How The Mandalorian Season 3 Premiere Handled Gina Carano’s Firing

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Mandalorian season 3 premiere.

The Mandalorian season 3 premiere saw Mando (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu return to the planet of Nevarro, now a bustling trade hub, to pay a visit to Greef Karga (Carl Weathers), now Nevarro’s high magistrate. After Greef unsuccessfully tried to convince Mando to become the planet’s new marshal, Mando revealed that he had come in hopes of repairing his old pal IG-11 so the assassin droid could accompany him and Grogu on their journey to the Mandalorians’ home planet of Mandalore.

But it was the marshal conversation that revealed how the show decided to write off Gina Carano’s character, Cara Dune. When Mando suggested Cara as an option for a new marshal, Greef gave a brief explanation for why she wasn’t available: “After she brought in Moff Gideon, she was recruited by Special Forces.”

We last saw Cara Dune infiltrating Moff Gideon’s (Giancarlo Esposito) light cruiser on a mission to rescue Grogu alongside Mando, Mandalorian warriors Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sackhoff) and Koska Reeves (Mercedes Varnado), and bounty hunter Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen) in the season 2 finale, which aired on Dec. 18, 2020.

However, during the hiatus between seasons, Carano was fired by Lucasfilm in February 2021 for sharing a series of offensive posts on social media, including one implying that being a Republican today is like being Jewish during the Holocaust. Carano was also dropped by United Talent Agency.

“Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future,” a Lucasfilm spokesperson said in a statement at the time. “Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

This also led to the apparent cancelation of Rangers of the New Republic, a planned Star Wars series that was set to center on Cara Dune. Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy told Empire Magazine in November 2021 that any important plot lines from the scrapped show would likely be absorbed into The Mandalorian instead.

“We’d never written any scripts or anything,” she said. “Some of that will figure into future episodes, I’m sure, of the next iteration of Mandalorian.”