Taking out your spoiler tags because, this many pages in since the season finale, people still reading aren't afraid of spoilers.
I think these Dark Troopers capture the essence, but weren't given enough screen time to establish menace. I also remembered the lightsaber resistance. A more fitting narrative might've been if Our Heroes whittled them one-by-one, distracting with the darksaber while Din got in with the beskar spear and rearranged their inner workings a bit. They're down to the last few and their elbow room is gone. That's when Luke and/or his Rogues show up to help turn the tide, rather than steal 99% of the show. Our Heroes have more agency, maybe even give Bo a moment of telling Gideon where to stick it, as besting his droids in battle counts perfectly well for winning the darksaber. Like... Maybe if this episode had ended with that moment when they're backed into cover and wondering how long before it gives out. *whoosh* A hard-to-make-out-it-went-so-fast ship catches their attention out the viewport. They share a glance... To be continued.
As for the other matter. It makes sense for Luke to show up because he is still a couple decades away from his big pre-TFA self-perceived failure. That's also two decades for Grogu to get trained up and leave -- or have it cut short due to pressing matters, and Din comes to fetch him. That's been my biggest grumble since sometime around 1983, as I started to become more aware, as a human (I was still only in elementary school) -- it seemed weird and a little stupid to start the story in the middle. But then there were no more movies, which confused me as well, because George said there were supposed to be twelve or nine, and this was only three. Then, when he sold Lucasfilm to Disney and they decided to skip over a full generation of character growth and galactic events to get to the next numbered episode, that confusion solidified into solid grumpitude. Rather than start at Episode I, and then tell the story in as many episodes as it needs to unfold fully, and in order, we have...
Episodes IV, V, and VI
Episodes I and II, beginning 32 years earlier
Clone Wars microseries between II and III
Episode III
Clone Wars ongoing series, set between II and III
Rebels, set several years prior to IV
Episode VII, twenty-five years after VI
Rogue One, between Rebels and IV
Episode VIII, back to the future
Solo, back between III and Rebels
Resistance, prior to VII and running through VIII
Episode IX
Mandalorian, just after VI...
It's just all over the place. Just as it's narratively a bad idea to go into the Prequels already knowing Anakin's and Obi-Wan's fate, now we're in this show knowing the fate of the New Republic, Luke, etc. Best we can do is try not to think about it. This show won't run all the way up to the Sequel era, and we have no idea the state of Mandalore in that time. A lot can happen between now and then. We just have to pretend we don't know what's going to happen to the larger galaxy, same as when we had to try to not think about how Episode III had to end.
