The Mandalorian’s second season doesn’t arrive on Disney+ until later this year, but that hasn’t stopped Jon Favreau from beginning work on season three. How can the show shift course going forward?
Since its debut on Disney+ back in November, The Mandalorian has easily become one of the most popular entities in the Star Wars galaxy. Given the show’s success — it quickly became one of the most in-demand series worldwide — it was no surprise when it was renewed for a second season. And although that second season doesn’t drop until later this year, it seems Jon Favreau is already hard at work writing a third season.
This is good news for fans of The Mandalorian, but it also raises questions about where the show will go moving forward. For the majority of the show’s first season, fans follow Pedro Pascal’s Mando on an episodic quest to shield Baby Yoda from the ex-Imperial officers who have put a bounty on the child’s head. Until the tail end of the season, each episode brings viewers to a new place and introduces new characters — a format that works relatively well for a short-form series, even if it can be frustrating for those who’d like to see more permanent storylines develop.
If the series is going to unravel into a long-form narrative, however — and it seems that’s what Favreau has planned — then one has to wonder whether The Mandalorian can continue with its episodic format, keeping Pascal and a puppet as the only regulars, while the rest of the characters file in for an episode or two at most. Admittedly, this sort of setup works for a show like Doctor Who, but can it survive in a franchise where fans are already accustomed to large-scale storytelling that connects all the characters and subplots at the end?
And, anyway, let’s be honest: We’d all love to see characters like Gina Carano’s Cara Dune and Giancarlo Esposito’s Moff Gideon play bigger roles in future seasons of The Mandalorian. The final episodes of season one — plus Esposito’s description of just how many Darksabers he’s broken preparing for season two — suggest that viewers may get that. But will this mean The Mandalorian will start to develop multiple storylines running parallel to one another, like Game of Thrones or Westworld?
The other question to ask about The Mandalorian‘s future is how it will tie into the rest of the Star Wars universe. A quick space adventure could be dismissed as something that occurred without much notice from the rest of the galaxy. But if this story is to be ongoing — and to raise the stakes, as it should — then it seems unlikely Mando and Baby Yoda won’t cross paths with some of the major players from the first trilogy of Star Wars films.
With that in mind, it seems The Mandalorian might need to shift its method of storytelling slightly, working to better connect each episode to the next — and ensuring that the story makes sense in the grand scheme of Star Wars history. That’s a daunting task, but it’s one Favreau seems up to. We’ll have to wait until season two arrives, however, to see if this is a shift Favreau and the creatives at Disney+ plan to embrace. Fingers crossed.
What do you hope to see from future seasons of The Mandalorian? Sound off in the comments section below.