After watching this latest episode, I had to remind myself what made this show good in the first place.
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.
Exactly this. TBOBF undermined everything the climax of Season 2 (for all its flaws) built to.
Navarro increasingly looks like Galaxy’s Edge. The dialogue & performances seem like those of theme park characters in an interactive visitor experience.
The cartoony feel of the show suggests the growing influence of Filoni in the Mandoverse. I’d rather they’d kept the animated tales entirely separate from this. Not least because I find elements to be absurd - space whales - or corny.