So apparently “The Mandalorian” started its new season while I wasn’t looking. This was once among the least offensive of the Disney Star Wars productions, and the best episodes of Book of Boba Fett were really more of a “Mandalorian” interlude.

By the way, the time stamps count down, because that's how my version of Disney+ does it now. If there is a way to fix it, IDK.

36:04 Based on the Previously footage, the story for this season (or episode), is going to be Din Djarin’s attempt to atone for taking off his helmet in the previous season finale.

33:43 I was about to say that I’m glad to see the faction of which Din & this smith (who is really cute in real life, BTW) is not just down to the two of them and the other guy who tried to fight him for the Darksaber in BoBF. But now I think this is a flashback to when Din got his armor.

29:56 Oh, it IS present day!

29:41 Based on everything else about this rather suspect cult, I feel like Din Djarin is going to get in trouble for this, too. And that fighter is the stupidest thing from the BoBF interlude. His job is capturing people and bringing them or their corpses to people who pay him for them. How is he supposed to do that in a fighter? The whole sequence where the annoying mechanic woman argues him into accepting it was utterly stupid. It’s like you asked for a work truck for your business that needed to carry your tools and the commodities you acquired and delivered, and instead you are given a two-seater sports car with a whole spiel about how awesome it handles and how fast it goes and how rare it is. Those are all good qualities if that is what you are looking for in a vehicle, but have nothing to do with what you need in a work truck.

Also, how shitty is Disney Star Wars that they are now having to mine the heretofore despised prequel trilogy for nostalgia bait to remind people of better content? Before the dark times. Before the Empire (of the Mouse)…

29:21 This episode is called “The Apostate.” I wonder if this is going to be about Din Djarin telling Mrs. Smith to shove The Way where the sun don’t shine and going off and doing his own thing and maybe teaming up with Katee Sackoff’s Mandalorian crew. Or do the people in charge of this simply not know what an “apostate” is, and what they actually mean is penitent or sinner or excommunicate? I’m frankly afraid to bet.

28:39 I’m as religious as the next guy, but when you start tying religion and the state of one’s belief or practice to a particular place or worldly condition, I start up with the agnostic cosplay. People give Catholics shit for our rituals, but we don’t fuck you over by tying Sanctifying Grace to some temporal phenomenon that might end up beyond accomplishment. Hell, we have ruled birds and reptiles to be liturgically classified as fish in order to help people without a lot of dietary options conform to Lenten abstinence. Don’t tell me you can only be absolved by your physical presence in a place that does not exist.

27:03 So far, so bad. This is not the depiction of an apostate yet; this is a pilgrim or a penitent.

25:37 Maybe that was supposed to be heartwarming, but it looked like a puppet cuddling up to a robot.

25:20 Clearly this is not Madalore. I really hope this is not going to be a fetch quest setup to unlock Mandalore as a location. They had way too much of that in the other seasons.

25:03 “Here’s to see an old friend,” feels like they are trying to remind us of Luke visiting Yoda in RotJ. But it’s a really stupid response to a customs inquiry.

24:47 Carl Weathers was in the “Previously” sequence, I’m going to assume he is the friend, because I can’t be bothered to look up Nevarro and remember what happened there. At least it’s not another desert.

23:23 How much time has passed on this show?

22:50 Isn’t this the kind of thing that everyone ripped “The Phantom Menace” for talking about? Nobody cares about how much this planet is prospering on the wandering badass show! When your film trilogy’s predetermined topic is the fall of a republic to an empire, political world-building serves a purpose.

21:52 That does not make you an apostate! First of all, it’s not a word in common use. Most people are probably going to think it means something like apostle. Excommunicate is a much better term for your status!

21:20 The High Magistrate is needed to handle a mugging? Pirates in the courtyard are not really a problem. Pirates in the shipping lanes are what you need to be concerned about.

18:54 This is an utter failure of any world-building they were attempting with the blather about real estate. If you’re all about setting up that Grief Karga is now a respectable businessman, he should have cops or uniformed guards ready to chase off the pirates. This sort of scene is how you establish that he’s trying to go respectable but is having trouble shaking his past.

17:23 There seems to be a depressing tendency in long-form space opera to conflate “planets” with “port towns” or “mining settlements”. Even the idea of a port city having trouble with a lawless element that does not appreciate the gentrification of their former haven should not be a problem they are looking for a single person to solve. Even on that lesser scale, they should be looking for a professional or expert to get their nascent military or law enforcement into shape, and consult on anti-scum strategies, not a lone gunman to impose order. For a planet, it’s utterly nonsensical.

