Review of the third season of The Mandalorian series

He still gets great results. After the premiere of the third season of The Mandalorian again belonged to the most streamed in the United States, although viewership dropped compared to last year’s runner-up. And the recipe for success is still the same. A stoic hero who never takes off his helmet because the warrior creed of the planet Mandalore forbids him to do so, he travels through space with a cute cub of the same alien race as Master Yoda, the famous green “furry” of the universe Star Wars.

From the middle of the second season, we already know that the alien, long nicknamed Baby Yoda, is actually called Grogu. With a bit of exaggeration, it was the biggest “event” that happened last season.

From the beginning, the creator and main screenwriter Jon Favreau bet on a simple note and tried to build on the fairy-tale-western background of the famous saga, on which George Lucas had already built when he invented the first stories “from a galaxy far, far away”. However, Favreau also fell into the trap of his own pattern from the beginning.

The Mandalorian borrows motifs from the most famous western films from The brave seven after Butche Cassidyho a Sundance Kida. Like the American westerns themselves, George Lucas draws on Asian influences at the same time. The motif of a wandering hunter with a child in his care was inspired by a Japanese comic and film series from the 1970s Lone wolf and cub. In addition, the creators refer to the classics of Japanese cinema, for example, the fifth episode of the second season not only revealed the name of the little alien, but in addition to the Japanese-looking locations paid tribute to how the most famous Japanese director Akira Kurosawa he worked with light.

But at the end of the second series, it seemed that the project was definitely losing any direction. And he just artificially keeps the two protagonists together so he can go on and on. What started out as a fun, fairly stylish – if a little lazily written – space western full of impressive action and diverse environments always relied a little too much on staying in the world of the popular sci-fi saga. Jon Favreau was able to throw the audience little things, details, favorite characters or variations on them, but the series increasingly turned into just a kind of pilgrimage through the giant toy store worth billions of dollars that George Lucas created. And which the Disney company has been trying to transform into the largest possible amusement park since 2012, when it bought the rights to it.

The plot was more reminiscent of a space video game where you randomly jump from planet to planet, in the gaming vocabulary from “quest” to “quest”. In another dictionary, it was simply a fable about a hen and a rooster, in which the titular hen, played by Pedro Pascal, runs from character to character and fulfills what needs to be fulfilled. With one major difference. The hen from the children’s nursery rhyme had a clearly given task: to save the suffocating rooster, which is “lying there in the chamber with its legs up”. The Mandalorian does bring his alien “cock” with him, but the reason for keeping him is less and less obvious.

The story thus seems to have a single goal: as the first series from the world of Star Wars, moreover, connected to the launch of the Disney+ streaming platform in 2019, to consolidate the position of the franchise, which in recent years has tried too much to replace quality with quantity.

Also in the third series, The Mandalorian uses the same trump cards in the form of action, strong acting stars and a fair amount of cuteness. He even allows himself to introduce new characters for almost an entire episode, moreover with the worthy goal of problematizing the clear division of the world into good and evil. The creators reveal the New Republic – i.e. the “good” ones who have been fighting against the domination of the evil Empire for a long time – as an excessive bureaucratic juggernaut that blindly believes in the system and the healing role of technology under the supervision of droids and robots that take over many human jobs. But even so, the whole thing is rather a relatively transparent play on adult themes in an overly simplified presentation.

Otherwise, the weariness of this diluted tea multiplies with each episode – the peak being the sixth episode from last week, when the heroes get into a strange colorful world, which they thought reigns comedian Jack Black with rapper and actress Lizzo in the role of a regent couple who foolishly believe in great values ​​like love and happiness.

This world of “direct democracy”, where people don’t have to work and androids do everything for them, wants to be a social critique in the guise of a light comedy. But the description of an apparent paradise in which something is rotten and where robotic servants break down suspiciously often has about as much depth as when the pizza delivery drones start dropping food on the residents’ heads in the animated series for preschoolers Paw Patrol.

Despite sketching a world where orders are changing and new territories are being politicized, The Mandalorian feels rather funny in its ambitions. Especially compared to the recent series Andor, whose director Tony Gilroy brought darker notes to the world of Star Wars, otherwise too designed for the whole family.

While Andor relied on dirty, believable environments and really contradictory figures, The Mandalorian – even with the third season’s attempt to get a little darker – still can’t get rid of the naive skeleton. Although in one of the episodes the fate of the entire planet is at stake, it is represented by a single city. As soon as it is about to be evacuated, the local ruler suddenly speaks to a handful of characters somewhere in the clearing. This almost reminds the viewer of the “logic” of domestic Christmas fairy tales produced by Czech Television, which similarly richly depict the kingdom as one castle and three stones somewhere in the mountains.

The little alien Grogu still manages to be a cute, forever not eaten, but also a really capable “toy” that all children will want to have in the room, especially when in the new series he trains his abilities as a Jedi Knight more and more. And Pedro Pascal in the title role can get by with a charismatic voice without having to show his face.

Otherwise, the series does not offer more than carefully designed images from the audience’s favorite world. It would be a perfect analogue of the old, purely conversational endless series to iron out if The Mandalorian didn’t rely so heavily on visuals. It still offers food for the eyes. But you can’t see much more from him.