I love how season one established that Mando will simply never be able to find another Mandalorian as they have scattered to the winds to Season 3 having him being unable to stop for gas without interrupting a Mandalorian Bar Mitzvah. Can't wait until episode 3 when Mando and Grogu go to Bill and Frank's Moisture Farm only to discover a heartbreaking suicide note.
Me loved season 1, liked season 2, and me probably going to just read these reviews in lieu of watching season 3. More this gets connected to other, lesser Star Warses, less interest me have in it. And me understand they have to bring in other characters for synergy's sake or whatever, but that early run of week-by-week Gunsmoke With Aliens episodes was terrific and they really could have stretched that out for several seasons before Zombie CGI Luke and People You Had To Watch 11 Seasons of Clone Wars To Understand Significance Of show up.
"If you did watch it, you know that the back half of that series turns into The Book of Sorry, We’re Sorry, Here’s Mando and Baby Yoda Instead"
Nothing feels more like old AVclub then getting a true LOL line like this in an episode review!
Its nice to be back with the Mandalorian, which has so much more charm and life than BoBF and Obi-Wan did. I'm also interested in the Mandalore storylines this season, though hope that the show will retain the episodic nature of the prior seasons as well. I will never understand what they did with putting a Mandalorian episode in the middle of BoBF (like why not just release it as a special standalone episode of Mandalorian a couple months later? At least then fans of that show will know they are supposed to watch it!)
I'm glad to have these characters back doing their thing again and I thought this was a promising start to the season. A bit of table setting, sure, but I like that the show seems to be sticking to the season long quest narrative with little mini-tasks scattered throughout to give each episode a way to feel like it's own little bit of incremental progression. We've got to get Mando back in the good graces of his people, and to do that we've got to get to Mandalore, but to do that we've got to get IG-11 repaired, but to do that we've got to find a certain part and before you know it we've got a list of goals to hit, ideally one episode at a time. While this episode felt a bit rushed in the end and wasn't the start to finish rough and tumble fun that the S2 premiere was, I still had a big 'ol goofy grin on my face from start to finish.
I also found it funny how Greef totally no-sold Baby Yoda's real name, but I found the lack of hand-holding at the show's new status quo to be even funnier. I guess that the higher ups at Disney+ have an idea of what the viewership overlap between S2 of The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett looks like, but I still cackled at the evident assumption that that overlap formed a perfect circle. That said, I don't think watching the spinoff too big of an ask to make. The Book of Boba Fett is all of two clicks away on the home page, and the idea of someone keeping up with characters across multiple forms of media or shows is far from unheard of these days (especially given that Disney+ has already been priming its viewers to do just that with its MCU stuff). It's not like this is 2003 and the Wachowskis are expecting viewers to both play a full length video game and seek out a compilations of animated shorts in order for them to fully understand what is going on in The Matrix Revolutions. It's merely mostly baffling rather than entirely baffling.
Disney does probably have that data, but they also have data on how often people will catch up on something when a text implicitly prompts them to do so, and to what degree that brings people deeper into the platform as a whole. How many people watched WandaVision before or after they watched Multiverse of Madness, for example? The more often they convince people that part of the value of Disney+ is being able to keep connected to ongoing narratives they care about, the more "permanent" it feels in people's media landscape.
But at what point does that become too much to ask? That's an open question, and this definitely feels like a test of that.
It does seem like it's a test case of some sort. The choice to offload a big emotional beat to a spinoff is too weird to be purely creative but also too weird to be anything but deliberate. I'm personally excited by the possibilities of cross-media storytelling but it does feel like we're still in a feeling-out phase with regards to just how vital a streaming spinoff can be to a main TV series or film franchise. Too disconnected and it can be like the current "canonical" Star Wars comics and novel series which are so disconnected from the movies and TV series as to hardly matter, and therefore be unlikely to drive a lot of additional viewership. Too interconnected and you leave people scratching their heads.
The sweet spot might be something like the way that WandaVision and Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness were supposed to work before the pandemic messed with their release dates, where the former wraps up its run a month or so before the latter is released. Too bad that proposed Dark Tower adaptation where they adapt the odd books as films and even books as seasons of TV didn't happen back when it was first floated because that would have been a wild experiment to see play out.
I left this premier feeling very deflated (especially after watching the very good Bad Batch episode which also came out today) - it feels like a lot of busy work that doesn't really go anywhere? I mean Josh doesn't even mention that whole pirate subplot, and who could blame him? It felt like they needed a way to show off Mando's sick ride, that's all. I do hope algaebeard pirate king does end up showing up again eventually.
