The Mandalorian is buckling under the weight of all this continuity

In the business world, there is a concept called scope creep. Unlike much business jargon, scope creep pretty much means what it says: it’s what happens when the scope of a particular project slowly grows as it’s worked on, eventually causing a problem where everyone involved is trying too many problems at once to solve.

once, and the project’s initial goals begin to suffer. It’s a failure of planning – don’t articulate a goal clearly enough and you’re essentially inviting sprawl, a bunch of unsatisfactory answers to so many vague questions, rather than a clear-cut solution to something you need to solve.

The Mandalorian has a scope creep problem. This is ironic, given how the series arrived seemingly fully formed: a loose, samurai Western take on Star Wars that caught on Lone wolf and cub, following the Mandalorian Din Djarin and his young Yoda-esque ward Grogu through the messy side of the Milky Way. But in the second season and beyond, The Mandalorian increasingly became a vehicle for clarifying Star Wars lore, eventually leading to a frustrating third season where the characters took second place in favor of unraveling the spotty fictional history of Mandalore and its people as they were presented in The Clone Wars And rebels.

This in itself is not the problem. Call a show The Mandalorian is not a promise to be only about the same Mandalorian, and in fact invites questions about other Mandalorians and what became of them. The show doesn’t have to answer those questions, but creator Jon Favreau and Star Wars Lore Wonk Dave Filoni have decided it will. That decision makes sense, even if the answers they give are a bit strange or divisive.

A great deal of effort has gone into season 3 detailing the differences between Din Djarin’s cult-like hideout of Mandalorians and the less religious sect that Bo-Katan (Katee Sackhoff) hails from, as well as the myth and history surrounding the final days of their once great homeworld of Mandalore. Very little of this is mined for drama – the goal here is clarification and consolidation, bringing all Mandalorians under one roof.

This is already a pretty big task, one that is probably too much for the limited amount of time The Mandalorian has in its far too short seasons. It only gets worse when that same logic is applied The Mandalorian‘s place in the Star Wars timeline, and what happens when the show’s writers decide — as they’ve done in Season 3 episodes like “The Convert” — to use the show as a vehicle to explore the conflicting ideas in connecting the canon.

The Mandalorian is the only major and ongoing work set in what has been called the New Republic era, the roughly 30-year time gap between the Rebellion’s victory over the Empire in Return of the Jedi and the rise of the First Order and the events of The power awakens. Lucasfilm’s new Star Wars canon has been coy about this gap in time — a few comics, like The Rise of Kylo Renand books, such as Claudia Gray’s Bloodlineset in this era, but nothing has really explored it with the depth of the Legends books and comics that followed Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire.

Image: Lucasfilm

This could have been a blessing The Mandalorian, giving it a clean slate to show off a Star Wars that was familiar but different. Instead, it chose much of the same: desert planets and Boba Fett. Reasonable! In 2019, when the series premiered, the sequel trilogy was not yet over The Rise of SkywalkerAnd MandoThe film’s gritty old-school approach was a good contrast to the bombastic sequel trilogy. Now, however The Mandalorian is, in fact, a cornerstone of modern Star Wars, and in bringing back the villain Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito), The Mandalorian has Also was commissioned to show the origins of the First Order, and how this grand New Republic we saw Han, Luke, Leia, and Chewbacca fight for was effectively screwed from the start.

On paper, these aren’t bad ideas, but The Mandalorian has been a bad vehicle to deliver them. What should have been a nimble ship now drags tons of continuity baggage behind it, forced to explain Mandalore, Mandalorians, and the political fortunes of the New Republic in eight measly episodes that won’t even tell you what they’re about until something in the first place 10 minutes have passed.

The cast of characters of the show is small and thin, the storytelling vectors are few and far between. The delights are mainly in Grogu slapstick and Wookieepedia updates; it doesn’t allow itself time to give its few character arcs the weight they deserve, like Bo-Katan’s ascension to Mandalore leader.

Images: Lucasfilm

Ultimately, this results in a show that leaves the viewer adrift. What is it about? Who should we root for? What do we want to see next? The Mandalorian gestures in half a dozen directions, but his heart is in none of them. If the relationship between Din and Grogu is at the heart of the show, it’s strangely become secondary – especially since the massive decision to have Grogu leave the path of a Jedi to be with Din happened in Boba Fett’s booka completely different presentation.

This is what scope creep looks like: a guy in cool armor and his cute little ward hovering next to him, constantly forced to interrupt their journey across the galaxy because someone makes them stop every 30 minutes to use the bathroom and the wiki to edit.