Success in Star Wars comes with complications. When you introduce characters as popular and momentous as the Mandalorian and his sidekick Grogu in time periods before movies and events that have already been made, people want to know: What happened to these characters? In other words: Why didn’t Mando show up to help the Resistance in the Star Wars sequels? If Grogu is basically a major Jedi-in-the-making, how come he didn’t try to stop Palpatine from somehow returning?
The creators of The Mandalorian are thinking about these things too. The Mandalorian writer/director/producer Dave Filoni told The Hollywood Reporter that he and the rest of the show’s creative team “talk about many different things” about what happens to Mando and Grogu after the eventual end of the Disney+ series to explain their absence from films like The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker.
While Filoni wouldn’t give a concrete answer to where Grogu was, he did say this…
As a kid, when Yoda said, “When gone am I, the last of the Jedi will you be,” to Luke, I took that very literally. Well, now we know that’s anything but true. There are many different people that could wield the force, and maybe Luke is the last Jedi as far as what Yoda would consider a Jedi. So we’ll just have to wait and see how the story evolves and what makes sense. But in my experience, there’s definitely a way to weave everything together and make it exciting. It’s possible it would never even have to cross over with what we saw [in the sequel trilogy] if the story has us somewhere else.
They’re going to have to explain this some day. Because there is no way in the world that Star Wars fandom will ever accept the explanation of Grogu’s absence from those movies as “Oh, well eventually Moff Gideon killed him.” Baby Yoda can never die. So this will need to be explained definitively at some point.
The Season 3 premiere of The Mandalorian is now streaming on Disney+.
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