But yeah, not really impressed by this one. Very slow and largely uneventful. Hopefully the coming episodes pick up the pace a little.
Ha. I forgot about the pirates pretty much immediately after that part was over. It does seem like a “hey we need some action in the 4th quarter...how about space pirates!” type of deal.
Overall I still think the episode was fine from a table-setting perspective. I guess we’ll see how it plays out.
Hopefully the pirates part wasn’t a back door pilot to a new series that we’ll all have to watch in order to know what is going on in The Mandalorian Season 4.
OK, showing my ignorance here. What was up with the scene in hyperspace (or whatever they call it) and Mando is sleeping but Baby Yoda sees some sort of creature's shadow in the light? Was he doing that with the Force? Or were those real? And if so are they biological creatures or spaceships? And what was the point?
But I liked they showed BY can somehow make it down from his bubble and into Mando's arms mid-flight. I don't know how long that ship flies but imagine being trapped up in that bubble without even an eye mask for 24 hours!
Those creatures are called purrgil. They're force sensitive space whales that can travel in hyperspace. They first popped up Star Wars: Rebels and played a significant role in the climax of that show. Given that, and given the likely direction the Ahsoka show will be taking, I'd guess they popped up here as a prelude to a larger appearance in that show.
I wouldn't sweat it too much. In this case it's probably just a bit of otherworldly flavor if you don't know what it means and an Easter egg if you do.
Yeah, I totally thought that was a flashback to Mando in the beginning.
I haven't seen the Book of Boba Fett, so I had no idea that they had a big chunk devoted to Grogu/Mando, seems like an attempt to draw in The Mandalorian viewers.
After Andor, it was hard for me to readjust to the lighter tone and more questy nature of the show, a little bit of a letdown for me.
I wouldn't say this was a let down for me, but I definitely felt my brain trying to shift gears from Andor to this. Especially since we only recently watched Andor so we didn't even have the distance of time to help ease that transition.
It's just such a different type of show but I don't really find any conflict between enjoying one and the other. To me they're an example of what seem to be the only two approaches that work in doing a new star war: super serious prestige drama on the one hand episodic 60 70s 80s style tv western/adventure show on the other
I definitely thought it was as flashback to Mando as well at first. In fact after the reveal I thought the deliberate timeline fakeout was the entire purpose of the scene
The show really shot itself in the foot by inexplicably shoe-horning the reunion into Boba Fett. Those two episodes would've made for a great season premiere. Then this is a good table setting into the rest of the season. As it stands, this was fine? Not great but okay. It's just infuriating how the Disney edict that everything is all connected really killed the momentum they should have for season 3.
Also, joining the chorus of those who thought it was a flashback until Mando showed up. I thought that was a nice twist.
This season premiere felt very... perfunctory to me. Here's your scenes with Mando outgunning some folks. Here's your scenes with Baby Yoda trying to eat something he shouldn't. Give the people what they want, right? That's fine enough to refresh our memories about the show, but the episode isn't really grounding this latest quest in anything that feels meaningful to the character yet. I also didn't follow the story logic behind "I need a droid" => "it has to be this broken one that a) tried to murder me and b) is going to be difficult to fix." Or why Bo Katan was just lounging on a throne on an otherwise empty planet with apparently nothing to do.
Totally agree with Josh and others that the transition from s2 and s3 would be incredibly jarring for anyone who (reasonably!) missed out on Boba. My wife's in that position, and we had to pause this one for me to summarize for her. And Josh, I had the exact same "Is this a flashback?" and "Is this trying to be the new Galaxy's Edge?" reactions while watching that you did.
I've liked this series before, but the two big elephants in the room for me at this point in its run are Grogu and Andor. For the former, it's pretty clear that the little guy was supposed to be written out by this point, except that he proved too popular and too big a driver of merch, so the corporate powers have declared that this will always be the Baby Yoda show. The question is what's gonna be driving the plot if the matter of his custody has been solved, and I'm not convinced that bathing in the maguffins of whatever is an especially compelling answer.
And regarding the latter... Look, Andor just raised the bar so much on a level of character and thematic weight that it's going to be a lot harder for me to tap into my 2019/2020 excitement for this other Star Wars title. It would be nice if this creative team took Andor's success as a challenge to up their own game, but everything about this first installment back feels like a resting on (imagined) laurels.
