The Challenge for ‘Star Wars’ Heading Into ‘The Mandalorian’ Season 3—and Beyond
Luke Skywalker’s arrival was a shocking and largely effective climax to Season 2—but also a worrisome sign of assimilation of ‘The Mandalorian,’ if only tangentially, into the all-consuming Skywalker Saga. Can Season 3—and ‘Star Wars’ as a whole—continue charting a new course?
Genre fiction creators put up with a lot of stupid questions, and genre fiction consumers put up with a lot of stupid answers.
Space fiction—answering to the pedant in many of us—must solve for the massive distances between key locations and the huge lags between major events that were clearly written with earthly dramatic conventions in mind. These practical considerations are especially pronounced in a serialized space adventure such as Star Wars, whose core rotation of characters were often separated by several galaxies but nonetheless ran into each other as frequently as you and your neighbors at the grocery store.
Science fiction and science fantasy writers since Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek have typically overcome the trouble of great distances with faster-than-light travel. George Lucas used hyperdrives to get his heroes and villains in Star Wars from one star system to the next in just a couple of wipe transitions. Space fiction must also contend with the social constraints in such a vast vacuum. Roddenberry used the United Federation of Planets; Lucas used the Galactic Empire, the Jedi Order, and the Force to impose some overarching morality, history, culture, and politics on an otherwise sprawling universe that realistically should have been defined by immense fragmentation. So Star Wars is the story of elite warrior monks with laser swords who help a ragtag rebellion topple an intergalactic empire and its dark mage overlord, again and again and again. Some things never change.
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They could change ever so slightly, though, if only we let them. The Mandalorian premiered a month before The Rise of Skywalker, the peak of critical exasperation with the so-called Skywalker Saga, which has been holding the mainline series and its many spinoffs and novelizations together for nearly half a century now. Initially, and wisely, The Mandalorian seemed determined to escape the Skywalker Saga to start a new life on the fringe frontier of Star Wars. The series would take place in the rough and rowdy Outer Rim, in the interregnum between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens. The Mandalorian would leverage the decades-old intrigue surrounding the bounty hunter Boba Fett, with his iconic armor and loadout. But surprisingly, The Mandalorian wouldn’t be a show about Boba Fett. The titular Mandalorian would be a new mysterious hero, nameless until the first season finale, and faceless until the penultimate episode of Season 2. This was intriguing.
The Mandalorian would still indulge our nostalgia for earlier generations of Star Wars. The Child, a.k.a. Grogu, a.k.a. Baby Yoda, would of course remind everyone of Yoda. The assassin droid IG-11 would remind fans of the bounty hunter IG-88 from The Empire Strikes Back. The most deeply devoted fans would rejoice in seeing Ahsoka Tano from The Clone Wars resurface in a big-budget project, played by Rosario Dawson. The Mandalorian played the hits while still representing a new direction for the franchise in a relatively new format for its storytelling—a live-action TV series.
But no, right, duh, Star Wars must be the story of elite warrior monks with laser swords, so of course the second season of The Mandalorian ended with a deepfake, plot-twisting Luke Skywalker cutting through a platoon of Dark Troopers on board an imperial cruiser to save Grogu. Luke’s arrival was a genuinely shocking and largely effective climax—but also a worrisome sign of assimilation of The Mandalorian, if only tangentially, into the Skywalker Saga. The universe according to Star Wars always turns out to be much smaller than I’d hoped.
This has become the definitive problem of modern Star Wars and, with The Mandalorian’s third season premiering next week, a peculiar problem for the series. Luke Skywalker, Yoda, Boba Fett—these mainstay characters give the in-universe history of Star Wars a sense of order and direction. What would Star Wars be without them? It’s proved to be a rather intimidating question in recent years, and it bears repeating as Star Wars approaches its 50th anniversary while still sending mixed messages about what it wants to be when it grows up. Star Wars is a series with stylistic signatures so distinct that even the slightest musical swell announces it unmistakably. You’d recognize the screech of those blasters and the whoosh of those lightsabers from a mile away. So Star Wars might be a series about the Skywalkers, but Star Wars might alternatively be a loose enough set of rules and conventions with lots of leeway for experimentation and digression from the script of A New Hope.
In the 2000s it was easier to interpret the prequels as the series creator saying, yes, the universe is huge, but Star Wars is in fact a story about the role of a specific lineage in a specific conflict—take it or leave it. Under current Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, the core conflict and even the core lineage (what with Rey being a Skywalker despite not being a Skywalker) have gotten so much more abstract; coincidentally, the TV spinoffs have overtaken the mainline movies quite decisively. The question is a bit more powerful now. Why does Din Djarin need to meet Luke Skywalker? Why can’t The Mandalorian—or anything else in the Star Wars universe—just make a clean break?
Disney manages Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe in very similar ways even though they’re very different constructs. The MCU gets into some timey-wimey multiverse bullshit, but fundamentally, Captain America, Spider-Man, Iron Man, and T’Challa share a small slice of history on a single planet. The relentless interconnectedness of their story lines might make for an obnoxious multimedia release model, but as pantheon-building, it’s easy enough to see the rationale and the appeal. The superheroes are very clearly the point of the MCU, and its sprawling, multi-phase superstructure is supported by the overabundance of heroes and villains in its source material.
Star Wars resembles the MCU in its multigenerational release model, but is still quite different in its storytelling fundamentals—chiefly its character dynamics. Unlike Iron Man, Luke Skywalker is peerless. The sequel trilogy was a creative attempt to at least give him a successor, in the form of Rey, but practically that doesn’t seem to be working out—Disney has proved reluctant in the four years since The Rise of Skywalker to pick up the actors, characters, and story lines introduced in the sequels—so Luke and a handful of other legacy characters are locked in a metanarrative stalemate. Star Wars is constantly warping back and forth across huge stretches of space-time while still insisting on being a close-quarters saga about half a dozen characters. Even The Mandalorian, with its initial dare to diverge from the Skywalker Saga, inevitably turns Luke Skywalker into Forrest Gump.
The problem isn’t even the urge to stick to the time frame of the six-part series as originally conceived by Lucas. Rogue One, Andor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Solo each embarked on similar missions to fill the speculative gaps between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. Yes, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Solo largely failed as portraits of heroes who couldn’t have been any more tediously canonized than they already were—but Rogue One and Andor largely excelled as novel efforts to make a familiar conflict feel somehow new and previously under-examined. Rogue One and Andor weren’t simply retreading the textbook history of the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance. They were adding a new dimension to Star Wars. The cameos from Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin satisfied those occasional cravings for some good ol’-fashioned Star Wars (and of course they also made perfect sense in the given context) without necessarily representing a backslide for lack of new ideas. It’s an admittedly fussy balance—honoring the characters and milestones that fans already love about the series while also making good on the creative freedom that outer space, intergalactic civilization, and boundless pseudoscience afford us.
In its third season, The Mandalorian may well chart a new course. The trailer shows Grogu reunited with the Mandalorian, bound for Mandalore, a much-hyped, lore-heavy, and yet still enigmatic planet in the Outer Rim. What will we find there? Something familiar? Or something unexpected?