The Mandalorian Ch. 21 teaches us to share.
It's okay for characters to take turns in the spotlight.
The Short Take:
A triumphant mix of rousing action and scintillating intrigue. But whose show is this? A fraught question, but I’m not sure I care what the answer is.
Image Credit: Star Wars News Net
[SPOILER WARNING: I’m no pirate and as such will not double-cross you. As long as you heed this spoiler warning, that is.]
The Long Take:
There have been murmurs. Whispers. Snide remarks. Din and Grogu have taken a back seat in their own show.
Most recently, I heard Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson debating on The Ringerverse’s House of R whether or not Katee Sackoff was actually a co-lead with Pedro Pascal this season. They noted that she’s listed as such in some of the episodes, and after “The Convert” and “The Foundling,” the idea that this season is actually more about Bo-Katan’s journey than Din Djarin’s seems more and more real. Now, with The Armorer herself ordaining Bo-Katan of House Kryze as the “chosen one” who “walks both worlds” and will reunite all the tribes of Mandalore, it’s hard to deny: Bo-Katan is the central figure of this season’s story.
Some might say we’ve been down this road before. A ubiquitous critique of The Book of Boba Fett was that the two best episodes of the season were actually episodes of The Mandalorian shoehorned in, continuing Din and Grogu’s story in the middle of an entirely different story about Boba Fett’s quest to become Daimyo of Mos Espa. Some might recognize a parallel now; so far this season we have had a Doctor Pershing episode and several Bo-Katan-centric episodes in the middle of what we thought was a show about Din Djarin’s clan of two.
First, allow me to entertain an argument against the idea that these two situations are in parallel. To me, Episodes 5 and 6 of The Book of Boba Fett — “Return of the Mandalorian” and “From the Desert Comes a Stranger,” feel like an intrusion (a welcome intrusion, but an intrusion nonetheless) because they continue the previously introduced plot lines of a separate predecessor series (The Mandalorian), displacing the plots introduced in the new series (The Book of Boba Fett). In Season 3 of The Mandalorian, however, Din and Bo (and maybe Pershing, TBD) are two co-participants in same storyline that has organically evolved from the same series. Plus, we haven’t gone off on a different quest without the main character like we did in The Book of Boba Fett when Din, for example, travels to the planet where Luke is building his Jedi Academy and training Grogu. In Season 3 of The Mandalorian, Din has at least been present alongside Bo-Katan this whole time. (Unless, of course, we follow Bo-Katan on her recruiting tour, leaving Din and Grogu behind on Navarro. Then this criticism is potentially in play.)
I’m not ready to compare the structure of The Mandalorian Season 3 to the structure of the now infamous The Book of Boba Fett, but I will say that the helpless townsfolk of Nevarro in this episode gave me The Book of Boba Fett vibes, and not in a good way. I recall that with The BoBF, the sparse background actors were largely a product of covid restrictions, but I’m assuming that wasn’t the case with this week’s episode? If I’m wrong about that, let me know. I just need to know if so many of them died that only a book club’s worth of people survived, or if the city itself, despite all its gentrified grandeur, only had a small group of actual residents?
Image Credit: Epicstream
At any rate, this “whose show is this?” anxiety may be more of a misunderstanding between viewer and creator; that what many thought this show was about does not perfectly align with the show Filoni and Favreau have been making this entire time. On Friday night, I attended a Paleyfest panel dedicated to The Mandalorian, featuring Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, Rick Famuyiwa, Pedro Pascal, and Katee Sackoff. To read all about it, I’ll send you to the review I wrote for Fantha Tracks, but a discussion point I didn’t cover in that review that applies to this question of “whose show is this?” is that Jon Favreau, at least, has always seen this series as about The Mandalorians as a people rather than a single Mandalorian. He actually said that they came up with the series and the storylines for the series by trying to answer a simple question: Where are all the Mandalorians? Why aren’t they around in most of the Star Wars stories we know? In order to fill in this gap, Favreau said that they always knew that all roads would eventually lead to Mandalore.
I recap this part of the panel to show that it seems like the plan all along was to tell a story bigger than Din Djarin and Grogu. Rick Famuyiwa also said that “It feels like we’ve pushed it as far as we can without breaking it”; again, this demonstrates awareness that they have been building towards this capacious story in which many different Mandalorians may share the spotlight because the whole point is that they have to work together to, as The Armorer says, “retake Mandalore.” Furthermore, I would say that Din and Grogu’s story is one and the same with the broader Mandalorian story; they’re both foundlings in search of belonging, and as such are fully invested in bringing Mandalore back to its former glory so that they may have a place to call home. They are the characters that we know and love and therefore we can experience Mandalorian history through their eyes. (The cutest little eyes at that.)
