Is The Mandalorian Even Interested in Being Television?

[Spoiler Note: General plot points through The Mandalorian Season 3, Episode 3 are discussed below.]

Raymond Chandler famously said a prime solution for being cornered by your own bad writing is to have someone enter the room holding a gun. Three episodes into the third season, The Mandalorian has done this so many times that the show is now one big room exclusively filled with men with guns.

Pirates, underground critters, a malfunctioning droid, TIE Fighters, a big sea monster, a very deep pool—so often the ground beneath our feet falls away as we’re plunged into unmotivated and meaningless action that, although delivered with pizazz, is nothing more than the illusion of dramatic content. No overarching conflict is worsened, no larger stakes are raised, no goals are more fiercely sought after. It’s just a man wearing a hat walking around without much urgency, free to do whatever he wants, occasionally pointing to his cute puppet son and leaving a pause so we can go, “Aww.” This costs over $15 million per episode.

Arguing that The Mandalorian is plagued with structural issues is like beating a dead tauntaun, but with two worse Disney+ series under their belt since we last saw our helmeted hero (not you, Andor), Star Wars TV is slipping out of our good graces. Apart from the thunderingly poor decision to retcon a dramatic S2 finale in somebody else’s show, we’re left with micro-goals that serve no purpose, decisions that are immediately invalidated, and no challenge to our characters’ values. What exactly is the point of all this?

So far this season: Mando turns up in Nevarro looking to reprogram the assassin droid, is told he needs to go get another part, makes a flying visit to Bo-Katan’s fortress in the Mandalore system, flies to Tatooine to gets the droid part, gets sold an astromech droid instead (if he didn’t need the assassin droid why wasn’t this addressed on Nevarro?), flies back to the Mandalore system (you were just there!!), flops about underground with some nasty critters, gets rescued, gets baptised, gets rescued again, and is accepted back into his clan with little resistance. By the end of three episodes, about 40% through the season, we have achieved the goal laid out in the premiere with little to no resistance. And I have zero clue why we took this path, nor how Mando feels about it.

What is the point of The Mandalorian? Is it that audience excitement outweighs any impulse to tell a genuinely compelling story in the Star Wars universe, and so—despite a lack of any narrative propulsement—the show must simply exist. These non-adventures are willed into existence with a collective shrug, filled with enough cowboy antics to make us think something is actually happening, that the train tracks aren’t being laid down in front of the moving train. We watch The Mandalorian for the same reason they make The Mandalorian, because “this is the way.”

Is The Mandalorian even interested in being television? It doesn’t have decent structure or pacing, nor does it take advantage of the character-building opportunities offered by the medium. Instead, we have to be content with a stuttering journey that commits a whole episode to meaningless actions and arcs that skip over huge changes. Is TV just an optic to Disney, an area that it’s profitable to expand in, meaning their flagship Star Wars property will just keep going until forced to stop?

We know Star Wars can be television because we’re hot off the heels of Andor, a show that admittedly didn’t have the most rigid structure, but did have an incremental build of tension, momentum and stakes thanks to its episodic format. While Disney properties are keener than ever to make all their films feel like television, it’s wild that everything on their streaming platform is still angling for movie-level prestige.

Of course, this week’s episode, “The Convert,” tried to change things up. Sandwiched between the adventures of Din Djarin and Bo-katan, we turn to Coruscant, the galaxy’s capital and homeworld of the New Republic (which looks indistinguishable to the old one). They’ve accepted a whole host of Imperial officers and scientists into their Amnesty Program so they can continue their work on more productive goals. Here, Dr Pershing (the guy with the glasses who wanted to clone Grogu) is delivering a speech to a bunch of sycophantic aristocrats, but secretly feels like he’s being prevented from achieving his full potential. So he teams up with another Amnesty member, Kane, to break into a decommissioned Star Destroyer for lab equipment—but it’s a set-up so Kane could weasel out non-conformers.

Whether Pershing’s adventure is a self-contained look at the dissolution of the Empire or a platform on which to build a richer villain in Kane or her employer, it’s a welcome change of pace for the too-often repetitive show. The problems lie in how the story is executed. Favreau and co-writer Noah Kloor are clearly riffing on CIA and NASA employing Nazis after their defeat in WWII, but asides from the incredibly blunt and static dialogue (as someone says to Pershing, “I’m so glad you’re working for us now”), there seems to be a misunderstanding of this point in American history.

Pershing and his colleagues all profess they were exploited by the Empire, forced to do their evil bidding, and now lament how spoiled their scientific potential is. But it doesn’t matter how conflicted you were when aiding and committing evil acts—if you did the deeds, you deserve no fair treatment, forgiveness, or leniency in your punishment. I’m sure the Imperial officers were all, now they’ve been caught, very sorry about the genocides, slavery, and torture, but to paint them as unfortunate souls bound by a greater force is remarkably queasy.

In all fairness, The Mandalorian understands how flimsily a justification American powers used to exploit expertise more extensive than their own, and it would be untrue to say that the episode expects us to sympathize for Pershing (Andor never asked us to empathize with its fascists!) But there’s a world of difference between how the topics are executed between the two shows, and Favreau’s trademark blunt, incurious style of storytelling makes any thorny characterisation impossible. Even when the show dives into the dynamics of the world the show is set in, it still feels as hand-wavey as it did in the first two seasons when characters sat around bars saying, “Things are different now the Empire is gone!”

The Mandalorian’s sudden interest in actually telling a substantive story comes perhaps a little too late. These are impulses you explore after you establish your characters, your world, your stakes in a debut season, but Din’s spin-off-friendly sophomore outing and the DOA-impact of The Book of Boba Fett have deadened any curiosity in this post-Empire world. The lack of limitations or canon for the time between the Original and Sequel trilogy that initially made the prospect of The Mandalorian so exciting now seems like a curse; with no narrative context, there’s no reason to make your story about anything, nothing to react to or hook your characters to. Mando is so unmoored from everything in the galaxy that he wasn’t even present for his show attempting to get more interesting!

Maybe it’s worth seeing if Season 3 finds a way to make this Coruscant story actually relevant to its main character, but it’s equally possible the Pershing story will serve retroactively setting up the Sequel Trilogy’s First Order. The point is that The Mandalorian has done nothing to earn the hype surrounding it, and this week’s attempt to finally resemble actual dramatic television only reveals how disjointed and clueless the series is. Season 3 is a pivotal time for the show to reestablish itself; so far it’s not trying hard enough.

Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.

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