That was weird.
My son hooted and hollered at the double-punch of Mando appearing and his theme playing. And the beginning was genuinely thrilling and exciting in a way TBOBF has not captured for me.
It's weird that so much Mando lore now resides in the middle of another series. That would be like the episode where Richie Cunningham goes to college and Chachi moves in with Fonzie while Arnold sells the diner to Al all taking place in a January episode of Laverne and Shirley. It's weird Will this all get a 10 minute recap on the real season 3 premiere?
So then the episode got moving,, and never left Mando. I couldn't believe it, as we had like seventeen mini-episodes unfold including a forging montage, a training montage, a flashback, a battle to the death...seriously I would have preferred these bits to be fleshed out over the first four episodes of the series, and have all the Boba Fett "Daimyo" stuff get crammed into episode 5 instead. I guess that would have been Mandalorian season 3, though. Yeah, that's what I want.
Once it got back to Tatooine I got a little bored or maybe just exhausted, and I will point out that TPM is my 3rd favorite saga flick so it's not like I wasn't enjoying the callbacks. Too much Pelli Motto for my taste. (She had more lines, screen time, and plot involvement this episode than any of the side characters introduced in TBOBF so far. Why couldn't we get a chance to get to know the characters of the 2 Gammoreans hanging around with Bo a like this? Some antics, some history, maybe one of them dated a Jawa..?)
Last week I was resigned to disliking this series because of the strange structure and complete failure of good storytelling. This week I loved so much of what was going on...but the underlying problems are still there. The storytelling is being forgotten and in its place are at best fun skits to watch (and at worst seriously cringe-inducing bad TV.)
If this is them trying to do a large overarching storyline, it isn't working. Build a larger narrative to guide the story, but remember these are individual episodes that at their best should have the ability to be watched and enjoyed on their own.