The way I see it, the franchise has been coasting off of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back for over 40 years now and almost nothing since has lived up to that standard of quality. Andor, ROTJ, TLJ, and the original Battlefront games are all that come close to me (and they don’t come all that close).
Correct. (I disagree about TLJ and I never played Battlefront, but agree with the general sentiment you express)
I’m still disappointed that nobody picked up on my “bricks and screws” reference. Ah well, I thought it was funny.
I’ve adopted an uncompromising pro-brick stance. Star Wars should include more bricks or brick-related masonry materials in the future.
Anyway, this episode was… adequate, I guess. If you watched Season 3 episodes 1 through 7, and then somebody came along and said to you “I’ll pay you $10,000 if you can write a full script for Episode 8 in 30 minutes”, this is basically what you would come up with. You’d resolve as many plot threads as efficiently as possible. You’d of course brush aside some open threads that are too annoying to deal with in a satisfactory way. You throw in a nice showdown with the main bad guy, etc. Bang. Done.
Then you’re like, shit, I forgot about the mythosaur. And I also forgot to add in a pay-off for those baby pterodactyls from that one episode. And a pay-off for that Order-66 flashback where we learned stuff about stuff. And a pay-off for that one time we had to sit through Dr. Pershing’s entire day. Whatever. If people want to see a Mandalorian riding a giant dinosaur, they can just watch the Holiday Special.
I don’t know what chaos was going on behind the scenes, but the overall strangeness that was Season 3 goes way beyond the usual type of problems that plague streaming shows. Most modern streaming shows become stale, repetitive or absurd around Season 3. But Mandalorian Season 3 was bad in particularly unique and fascinating ways. They erased all the dramatic and emotional consequences of everything that happened in Seasons 1 and 2, in an episode that aired as part of a spin-off show. That’s amazing.
Well, there’s no open plot threads left to wrap up. Not really the best way to generate interest in Season 4 (if Season 4 ever exists). So it turns out Gideon’s stupid clone project wasn’t some proto-Snoke experiment after all. He was just making more Moff Gideons. Maybe he published an article in a peer-reviewed Imperial science journal explaining how to genetically engineer force-sensitive beings. I hope Din at least got a really good deal on those moisture vaporators. Hopefully he breaks even after the next harvest. Man, Season 1 feels like a distant memory. Remember when Kuiil the Ugnaught retrained IG-11? Did that even really happen?
Season 3 was pointless in so many unique and interesting ways. This show would have gone out on a relatively high note if they just ended it with Season 2.