When Lucasfilm surprise dropped our very first trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu this week, the first thing we saw was a very familiar ship: the bulky chrome body (now bedecked in stripes of yellow paint) and the barrel-shaped twin engines jutting out of either side. It was meant to invoke one thought to anyone who’s watched the show: the Razor Crest is back.
The thing is, the Razor Crest was blown into itty-bitty bits during the climax of The Mandalorian season two. We don’t know yet whether or not, months or a year or so later, Din Djarin managed to go back to Tython and collect all the remaining scrap from his old ride to be put back together—probably not, considering that The Book of Boba Fett dedicated an episode to Din getting a new ride in the form of a Naboo N-1 Starfighter. But whether or not he found the time to go back or just simply managed to buy another ship of the same type, an ST-70 Gunship is not really what the return of a ship that looks identical to the one he used to fly around in really says.
It mostly just says, “That thing you know is back.” Which The Mandalorian has gotten, for good or ill, very good at saying; it’s now just applying that to something that’s been gone for a season and a bit of TV, rather than things we know from other old Star Wars material. And it’s just the latest in a long line of things that The Mandalorian, as a show, has given up on in terms of displaying any kind of real growth for its lead characters.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t particularly like the show’s new choice of ship for Din either. Going from an unwieldy metal brick of a transport ship to a slick, stripped-down starfighter—even putting aside the nostalgia play of it being a ship fans knew and recognized, instead of a new design like the Razor Crest had been when it was introduced—didn’t make sense for a character that was ostensibly still trying to be the bounty hunter he had been.
The N-1 was a hero’s ship, one that reflected that, for better or worse, Din’s status in the Star Wars galaxy had changed: he was no longer the lone wanderer just making his way on the fringes of the galaxy; he was thrust into the upper echelons of Star Wars‘ heroes and villains, rubbing shoulders with Luke Skywalker and being the onetime inheritor, whether he wanted to be or not, of the Mandalorian people’s legacy. He was recognized as recognizable and needed a vessel to match that.
The Razor Crest, in a lot of ways, represented the imperfect man we’d come to know over the course of The Mandalorian‘s debut season—it’s not a cool ship, it’s not decked out with a bazillion weapon hardpoints, it wasn’t luxurious inside or out, it was practical, rugged, the Star Wars equivalent of a hauling truck, and that made it perfect for a bounty hunter scrounging around from job to job. Replacing it with a starfighter that was distinctly impractical for the job of bounty hunting but was also the antithesis of everything that made the Razor Crest feel unique, felt like the show forcibly telling us that Din was moving on and accepting his new place in the galaxy, even if that new place was beholden to Star Wars‘ broader yearning for the familiar.
Now, in The Mandalorian and Grogu, Din has kept that new status quo while also returning to familiarity with this “new” ship. There’s no moving on or mark of what his life was like when The Mandalorian first began anymore. Now he is more explicitly that unequivocal hero, allied with the New Republic, and brushing shoulders with familiar faces over and over. Because the Razor Crest itself has now become something Star Wars can mine for nostalgia, as much as one can mine nostalgia for something that’s just six years old (and has been gone for most of those six years). Now we can be sold all those Razor Crest toys again, except they’ve got yellow paint markings on them. She’s got a new hat!
But really it’s not the ship itself that is necessarily a problem here (again, I liked what The Mandalorian said about Din through his ship of choice in its first two seasons a lot), but what this return represents overall: The Mandalorian finds it really hard to let go of any potential opportunity for growth. The Razor Crest‘s return pales in comparison, narratively speaking, to the number of character throughlines that the series has set up and then promptly dropped. Seasons one and two set up a compelling arc of Din coming to question the orthodoxy of his own Mandalorian covert—and, through characters like Bo-Katan, the idea that there were other ways for him to exist and be Mandalorian outside of those not necessarily healthy teachings—climaxing in both his decision to remove his helmet and to give up Grogu to be trained as a Jedi.
All that immediately turned around in season three, which opened with an arc of almost-penitence for Din, running back unequivocally into the arms and teachings of the covert with little engagement as to why he should do that. And that he did so with Grogu at his side again—a separation resolved between seasons in that aforementioned Book of Boba Fett appearance, largely at the heinous expense of mishandling the character of Luke Skywalker—was just further indication that the show could not imagine a way to follow through with the shifts in its status quo that it laid out. Din Djarin can only be the faceless adherent of the Way; only he can guide Grogu’s path, and now, he can only pilot that one kind of ship you know he piloted before.
It’s a strange sense of inertia that feels jarring as Din becomes the face of Star Wars‘ return to cinema at a time when the series needs newness to guide its way rather than resting on the laurels of familiarity. A couple splashes of paint just simply aren’t enough compared to the message The Mandalorian and Grogu‘s debut trailer sent: that sensation of newness has yet to be found here.
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James Whitbrook
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