16:45 If rebuilding IG-11 was an option, why did they make a statue of him? Is Din Djarin some sort of cutting edge robotics expert that this would never have occurred to anyone?

Also, I guess noble sacrifices are just not going to be a thing, since you can always stick them in a bacta tank or rebuild them.

14:25 “Nevarro has attracted the best droid-smiths of the Outer Rim”? Then why didn’t you try to fix him before this?! The populace, or at least Grief, cared enough about him to raise a statue in his memory, why was bringing him back to life never even considered?

14:05 And now we are going to the well of the objectively worst Star Wars movie of all, Rise of Skywalker, for Babu Frick’s species. Yay. They mutter and have accents! Aren’t they the funniest?

12:32 First of all, that dialogue was stupid, and seems to have been redubbed in post. Why did Din Djarin need Grief to translate from outside the room? They were speaking clear English or Republic or Imperial or whatever the language is (please don’t be Common Tongue). But then, if he needs Grief’s translation, why does he, at one point snap “I got it” following a phrase that was no less easily understood than prior lines? And then we go back to Grief translating, suggesting that Din has not adapted to the knack of hearing their dialogue, so what was different about that one line that he felt Grief should have known better than to translate it? I really think as originally written, the “Anzellans” might have been something else and their dialogue incomprehensible, and then someone said “Hey, people liked Babu Frick, why not make them the droid experts?” and digitally inserted them with new dialogue.

Also, it seems like a pretty rudimentary concept that if his memory thingy is broken, it won’t be IG-11 anymore. Like, we have computers and smartphones now. This idea should be sufficiently intuitive to the normiest of viewers that they don’t need it explained, and also Din Djarin looks like an idiot for need it.

Also, also, it looks like we’re doing a fetch quest.

12:06
Din: “Keep IG safe until I get back with the part”
Grief: “If the Anzellans can’t find it, I don’t know who can.”
Who is going to look for the part? Din or the Anzellans? This dialogue does not match up!

9:30 This is beyond stupid. We establish at the outset of this scene that Din Djarin’s fighter, which is decades old, has a function that detects incoming enemies. It can even tell that ships belong to pirates with which he has no known dealings, are enemies. So why do the pirates not have similar technology to detect his ship? How is a 30-40 year old fighter too stealthy for their systems? Why are they trying to find him by line of sight? All you need is to fill some of the silence in this fight sequence with an explanation that the asteroids’ composition messes with their sensors. It could be a thing that this is how the pirates are bothering Nevarro, using that very property to sneak up on their victims, and then Din could turn that into a lesson for Grogu about turning the enemy’s advantages against him.

8:05 If running that easily was an option, what was the point of this whole scene?

7:49 Okay, fine, the Madalorian system has two Earth-type planets. That’s a thing that happens. You can’t just refer to asteroid miners as “belters” to remind us of “The Expanse,” whose whole thing is realistic depictions of space issues, and ten minutes later rape astrophysics like this.

6:28 Okay, seriously, Din, what did you expect? The last time you saw Bo Katan, ownership of the Darksaber was a serious point of contention between the two of you. Why would you expect her to welcome you back without it? And where is it for that matter? I was more or less expecting them to have just forgotten about that conflict, if he was simply walking in to ask for her help, but since the show is not flushing that issue down the memory hole, why did they make him so blind as to think he would not have a problem here?

5:54 This is more dialogue of people talking past each other. Din asks if Bo Katan is giving up her plan to retake Mandalore, and then she accuses his cult of giving up on Madalore long before the Purge. How does that answer his question? What does it have to do with his question? Unless she thinks he is accusing her of giving up, but that was not his tone. And since he came to join her, why is she identifying him with his cult? And “Where were you then?” I got the impression the Purge was way in the old days, like he was not around for it.

And why is she sitting on this throne? What is she doing with her life, if she’s the only one here?

4:51 if the planet is ravaged and destroyed and poisoned how does “under the civic center” help him find the mines? Giving them the benefit of the doubt that he has maps of the planet and can find the city of Sundari, how is he to tell which building in a ruined city is the civic center? And why would the mines not be on said map? Is Sundari the Mandalore equivalent of Wakanda, in that it is the only place on the planet that has the special metal?

4:42 They have interstellar communications, and she is sitting on a planet in the same system with nothing to do! How does Bo Katan not already know if Mandalore is really poisoned?

Also, interstellar communication. Why do so many of these meeting need to be face to face?

This episode was written by Jon Favreau. It reads more like it was written by Christopher Moltisanti during his visit to the set.