As I’ve been working on my Mando Season 3 edit, I’ve run across some very strange bugs in the show. Wondering if anyone has some insight.
What is going on here…? How is R5 already following Din on Nevarro?
That is Season 3 Episode 1, right after they land and walk into town. Din doesn’t even pickup R5 from Pelli until the beginning of the NEXT EPISODE… R5’s texture also looks off, like they didn’t fully touch up his model.
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.
Again, here is Grogu clearly to the left of Greef.
But then POOF he is instantly gone again.
,
But then in the VERY NEXT SHOT… he is directly behind them walking but his compositing and color looks super wonky as he is very obviously green screened in.
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 not only throughout all of Nevarro, but also later on in the Mines of Mandalore.
Grogu is directly behind Din’s right shoulder -
But then 2 seconds later he is nowhere to be found (Notice how Grogu’s bright flashlight makes no difference on Din’s armor when the light is there in the close up vs when Grogu and the light are missing in the next frame)-
And then 2 seconds after that he is hiding behind a piece of rubble and cave wall that is not seen anywhere else on this set piece - 
And it’s not only the visuals that are extremely mixed up, I want you to take a step back and consider if this series of events makes sense to you:
- After completing his mission and giving Grogu to Luke, Din goes back to bounty hunting for an undetermined amount of time, he tracks down his clan, but it is very quickly discovered that he violated the creed and Din is cast out of his clan as an apostate. He is told his only path to redemption is to bathe in the waters of Mandalore. (Perfect setup for a new and compelling story post-Season 2)
- Din sulks off to Tatooine to get a new ship, supposedly with the intent to go to Mandalore in it. (This makes sense, if he is going on this new journey, he needs a way to fly to and explore Mandalore)
- While getting his new ship, he learns that Boba needs help and Din says he will assist, but then suddenly decides that he has to visit Grogu IMMEDIATELY. (Surely, that could’ve waited? Why does he have to go there right this second? This was where the Disney forced reuinion stuff starts to interfere and I start to see evidence of massive plot changes. With no actual urgency in the story, Din tells Boba to wait until he gets back and then rushes across the entire galaxy to check on Grogu. If their reunion wasn’t forced to be included in BoBF for this final battle, there’s no reason at all that this visit to Grogu shouldn’t just happen after the Tatooine battle)
- 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. (It is VERY confusing how much time passes in these events. How long was Grogu with Luke? Some of the lessons seem like 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. I know there’s been a ton of debate about Favreau’s “2 years” comment, but either way, that doesn’t fix the issues here)
- Din goes straight back to Tatooine to help Boba instead of going to Mandalore (Aside from just zooming back and forth across the entire galaxy for no presented reason and time grinding to a halt, 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. We are left with 0 clues as to where they go or what they intend to do next (We get this whole “solo Din on the apostate’s repentance trail” setup, but then out of nowhere Grogu returns and makes that all seem unnecessary. The first 2 seasons of The Mandalorian 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?)
- So 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. Grogu is serving no function at all here as he is completely ignored in all of this, so we see that them reuniting changed nothing at all about the plot that was so carefully setup, and learn that Din has reverted back to his secondary motivation of wanting repentance, all through a conversation about an event offscreen.)
- 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. (The fact that IG-11 even has any parts usable aside, this is an extremely distracting wrench in the plot structure, and that’s not even considering the whole pirate arc that also gets setup while he’s here. This is where R5 appears somehow, and Grogu is missing from a ton of scenes. This leads me to believe that this whole segment was completely altered in reshoots/post-production.)
- So Din is apparently now on a mission to search 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 this IG-11 part is? Din lands and… tells her “I’m here to join you in retaking Mandalore”. Uh, ok, that’s new. Bo says no one will follow her without the Darksaber, then Din just says that he is going anyways to explore and he 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 part and it seems like he is going to Mandalore right now without IG? 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 already in the Mandalore system and only a few minutes flight away from the planet 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 all the way 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! Pelli 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. 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… (This is where I gave up on trying to understand what is happening. This order of events is so beyond normal understanding or any form of logical sequencing. And we’re only 5 minutes into Season 3 Episode 2 at this point and we still have an enormous mess of pacing ahead throughout the rest of the season. This is seriously a complete nightmare plot structure.)
Tldr; With those disjointed events that were obviously not intended to be placed in this order and the visual errors showing that R5 and Grogu were originally intended to switch places at certain plot points, it is clear that the reunion was not the original plan and that they had to massively rework Season 3 from top to bottom. It’s like they had originally shot whole planets 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 and R5 still in the background. 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. There’s a lot of additional speculation/evidence out there, especially in terms of the S3 ending and some BTS leaks of Gideon scenes that were never used, but wow, from an editor’s standpoint it is crystal clear that this season was so stitched together in post production to become something that is was not originally intended to be.
