I mostly enjoyed this episode, but this whole experience is giving me déjà vu, bringing up memories of Book of Boba Fett. Basically for like 75% of the show’s run time, the show just spins its wheels mostly going nowhere. Seeds are planted that admittedly do pay off later, but these seeds don’t require 75% of the show to feel like fluff. It’s always those last one or two episodes, comprising around 25% of the show, where stuff finally happens. This is exactly what happened with Boba Fett, where the primary villains didn’t do anything until the last scene of the second to last episode. Yet we had like 3 episodes where Boba Fett wanders around town trying to get an appointment with the mayor or whatever. It’s like whoever writes this stuff is incapable of writing with an evenly distributed sense of progression.

Now this Mandalorian episode introduces some legitimately cool things, like the Imperial Council. This is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a live-action depiction of Post-ROTJ EU stuff, and a rare instance where the political landscape of the post-ROTJ Galaxy is actually explored. We should have seen this council much earlier, dropping in on their nefarious meetings throughout the run of the series.

And yeah, it sucks that all of this is mostly just setting up the Sequels. There is literally nothing in Star Wars more boring than the First Order. But at least the Thrawn-related stuff has some potential to be interesting, since Thrawn’s story seems mostly orthogonal to any potential proto-First Order story-line. I’m just not remotely convinced that anyone involved with this show has the requisite Zahn-like writing talent to depict Thrawn correctly. Dave Filoni is not physically capable of writing lines like “But it was so artistically done”.