Questions raised by The Mandalorian season three

Though I haven't stooped so low as to call those sceptical towards the recent output from franchises I enjoy names, I'm aware that I tend towards the over-positive side of the fandom spectrum. Of course there's a lot to criticise, for instance, in the Disney + Star Wars shows. But still I have an irrational urge to shout "shut up! Just shut up!" when confronted with too many negative fan responses. 

It's not just because of my old affection for the Mighty Mouse, which makes me cringe whenever someone uses the "oooh, Disney's so bad, they only want to make money" argument (I admit, my brand loyalty is waning of late – not because Disney wants to make money, but because they want to preach at the audience while doing it). I'm also somewhat of an anxious consumer. I've witnessed in the past how crucial good viewing figures have been for the continued existence – or not – of my favourite TV shows. That's partly why I've been obsessing over viewer responses to the latest season of The Mandalorian, to the point where it almost overshadowed my own enjoyment of the series. Because if various commentators talk down the season too much, and viewers consequently fail to tune in, Disney might quite simply stop making Star Wars TV shows. And then where would I be?

So, when I say that this season was somewhat unfocused and probably the weakest of The Mandalorian seasons, please let the record reflect that I still liked it very much and want lots more of this particular sort of fare. That said, here are a few points that puzzled me after the season finale aired yesterday:

So, who was the spy, then? An enjoyable part of The Mandalorian from the first has been the episode titles, which can often be interpreted in more than one way. The episode title "The Sin" in season one can refer to Din Djarin taking back Grogu (at that time still known as the Child) from a group of sinister ex-Imperials, after having accepted payment for delivering him. It's a clear violation of Din's wonderfully deal-based creed. But the real sin was handing over Grogu in the first place. The title character of the episode "The Jedi" can be Grogu or Ahsoka (though she left the order years earlier). "The Believer" can be Din Djarin, or the cynic Mayfeld who discovers something to believe in when confronted with a particularly nasty ex-Imperial, or even said ex-Imperial himself: what he believes in may be terrifying, but he does have conviction. And so it goes on.

So when an episode is called "The Spies", you certainly expect to see more than one spy in it. It could just as easily have been called "The Spy" and featured more than one spy, leaving you guessing as to which of them the title specifically singles out in true Mandalorian fashion. But no, here we have an episode title which is unusually insistent on the plural – and only one spy, Elia Kane who we already knew was crooked, is revealed during the run-time of the episode. This may of course be explained in the next season, but then the reveal that one of the assembled Mandalorians was playing false all along will have less of an impact because it has already been quasi-spoiled. In my view, the spy should either have been revealed before the season's end, or they should have gone with the episode title "The Spy" instead.

What's the Armourer's game? This isn't an original observation by any means, but the Armourer – the spiritual leader of the "covert" of Mandalorians Din belongs to – is awfully soft on Bo-Katan Kryze. Din Djarin, who's always toed the line, gets into trouble for having removed his helmet in public (all for the love of his boy) and has to fulfil a task the Armourer herself believes impossible and bring proof of it in order to get accepted again. 

It's another story with Bo-Katan, though she has lived in open defiance of the Armourer's creed. She is integrated into the covert, though that wasn't her original intention; her alleged sighting of a mythical beast is taken by the Armourer at face value without proof; later, she is singled out as the future leader of the Mandalorian people by the Armourer, who asks her to remove her helmet so that she can "walk both ways" and unite the covert and less dogmatic factions of Mandalorians. 

It's not that Bo-Katan hasn't proven herself useful, but still, it's a steep rise to the top for one whom the Armourer was very scathing about in The Book of Boba Fett (in one of the episodes where it forgot it wasn't The Mandalorian). This strange Armourer-behaviour made many speculate that maybe she was the spy, though her motives would in that case have been unclear. As it is, the Armourer remains enigmatic – which I realise is partly the point, but it's starting to get on my nerves.       

Whatever happened to Doctor Pershing? Unpopular opinion: I really liked the Doctor Pershing episode, though admittedly there wasn't much Mando in it. It's hard to pinpoint what I want from political intrigues in Star Wars, but maybe, like my expectations of the franchise or the genre as a whole, it can be summed up with the words: relatable but different. I shudder at clunky parallells with the real world. My heart sinks every time someone calls the Imperials "space Nazis". It's obvious where Lucas got some of the inspiration for his black-hearted Empire from, but still: this is a galaxy far, far away. Let the Empire be evil in its own way!

The limitations of the New Republic as seen in the Pershing episode don't have an obvious real-world counterpart, but it illustrates wider philosophical problems we too can be faced with. What some commentators took away from the episode was that the New Republic was too soft on Pershing and other ex-Imperials, thereby letting itself in for being double-crossed. Me, I saw the complete opposite. 

Pershing is allowed to give a lecture on cloning, but he isn't allowed to practise it or do any research at all. After having lived in a "re-integration" camp, he is housed with other ex-Imperials who are all busily extolling the virtues of the New Republic and condemning the Empire, yet none of them is keen to re-visit that camp. Pershing's job isn't only menial but gives no satisfaction at all, as he's tasked to make an inventory of Imperial technology which will then be scrapped when, according to him, it could be put to good use. His freedom is restricted: he's not allowed to leave a certain zone, and the Republic has planted a mole – double agent Kane – to spy on and employ entrapment strategies on him and other fellow ex-Imperials. 

There are more indications still that the New Republic's "Amnesty programme" isn't all it's cracked up to be, yet you can see their dilemma: ex-Imperials are a threat to their regime, and it can't be easy to know which of the Imps will make model citizens and which will remain bad news. All the same it was clear, at least to me, that they'd set the bar far too low with being "not as bad as the Empire".

