It’s been two days and I still have not fully recuperated from the shock of that stunning finale. There were so many moments to digest, so much storytelling implications to explore, but I’m still trying to process most of what happened in the finale so I’m going to stick to talking about the basics; like the return of *that* character and what I think about the new spin-off coming next December.
So, let’s get down to business.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
We knew it was going to happen. Ever since that Beskar spear made its debut in Chapter 13: The Jedi it was very obvious that Mando was going to need it in his fight against Gideon at some point in the season. Thankfully, the duel lived up to the hype.
I loved the fluidity to the fight, I loved the choreography designed for Mando’s spear wielding, I loved all of it. And can we just geek out over the kickback spear deflection. Yeesh, that was awesome.
But of course, I’m just going to get to the nitty-gritty of this finale’s greatest moments and go for the juggernaut, the return of Luke Skywalker.
It was very plausible that Luke Skywalker would be the Jedi to save Grogu but the thought felt impossible. How could they pull it off? Would Sebastian Stan really get a chance to play the character? When he arrived in his singular X-Wing my mind practically exploded. The confirmation thereafter as he appeared on the camera walking through the halls as this mysterious figure cloaked in darkness was even more shocking.
It was happening! It was actually happening and I couldn’t believe it.
When Luke Skywalker removed his hood and we got to see not Sebastian Stan but a digitally de-aged Mark Hamill staring right back at us I was elated. Yes, the CGI looked like the glow-up version of Battlefront II but I was excited nonetheless.
Disney had gone for it. Luke Skywalker was back and the Jedi master we always thought he could be. Now, I know there are a lot of people bashing Rian Johnson this past weekend since the episode dropped on Friday but I, for one, have no problem with how Skywalker was utilized in The Last Jedi but I’ll speak more on that topic in a later post.
In terms of Mando having to let Grogu go…the scene still makes me cry every time I watch it or even hear the music. It’s a very emotional scene that has torn my heart in two. I was not ready for that ending!
But of course, there’s that spinoff that’s coming next December.
The Book of Boba Fett. Ooh, that rolls off the tongue nicely. An artist for LucasFilm has announced that the spin-off is indeed a spin-off and is not the de facto third season of The Mandalorian but I’m honestly not quite sure about that.
Favreau and Filoni have not confirmed that The Book of Boba Fett is simply another surprise spin-off and that we’ll still be getting The Mandalorian‘s third season either next year or early 2022. If this is just a spin-off, it still means that we won’t be seeing Din Djarin and co. for a while, as his story needs to have a brief hiatus so that we can see his character grow in an efficient way, like the Marvel movies.
So what could this spin-off possibly be about? The criminal undertakings of Boba Fett and Fennec Shand? And yes, I’m already thinking about it. Will Han Solo be featured at any point in this show?
Think about it. We’ve gotten Bo-Katan, Ahsoka Tano, and freaking Luke Skywalker in a single season of The Mandalorian. What wouldn’t be more fascinating than Solo running across his old pal Boba Fett in an epic episode that allows us another chance to see the beloved smuggler again? The question is, would it be Alden Ehrenreich’s version of Han Solo or a digitally de-aged version? The thought is totally exciting.
In fact, for that matter, could we even see the likes of Qi’ra in this series? Last time we saw her she had taken over Crimson Dawn from Dryden Vos. If Boba Fett is now part of the Shadow Collective as the leader of Tatooine’s criminal ring, it’s very possible we can see her return as a crime boss queen in this series. Because for all we know, she isn’t dead during this time in the galaxy.
Oh snap, we need to see Qi’ra in The Book of Boba Fett! Oh, there’s a lot to be excited about with this show and I just know that Favreau and Filoni have a lot of surprises up their sleeves.
All in all, that finale was one of the best I’ve ever seen and a perfect conclusion to a show that has made the last two years some of the best years being a Star Wars fan.
I thank you for reading and I hope you have a great day.
