This season of The Mandalorian has been frustrating in all new ways, delivering some of the best episodes of the series right next to some of the worst. But more annoying than the inconsistent quality has been its aggressively incoherent overall plot. Everything about Season 3 was disjointed, disconnected–a series of things that were happening on the screen, nothing more. Some of those things were very awesome, and some of them were very much not awesome, but none of them added up to anything. Season 3 of The Mandalorian is all parts and no sum.
It should go without saying that we are dealing with heavy spoilers from Season 3 of The Mandalorian from here on out. Consider yourself warned.
Here’s one illustration: Early in “Chapter 23: The Spies,” we got several shots of the massive Mandalorian fleet cruising above Nevarro. We saw several drop ships like the one Bo-Katan flies, we saw the gigantic Imperial light cruiser that served as the flagship, and we saw a bunch of other small and medium-sized ships that would serve as the fleet’s backbone. They all left Nevarro and flew to Mandalore together.