But what happened to Doctor Pershing after Kane, seemingly, fried his brains out? And was it so smart to do it when her bosses clearly wanted their clone doctor's brains unfried?         

Will we ever see the end of the helmet rule? Are the Armourer and the other helmet nutters really expecting this genuinely stupid rule to survive, when they live side by side with Bo-Katan's buddies who don't adhere to it? And why hasn't Din Djarin abandoned it a season and a half ago? It's time he and his fellow Mandos saved their helmets for battle and started thinking about the future of their civilisation. Because how do you find a mate and procreate with your helmet on?

Shadow and Bone season two: when protagonists go dark

As far back as August 2021, I watched the first season of the Netflix fantasy series Shadow and Bone and liked it. Now the second season is available, and though this is one of Netflix's more solid fantasy offerings (that I have seen, that is) I have to admit I'm a tad disappointed.

With the setup stage out of the way, I expected the second season to be better than the first. But after a spirited start with an enjoyable MacGuffin hunt, one of the main plotlines slowed down, while the other reached a questionable climax – and then slowed down too. The pace in the second half of the season was at times leaden, which is an unwelcome trend in newly-produced fantasy series. 

Some problems from the first season which I had expected the second to get to grips with – like the story of the Crows from Ketterdam, a colourful band of rogues, and the one about sun-summoner Alina never integrating fully – remained. Even the first time around, I found the hour-long episodes a bit overlong, and now I noticed it even more. The series overall would have benefited from more and shorter episodes, where some scenes could easily have been sped up and/or trimmed down.

In some ways, though, things were changed up, but not always in a manner I liked. In the first season, I preferred the storyline involving the Crows to that of Alina, whose pining after her childhood friend Mal I found tiresome. This time around, I was less taken with the Crows. Not that there wasn't a lot going on with them at first, before they too were hit by mid-season inertia, but I didn't much care for their leader Kaz going full-out Monte Christo on his underworld rival Pekka Rollins.

It raises an interesting question, though: how dark can a protagonist we're expected to root for go? Kaz isn't meant to be a knight in shining armour, but nor is he meant to be a villain. Anti-hero is probably the best fit. But even anti-heroes are supposed to be distinguishable from villains.

I don't think it's just villain-loving souls like me who are fascinated by speculations on what villainous versions of our favourite heroes and heroines would be like. Writers are aware of it, but there's a reason plots advertised as exploring a hero's or heroine's dark side often turn out to be cop-outs, such as the seemingly villainous protagonist being under some spell, or just pretending to be bad, or being an evil doppelganger. Once a main player who's not supposed to be a villain has committed to the dark side, it's not so easy to pull them back again. "Good" characters rarely have the style and charisma of first-rate villains, but they are supposed to have the advantage of doing the right thing, or at least knowing what the right thing is. If they lose that advantage, what do they have left?

In Kaz's case, his behaviour reflects badly on his crew as well as they aren't really trying to hold him back. He starts off by blowing up his own club, now in Rollins's possession. That made me sit up and wonder "hello, isn't it likely people died because you wanted to make a point?", but the Crows never ask this question, though they are a little shaken by the destruction of property (Jesper laments his lost jackets). 

The worst part of Kaz's plan, though, is that he uses the knowledge that Rollins has a small son against him. In a pivotal scene, he defeats Rollins by leading him to believe that Kaz has buried the boy alive and will only give away where he is in time for Rollins to save him if Rollins bends to his will. It's a deeply unpleasant scene, witnessed by Jesper, Kaz's best friend, and Nina, a relatively new recruit to the Crows. I expected one of them to give Kaz a piece of their mind afterwards and make it clear to him that he was out of line. 

Nope, doesn't happen. Jesper is content as long as they don't really harm the boy, and also swallows Kaz's story of Rollins having "killed" his brother. The brother died of a disease carried in by one of Rollins's ships, which only makes him guilty of murdering Kaz's brother in Kaz's brain, but the Crow leader even gets away with a piece of his revenge motivation being wonky.

This is another problem with "the hero/heroine going dark" storyline. If the other good guys go along with it, then they too are compromised. I'm all for nuanced characterisations and stories not being about unblemished good vs irredeemable evil, but there is a line, in my opinion, which characters who aren't villains shouldn't cross – at least not without there being repercussions and regret. (Also, I believe at least some of my villain crushes would have balked at Kaz's tactics.)

Anyway, back to Alina. I had a lot more time for her part of the story this time around, mostly because of chief villain General Kirigan. Ben Barnes's Kirigan really grew on me during this season: he is darned attractive, and Alina plainly thinks so too. Her romance with Mal may still be a drag, and there isn't a lot of heat between her and a potential new love interest either (a dashing runaway prince who's taken up privateering – when Alina had to get engaged to him "for state reasons", I realised belatedly that the novelist Leigh Bardugo was probably a woman, which proved to be the case). But there's real chemistry between Alina and Kirigan. When other couple constellations where on screen, I tended to think "get a move on", but when Kirigan and Alina had one of their tête-à-têtes, the lack of pace didn't bother me one bit.

There are still things to enjoy in the series, then. As last time, I'm impressed with the world building, the costumes and settings are really appealing, Kirigan's a good villain, and Pekka Rollins isn't half bad either, though he sometimes seems to act like a bastard just for the heck of it. I found the juxtaposition of his Scottish accent and Finnish first name a nice touch: yeah, fantasy Finns are tough.

Alina's flirtation with dark forces, hinted at in the final scene, is more intriguing than Kaz's, and I have some hope that the writers will be able to make something out of it without ruining the character if there's a third season. But they'll have to watch out.