My read on it:
IF she still wants it so she can rule, she wants absolutely zero question as to her right to wield it. She doesn’t want it through a loophole of defeating a rando cyborg guy who got the drop on Din and swallowed him whole in an ambush. And she wants an audience…she wants (if I may borrow from another franchise) the full Warrior Falls challenge where plenty of people will see that she clearly defeated the current rightful wielder of the Darksaber in combat.
I meant she didn’t have to give him back the darksaber after she rescued him. He offered it to her before and yielded in their verbal “combat” at the end of season 2, she couldn’t accept it without winning it for real, then in this episode she legit won it for real and let’s him reclaim it.
Which is why I answered the way I did—it doesn’t change anything either way. Nytwyng’s answer is also fairly accurate as to why she wouldn’t want to take it.
I don’t think Mando fell off the shelf into the water. It looks like he was pulled into the water. Plus not sure if the damage to the city made parts of the shelf to fall in.
He wasn’t pulled, he just stepped right off the ledge. If he was pulled, we’d have seen something more definite.
He’s wearing a lot of very heavy armor, so the speed at which he fell is totally consistent with what would be expected.
I think the only issue so far I have is that between season 1, 2 and book of boba fett, and now season three is how much time has passed since start of season 1
For that matter, how long is a typical episode in the course of the star wars universe ? for us its 60 minutes for example, but how long is it for the characters ? few hours, a day or two, a week ?
I know hyper space travel takes AT LEAST a minmum of 1 hour to get anywhere in hyperspace alone sometimes a jaunt across the galaxy could take as much as 3 days too.
That’s my only issue with the show. How is time kept ? P-47, any thoughts on that ?
So I rewatch it a few more times. I believe you’re right he didn’t get pulled off. But when she drives into to water to rescue him. You can see a collapsed staircase. So I guess I was half right.
How is time kept? The short answer is that it doesn’t seem to be.
The longer answer is that it doesn’t really need to be because time management is not really a concern for this story at the moment. There’s no imperative or time pressure, so things can happen at whatever pace works well for the story, and what exactly that timeline is is fairly irrelevant so there’s no real need to make it evident anywhere.
As for the gap between seasons, I’d guess 2-3 years have passed since the beginning of the show, judging by the changes in Nevarro and the meta information that TV shows will often progress the show’s time at a similar rate to the real world’s time (aging actors and all) season-to-season, even if not in how the episodes are spaced.
Hyperspace is so goofy that I pretty much just ignore whatever they do with it in contemporary Star Wars media because it makes no worldbuilding or practical sense. Jumping from Kalevala to Tatooine and back is not cheap in time or fuel—were they considering this distance, they would have given him a different itinerary.
I believe that, in a recent interview, Favreau said that Grogu spent a year or two with Luke and that several years have passed on Mando and BoBF combined until now.
You were dead-on. I wasn’t sure that it made sense for the waters to be at the same level if the place had collapsed, but however they did they are.
As for this episode, 8/8 with a full 2,500lbs bomb load and some HVARs thrown in for good measure. WOW! This was absolutely impeccable, start to finish.
If they Jurassic Park the Mythosaur, I will be a very happy sentient fighter plane.
I loved the fighter fight at the beginning even though Star Wars starfighters don’t act at all like airplanes and she apparently isn’t flying a Clone Wars-vintage Kom’rk-class since the cockpit didn’t do any of its fancy spinning (that’s a good trick!).
The accidental conversion was hilarious, but convenient, and does a pretty good job demonstrating how accepting Mandalorians are.
The whole sequence with Pershing and what’s-her-face was excellent, and pretty tense. I knew she was setting him up, but I wasn’t quite sure why, or how it would be paid off. Evidently, she is still in the tank for Gideon, his woman on the inside.
Pershing is a gullible idiot to have fallen for her manipulations, but it’s consistent and makes sense—I’m not saying that to say the character was behaving in a way that requires uncharacteristic stupidity.
Oh, what else, I’m sure I’m forgetting something.
