The following contains potential spoilers for Star Wars: The Mandalorian Season 3, which premieres in February 2023.
Star Wars has been in a bit of a tailspin after Disney released the sequel trilogy. The sequels did a bang-up job of dividing the fan base, but at least they pushed the franchise in a definitive direction. Since then, Disney has tried spinoff movies, but that idea crashed and burned. Then post-Rise of Skywalker content was being cut off, and then it wasn't. There was also supposed to be a Rogue Squadron film, but that's been delayed extensively. There's also been very little development on Rian Johnson's trilogy.
In other words, Lucasfilm hasn't been able to decide what it wanted to do with Star Wars movies. The company has put all of its focus into Disney+ series while it stalled and pondered where Star Wars cinema would go next. Unfortunately, the content of the Disney+ series has also been kind of all over the place -- but Star Wars may get a whole new, unified direction when The Mandalorian Season 3 comes out in early 2023.
Fans who've been looking for more Din Djarin and Grogu content recently got a trailer for Season 3. It originally premiered at Star Wars Celebration and then subsequently surfaced online, before a version of it was released at D23, making it available for everyone to break down. The obviously exciting parts are the live-action debut of Mandalore and what looks to be tension between Bo-Katan Kryze, Din and the Armorer, the latter of which is set for a more significant role in Season 3. However, there's potential for something that could have massive ramifications on the series and the Star Wars franchise -- even if the shot wasn't in the newly released trailer.
At one point in the trailer seen during Celebration, an Imperial Star Destroyer is seen leaving some kind of shipyard. It could have been on Corellia, but given the series' setting, it's probably on Mandalore. That would make sense in Star Wars canon because the Empire did have a heavy presence on Mandalore after Return of the Jedi. It was seemingly Moff Gideon's base of operations. Yet Gideon was taken into custody at the end of Season 2 -- meaning the Star Destroyer may have a much more sinister owner. It could possibly belong to Grand Admiral Thrawn.
The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett and the upcoming Ahsoka all take place during the same time period and the first two series have had multiple crossovers already. Fans look at them as three parts of the same whole. However, for the shows to become an official shared universe, there needs to be an endgame that pulls everything together -- and a big-name villain like Thrawn would do that. Finding Ezra Bridger and Grand Admiral Thrawn appears to be the premise for the Rebels-centric Ahsoka, so it's unlikely that the Chiss admiral will physically appear in Season 3 of The Mandalorian.
Yet the new season would be the perfect place to connect him to the universe through a namedrop or other off-screen development because a lot of Star Wars fans already believe that The Mandalorian's Moff Gideon has been working for Thrawn all along. Hopefully, Din will discover something about Thrawn while he's searching Mandalore's caverns for redemption. Even something small would go a long way toward giving this developing universe a unified story and endgame.
The Mandalorian Season 3 premieres 2023 on Disney+.
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