-hunter must protect small innocent child

Of course, even Season 1 had a lot of the “video game side-quest” style writing, but at the time I never minded it and the idea of a bounty hunter and a little child going on random unconnected adventures across the Outer Rim of the Star Wars Galaxy seemed charming and fascinating.

The Mandalorian episode that (inexplicably) aired as a Book of Boba Fett episode (I think it was Episode 5) somewhat recaptured a lot of the original charm of this series. Mando was alone, off on a job, looking for his target in some grimy underworld meat locker. There was unexpected extreme violence (Mando slices some criminal in half, then walks around with a bisected corpse in a bag), which recaptured the sense of danger and lawlessness prevalent in the first season. The giant “ring” space station was an incredible new location (despite being a common sci-fi element).

But the ACTUAL Season 3 Premier somehow just seemed incredibly bland, safe and directionless. The fact that Baby Yoda is suddenly back makes the show feel dramatically meaningless to me. Suddenly it’s much harder to care about anything going on. Every shot of Baby Yoda doing something cute comes off now as forced and manipulative. It feels like the “edge” of Season 1 is gone. The Wild West of the Outer Rim feels closer to a Disney theme park now. This might have something to do with Navarro now having developed into a thriving First World city - but the sense of blandness permeates beyond that. There’s a fight with a giant monster, but it comes out of nowhere and feels arbitrary and meaningless, unlike the Krayt Dragon fight in Season 2, which was integrated into the plot. We meet some “Space Pirates”, but they feel like silly cartoons. Pirates/gangsters in Star Wars used to be depicted with a certain level of grotesque darkness, while keeping everything rated PG. Jabba the Hutt may have been a giant slug with a cartoon laugh, but he also executed his dancing slave girl because she refused to “come closer”.

I don’t know. This just feels like a different show than Season 1. It just feels bland and aimless, especially since the heavy emotional payoff from last season was basically rendered completely pointless. I feel like that decision caused incalculable damage to the series as a whole. On top of that, there’s no real “hook” or open plot thread that seems particularly engaging. There’s this potentially exciting idea of “retaking Mandalore” floating around, but what does that even mean? Retake it from what? I thought it was almost entirely irradiated and uninhabitable. In fact, I’m not sure what Bo Katan expected to do even if she had the Dark Saber.

Anyway, it isn’t looking good at this point, but hopefully I’m wrong and the rest of the Season turns out to be amazing.