Season 3 is off to a rocky start. Episode 3 was yawn inducing all the way. Not sure what the point of seeing the doc struggle with his ethics. Not a great episode.
A budget saving maneuver for some productions is to take a guest star and compact their scenes, as much as possible, into as few episodes as possible.
The other possible situation is if Moff Gideon is not available ( i.e. the actor , Giancarlo Esposito is doing something else, i.e. Coppola's Megalopolis, etc) , then the show needs to put Kane front and center and do it very quickly to create another semi-main antagonist.
It's pretty clear that Pershing is designed as being derivative of the knotty role of scientists during war or, more to point, post war. After WW2, plenty of former Germans in high ranking positions, were essentially given a pass for previous "misdeeds and crimes" in exchange for their work to advance things like the great space race. Also there were several characters in Lone Wolf And Cub that had murky backgrounds and conflicted motives.
A big theme of this show is the decay of the systems and structures that formerly upheld a type of code or honor amongst all participants. When society changes, the old rules changes, and many get swept up in the fallout of not being able to adapt. In that way, one could argue Mandalorian is also, in part, an homage to some very core themes of Gone With The Wind.
Favreau and Filoni are paying homage to Lucas, who lifted core concepts from not just guys like Kurosawa and Kazuo Koike, but also the luminary filmmakers of his youth, like David Lean, and literary influences like Joseph Campbell.
Gone With The Wind is timeless. It's an incredible book and an incredible film. Unfortunately some of it's sub themes and the back history of Margaret Mitchell makes it prime fodder for the cancel culture. But what makes GWTW timeless is it's a very simply but replicable kind of narrative about the overall human condition.
Djarin is, in effect, a man out of time. It's very simple effective storytelling. It's not like Kurosawa was reinventing the wheel. And Lucas himself was a shameless parrot when it came to "borrowing" from other filmmakers and artists in his youth.
Pershing struggles because he's both lost in the old world and equally lost in the new world. He operates, from a narrative standpoint, as a cautionary tale for Djarin. Part of the point of Grogu is that Mando was adrift without purpose. The Child gave him a real purpose. Grogu is the bridge between the old world and the new world. For Pershing, the thought would be that his skill and science could be that for him. But it's not enough. The morality dilemma that seeps all across the show is the purpose must come from a place of selflessness to be true. This is represented by the divergent perspectives of Djarin and Bo Katan. The latter is so power hungry and so driven by that lust, that her purpose is corrupted. The harder she chases it, the further it eludes her. But Mando suffers personal loss after loss for Grogu. And he doesn't care that it costs him. It's that casual indifference that opens up the entire universe around him.
The Mandalorian takes an entirely different spin through the lenses of what made Campbell so influential to modern artists.
