Hey, all! Here’s what is going on with Book 5:

I’m torn. I have two versions of the film now… both are radically different from one another. Let me share my discoveries/dilemmas.

Draft 1 is akin to my previous Book 5 containing most of BoBF presented in typical ACBAGEL fashion. This contains the updates to my Boba story I have previously mentioned.

Draft 2 is a completely new film from the ground up. A film solely about Din’s journey without Grogu. This goes straight from his BoBF scenes to his S3 Apostate arc with the Underworld/Pirates as the main antagonist, concluding with him helping Nevarro and then finally going to check on Grogu once he has regained status as a Mandalorian.

The main reason I felt the need for a different vision for the film after I completed Draft 1 was because I started working on Book 6 and something felt very wrong. I couldn’t place Din’s motives together in any sensible way. In BoBF he is back to his purposeless, violent ways of bounty hunting, then learns how he is an apostate and cast away, has no hope that he will ever reuinite with Grogu, so restoring himself before his people is his only purpose. It is very offputting for him to go through this and then just ignore his apostate status and his Mines of Mandalore quest for SO long. If that apostate theme is introduced here as such an impactful and life changing moment, it needs to be addressed and not pushed off for no discenrable reason, because there’s really nothing else Din would do. That’s all he has left.

Let’s consider the D+ series of events:

After completing his mission with Grogu, Din goes back to bounty hunting for an undetermined amount of time, finally tracks down his clan, but very quickly admits he violated the creed and is cast out of his clan as an apostate (Love it all, it makes sense and is hugely impactful. It sets up so many possibilities for the future of Din’s story)
Din sulks off to Tatooine to get a new ship, supposedly with the intent to go to Mandalore in it? (Sure, that makes sense. If he needs to fly to Mandalore alone, he needs a way to get there and explore to find the mines)
While getting his ship, he learns that Boba needs help ASAP and says he will assist, but then suddenly decides he has to visit Grogu immediately (Starting to confuse me here, I can somewhat understand Din wanting to lend Boba a quick favor, they have some mutual respect going on, and Boba doesn’t care about Din’s violation of the creed so Din is comforted by a Mandalorian that accepts him, but the need to go see Grogu RIGHT NOW throws a massive wrench in the pacing. Surely, that can wait? Why does he have to go there right this second? This was where the Disney forced reuinion stuff starts to interfere… With no actual urgency in the plot, Din tells Boba to wait until he gets back and then rushes to check on Grogu. I get it, he misses him and wants to give him the armor, but there’s no reason at all this shouldn’t just happen after the Tatooine battle. [And this is how I have my Book 5 Draft 1 setup, visit Grogu AFTER Tatooine concludes])
Din flies across the entire galaxy to check on Grogu, learns he can’t really interfere and immediately leaves. We then see ALL of Grogu’s Jedi training take place in 20 minutes. (Sigh… Great emotional scenes on their own, but again, we learn there truly was no urgency at all to do this right now and it ends up feeling like a distraction. It strips this visit of much of its emotional weight. When he leaves to go right back to Tatooine it’s like… ok, that was touching but kind of pointless in the overall plot structure. It is also VERY confusing how much time passes in these events. How long was Grogu with Luke? Some of the lessons seem very basic Day 1 stuff, so what was he doing with Luke in between seasons? He does all of this training while Din is flying back to Tatooine? I can’t get a grasp on the chronolgy here)
Din goes straight back to Tatooine to help Boba instead of going to Mandalore (Aside from just zooming back and forth across the galaxy for no presented reason, this decision from Din is fine, he already promised Boba he would help him and Din has always been a man of his word)
Din fights on Tatooine to stay true to his oath, but WHOA he reunites with Grogu who followed him, and after the battle they jump off to hyperspace, and we are left with 0 clue with where they go or intend to do next (I am definitely on the side of Din and Grogu reuniting in BoBF is the worst thing to ever happen in the Mandalorian. No need to beat a dead horse here as many already share that sort of sentiment, and I had always planned to NOT make them reunite here. The other problem is that the “film”/BoBF ends here. We get this whole solo Din on the apostate’s repentance trail setup, but then suddenly Grogu returns and makes that all seem unnecessary. The first 2 seasons were all about how Grogu grows to be Din’s #1 purpose giver, not the Mandalorian clans… So it’s like, wait, does Din even care about being an apostate anymore? He can just stay with Grogu now like he always wanted. Where are they going now? What do they want to do together?)
With Din’s motivations and emotions completely unknown at this point, we learn that offscreen Din meets a Jawa on some unknown planet and that Jawa had already met a random traveler who had somehow made it to the surface of Mandalore and pulled a tome out of the crystal and then sold it to the Jawa and then Din buys that tome… Whew. Then Din, for no apparent reason, goes back to his former Mandalorian clan on their random new rock world hideout, even though he is still a banished apostate, to tell them that he acquired this tome from a Jawa from a traveler who said they made it to the surface. And the Armorer is like, “Ok…? But did you baptise yet?” and Din says no and so is still told to leave, but then he STILL doesn’t go to Mandalore. (Holy crap! This is an absolute mess. First of all, THIS is how we learn that Din still wants to not be an apostate even though he has Grogu again? From an offscreen event? And then Din looks like a complete moron traveling to his old clan to tell them about this third party story with no real information and no actual steps made towards repentance. I mean, this is beyond awful. Grogu is serving no function here as he is completely ignored in all of this, we see that them reuniting changed nothing at all about the plot that was so carefully setup, and that Din just reverts back to his secondary motivation of wanting repentance without showing us anything on screen. No character growth at all for him and Grogu and an absolute mess of his character arc is unfolding)
So now Din goes to Nevarro because he NEEDS IG-11! No other droid will do, that’s the only one he trusts to search for the mines with him. Thankfully, IG-11 is mostly intact, except for one crucial part that would restore his memory. Since no one on the planet has this part, Din leaves empty handed but tells Greef he will be back with the part. (More yikes, that fact that IG-11 even has any parts usable aside, this is so forced in… We haven’t seen IG-11 on screen for years. Years in real life and years in the show. But Din NEEDS him right now! He can’t find the mines without him specifically, but not really, he just wants him. Another extremely distracting wrench in the plot structure, and that’s not even considering the whole pirate arc that gets setup while he’s here.)