As far as why it has to be that particular droid goes, if I recall correctly the first season established that Mando doesn’t like droids and only came to trust IG-11 after it was reprogrammed to protect Baby Yoda and was willing to sacrifice itself to save others.
I don't understand why folks are comparing The Mandalorian to Andor. They're just completely different types of shows and share nothing in common other than the shared Star Wars Universe. Andor is a prestige totally serialized tv series in the vein of the Wire while The Mandalorian is a mostly episodic much lighter sci-fi western in the vein of 70s 80s westerns and other adventure shows like the Hulk and the Fugitive. Expecting the Manadalorian to be like Andor in contemporary terms would be roughly like turning on Law and Order: SVU and expecting it to be Season One True Detective
I thought it was a solid premier. Enough to get me excited about the season.
I can’t get over the fact that they reunited Mando and Grogu in a different show and didn’t even reference it here. I’m sure just about everyone who watches and cares about The Mandalorian also watched Boba Fett, but this is annoying. Couldn’t they at least co-title the last 3(?) episodes of Boba “Mandalorian Season 2.5” or something?
I thought the same thing as you with the kid in the opening scene.
And I’m sure I’m not the first one to say this, but I chuckle every time they talk about the “creed” in an episode with Carl Weathers.
So... I don’t know how to feel about bringing back IG-11? Does that negate the droid’s sacrifice? Does that negate that moment in the series? I was hoping that character moment with Mando would make him reconsider his position on droids but... It seems like it hasn’t?
I'm just surprised at how horrible that self-destruct was. It was inside of his damn chest, and the chest is the part that is 100% fine. Put some power to it, and it's fully operational. It's absolutely a cop-out.
I assumed they would only be working with his head, maybe build a new body for him out of a protocol droid and make a murder C3P0. New merch, new toys, new IG-11. But instead, it's literally fine? And they looked at that script and said "that's the best idea we have"?
RIGHT?! They made that destruction REAL, like, there was no coming back from.
But now... We are coming back from it because... Growth isn't an option? Or rather, the growth I THOUGHT the show was doing wasn't what the show wanted to do?
I get merch is real for Disney but c'mon folks. You got space whales!!! SPACE WHALES
Note for the Mandalorians: If you're going to hang out next to a lake with a big space alligator, make sure the explosives on your utility belts are powerful enough to blow through its hide.
It's probably never going to happen, as witnessed by Grogu trying to play with the droid mechanic like a toy, but I really wish they would grow the character up to the point that he IS a character and not just force ex muppeta to save Mando three times per season.
I very much enjoyed the creature design/effects in this episode. The Baby Friks, the leaf-beard pirate, the kobold-looking alien that immediately crashes into an asteroid... A great return to the tradition of Star Wars' weird little guys.
Josh, I too was fooled by the foundling in the opening scene. That said, I loved the damn alligator possibly more than any Star Wars mega-creature ever other than the space slug.
Overall, I though this episode was a bit weak, but as I said after watching TPM for the 2nd time - if you put R2-D2 on the screen and make him beep for 2 hours, I'll probably watch it 3 times.
Obviously I'm very late to the party with this but I don't watch Boba Fett and don't have disney+ so was completely thrown by the start of the ep.
It seems baffling to me that they would have crucial Mandalorian plot points NOT in the Mandalorian. I had to watch a youtube recap as it was to remember what happened, and then this was totally bizarre. I understand something for fans of Star Wars who watch everything but not "how are the two main characters going to be reunited?" I'd hate to see The Mandalorian go the way of the marvel films where its too confusing to even bother keeping up with them most of the time.
Yup I was someone who did not watch The Book of Boba Fett before last Wednesday, saw the opening scene (which I too thought was a flashback to Mando's childhood), then was super confused when Mando and Grogu saved the day in a new ship...
So I did end up watching BoBF before finishing this episode last night.
Definitely a swing and a miss by Favreau et al by having the Grogu Mando reunion in that other show.
One thing I realized after bingeing Book of Boba Fett just before watching this episode is that they're using the same set/VFX for Mos Espa and Nevarro City. Very similar shots of the front of Garsa Fwip's Sanctuary and the buildings of Nevarro (just more sand in the former vs trees in the latter). See these photos for example (though if I realize they're not exactly perfect mirrors).
I love how season one established that Mando will simply never be able to find another Mandalorian as they have scattered to the winds to Season 3 having him being unable to stop for gas without interrupting a Mandalorian Bar Mitzvah. Can't wait until episode 3 when Mando and Grogu go to Bill and Frank's Moisture Farm only to discover a heartbreaking suicide note.
