Star Wars has had a lot of moments where it has been changed forever. The debut of a new major movie addition to the Skywalker Saga always did that. The rebooting of continuity at large ahead of those movies did that, too. As Star Wars has grown and expanded across books, comics, films, TV shows, and games over those years, each new addition has a chance to fundamentally impact everything we know about what Star Wars is at that point. But there is perhaps no moment Star Wars changed forever more potent in the modern history that on this day five years ago, November 12, 2019: the day the first live-action Star Wars TV show, The Mandalorian, began.
The Mandalorian didn’t just change Star Wars for a lot of the reasons we might recognize it for these five years later. At the time, everyone knew the debut of that diminutive, big-eared green creature at the end of the episode was going to be huge, but no one could predict the thrall the Child, aka Baby Yoda, also aka Grogu, eventually, would come to have on mainstream pop culture as a fully armed and operational merchandising behemoth. It didn’t just prove that Star Wars live-action material could work on the small screen, kickstarting a whole streaming age for the galaxy far, far away. Revisiting the very first episode of the series these five, wild years later, one thing that’s abundantly clear that The Mandalorian thrived on when it debuted is perhaps now the very thing it struggles with most: the sheer potential of the newness it was putting on screen.
Star Wars is about the wanderlust of discovery as much as it is the Empire vs. the Rebellion, or Jedi, Sith, and the Force—it has endured and been iterated upon for generations now because part of the creative strength of the world George Lucas built was that people saw the potential for so many different ideas and kinds of stories that could exist in its sandbox. And that first episode, simply titled “The Mandalorian,” and much of season one itself, keenly speaks to the inherent excitement of that potential.
As subdued as a story as it is for the most part, The Mandalorian‘s debut episode is an almost-ceaseless mystery. Even before we reach the reveal of Mando’s bounty target in the Child, it allows the audience the chance to constantly be asking questions of it. Who is this masked bounty hunter that we’re following? What became of the Mandalorian people, that they now resort to hiding in coverts away from the prying eyes of the galaxy? What are these remnant Imperials we encounter through our hero’s dealings—and are we really meant to trust a “hero” willing to work with the Empire in the first place? Is Star Wars even allowed to have this kind of flawed, human perspective in a protagonist anymore?
“The Mandalorian” didn’t just ask these questions, it downright luxuriated in them. Its slow establishment of a world that brushed on the familiar of what Star Wars was and looked like—the imagery of Mandalorian helmets and Stormtrooper armor, the familiar rugged frontier worlds of dive bar cantinas and run-down technology—while still affording the space to genuinely feel like nothing we’d really gotten out of the series on-screen up to that point. The Mandalorian wasn’t just new, it was interested in that newness, in presenting something that was not just additive to Star Wars‘ grand tapestry, but also asking questions of that wider world that opened it up to even further potentiality.
As we sat on the precipice of the sequel trilogy’s conclusion in The Rise of Skywalker a month after The Mandalorian‘s debut, culminating a new saga that had precariously balanced—and bitterly consumed in a now-forever culture war over—the push and pull of newness and stoking the flames of nostalgia, The Mandalorian felt like a big-swinging glimpse into the future of what Star Wars could be after the conclusion of the Skywalker Saga, where the familiar gave way to asking big, fresh questions about this well-trod world, from the lens of a character completely disconnected from the movers and shakers of the galaxy.
It took a while for that to no longer to be the case, but The Mandalorian eventually got there. Arguably the signs were there the instance Moff Gideon ignited the Darksaber at the very climax of season one, signs that only got bigger and louder as season two came along and trickled in familiar faces like Bo-Katan Kryze and Ahsoka Tano before rolling out the dangerously big guns in its Luke Skywalker-starring finale. By the time we reached season three, and the show was already bearing the weight of supporting a spinoff in The Book of Boba Fett (which itself briefly just became a string of Mandalorian episodes), The Mandalorian had changed just as much in itself as it had changed Star Wars. No longer was this a story of asking many questions, of the potential additive allure of the Star Wars world, but a story of asking one: what action figure can we pull out of the toybox next?
So many of its reveals were less about adding newness to that world, and more about drawing lines and connecting dots, as it elevated its central pairing in Din Djarin and Grogu to the same circles of Star Wars stardom as figures like Boba Fett and Luke Skywalker, from a lone bounty hunter wandering the fringes of the galaxy to a key figure of Mandalorian society in its resurgence, from a morally dubious lurker in the shadows to an unabashed and unequivocal hero figure, an official ally of the New Republic with all the edges smoothed off and trapped in amber. Even Mando’s ship—a new design, clunky and bulky and reflective of a man making his way across the universe in the only home he had, got blown up and replaced with a starfighter that put a pin in his past life as a lone mercenary and presented us a shiny new hero ship. And of course, it was a design we already knew from somewhere else.
The Mandalorian‘s double-edged success as it has continued this transformation over the past five years reflects Star Wars‘ own uncertain stagnancy in the here and now, as Lucasfilm still struggles to chart what exactly it wants this saga to be, and where it’ll go next, after the tepid reaction to The Rise of Skywalker. The familiar has been mined, over and over again, and while there are still sparks of potential in the TV empire that The Mandalorian laid the ground for, we’re five years into a period of soul searching defined by the nostalgia the show and the franchise at large continues to put on a pillar and a litany of announced and rumored projects that have yet to materialize in any tangible way. One of the few that has? More Mandalorian in the form of The Mandalorian & Grogu—now a major motion picture designed to usher in Star Wars‘ return to the silver screen, no longer something new and fresh and exciting, but wrapped in the familiar and reliable blanket of its major connections to Star Wars‘ nostalgia.
Five years on, it’s safe to say that The Mandalorian really did change Star Wars forever. Whether it was for better or worse remains a question worth asking.
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