Gina Carano’s Cara Dune Written off ‘The Mandalorian’ in Season 3 Premiere

Thank the Maker — The Mandalorian is back with new episodes on Disney+ after a two-year absence. There’s been a long wait between seasons, and the Season 3 premiere of Disney+’s premier Star Wars didn’t waste much time setting up the lay of the land for Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu’s new adventure. But not only did the show have to establish where all of our faves are now, the premiere had to deal with some behind-the-scenes… uh… plot developments that also impacted The Mandalorian’s status quo. Case in point: the whereabouts of one Cara Dune, played by Gina Carano.

Here’s your SPOILER ALERT. Now, let’s talk about Marshal Dune.

What happened to Cara Dune on The Mandalorian?

To keep spoilers to a minimum, we’ll just talk about the Nevarro portion of the Season 3 premiere, a chapter titled “The Apostate.” To set the scene: Din Djarin has returned to Nevarro, the planet that served as the backdrop for a chunk of Season 1, including that bar shootout with Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito). As we saw in Season 2, the town — and likely the whole planet, because in Star Wars every town is a microcosm of the entire world — has gone straight. That bar was turned into a school, former bounty hunter wrangler Greef Karga is now the magistrate, and ex-Rebel shocktrooper Cara Dune went from getting into bar fights to being the marshal.

In the Season 3 premiere, Din returns to Nevarro and reconnects with Karga, who’s now the high magistrate and has a big, fancy cape complete with little servant droids scooting along behind him carrying said cape, making sure it doesn’t get dirty. Din is there looking for allies, so he naturally asks about Cara Dune. After all, she was fighting by his side against the Empire in the previous episode of The Mandalorian (which aired two years ago). Karga gives him an update:

“After she brought in Moff Gideon,” says Karga, “she was recruited by Special Forces.” So that’s that, and that’s the in-universe explanation for Gina Carano’s absence.

Where is Gina Carano now?

If you don’t recall, Carano was fired from The Mandalorian in February 2021, two months after the Season 2 finale aired. Her exit from the show came after she shared an Instagram post that equated being a republican in 2021 with being a Jewish person in Nazi Germany. Regarding the post and Carano’s employment status, a Lucasfilm spokesperson said at the time that “Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

That wasn’t the first time that Carano’s online presence put her employment at risk. Prior to that post, she mocked mask wearing and dabbled in some 2020 voter fraud conspiracy theories. Carano made headlines a year prior to her firing for mocking pronouns and alleging that the trans community is “abusive.” Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal’s sister is trans.

Since being fired from arguably the most successful franchise in pop culture history, Carano has teamed up with conservative personality Ben Shapiro, canoodled with a Joe Biden impersonator in a Hunter Biden “biopic,” and had her latest film open to $13,000 at the box office. Carano, however, said she’s doing just fine in a tweet from January:

New episodes of The Mandalorian premiere on Wednesdays on Disney+.