Long before this season, fans and critics have speculated about who the titular Mandalorian actually is. Despite all the possibilities, I do think that a quick line in this episode reveals that the Filoni and Favreau are still thinking of Din Djarin as that Mandalorian. When Din flies circles around the pirates in his modded N-1 Starfighter, Pirate King Gorian Shard says, “It’s The Mandalorian!” I think this show can contain multitudes. We can still call Din The Mandalorian, while we also tell a story about all Mandalorians. Though, if I go into overanalyze mode, I might say that the fact that Gorian Shard calls Din “The Mandalorian” rather than Din Djarin speaks to the Galaxy’s current perception of The Mandalorian people. They are so few and so scattered that when someone encounters one, they have to be the token stand-in for their entire civilization.
Now allow me to entertain the possibility that we should all cool our jet packs and not jump to conclusions about the centrality of Din Djarin to this season’s main storyline of retaking and restoring Mandalore. I’ve been waiting for the conflict shoe to drop between Din and Bo all season long, and while there has been no evidence that this will happen, everyone seems to be conveniently forgetting about the Darksaber. If Bo does go and recruit more Mandalorians — let’s say the other Nite Owls — remember what she said they were all obsessed with? The Darksaber. So at some point the ordained leader rubber is going to meet the symbolic power road and someone is going to say, “hey wait, why should we follow you when this guy has the most treasured ancient weapon that determines who should rule all of Mandalore?”
And then we’re going to be back to where Bo-Katan was the last time she ascended to the throne; in the animated series, Star Wars: Rebels, Sabine Wren (who we already know is going to appear in a future series, Ahsoka) gives the Darksaber to Bo-Katan because she doesn’t want it and thinks Bo should lead the people of Mandalore. We later mfind out from The Armorer in The Book of Boba Fett that Bo-Katan’s last reign was seen as a cursed failure. Most lore nuts agree that Bo will likely think that this happened because she did not win the Darksaber in combat, or “the right way.”
All this internal debating on my part fails to address the larger question of our values when it comes to episodic storytelling. Why do we care so much if the story no longer exclusively revolves around Din and Grogu? I think in this case the answer might be simpler: because we really like these two characters and want to spend time with them as much as possible. But, more broadly, why can’t a show be more like a storytelling relay race, handing the baton to various characters who are all interconnected? To me, this seems to mostly be the genre conventions of television telling us what to like and not to like. We’re used to one show, one hero. And we get fussy if we see anything stray from that model. Because that’s what the status quo has conditioned us to want.
When I stop to think if any show has offered an alternative to this model, I think of HBO’s Game of Thrones. You could say that The Starks were our main characters, but it would be difficult to pinpoint one Stark as THE main character. Lo and behold, Jon Favreau was quoted in an Entertainment Weekly interview from 2020, saying, “As we introduce other characters, there are opportunities to follow different storylines…The world was really captivated by Game of Thrones and how that evolved as the characters followed different storylines — that's very appealing to me as an audience member." This decentralized narrative, where we have an ensemble of main characters who diverge and converge in varying combinations, makes a lot of sense, especially knowing that we’re about to link up with other characters from Rebels in the upcoming Ahsoka series.
Image Credit: Inside the Magic
Please don’t mistake my agonizing over this issue for a distaste for this episode. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’m still high on those jet pack fumes. It doesn’t take much to get my fists pumping in the air with this show, and Chapter 21 delivered on pure Mandalorian action — from the dog fights with the pirate ships to The Armorer just whaling on the pirates who think they have the high ground with her hammer. And it balanced all that toothsome action with the mystery and intrigue of Carson Teva’s investigation (I’m all about Detective Kenobi, so I’m automatically on board with Detective Teva) and the emotional stakes of The Children of the Watch finding a new home, in light rather than shadow. I’m tempted to say this is the best episode we’ve gotten all season.
And I haven’t even gotten to flipping out about Zeb!!! For those of you haven’t seen the animated series, Rebels, the lavender-colored alien speaking with a gravelly, surly voice to Carson Teva is Garazeb Orrelios or, to his friends, Zeb. I was so shocked to see him here that I at first rationalized him as another random Lasat. That was foolish in retrospect because we know that other members of Phoenix Squadron (the crew/family at the center of Rebels) have been confirmed to appear in Ahsoka. So his appearance here is likely an early seed that will branch out into that series.
The main thing you need to know about Zeb right now, I think, is that his entire people were nearly wiped out by The Empire. More specifically, they used a T-7 ion disruptor, which would slowly and painfully disintegrate victims at the molecular level. This means that it’s not going to take much to get Zeb to join a mission if it means exacting revenge on Moff Gideon, who raged similarly brutal death and destruction on Mandalore.
Image Credit: Men’s Health
Yes, I’ve spent more time in this review talking about Bo-Katan and Zeb — two characters who originated in animated series — than I have about Din and Grogu. And that’s okay sometimes. Star Wars is a big story and there’s plenty of room for everyone.
I have been baffled by the criticism of this show not being solely focused on. Din & Grogu. I enjoyed your discussion of that