Hey, Maybe Star Wars Should Leave Mandalore the Hell Alone
By Rob Bricken
To paraphrase Luke Skywalker, “If there’s a nice center to the universe, Mandalore is the planet it’s farthest from.” The home planet of Jango Fett, Bo-Katan Kryze, and Sabine Wren is a hellhole, and it has been throughout the entirety of Star Wars’ main continuity. So much so, in fact, that I don’t think anyone needs to go back, whether it be characters or viewers.
Mandalore has been a major point of interest—obsession may be a better word—for Dave Filoni since he began the Clone Wars cartoon in 2008, and has continued to this day, where he’s more or less shepherding the entirety of the Star Wars TV universe. Mandalore featured in a major arc in Clone Wars; it was a major storyline in the Rebels cartoon; and now it seems it’s going to be the focus of The Mandalorian’s third season, as Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) gets enlisted to help the deposed Bo-Katan and her fellow faction of Mandalorian warriors regain control of their ancestral planet.
Except as Djarin points out in season two of his TV series, Mandalore is “cursed” and “everyone who goes there dies.” He’s not wrong. The history of Filoni’s Mandalore is filled with death, tragedy, death, violence, and more death. It technically began before the Clone Wars, during the ancient days of Old Republic, thousands of years before the events of the Star Wars movies. The Mandalorians were a war-mongering race that frequently clashed against the Jedi for centuries, ruining most of the surface of their planet in the process. It led to a group of more peaceful “New Mandalorians”… that ended up fighting the old-school Mandalorians, and burning the remains of the planet’s grasslands into ash.