(Am I missing something here? How is R5 already following Din on Nevarro? Season 3 Episode 1 right after they land and walk. Din doesn’t even pickup R5 from Pelli until the next episode. Also, there are a TON of scenes where Grogu completely vanishes from sight. Like one shot he’s hovering right next to Din’s hip, the next he is nowhere to be found. Here he is clearly to the left of Greef, and then POOF he is gone again, but then in the VERY NEXT SHOT he is directly behind them walking but his compositing and color on the scene looks super wonky. It makes even less sense when you see it play out in video form rather than these stills. I mean there’s at least 5 instances of this where he should be there on the screen based on his previous placement but he’s not, and this occurs throughout all of Nevarro. Am I losing my mind with all this or is this evidence of some massive scene rearranging going on from Disney last minute? It’s like they had originally shot the whole planet with R5 and no Grogu at one point, and then re-shot half the scenes again to add Grogu in with a new storyline, but didn’t do a good job as Grogu is still missing from a ton of the new shots. This would also mean that Din was supposed to go to Tatooine before episode 2. Din also lands on Nevarro with Grogu still in the bubble instead of the droid port, but then R5 is following him in the next shot… So there are tons of different reshoots and VFX alterations going back and forth and it is a terribly messy presentation. This is just at first glance of my editing too, I’m sure there’s a ton more wrong here if you go frame by frame on this world.)

So Din is apparently now searching for this part to fix IG before he can go to Mandalore, so hmmm, where will he go to find it? Maybe he will try some scrapyard world like Raxus Pri- wait, what? Why is he suddenly in the Mandalore system? He’s landing on Kalevala from The Clone Wars? So this must be where Bo-Katan is… wait why does Din think she has or knows where the IG-11 part is? Din tells her that he wishes to join her in going to Mandalore. She says no one will follow her without the Darksaber, then Din just says that he is going anyways and leaves in under 2 minutes. (What the hell is going on? I thought he needed the droid part? Why did he just randomly go to Bo-Katan and want to join her in liberating Mandalore?? Bo-Katan sees Grogu next to him and doesn’t react at all??? Is she not confused how they reunited? Last thing she did with them was that enormously risky quest to rescue Grogu and she saw him leave with LUKE SKYWALKER. Then Din leaves without ever mentioning the droid and it seems like he is going to Mandalore right now without him? I am SO lost in this disjointed order of events.)
So I guess Din is just suddenly okay with going to the Mines alone without IG since he is only a few minutes flight away from Mandalo- Oh ok, random scene of Pelli on Tatooine, maybe it’s setting something up with Boba returning to join Din on Mandalore? That would be kind of cool for them to- WHAT?? How and WHY is the N1 instantly landing on Tatooine?! Din gets out and tells Pelli he needs the IG11 part…! Wtf is going on?? Why did he go right to the Mandalore system to talk to Bo BEFORE getting the droid part if that’s what he still wanted? Now he has to go ALL THE WAY BACK to the system he just came from! But wait! She doesn’t have the part, and the Jawas don’t have it, so she tells him to just take R5 and Din says ok fine I guess. He then flies ALL THE WAY back to Mandalore where he JUST CAME FROM to now go into the Mines with R5 instead of IG…??? (And this is where I gave up. This order of events is so beyond understanding or any form of logical sequencing it’s not even possible to edit this into anything sensible without RADICAL changes. And we’re only 5 minutes into Season 3 Episode 2 at this point and still have an enormous mess of pacing ahead throughout the rest of the season. This is seriously a complete nightmare plot structure. It is unsalvagable in its current form.)

