The first trailer for Season 3 of The Mandalorian dropped this week, and as somebody who lives his life perpetually online and follows pop culture, I watched fans on social media going generally crazy for it. There’s clearly a lot of excitement for new episodes of the show, which technically hasn’t run a new episode since the end of 2020. And there’s a lot in the trailer that absolutely looks cool, but I just can’t get too excited about the new season.
I loved the first season of The Mandalorian. The show took place during an era of the Star Wars timeline that had yet to be deeply investigated during the movies. It introduced a collection of brand-new characters we’d never seen before, and they went on adventures that felt fresh and new. But Season 2 of the show felt like an easter egg hunt more than a show, and the trailer for Season 3 looks like it’s going to be more of the same.
Andor Showed That Star Wars Doesn’t Need To Be A Parade Of References
I enjoyed seeing the return of Luke Skywalker at the end of The Mandalorian Season 2 as much as anybody, and seeing characters like Ahsoka Tano and Bo-Katan Kryze come to life in live-action was cool, but ultimately Grogu and The Mandalorian become bystanders in somebody else’s story when these moments happened. The second season felt designed to be little more than a series of references to other stuff, and the Mandalorian and Grogu became witnesses to events involving others, and not active characters themselves.
That can be fun and it scratches a nostalgia itch that we all have, but we’re living in a post-Andor world now, and serving up nothing but nostalgia just isn’t good enough anymore. Andor started with characters that we knew, but they took us away to tell stories that were unlike anything we had seen before, while still feeling distinctly like they were part of Star Wars.
Andor was amazing, but it was also quite different from The Mandalorian, namely in the styles and tones of the shows. As such, there’s plenty of room for both of them to exist, investigating very different corners of what can be an incredibly broad Star Wars universe. But both should still be able to tell original stories and not be tied down by the existing lore of the franchise.
The Mandalorian Season 1 Was Much More Interesting Than Season 2 Or The Book OF Boba Fett
The Mandalorian started off on a path similar to Andor. It gave us a character who looked like Yoda who could use the Force, but it also gave us a character who had literally never heard of the Jedi. Each episode was a different adventure for Mando and Grogu that either had no connection to previously established lore or did it in such a way that it went over the heads of the viewers who weren’t familiar with it, and thus were unaffected.
This all changed in literally the final seconds of the first season. Seeing the Darksaber was something that got fans excited and worked great as a cliffhanger going into the second season, and there's no denying it was cool for fans who knew what that blade was. The problem was that Season 2 didn’t wait until the end to drop a big moment that would leave fans talking. It certainly did that with Luke Skywalker, but nearly every episode of the second season included a character that we’d seen elsewhere in Star Wars or otherwise referenced in another film in the franchise.
Even The Book of Boba Fett, which already had enough of a nostalgia hook by being about Boba Fett in the first place, couldn’t seem to help itself. The limited series spent two of its episodes turning the Mandalorian himself into the reference that fans were being reminded of, and gave an episode of a show about Boba Fett over to Luke Skywalker and Ahsoka Tano.
We Already Expect Ahsoka To Continue One Star Wars Story We Know
The most interesting way that Season 2 of The Mandalorian connected to the Star Wars universe we already knew was the inclusion of Ahsoka Tano, played in live-action by Rosario Dawson. Her episode of The Mandalorian set up a continuation of the story where Dave Filoni’s Star Wars Rebels left off, and the casting announcements for the new Ahsoka series indicate that’s what we’ll be getting.
As a fan of Rebels, I’m all for it. There’s nothing wrong with continuing these stories, and using a successful show as a back-door pilot into another show is nothing new. But knowing that we’re going to get Ahsoka, using The Mandalorian as a way to continually revisit the parts of Star Wars that we already know becomes even less important. We can let Ahsoka continue these stories and let The Mandalorian go forward in a new direction
The beauty of Star Wars today is that it's broad enough to tell lots of different stories that don't need to be connected to each other. It feels like everything new is designed to reference and explain everything that came before it, as if Star Wars was a single chronological story designed to be told that way.
The Mandalorian Season 3 Trailer Looks Like More Of The Same
Based on the trailer for The Mandalorian Season 3, it certainly looks like we’re in for more of what we got in Season 2. Din Djarin is off to the planet Mandalore, a place we’ve only previously seen in Dave Filoni’s animated Star Wars shows. One scene appears to take us back to the Jedi prequel film era that we previously saw in Season 2. We even saw creatures of the same race as Babu Frik from The Rise of Skywalker, because clearly we all needed that.
That’s not to say there aren’t new elements in the trailer for The Mandalorian. There’s a lot that looks very interesting, as our hero looks to be leading a whole team of Mandalorioans, which could take the series in a very fresh direction. It’s possible that this will be the bulk of the show, and that the easter eggs and references will be kept to a minimum, but the trailer isn’t selling that. I’ll watch the show either way, and I'll enjoy the references as they come. I like Star Wars, but I'll be hoping for something more from this show.
