We saw this stuff kinda differently...Brian Earl Spilner said:
Cad Bane was dispatched without much of a fight. They were clearly setting up an epic showdown that we didn't get.
Neither Fett nor Mando ever really did anything particularly cool or exciting before the Rancor arrived. They seemed like they were just bumbling through the battle without even a hint of a strategy. These are the two of the baddest dudes in the galaxy, and both of them have looked much better than they did in this episode.
Black Krrsantan -- Really? You set up a badass warrior like that only to show us him getting his ass whooped the entire episode?
But then Grogu pretty much only using his force power to take out a big bolt from a droid, and then calm the Rancor down...meh. Was really hoping for a cooler moment for him. Granted, he did save the day. But it just didn't "feel" that exciting to me. Nevermind the fact that I thought Luke sending him to Tatooine alone on an X-Wing just felt off to me. Like a manufactured way of keeping Luke out of this episode.
Also, not even a hint or setup of who was behind the Pykes?
Glad I didn't stay up till 3 am honestly.
Bane put up a whole fight, and just kinda let his guard down, but he's always been cocky like that. The disappointment there is that they just kept too many good things behind the curtain in this show til the end, so we didn't get all the Bane content we wanted.
Fett and Mando really looked at each other and said, "yeah let's go down in a blaze of glory," went out there in the open amidst like 50 pykes and killed half of them. Not too shabby when you consider just a dozen or so clones was all it took to kill some of the jedi we have seen. Boba's best fighting was seen right before he got his armor, when he just hammed stormtroopers with his stick. But no, they had no strategy, because Fennec's whole plan failed, and they were left hanging in the wind so the plan was, "Go kill as many as possible before dying, because we can't do anything else but run."
I was also really disappointed with Santo at first, he got enslaved and mutated by Trandoshians (probably mispelled) but didn't fight them with the same passion that he dismembered the one in the sanctuary. But then we see, he didn't go down so easy. Not only did he break free from like 8 human lizards that had tackled him, he killed them, fought his way through more, and then got swarmed again by the pykes on his way to the others. He then carried all those pykes on his back like Jace Sternberger with a South Carolina defender all the way to his friends, and threw them off of him. The fact that he just won a 1v12+ in hand-to-handcombat was pretty impressive to me. While he did get beat up at first, I feel like he did more kicking the others, seeing as how he came out on top. Heck, the speeder bike gang needed help fighting the militia of one crime family, but Santos fought off another crime family all on his own, and a few Pykes, on his way to the others.
Grogu ripping the bolt out of the droid was all he could do, I think. he's not the most powerful. Remember how Luke showed him, "I can teach you to not just catch frogs for dinner, but to pick up every last little hiding frog in this swamp." Similarly, Grogu couldn't really get the whole thing, but he did enough to keep Mando alive long enough for the director to give us another cool option: Rancor Smash. Had Grogu just crumpled that droid like a soda can, Star Wars fans would complain, "Why is he so helpless half the time and letting Gideon's Dark Trooper Droids take him, and the other half, he can ragdoll a 1.5 ton robot with shields and blasters?"
Lastly, I think that they're holding back on who's behind all the spice just to keep their options open, which I can understand. What's becoming a bit more clear is that they're setting things up for whoever is behind the spice to be a powerful villain in the future, which is good.
I totally get your criticism and the ways you felt disappointed. You raise good points and I certainly wanted some different things, and I definitely wanted more Luke action. This is just my way of trying to be optimistic and explain why they didn't do some other things.