Din’s apostasy happens in point #1 there and isn’t even resolved through EVERYTHING I wrote there. So so so many random events and distractions, nonsensical plot structure, and blatant mental errors. That is why I had a meltdown after Book 5 Draft 1 and starting to build Book 6.

Let me propose to you an alternative solution:

Book 5 Draft 2:

Din’s Ringworld story, he hunts the bounty, and we see what Din is like absent of Grogu. He has reverted back to his old brutal, somewhat purposeless self. Din is banished and I add in dialogue from Mando S3 from Armorer so he has a crystal clear picture of how he can be restored (this just avoids him going to that Rock planet to have a 95% identical conversation that makes him look like a moron).
Din takes a transport ship from Ringworld to Nevarro, where we get the scene of him and Greef discussing his desire to fix IG-11 to search the Mines with him. Din is lonely and he is seeking any resemblance of companionship as he feels like he has lost everything. He learns that this task to restore IG-11 is a fools errand and there is no way to achieve what he wants. The man is extremely depressed and hopelessly alone now. He runs into the subsequent trouble with the Pirates on the surface just to add onto his neverending trials. Mando then leaves on another transport ship to go to Tatooine to get his new Razorcrest so he can explore Mandalore.
When Din gets to Tatooine, we now get the Pelli building N1 sequence. During the test flight, Din encounters Gorian Shand’s pirates above Tatooine. We get the dogfight scene as in S3 with him testing out the new N1, before he lands back on Tatooine and gets R5 instead.
Din, still searching for companionship, goes to Bo-Katan as she is right next to Mandalore where he is headed anyways. She rejects him too, and again, Din sulks off completely alone in his suffering. The rest of the mines play out without Grogu. He gets captured alone and all hope is lost, he has resigned himself to die. (This also explains why he doesn’t even try to fight the freaky droid or try to break out later, he has lost all will to even live)
R5 notices Din isn’t coming back to the ship, so he jets out by himself and returns to Bo’s castle. She has a change of heart, curious to see Mandalore for herself, and goes to save Din alone. The rest of the Mines and baptisms play out.
Now restored, Bo takes Din back to his ship on Kalevala, only for them to be ambushed and the whole castle to be bombed by Imperials. Din and Bo then escape to the Mando clan rock planet (for the first time now) and she is introduced to the Watch as they are both accepted into the clan.
Nevarro is suddenly attacked by the Pirates that have been dogging Din throughout the film and we play out the final storyline of the Mandalorian clan retaking that world as a temporary home. Bo is given a task to go reunite the clans under this new hope for Mandalore, and Din, not only again a Mandalorian, but a Mandalorian hero carrying the Darksaber to bring them all to Mandalore, goes to see Grogu, his true desire, only to realize that he still can’t be with him and has to leave after delivering the armor as we get a tiny glimpse of Grogu training his new Jedi powers. The end.

Having the Nevarro retaking happen as the conclusion of Book 5 serves a few purposes. The first is that it brings the pirates into the story to fulfill the role of the villain for this film which some of Season 3 was lacking as it bounced around random storylines. We open the film with Din hunting criminals, he is attacked by pirates, and then he brings the clan together to save Nevarro from pirate invasion, all while going on a full character arc of personal redemption. We now have a clear and concise antagonist that helps give Din’s journey some guidance. Second, this gives the Mandalorains more agency and power up front, fortelling their strength in being able to retake Mandalore at some point down the road.

I still have to storyboard exactly how Book 6 and 7 would play out on their own now, but essentially, Book 6 would be Grogu training with Luke, Din and Bo reuniting the rest of the clans to prepare to retake Mandalore, and BoBF Boba content (now I can also consider the possibility to have Din and Grogu reunite during this Tatooine battle, as it actually feels like time has passed and each character has grown and changed significantly since they departed one another. We also can see how much Grogu learned from Luke as we’ve seen him train across 2 films and then come in to subdue the Rancor which is an awesome new display of strength). I am considering interweaving Pershing’s storyline throughout a Book 6 as well. Book 7 then addresses Grogu training as a Mandalorian after already training as a Jedi, and then everything to do with retaking Mandalore.

Would love to hear some thoughts on all this! I really like how it gives Din a very personal journey in Book 5, paces out Grogu’s training SO much better through the entirety of 2 films as we really feel his absence, sets up a natural growth of power for the clans reuniting and retaking Mandalore across 3 films, and gives Boba’s final scenes some closure instead of feeling like he just gets written out of the story for all of Season 3.