The Coruscant worldbuilding was all excellent, and the mountaintop thing was cool. I can’t remember if we’ve seen that in Canon before, but I think it showed up in the background of a Clone Wars episode? Maybe the one where Robonino and the Selkath tried to assassinate Padme and Bail.
The use of letter/number designations for the Imperials as names more than just data-identifiers surprised me, but I suppose it isn’t a foreign concept to Star Wars. Perhaps it was considered poetic justice.
Hmm…
In summation, I suppose I’ll just say I really like Bo-Katan. They’re doing an excellent job with her thus far, and that was my biggest question mark coming into the season.
Aye.
Great episode, it tickled my brain, and now my GM fingers are itching.
Definitely. I anticipate that the Disposal Yards will become a staple trope of RPGs.
Indeed. And the whole mandalorian culture thing, the mysticism and religiosity if you will, this works well with my head canon, game universe, and campaign history.
I just feel like they’re deliberately making the NR look as bad as they can to justify the fetid world building of the sequels, so I could’ve done without the Coruscant sequence.
Eh, it portrayed politicians as scummy, self-interested sleazebags (in other words, accurately), and that isn’t really any different from the other Star Wars depictions of politicians.
As for the other governmental organizations etc., it didn’t really seem that bad to me? What exactly are you poking at to say they were “making the NR look as bad as they can”?
That general area of Monument Plaza did indeed show up in Clone Wars (although I don’t recall if the mountaintop itself was visible or not), and that bit of worldbuilding has shown up in a lot of print material dating back to Legends. I’d always pictured it, though, as an open area of part of the ground in the Plaza being the mountaintop rather than it sticking up through a display-like opening. A lot of its references were always something along the lines of “the only place on the planet where people can still touch the actual surface,” so the “no touching” aspect threw me (unless it’s a newly-instituted New Republic policy).
This is one of the reasons I think that the NR in the Legends was a bit too optimistic about what would happen after the fall of the Empire. It was mainly that Bothan (Borsk Fey’lyah, or something or other?) that felt like a Star Wars-level sleazy politician. Granted, we hadn’t really seen any Star Wars politicians politicking before the prequels; and many of the few prequel scenes where there were politicians with some integrity/conscience conversing were cut from the films. Andor, like it or not, but the series display how politicians just worsened under Palpy’s regime (understandably?). This side of it I like. It’s more paranoid than the Republic perhaps, but otherwise it has very much the same kind of structure and culture. Corruption is rife - which may be considered logical, considering the vastness of a bureaucracy that runs thousands of worlds.
Despite the flaws that can be pointed to in the sequels, I think that it is a more likely scenario than what we were served in many of the old Legends books (that the Empire hid, reformed, waited, and attacked). It also makes sense, given what we now know, that Palpsy wouldn’t continue to wage war, but rather hide, wait it out, and come slamming back. The corruption of the wealthy and powerful in the core worlds is an easy target for manipulation and taking advantage of (given the sleazebag-standard of Star Wars politicians), no need to rush retaking the galaxy, let chaos ensue, let the NR undermine its own legitimacy, play on the prejudices of the core worlders and outer rimers…
Combine what we know from the prequels, Andor, Clone Wars, and what little appeared in Rebels, and the NR’s rehabilitation and reintegration (assimilation?) program smacks of good intentions leading to the proverbial hell. It feeds into the misplaced sense of superiority that the bureaucracy and core worlders are displayed as having. Dismantling the imperial fleet, and their own (because we’ve had a great war, so now we will never have war again… Reminiscent of something?), in a vast galaxy where fleets can hide wherever. It’s a clear ideological choice, that ignores or does not want to acknowledge the realities of living in a galaxy with FTL. It rings true to the level of reasoning we are used to Star Wars politicians (and others) displaying. For all the futurism, it does not appear that Star Wars is an information or knowledge society in the same way ours is considered to be one.