Me loved season 1, liked season 2, and me probably going to just read these reviews in lieu of watching season 3. More this gets connected to other, lesser Star Warses, less interest me have in it. And me understand they have to bring in other characters for synergy's sake or whatever, but that early run of week-by-week Gunsmoke With Aliens episodes was terrific and they really could have stretched that out for several seasons before Zombie CGI Luke and People You Had To Watch 11 Seasons of Clone Wars To Understand Significance Of show up.
"If you did watch it, you know that the back half of that series turns into The Book of Sorry, We’re Sorry, Here’s Mando and Baby Yoda Instead"
Nothing feels more like old AVclub then getting a true LOL line like this in an episode review!
Its nice to be back with the Mandalorian, which has so much more charm and life than BoBF and Obi-Wan did. I'm also interested in the Mandalore storylines this season, though hope that the show will retain the episodic nature of the prior seasons as well. I will never understand what they did with putting a Mandalorian episode in the middle of BoBF (like why not just release it as a special standalone episode of Mandalorian a couple months later? At least then fans of that show will know they are supposed to watch it!)
I'm glad to have these characters back doing their thing again and I thought this was a promising start to the season. A bit of table setting, sure, but I like that the show seems to be sticking to the season long quest narrative with little mini-tasks scattered throughout to give each episode a way to feel like it's own little bit of incremental progression. We've got to get Mando back in the good graces of his people, and to do that we've got to get to Mandalore, but to do that we've got to get IG-11 repaired, but to do that we've got to find a certain part and before you know it we've got a list of goals to hit, ideally one episode at a time. While this episode felt a bit rushed in the end and wasn't the start to finish rough and tumble fun that the S2 premiere was, I still had a big 'ol goofy grin on my face from start to finish.
I also found it funny how Greef totally no-sold Baby Yoda's real name, but I found the lack of hand-holding at the show's new status quo to be even funnier. I guess that the higher ups at Disney+ have an idea of what the viewership overlap between S2 of The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett looks like, but I still cackled at the evident assumption that that overlap formed a perfect circle. That said, I don't think watching the spinoff too big of an ask to make. The Book of Boba Fett is all of two clicks away on the home page, and the idea of someone keeping up with characters across multiple forms of media or shows is far from unheard of these days (especially given that Disney+ has already been priming its viewers to do just that with its MCU stuff). It's not like this is 2003 and the Wachowskis are expecting viewers to both play a full length video game and seek out a compilations of animated shorts in order for them to fully understand what is going on in The Matrix Revolutions. It's merely mostly baffling rather than entirely baffling.
Disney does probably have that data, but they also have data on how often people will catch up on something when a text implicitly prompts them to do so, and to what degree that brings people deeper into the platform as a whole. How many people watched WandaVision before or after they watched Multiverse of Madness, for example? The more often they convince people that part of the value of Disney+ is being able to keep connected to ongoing narratives they care about, the more "permanent" it feels in people's media landscape.
But at what point does that become too much to ask? That's an open question, and this definitely feels like a test of that.
It does seem like it's a test case of some sort. The choice to offload a big emotional beat to a spinoff is too weird to be purely creative but also too weird to be anything but deliberate. I'm personally excited by the possibilities of cross-media storytelling but it does feel like we're still in a feeling-out phase with regards to just how vital a streaming spinoff can be to a main TV series or film franchise. Too disconnected and it can be like the current "canonical" Star Wars comics and novel series which are so disconnected from the movies and TV series as to hardly matter, and therefore be unlikely to drive a lot of additional viewership. Too interconnected and you leave people scratching their heads.
The sweet spot might be something like the way that WandaVision and Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness were supposed to work before the pandemic messed with their release dates, where the former wraps up its run a month or so before the latter is released. Too bad that proposed Dark Tower adaptation where they adapt the odd books as films and even books as seasons of TV didn't happen back when it was first floated because that would have been a wild experiment to see play out.
I left this premier feeling very deflated (especially after watching the very good Bad Batch episode which also came out today) - it feels like a lot of busy work that doesn't really go anywhere? I mean Josh doesn't even mention that whole pirate subplot, and who could blame him? It felt like they needed a way to show off Mando's sick ride, that's all. I do hope algaebeard pirate king does end up showing up again eventually.
But yeah, not really impressed by this one. Very slow and largely uneventful. Hopefully the coming episodes pick up the pace a little.
Ha. I forgot about the pirates pretty much immediately after that part was over. It does seem like a “hey we need some action in the 4th quarter...how about space pirates!” type of deal.
