Heavy spoilers for the fourth episode of The Mandalorian season 3. Not that much of significance happened…
Okay, so the last episode of The Mandalorian definitely grabbed me with its amateur version of Andor. I like it when Star Wars puts on its grown-up pants and starts thinking about the practical side of the Empire’s fall. The reintegration of ex-Imperials is an interesting subject, a little contrived and illogical here and there, but manageable. With episode four, the third season goes straight back into the narrative descent.
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So Mando and Bo-Katan are peacefully in the process of having Grogu raised as a fundamentalist by the Mandalore exiles – including the Yoda memorial somersault that was already bad in the prequels – when the next side quest begins. Suddenly and without anyone knowing (as we later learn for the repeated time) a pterosaur passing to (again) to kidnap a child from this Power Ranger community. With a community that can’t hold 100 people, it must have been a terrible tragedy every time. And yet no one from the Lord Helmchen fan club comes up with the idea of killing off the cattle beforehand?
That’s not the only bullshit we’re supposed to believe this episode. So the excuse that the mandos don’t attack with full force of arms is that the robber kills the child as soon as he is attacked. Quite apart from how far-fetched it seems to impute such a calculation to this monster: Afterwards, the hunting party later has all the time in the world, even taking a break overnight. Only, of course, in order to reach the nest the next morning just at the moment when the dinosaur regurgitates the child alive, intact, dust-dry and obviously germ-free from its crop.
When it comes to a fight, the pterodactyl suddenly doesn’t kill the child after all. Or was it just no-shooting and a high-speed chase, a flamethrower in the mouth and bolas on and knives in the wings doesn’t seem too serious an affront to this turkey after a traumatising depilatory cream accident? Of course, after rescuing the child and repeating the last scene of the first Jurassic World, the chicks are also rescued and brought back to camp. I feel like we’re already firmly on the footsteps of the caravan of the brave here. Except that I actually have a soft spot for these Ewok films that can only be justified by the fact that I first saw them when I was just a school kid.
There’s so much I don’t like about this episode, down to little things like the fact that everything the Armorer makes just needs to be glued to armor and mail with Power Strips. Apart from the fact that Bo-Katan won’t be taking off his helmet any time soon, the episode otherwise hardly gains an inch of ground in terms of the narrative. As much as I love creature features, including and especially when it comes to Star Wars, to make matters worse, this wasn’t all bad and predictable. It was also highly concentrated filler material – making it the weakest episode of this season, perhaps even of the show itself.
It’s such a shame. The series has a lot to offer visually and artistically, the cast is good and in the first two seasons – with which I also had my problems – it showed in its best moments how damn cool detached Star Wars stories can be. Sadly my best hope now is that consistency was never her forte. Because that means they might as well get their act together for the rest of the season. After all: The music is still the absolute hit.
