Warning: This article contains spoilers for the season opener of The Mandalorian season three.
All coordinates are set for Mandalore in season three of Disney Plus’s The Mandalorian.
After admitting to his warrior clan that he’s broken the Mandalorian Creed by removing his helmet in front of others, Din Djarin only has one hope of redemption. As per the Creed of his people, he must head to the warriors’ home world to bathe in the living waters under the Mines of Mandalore.
The problem is Mandalore isn’t the planet it was. There’s an excellent reason that the warriors we meet have divided into different factions and scattered across the galaxy. The causes of the scattering of the Mandalorians we have met in the Disney Plus series lie in a tragedy that happened years before the events of The Mandalorian. However, the series looks set to reveal more about the truth about what happened then and everything that took place after it.
The Purge of Mandalore
Mandalorians may have entered the Star Wars saga on the villains’ side thanks to Boba Fett, but as a bounty-hunting warrior culture defined by violence, they work by their own rules. They have been sworn enemies of both the Jedi and the Empire, and we see the consequences of that in The Mandalorian.
The Great Purge of Mandalore was a devastating assault on Mandalore by the Empire that ravaged the planet and nearly wiped out the population.
There’s still much to learn about the event, including the state the planet was left in, which The Mandalorian’s third season will explore. But the passing references are slowly being expanded.
We witnessed two pivotal moments in Mandalorian history, not in The Mandalorian but in its sister show. Din Djarin, the Mandalorian, was cast out of his sect during Chapter 5 of The Book of Boba Fett for breaking the Mandalorian Creed. Before his admission and expulsion, we discovered more about the sect and events on the warriors’ planet that had led them to be among the few survivors of the culture. The episode’s flashbacks built on events in The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels series, as the Purge was linked to the end of that conflict and the rise of the Empire witnessed in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.
Beyond the Clone Wars
Boba Fett was the saga’s best-known Mandalorian for many years and, as we discovered in the Prequel Trilogy, a clone. Star Wars expansion has made Fett a less central figure and revealed him as an arguable Mandalorian, although he still represents some of its essential parts.
During the Clone War, Mandalore fell under the rule of Sith Lord turned crime lord, Maul. Liberated by the Galactic Republic hours before the establishment of the Empire, the planet was almost immediately re-occupied. Wary of the power of Mandalore, the Empire adopted a slightly more lenient rule than usual, enabling it to govern its houses and clans for years. Still, it wasn’t in the Mandalorian mindset to yield.
The Darksaber, an ancient weapon of Mandalore, became a symbol of new hope. However, it also helped sow the seeds of division and, according to some, sealed the fate of Mandalore.
During the final days of the Empire Bo-Katan Kryze, leader of Clan Kryze and formerly of the Death Watch, a sect dedicated to returning Mandalore to their warrior ways, was gifted the Darksaber by revolutionary leader Sabine Wren. Kryze’s decision to take the weapon was controversial. A formidable force of Mandalorians banded together behind the blade, but as she had not won the legendary saber in battle, others believed it fulfilled the prophecy of a curse that spelled the end of Mandalore. Those included the Children of the Watch, an orthodox Mandalorian sect, and Din Djarin’s future clan.
The Empire was on hand to deliver that curse. Confronted with a new resistance under Kryze, it took action. As Djarin stated in the Mandalorian Chapter 11, “once the Empire knew they couldn’t control it, they made sure no one else could either.”
Night of a Thousand Tears
Seeking to crush the resistance in their typical style, the Empire started a mass purge of the Mandalorians. The culmination, known as the Night of a Thousand Tears, saw the planet’s domed cities obliterated, vast swathes of Mandalorians killed, and huge quantities of Beskar alloy depleted. In The Book of Boba Fett Chapter 5, we saw flashbacks to Imperial droids eliminating survivors until only a few disparate tribes survive.
As the Armorer told Djarin in The Book of Boba Fett, “Had our sect not been cloistered on the moon of Concordia, we would have not survived the Great Purge.” Summing up the catastrophe, she was adamant that Kryze had made the Purge inevitable.
“Those born of Mandalore strayed away from the path. Eventually, the Imperial interlopers destroyed all that we knew and loved in the Night of a Thousand Tears.”
Calling it “The Night of a Thousand Tears” is quite an understatement. It represented the near-obliteration of Mandalorian culture. As you might expect, the Empire and Moff Gideon, who played a crucial part in the siege, have a different name for it: The Siege of Mandalore.
We’ve seen the Empire destroy entire planets before, but this attempted genocide is one of the saga’s darkest chapters. It also built on another catastrophe of Mandalorian legend, i.e., The Great Cataclysm.
That devastating event had come at the culmination of the earlier war between the Jedi and the Mandalorians. It ruined the planet’s surface, reducing much of it to an uninhabitable desert and resulting in the domed cities that the Empire’s Tie Bombers later obliterated. The links between the Jedi and Mandalorians are further complicated by the Darksaber, a twist on a suspiciously familiar weapon crafted by Tarre Vizsla, the first Mandalorian to join the Jedi Order.
In The Mandalorian, and other series, we have met the scattered Mandalorians and discovered more about their factions, including those that followed the brooding Kryze and the ones who joined the Children of the Watch. The question is why, during the time of the New Republic, Mandalorians remain divided and unable to restore their culture.
The future of Mandalore
To understand the future of Mandalore and if a new leader will emerge, there’s a vast gulf of opinion, fact, and Imperial propaganda to unpack, something we have to do as there’s no doubt that the Purge is becoming one of the most important events in Star Wars lore.
We haven’t been to Mandalore, as the planet is said to be poisoned and off-limits to the warriors. In Chapter 17 of The Mandalorian, Djarin brings a piece of the planet to the Armorer, who sees it as proof of the damage done to the homeworld. Djarin counters that the rock-glass shows the planet isn’t poisoned as scavengers are retrieving items and minerals from Mandalore.
Dropping in on Kryze, who is the most abandoned and broken we’ve seen the former rebel leader, Djarin signals his intent to find out if the planet is poisoned once and for all. Eager for him to leave her alone in her Mandalorian castle, she reveals the location of the mines that may or may not have survived the Purge.
Dividing the Mandalorians who survived the Purge and fuelling the idea of a curse that prevents them from returning to their homeworld is undoubtedly convenient for the Empire. The planet may be devastated, but it holds hopes of salvation for at least one Mandalorian.
The Mandalorian season three airs weekly, every Wednesday, on Disney Plus.