Overall I still think the episode was fine from a table-setting perspective. I guess we’ll see how it plays out.
Hopefully the pirates part wasn’t a back door pilot to a new series that we’ll all have to watch in order to know what is going on in The Mandalorian Season 4.
One pirate literally said "avast" lol
Totally agree with the deflation AND the fact that The Bad Batch is very good, especially compared to this show 👍
OK, showing my ignorance here. What was up with the scene in hyperspace (or whatever they call it) and Mando is sleeping but Baby Yoda sees some sort of creature's shadow in the light? Was he doing that with the Force? Or were those real? And if so are they biological creatures or spaceships? And what was the point?
But I liked they showed BY can somehow make it down from his bubble and into Mando's arms mid-flight. I don't know how long that ship flies but imagine being trapped up in that bubble without even an eye mask for 24 hours!
Those creatures are called purrgil. They're force sensitive space whales that can travel in hyperspace. They first popped up Star Wars: Rebels and played a significant role in the climax of that show. Given that, and given the likely direction the Ahsoka show will be taking, I'd guess they popped up here as a prelude to a larger appearance in that show.
Thank you! It's getting harder and harder to tell what's dramatic foreshadowing and what's just marketing for other shows/video games.
I wouldn't sweat it too much. In this case it's probably just a bit of otherworldly flavor if you don't know what it means and an Easter egg if you do.
Yeah, I totally thought that was a flashback to Mando in the beginning.
I haven't seen the Book of Boba Fett, so I had no idea that they had a big chunk devoted to Grogu/Mando, seems like an attempt to draw in The Mandalorian viewers.
After Andor, it was hard for me to readjust to the lighter tone and more questy nature of the show, a little bit of a letdown for me.
I wouldn't say this was a let down for me, but I definitely felt my brain trying to shift gears from Andor to this. Especially since we only recently watched Andor so we didn't even have the distance of time to help ease that transition.
It's just such a different type of show but I don't really find any conflict between enjoying one and the other. To me they're an example of what seem to be the only two approaches that work in doing a new star war: super serious prestige drama on the one hand episodic 60 70s 80s style tv western/adventure show on the other
I definitely thought it was as flashback to Mando as well at first. In fact after the reveal I thought the deliberate timeline fakeout was the entire purpose of the scene
The show really shot itself in the foot by inexplicably shoe-horning the reunion into Boba Fett. Those two episodes would've made for a great season premiere. Then this is a good table setting into the rest of the season. As it stands, this was fine? Not great but okay. It's just infuriating how the Disney edict that everything is all connected really killed the momentum they should have for season 3.
Also, joining the chorus of those who thought it was a flashback until Mando showed up. I thought that was a nice twist.
This season premiere felt very... perfunctory to me. Here's your scenes with Mando outgunning some folks. Here's your scenes with Baby Yoda trying to eat something he shouldn't. Give the people what they want, right? That's fine enough to refresh our memories about the show, but the episode isn't really grounding this latest quest in anything that feels meaningful to the character yet. I also didn't follow the story logic behind "I need a droid" => "it has to be this broken one that a) tried to murder me and b) is going to be difficult to fix." Or why Bo Katan was just lounging on a throne on an otherwise empty planet with apparently nothing to do.
Totally agree with Josh and others that the transition from s2 and s3 would be incredibly jarring for anyone who (reasonably!) missed out on Boba. My wife's in that position, and we had to pause this one for me to summarize for her. And Josh, I had the exact same "Is this a flashback?" and "Is this trying to be the new Galaxy's Edge?" reactions while watching that you did.
I've liked this series before, but the two big elephants in the room for me at this point in its run are Grogu and Andor. For the former, it's pretty clear that the little guy was supposed to be written out by this point, except that he proved too popular and too big a driver of merch, so the corporate powers have declared that this will always be the Baby Yoda show. The question is what's gonna be driving the plot if the matter of his custody has been solved, and I'm not convinced that bathing in the maguffins of whatever is an especially compelling answer.
And regarding the latter... Look, Andor just raised the bar so much on a level of character and thematic weight that it's going to be a lot harder for me to tap into my 2019/2020 excitement for this other Star Wars title. It would be nice if this creative team took Andor's success as a challenge to up their own game, but everything about this first installment back feels like a resting on (imagined) laurels.
As far as why it has to be that particular droid goes, if I recall correctly the first season established that Mando doesn’t like droids and only came to trust IG-11 after it was reprogrammed to protect Baby Yoda and was willing to sacrifice itself to save others.
