I’ve recently revisited The Mandalorian and yeah…I forgot how magical it is. That finale is truly something special; from the super cool all-female unit consisting of Bo-Katan, Cara Dune, Fennec Shand, and Koska Reeves to the imminent showdown between Moff Gideon and Mando which pretty much is the most fulfilling duel since Rey vs. Kylo in The Force Awakens. But of course the best part arrives in the finale’s final fifteen minutes which offers one of the best surprises in the entire franchise’s history with Luke’s unbelievable return.
But what is it that makes his return so special? We all knew a Jedi was coming and we all kind of expected it to be Luke but it still sent chills down our spines when our affirmations turned out to be true. The magic honestly belongs to Ludwig Gorannson’s incredible score.
You see, when the Jedi usually arrive to save the day they are accompanied with a heroic rendition of the Force Theme but here we finally observe the mysticism of the Jedi through the eyes of non-Force wielders.
For Mando and co., they didn’t see the X-Wing’s arrival as a savior moment. In fact, for all they knew, an even scarier individual had arrived and Gorannson portrays that perfectly in his music for that moment.
Watch the scene below.
Because Luke is hooded for the duration of his Dark Trooper-destroying endeavors it almost makes one wonder if it’s really Luke even though everything points to that fact. Goransson helps to extend the suspense by never once using any musical cues to help us determine if it’s really Skywalker or not.
It is only when he removes the hood to reveal himself that we hear the iconic Force Theme along with our excited exclamations or loud bursts of tears.
It’s a powerful moment and honestly is the “Portals” moment of the Star Wars franchise. We, as Star Wars fans, collectively lost our minds upon seeing Luke’s epic return and it remains the highlight of 2020, in my opinion.
In case you’ve never seen it, here is a twenty-one minute video of fans reacting to that finale. This just might make your day.
I thank you for reading and I hope you have a spectacular day.
Annlyel Online 
It’s kind of funny, because I think that the two “hallway scenes” (Luke here and Vader in Rogue One) kind of go in opposite directions as to how they hold up.
Vader’s comes off a little flat in live viewing because you’re coming off the crushing emotional blow of Jyn Erso’s death, but gets better the more you see it, especially when you’re watching it by itself without the death scene right before it. In short, it’s probably the best scene Disney’s done in Star Wars, but it gets that way more and more with time.
Conversely, Luke’s was epic in the suspense of “who is that? Is that him? Green lightsaber… gloved right hand, bare left hand… I think it is! But who’s playing him? Did they get Sebastian Stan, or is it someone else???” It draws out enough to make you wonder. But… once you know all the answers to this and watch it again? Holy shlamoley, do those droids look like morons in this scene. Luke repeatedly offers his back to them by wading into crowds of them at point blank range, and they somehow can’t shoot him. I keep watching to try to tell if he’s getting his saber into the right places, and it’s just not there. In some spots it even makes me wonder if they even bothered to choreograph it so their stunt double was out of the . It takes a bit away when my wondering goes from “is that Luke?” to “
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Okay, accidentally hit post somewhere before I got done editing, but… you get the idea. Basically I find myself wondering if Gideon just sucked at coding droid offensive routines and he got away with it until Luke showed up because their armor was just better than anything besides what a Jedi could do. That last sentence was going to read that it takes a bit away from the scene when repeat viewings switches the wonderment in the brain from “whoa, is that Luke?” to “whoa, these guys make stormtroopers look like elite marksmen…”
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Lol.
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Oh no! I haven’t watched it enough to pay attention to the droids but geez, you’re right. Oh, I don’t want this to become like the Praetorian Guard scene (which used to be awesome but now I just see how lame the choreography actually is.)
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Yeah. Somewhere in there I had a poetic thought I managed not to get out, but… the Vader hallway scene comes off flat when you first see it due to following Jyn’s death, and gets awesome the more you rewatch, while Luke’s is awesome the first time because you’re wondering if that’s really him and the epicness of having him come for Grogu, but the fight scene gets worse on rewatching because the choreography is awful. There’s still the fridge brilliance of him and Ahsoka having the parallel in handling Grogu and Vader, and the emotional moment of Mando saying goodbye was still neat… but the fight to get there? Doesn’t hold up as well at all.
That said, here’s my way to forgive the scene. Maybe it even works.
Part 1: Battle droids have been well established in Star Wars continuity to just be inferior to motivated and well trained sentients. The most powerful droid armies ever built were those of the CIS in the Clone Wars. However, most likely Gideon has near zero access to the knowledge base from those times — we already know that the Empire purged the Geonosians, and it’s very likely they did so to most of the rest of the principals of the old Separatists.
Part 2: Gideon doesn’t exactly have more than a rump/remnant of Imperial resources to work with. He doesn’t even have one full sized capital ship, and while he has apparently managed to scrape up a few good scientists, the expertise he’s got at his disposal is way, way less than the Separatists that built the subjects of Mando’s childhood nightmares. And with that, he’s trying to build a crack squad of super soldier droids that can fight, fly, and maybe try to process situations without rote directions to do anything that may come along that’s unexpected. That the first version of that effort, with inferior resources to past droid armies, is not very good at handling what is almost certainly a very unexpected situation maybe shouldn’t be that surprising. I’m a programmer myself; I can relate this is not an uncommon situation with any prototype software. The first version ALWAYS sucks.
So Gideon’s trying to really push the envelope of these droids’ physical capabilities, with a skeleton crew of droid builders, who probably never anticipated that they might find themselves in a hand to hand fight with something that could actually hurt them. The droids’ combat subroutine is probably just, “See enemy. Shoot enemy. Keep shooting if you don’t hit them the first time, because they’ll die before you will.”
In general, they’re visibly not as bright as the older droid armies from the Clone Wars on multiple levels besides this. Those droids could actually speak with limited capability, whereas these guys are just dumb, mute brutes. While they were able to functionally abduct an unconscious Grogu while all his defenders were distracted fighting stormtroopers down the hillside, that was a fairly direct task where nothing went wrong.
And these dummies were then expected to think on their feet while the most powerful Jedi since the fall of the Temple, and maybe ever, was wading through them with his saber at close range.
They probably just couldn’t do it.
If you believe that? Then the scene holds up. Better than the Praetorian Guard scene does. Yes, the choreography comes off pretty bad for it, but the droids looked like morons because, situationally speaking, they WERE morons.
If you don’t believe that? Well, then I got nothing. 🤣
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That makes a lot of sense. Especially considering we never see the Dark Troopers again. That means even the First Order knew they were a bust and decided to train real soldiers instead.
Now I feel better.🙂
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