With a third season of The Mandalorian a week away, it might be a little wild for Star Wars to already be talking about the future beyond it. But always in motion, the future is, a wise little green goblin once said—and it’s going to be especially so when the series is joined by two more contemporaneous series.
Although we already had The Book of Boba Fett more intimately connected to The Mandalorian’s setting—to the point it became The Mandalorian with the name filed off for a few episodes—The Mandalorian has, by and large, been the only window into the early time period between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens we’ve gotten to see on-screen. That means our view of that world is very specifically filtered through the lens of Din Djarin and the characters in his orbit, even if that orbit has started to increasingly include a host of Star Wars characters we’ve met time and time again before.
Now with two more shows on the way in that similar period—Ahsoka, arguably itself a Mandalorian spinoff at this point as it is a spiritual continuation of Star Wars Rebels, and the Jude Law-starring Skeleton Crew—the show has to be more mindful of what it sets up and puts down about the galaxy far, far away, especially as it grapples with some of that galaxy’s major characters.
“Season four, yeah I’ve written it already,” Mandalorian producer Jon Favreau recently told BFM TV (via Variety). “We have to know where we’re going to tell a fully formed story. We had mapped it out, Dave [Filoni] and I, and slowly you start to write each episode. I was writing it during post-production. All of it has to feel like a continuation and one full story.”
“[Dave’s] doing Ahsoka, which I’m producing with him. He’s the writer and showrunner on that. To understand what’s happening on other shows… Skeleton Crew all take place within the same Star Wars time period,” Favreau continued. “There’s a lot more things that we’ve got to keep in mind and also stuff that we’ve built up to from previous seasons of The Mandalorian as well.”
It’s interesting to see just how Mandalorian has evolved from a show that felt relatively small stakes and disconnected from the wider sea-changing events in a post-ROTJ galaxy—even when it threw a bombshell Baby Yoda at us in its first episode—into something that now has to be very aware of its place in that galaxy, as all these new shows come out in its wake. What that means for the series going forward, and its connections to those other shows beyond that awareness remains to be seen; given Filoni and Favreau’s Star Wars house style at this point, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a crossover or six.
But still, The Mandalorian has well and truly taken its first steps into a larger world at this point.
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