I don't understand why folks are comparing The Mandalorian to Andor. They're just completely different types of shows and share nothing in common other than the shared Star Wars Universe. Andor is a prestige totally serialized tv series in the vein of the Wire while The Mandalorian is a mostly episodic much lighter sci-fi western in the vein of 70s 80s westerns and other adventure shows like the Hulk and the Fugitive. Expecting the Manadalorian to be like Andor in contemporary terms would be roughly like turning on Law and Order: SVU and expecting it to be Season One True Detective
I thought it was a solid premier. Enough to get me excited about the season.
I can’t get over the fact that they reunited Mando and Grogu in a different show and didn’t even reference it here. I’m sure just about everyone who watches and cares about The Mandalorian also watched Boba Fett, but this is annoying. Couldn’t they at least co-title the last 3(?) episodes of Boba “Mandalorian Season 2.5” or something?
I thought the same thing as you with the kid in the opening scene.
And I’m sure I’m not the first one to say this, but I chuckle every time they talk about the “creed” in an episode with Carl Weathers.
So... I don’t know how to feel about bringing back IG-11? Does that negate the droid’s sacrifice? Does that negate that moment in the series? I was hoping that character moment with Mando would make him reconsider his position on droids but... It seems like it hasn’t?
I'm just surprised at how horrible that self-destruct was. It was inside of his damn chest, and the chest is the part that is 100% fine. Put some power to it, and it's fully operational. It's absolutely a cop-out.
I assumed they would only be working with his head, maybe build a new body for him out of a protocol droid and make a murder C3P0. New merch, new toys, new IG-11. But instead, it's literally fine? And they looked at that script and said "that's the best idea we have"?
RIGHT?! They made that destruction REAL, like, there was no coming back from.
But now... We are coming back from it because... Growth isn't an option? Or rather, the growth I THOUGHT the show was doing wasn't what the show wanted to do?
I get merch is real for Disney but c'mon folks. You got space whales!!! SPACE WHALES
Note for the Mandalorians: If you're going to hang out next to a lake with a big space alligator, make sure the explosives on your utility belts are powerful enough to blow through its hide.
It's probably never going to happen, as witnessed by Grogu trying to play with the droid mechanic like a toy, but I really wish they would grow the character up to the point that he IS a character and not just force ex muppeta to save Mando three times per season.
You're probably the only person who wants that I'm sorry to say. If he grows up I'm canceling my D plus subscription
I very much enjoyed the creature design/effects in this episode. The Baby Friks, the leaf-beard pirate, the kobold-looking alien that immediately crashes into an asteroid... A great return to the tradition of Star Wars' weird little guys.
Josh, I too was fooled by the foundling in the opening scene. That said, I loved the damn alligator possibly more than any Star Wars mega-creature ever other than the space slug.
Overall, I though this episode was a bit weak, but as I said after watching TPM for the 2nd time - if you put R2-D2 on the screen and make him beep for 2 hours, I'll probably watch it 3 times.
Obviously I'm very late to the party with this but I don't watch Boba Fett and don't have disney+ so was completely thrown by the start of the ep.
It seems baffling to me that they would have crucial Mandalorian plot points NOT in the Mandalorian. I had to watch a youtube recap as it was to remember what happened, and then this was totally bizarre. I understand something for fans of Star Wars who watch everything but not "how are the two main characters going to be reunited?" I'd hate to see The Mandalorian go the way of the marvel films where its too confusing to even bother keeping up with them most of the time.
Yup I was someone who did not watch The Book of Boba Fett before last Wednesday, saw the opening scene (which I too thought was a flashback to Mando's childhood), then was super confused when Mando and Grogu saved the day in a new ship...
So I did end up watching BoBF before finishing this episode last night.
Definitely a swing and a miss by Favreau et al by having the Grogu Mando reunion in that other show.
One thing I realized after bingeing Book of Boba Fett just before watching this episode is that they're using the same set/VFX for Mos Espa and Nevarro City. Very similar shots of the front of Garsa Fwip's Sanctuary and the buildings of Nevarro (just more sand in the former vs trees in the latter). See these photos for example (though if I realize they're not exactly perfect mirrors).
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTPxb7-A_F1bcyDaApzsSybIgzpI28lfWDJUfyJHOofAY13dLYEd0GFxNv2HPLS8865vxA&usqp=CAU
https://www.brickfanatics.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Star-Wars-The-Mandalorian-Season-3-trailer-Nevarro-featured.jpg