Annlyel Online 
Qi’ra in BOBF could be interesting. It’s the one angle of the Solo movie that was actually kind of memorable. We know Maul is dead by this point per Rebels, as Luke was clearly still just a little boy when his fatal rematch with Obi-Wan happened, and even at that the fact that it was Obi-Wan that killed him hard binds it to taking place before A New Hope. Which means Qi’ra is no longer answering to Maul at this point. To be honest, I find myself thinking that Maul’s cameo in Solo was kind of wasted. It seemed like it could be a segue into a new live action setup with Maul as an interim villain… and then it didn’t really go anywhere, so far as I can tell.
Already have spoken on Luke as Jedi Master taking away Grogu. I do still think that this potentially has some unfortunate implications for Grogu’s likely fate between now and the sequels, but… that’s how that cookie crumbles. The fact that this takes place when it does kind of puts book ends around what happens to these characters if you extrapolate out far enough, and it’s not like we don’t already know that Ahsoka is doomed to die some time in the next 25 years of the timeline, too.
…damn the sequels. Damn them all to heck! 😖
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I know right! But remember. Dave Filoni said that just because we heard Ahsoka speaking to Rey doesn’t mean he believes she’s dead. So…maybe she’s not dead.
Gosh, I wish Favreau and Filoni could’ve made the Sequel Trilogy but oh well. I have a feeling the storyline under their direction will try to fix flaws in the Sequel Trilogy to make the somewhat more cohesive and likable.
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Yeah. I’ve said a few times that one of the better things about the Mandalorian is that it’s filling in gaps in the movies and making them somewhat more interesting. Filling in the origins (potentially) of the First Order is one way to do it. Even the fact that Cara Dune actually acts upset about Alderaan’s destruction strikes me as a really big deal; I phrased it as giving her a moment that Leia never was allowed to have, for a character that is in no way portrayed as a weakling nonetheless. Alderaan was the biggest atrocity of the original trilogy, and the fact that nobody ever is seriously portrayed as even slightly grieving over his trauma — even Leia, who actually was forced to watch it happen — always struck me as a narrative flaw of the films.
…Of course, this made Hosnian that much dumber in its effort to one-up the originals, because we’re given a planetary system that no character in the story even directly cares about, and it isn’t even entirely made clear that this isn’t just a decapitation strike, it also involves apparently destroying what little, mostly disarmed New Republic fleet there is. The Republic is really really dumb if they’re disarming like this enough that they’d be this vulnerable when they know the First Order is out there. However, this series goes some distance in making this whole by portraying the Republic as rather feckless and viewed as a joke even by people who’d otherwise be sympathetic to it. To me, I can’t for the life of me visualize why they wouldn’t at least have a deterrent fleet of ships with just enough firepower to be “Death Star mission-killers” that they keep hidden and mobile that could react to any remnant’s efforts to reprise the superweapons of the Empire. Ie they effectively act like the nuclear submarine forces that real world nuclear powers possess, that are constantly kept submerged and on the move so that no enemy wanting to nuke their homeland can possibly get to them in time to keep them from responding. They don’t need to be planet killers. Having enough firepower to mission-kill a Death Star by piercing its shielding and wrecking its superlaser and/or hyperdrive is enough. It’s clearly within the Republic’s resources, and would’ve had the added advantage of making it so that the sequels aren’t complete reskins of the original trilogy. They might be closer to reskins of “hero ship” anime and/or a story where the First Order pursues our small scale fighters while they try to find the Republic’s deterrence force where it’s hidden away after everyone who they could easily find who knew where they were died at Hosnian… but this wouldn’t exactly be the first time Star Wars has borrowed from Japanese cinema. It’d just be a little more Leiji Matsumoto and less Akira Kurosawa.
But… we got what we got. And the Mandalorian portraying the New Republic as being regarded as a joke even long before the sequels still somewhat sells why they were so easy to knock over when the First Order came along. So… it helps.
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