How Much Time Has Passed Between Seasons Of The Mandalorian? An Investigation

There will be spoilers for "Star Wars: The Mandalorian" Chapter 17 – The Apostate

During a roundtable interview that /Film attended leading up to the premiere of the third season of "The Mandalorian," executive producer Jon Favreau defined the time that had passed since Grogu left the Mandalorian to go with Luke Skywalker. You might be surprised by how much time has actually passed. Favreau said:

"[Grogu] is definitely somebody who has spent time in both worlds. We know that he started off earlier in the Jedi Temple, we've seen flashbacks that speak to that. And then we know that he's been rescued and spent many years with The Mandalorian, went back with Luke, now we've been two years apart from him there, training... What's interesting is that, as he chooses to return to his friend, the Mandalorian, because he's developed an attachment... It's interesting how that echoes, in a way, Luke's path when he was drawn to the attachment to his friends and how that helped shaped the future."

Some thought this could mean that Jon Favreau meant in-universe time, but when Variety asked him to clarify on the red carpet, he reiterated that a large swath of time could have passed. "I don't know if I said many years," he told Variety, "but it's probably about the real time that we've experienced. The end of season two, when they said goodbye, we checked in, in "The Book of Boba Fett" about a year ago when they parted company again, and then he rejoined the Mandalorian. I think somewhere between zero and two years."

So what on-screen evidence is there for the passage of time as Jon Favreau has laid out here? Let's dig in.

Well, if we look at "The Book of Boba Fett" and the opening of the third season of "The Mandalorian", there's a lot of evidence that Jon Favreau knows what he's talking about. And not just because his name is on the "written by" credits.

In "The Book of Boba Fett", there's no indication to start with how long it's been since the end of season 2 of "The Mandalorian," which saw Boba Fett and Fennec Shand arriving on Tatooine to take over Jabba the Hutt's territory. There's also no indication as to how long their plan took to execute. Did this take place in a matter of weeks? Or was it months? When we catch back up to Din Djarin, he's been on a long quest to find the Armorer and his covert. This mission picks up at the tail end, implying that he's been on that quest for a while. Could it have been a year? It's entirely possible.

When Mando visits Grogu on Ossus, there's not a real sense of how long it takes for him to get back to Tatooine to help Boba Fett, or how long he's actually there. It could be days or weeks. Perhaps months could have even passed. There's not really any solid timeline developed. This lends a lot of credence to Jon Favreau's assertion. There's nothing in these episodes proving that much time can't have passed, which is a mark in his favor.

When we get into the third season of "The Mandalorian", the long passage of time feels a lot more clear. When Din Djarin catches up to his covert, they have ballooned in number. When we saw the Armorer in "The Book of Boba Fett", she had one adherent left; Paz Vizsla. Now, there are dozens of Mandalorians swearing to her creed and joining her ranks. This clearly didn't happen overnight. This is a significant advancement of the timeline and could well be shortly after Din Djarin completed his mission on Tatooine, but he also talks about having another adventure to the Armorer, about that piece of glass he brought back from Mandalore, implying even more time has passed.

Then, when we visit Nevarro, Greef Karga has been made High Magistrate and the entire economy is booming in a way that it simply couldn't prior to the events of the last two seasons. The school has replaced the cantina. The people there have made it respectable. Think back to the first season and Din Djarin's walk through the marketplace and how sad and dingy it seemed, with Kowakian Monkey-Lizards on spits or being sold in cages. Now, they're in the trees like tropical monkeys, and the entire place looks like it could have been built in a new land in a Disney Park, a cross between Batuu and Main Street, U.S.A. This is something else that didn't happen overnight. And the discussion about the growing New Republic and how they recruited Cara Dune out from under Greef to be special forces allows even more story to have occurred.

The last big clue is something Bo-Katan says in this episode. That she had built that coalition and tried to lead them for a time. But without her possession of the Darksaber, they all just scattered to the wind again and took on work as mercenaries. There's no indication how much time had passed, but it's enough that they tried to follow Bo-Katan, but it just didn't work and had to find their own way.

Watching the advancement of every single storyline jump by leaps and bounds this season, it feels like Jon Favreau knows exactly what he's talking about.

The other thing we should point out about the timeline is that it is never going to be pinned down definitively until it has to be. When Favreau said between zero and two years, I really think he means it. As creative storytellers, they're going to reserve the right to expand or contract that timeline however they need to so that they have the room to tell the stories they want. There is very little going on in the galaxy in this part of the timeline that acts as a major tentpole event, so the runway they have to play with can be as long or as short as they want it to be. It's why the evidence presented above is all in vague generalities. There's nothing set in stone and there won't be until they need one. If a character like Rey were to be born and they dealt with that story on the show, it would lock them into a specific year in the timeline. Short of that, all of this is as much or as little time as the story needs for these events to take place.

Was Luke with Grogu for two years? Maybe. Does it matter if it was more or less? At this point, no.

Don't expect a more definitive answer on this until long after the show has ended. If Favreau is saying it was two years at this point, that is not out of the realm of possibility, given what we know. And if you're a creative, why would you want to lock yourself into a specific amount of time, one way or another? There's no upside to defining it in stone. The story works just as well without a calendar on screen, flipping pages to show us the exact date. 

It's important to note that "Star Wars" is just like this. It always has been too. Don't think too hard about how long Luke was on Dagobah with Yoda in "The Empire Strikes Back." Because he was there almost the entire time it took Han and Leia to get from the Anoat system to Cloud City at sublight speeds. It could have taken months or more!

The timeline advances at the speed of the story and the pinning down of exact times and places for events is the work of historians, not necessarily the creatives. They're trying to tell an entertaining story. That we have the Lucasfilm Story Group and the incredibly talented team behind their timeline helping folks like Favreau keep it all straight is merely a bonus.

"Star Wars: The Mandalorian" streams new episodes every Wednesday only on Disney+.