Also, the social class dimension and “geography” also matters in this, which I felt was well executed in the scenes after Pershing’s speech: the core versus the outer rim with those flamboyant buffoons. This aspect has always been present (at least from the prequels and onwards), but at times under-communicated or underutilised (or I have just been caught with the wizz-bangs). The social and political challenge of governing a galaxy, let a lone a planet or landmass. It’s cool, and also what Karga commented on.
Actually, the Canon and old Legends bear a lot of similarities on this front, though the scale differs. In Canon, Palpatine orchestrated the final defeat of the Empire proper at Jakku, but many warlords still sprung up, fighting on their own or with larger groups, holding small pieces of territory or trying to expand elsewhere, etc.
In Legends, you had much the same thing. Palpatine “went to” Byss where the Empire had a lot of his secret reserves and continued to build up his strength (personal and militarily) only to come back hard. Meanwhile, the “unworthy” Imperials fought “petty” wars with the New Republic as warlords.
They presented a more serious territorial and military threat in Legends, but the principle is quite similar.
What is lacking in current canon is an organized “Imperial Remnant” faction, but that is likely what they are building to with Gideon’s apparent escape and the cloud of TIEs we saw on Kalevala.
After World War Two, the US, the victorious power and un-argued king of the sea, dismantled or decommissioned a massive portion of its fleet, no longer willing or able to maintain such a large fleet in peacetime. The remaining vessels still constituted the most powerful navy in the world by an overwhelming margin.
The New Republic maintained a standing military and navy, unlike its pre-Empire counterpart. However, they would not wish to maintain the whole of their Alliance fleet because they would not be able to afford to maintain the ships alone, much less the crews to staff them. Maintaining the Imperial ships was out of the question due to their identifiably Imperial nature. Accordingly, their recourse was to decommission and scrap the credit sinks, raising funds in the process (all the tech in ships… They ought to be able to turn a profit).
Deleting ALL Imperial-branded equipment etc. is very overzealous.
I think it’s always been pretty well communicated. The Outer Rim is barely civilized, far from even the Empire, poor, farmland, moisture vaporators, where people go to hide, etc.
Even in the OT, the Outer Rim was cast as the backwaters. That’s even what the name itself suggests, giving the idea of a far-flung edge and a vast frontier (if you know how geometry works). It was certainly a principle present in the Clone Wars, and if you look into the strategic story choices made surrounding politicians, this drives it home. Who are the most influential? Bail (Core), Padme (Mid Rim), Mothma (Core). Who runs into trouble and struggles to receive support from the senate? Onaconda Farr (Outer Rim) and Riyo Chuchi (Outer Rim). Padme a little bit, but that’s because of her vulnerable position on the edge of the Outer Rim and not really because of any lack of support from the Senate.
Further, the Separatists tended to be in the Outer Rim. The further out from the Core you got, the more of them joined the Separatists because of dissatisfaction with the Republic or de facto control by a trade conglomerate the Republic let run wild. After all, you had “The Outer Rim Sieges” toward the end of the Clone Wars.
Indeed, the scale is what I think matters in some of the telling here, and the duration also. In the old Legends, the Imperial Remnant became a recognised state in its own right. Which was cool at the time, but it was also not Palpsy’s Empire as such. Based on some of the lines in TFA I have the impression that the NR was a reduced governing body compared to the Empire and the Old Republic. There are more independent planets around, but I may be wrong.
Yep, again, Dark Empire was fun, but I kept it out of my reasoning above due to it being a graphic novel, and there seemed to be less coherence between the narrative expansions back in those days. But certainly, Dark Empire must have as served some kind of inspiration here.
In principle, but in practice the time scale and threat-levels differ, at least based on what we currently know, and the impressions I got from the early novels leading up to the sequels. They washed over the time between the Empire and the First Order in very broad strokes, and I can assume it was because they were gong to flesh it out further, like they are now doing. As you say:
Gideon is like a grumpier Gilad Palleon, or something. Although, I’m uncertain if he’s connected to Thrawn (there was a character in Rebels called Palleon, I believe, so he may still appear in some form again).
It will be interesting to see what they do with this, Gideon may not be aware of the rest of the imperials hiding out there. So he may not be one of Palpy’s “chosen ones”.
