Summary: Bo Katan retreats and prepares a counterattack. Mando escapes from captivity and Grogu finds him. They head to Gideon's command center and find a bunch of clones which they promptly destroy. Gideon angrily confronts them afterward and Mando fights him. The fleet escape the capital ship and send reinforcements to Bo Katan, engaging Gideon's forces. Bo Katan arrives to fight Gideon, while Mando leaves to save Grogu from the Praetorian guards. Mando kills them. Gideon breaks the darksaber, but the capital ship crashes into the base and kills him. Grogu protects Mando and Bo Katan from the fire. The Mandalorians successfully retake Mandalore. Mando contacts Teva to do independent work for the New Republic. He settles down with Grogu in a cabin on Nevarro.
The Good: It took a while, but the focus finally shifted back to Mando for this final episode, and the episode is stronger for it. There are some good action scenes here, especially the one where Mando fights guard after guard on the way to the command center, and this allowed me to remember how much I missed watching Mando solve problems on his own. We haven't seen enough of him in his own show this season (see: The Bad), but this season finale spends a good amount of time with him at least. I liked how conclusive the ending felt with Mandalore retaken and Mando moving on to a new, yet familiar, chapter of his life with Grogu under his care. The Bad: But despite that, so much of this episode was poor. This entire season has been built around Bo Katan, so even though we shift gears back to Mando for this episode, he doesn't have any interesting story to tell. This season has let him down in terms of creating a story for the character. We've essentially just had a few sporadic moments of fatherhood, including some cheesy scenes here where he adopts Grogu and makes him an apprentice through a pretty stupid technicality that continues to undermine the Mandalorian culture. This is not a good enough story to build a season around, and the result is that Mando feels like a passenger throughout the entirety of season 3, which is problematic because seeing this character is the main hook of the show. Even more disappointing is Bo Katan. She essentially hijacked this show for season 3, and the show failed to come up with any compelling ideas for her to make this worth our time. She's just guilty about past mistakes and has to rise up to lead her people to success this time. It's such a simple storyline with little intrigue or conflict for her to deal with. Her rivalry with Gideon is poorly fleshed out and never becomes interesting. I'm extremely disappointed with the simplicity of Bo Katan's storyline. A few episodes ago I raised up an interesting possibility where Bo Katan may be using the Mandalorian groups for her own ends, and may have ulterior motives for everything she is doing. But sadly, the show is never interested in introducing such nuance to its characters. Everything ended up being exactly how it appeared on the surface involving Bo Katan, and that was the single least interesting direction that the story could have gone. I wish there was more to this. Gideon ended up being a spectacular disappointment. Every season he came in, talked big, and promised a menacing new threat. And every season he proved to be absolutely incompetent, getting soundly beaten almost immediately with no victories or accomplishments to make him feel like a threat. Because of this, he was sorely in need of some success this season to make him feel like a worthwhile antagonist. And the show completely let him down. Gideon manages to escape imprisonment off-screen, comes back for two episodes, and after what felt like hundreds of moments of typical villain incompetence, he finally dies in the most anticlimactic way imaginable. What a waste of Giancarlo Esposito, who can be such an asset if used correctly. Instead, Gideon was incompetent at every turn, and the grandiose performance rings completely hollow when you realize he's all bark and no bite. We finally learn what his grand plan was in this episode, and it's the most unoriginal, boring answer imaginable: he wants to clone himself and make himself stronger. Even worse than this is how we learn about the plan. Gideon gives an awful villain monologue to Mando explaining his entire plan for no reason at all. This is one of the worst villain tropes out there, and the execution in this show is terrible. Even Giancarlo Esposito could not salvage something from the terrible dialogue he was given. There was so much tonal dissonance and bad writing in this episode. For tonal dissonance, this episode had too much dumb childish comedy in the middle of intense scenes. While Mando is risking his life fighting guards, why do we cut to a dumb scene with R5 fighting an army of mouse droids? It completely takes me out of the moment. Even worse is when the Praetorian guards corner Grogu, and instead of killing him immediately like they should, they break the mech and completely fail to catch Grogu as he leaps around. This completely broke my immersion, and seeing Grogu laughing is absolutely stupid. We have seen that Grogu does understand when he's in danger and is often afraid, so to see him laughing in this life or death situation is not only tonally wrong, it's a total misinterpretation of the character for the sake of bad humour. As for bad writing in this episode, I can honestly go on forever. Last episode Gideon told his men to take Mando to the debriefing room. I thought maybe Gideon had a plan for him. Maybe he wanted something. Instead this was just an idiotic convenience so Mando can escape, and Grogu can somehow find him in the middle of an imperial base, and Gideon is somehow totally fine with this. Gideon looks so stupid for letting this happen, and even though he knows exactly where Mando and Grogu are, he does nothing and allows them to destroy his clones! This is horrible writing because Gideon makes the single stupidest decision at every turn, making everything nice and convenient for our heroes. Last episode the Praetorian guards were ruthless and intimidating. Already they have been wasted because this episode sees them not show any degree of ruthlessness and they are disposed of with frustrating ease by Mando. Now I will never view these guys as a threat ever again. The crash at the episode's end is similarly poorly written. An entire ship has crashed into this base, and you're telling me that Grogu can just use the force on some flames and that's enough to allow Mando and Bo Katan to survive? That makes no sense. Would they not get crushed by debris? How about the force of the explosion? How do they get out of there if Grogu is only holding back the flames? None of this makes sense. The handling of the darksaber gets a section of its own. This artifact was a massively important plot thread throughout the entire show. There was such fascination surrounding who owns it, how people can get it, and what it means to Mandalorian culture. After we saw a contrivance to get it back to Bo Katan, now thie darksaber gets broken in the most anticlimactic way possible. What the hell? Why did we bother investing in this thing if it breaks so easily, and nobody really reacts to it at all? The destruction of the darksaber doesn't get brought up again, and it has no relevance to the episode at all. After so much of the season 2 finale and the intrigue heading into season 3 was centered around the darksaber, I can't help but be massively underwhelmed with how it was handled this season. The Unknown: So Gideon's grand plan was to clone himself and give himself the force. Is that all there is to it? Is he dead now? Or has he managed to survive this season too? With the discovery of clones of Gideon, I have to ask if there is another clone of him out there somewhere. Is the darksaber destroyed for good? Can it not be fixed? How does this affect the Mandalorians? Will Grogu get his mech back at some point? Or has the show moved on with the new IG-11 marshal in Nevarro? What will come from Mando working with Teva? How much more will we see of Mandalore and Bo Katan in this show? Best Moment: Mando setting us his new life was a nice, sappy conclusion. Character of the Episode: Mando. Conclusion: Ultimately, this was a deeply disappointing finale to a deeply disappointing season. This episode was anticlimactic, poorly written, sloppy, and overall unsatisfying in just about every way. Season 3 was also deeply disappointing. This season was a disjointed, unfocused mess that stumbled at nearly every turn. I feel like the idea and expectation of season 3 ended up being much better than what we got. A season where Mando and Bo Katan team up to unite the Mandalorians and retake Mandalore while also defeating Moff Gideon sounds like it should be a good time. But the season was so messy, it failed to tell compelling stories, and the writing was even worse than it had been in previous seasons. Add in a couple of awful episodes in the back half of the season when the show should have been ramping up to something great, and we have a season that fails on almost every level and is even worse when you look back on it. I hope season 4 can get this show back on track. Score: 46
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Aaron DhillonJust a university student who loves to watch TV. And analyze it way too much. Archives
March 2024
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