I also wonder if the NR cares to act, or even notices. I think this episodes is letting us know that the NR is probably not going to act, not on any large scale at least. Further cementing the divide, fomenting discontent and maintaining grudges and prejudices against the core worlds and the NR. And then we have the few NR rangers zipping around in their X-Wings trying to keep law and order, reporting to a bureaucracy that is incapable or unwilling to act…? It’s cool.
Yeah, I was referencing The Great War, or World War One, and a sentiment present at that time that did not believe there could be war again, I mean, it wasn’t ruling politics or whatever, but the ultimate destruction of the first industrial war left many cultural scars, and there was for a (short) time at least, a disbelief that this would happen again… which is why some (at least smaller) countries reduced their standing militaries. But your points illustrates the rationality well.
Yeah, it’s been present, my comment was more aimed at my own focus, which used to more aimed at the mysticism of Star Wars.
What you say is true, but not necessarily obvious to every consumer of the franchise, at least not until the PT and Clone Wars. The older Legends books did communicate it too, but the focus wasn’t on it in the same way - at least not as I remember it (granted, it’s been years since I read those books). Rebels really drove it home I think, but the Clone Wars series were a good preamble. Or I just ignored it at the time of consumption. 
Please don’t add your editorializing into the quote box. If you want to wink at me in response, have at it, but please don’t change my quote to do it. Maybe it wouldn’t bother most people, but I have a particular issue with people messing with my words.
That all seems pretty accurate. On the New Republic, I would say I think it’s less that it’s a “reduced” or “decentralized” government (which would be a good thing) than that it’s impotent and mired in corruption, unable to really project its power or extend its influence.
TRoS was basically Dark Empire reskinned. I only enjoyed TRoS in the first place because I had no hopes for it and turned off my brain entirely. Still haven’t gone back to rewatch it.
But I hated Dark Empire, and I disregard TRoS. I haven’t really liked any Post-Endor chronologies. I enjoy the Imperial Warlords-type thing, but what I feel is missing a lot of the time is hope. I want a happy ending. I like The Mandalorian in part because there is that hope of future prosperity, of the Mandalorians returning home and rebuilding their culture and world, but if the emperor never really died, if the Empire never goes away, if the New Republic is just worse than the Republic, it kinda makes all the sacrifices and efforts of the Rebellion pointless.
Were I to be writing a post-Endor chronology, it would essentially boil down to “The New Republic ushered in a new era of peace and liberty, and Luke founded a new Jedi order that wasn’t as idiotic as the last one. Over the course of the next two hundred years, the New Republic grew complacent and a new threat arose!”
Just give them some time to enjoy the victory, please. Let there be heroes and families and peace. Let the heroes settle down and see their children grow up and live lives in peace. Eternal war is Warhammer’s thing.
Anyway…
Captain Pellaeon is Canon, as captain of the Harbinger under Admiral Thrawn. It is unknown (meta) whether he survived the blockade of Lothal or not.
He either totally isn’t, or he’s a “rear-guard,” Palpatine’s agent in the known galaxy liaising between the two worlds. I prefer to think that he has nothing to do with the story of the sequels.
I don’t know that the New Republic wouldn’t act… If you have a full-on Imperial remnant faction out there threatening to actually take back territory or establishing a significant threat to New Republic systems, they will certainly have to will to act (or at least should) and may not have much of a choice in the matter. If he is just operating around the fringes, he may be able to get away with it, but if he does anything directly against them they can’t afford to ignore him.
Haven’t read many of the old Legends books, and am mostly familiar through lore videos and Wookieepedia research.
With Rebels, I may be forgetting some things, but I didn’t think there was all that much in it to drive home the core/outer rim dichotomy, in large part because it all took place in the Outer Rim. We may be looking at the same information with different perspectives on what counts towards the principle under consideration.
I’m a Clone Wars aficionado—it’s really my main area of focus—and can definitely say those ideas are pretty heavily engrained in much of the story, especially the politicking towards the end with Pursuit of Peace and similar storylines.