Spoilers to follow for the first two episodes of The Mandalorian
After giving us only two brief days to ponder thatbombshell endingtoepisode 1(while we all also low-key try not to picture Yoda and Yaddle just full-on smashing puppet parts)The Mandalorianhas returned, rougher, shinier, and Maclunkier than ever. Not bigger, though; Chapter 2, “The Child”, runs a lean, mean 32-minutes, continuing the feeling thatThe Mandalorianis less a TV series than it is a slightly overlongStar Warsmovie chopped up into segments. Not that I’m complaining, exactly. What this episode lacked in length it did make up for by being the firstStar Warsstory to feature someone just straight-up hauling off and socking a Jawa straight in its face. Folks, youdolove to see it.
Ah, right, and another huge revelation: Our still-unidentified Baby Yoda, this freaking adorable tiny shaved Mogwai, is Force-sensitive. Like,realForce-sensitive, lift a whole-ass alien rhino-bear off the ground Force-sensitive. If midichlorians run in the family, this viridescent little moppet is out here filling entire diapers with the stuff.
So yeah, not a sizeable runtime but we’re left withplentyof questions. But first, a note: I have seen the first three episodes ofThe Mandalorian, butnothinghere will touch on anything addressed or answered in “Chapter 3”. Spoilers are coarse, and rough, and irritating, and they get everywhere, but not inthisspace, fan-dalorians. With that out of the way, let’s get started with the important stuff…
Would You Die and/or Kill For This Tiny Lil' Yoda Child?
Yes. Absolutely. I’m a little ashamed of how quickly I’d disintegrate both family and loved ones if it meant Baby Yoda would be slightly less inconvenienced. On a much more realistic level I also regret nothing about these feelings. Pretty much the only person in the galaxy who could convince me to terminate this kid or any alien toddler for that matter isWerner Herzog, so two episodes in andThe Mandalorianis really proving to be a struggle for me, morally.
No But Seriously, Who Is This Kid?
I say “kid” but episode 1 established that the tiny bat-eared pea-pod is 50 years old, while this episode made it pretty clear that it—and I do mean “it”, as our main Mando (Pedro Pascal) and cha pig-faced boy Kuiil (Nick Nolte) both play the pronoun game throughout to low-key keep another layer of this mystery alive—has more than a baby’s worth of awareness. It attempts to heal The Mandalorian’s arm wound. It appears to know when both it and Mando are in danger. And, as I mentioned, it is in-tune enough with The Force to lift the local wildlife in the air with its mind.
That at least (kind of) explains one key thing: Why The Client (Herzog) and his skittish bespectacled associate Dr. Pershing (Omid Abtahi) sent a Mandalorian, a bounty droid, a few Trandoshans, and lord knows who else to collect this prize. The ability to tap into The Force is ahotcommodity right now. At this point in time, the only Jedi walking around is Luke Skywalker, and that dudewhippedthe Empire’s collectively evil ass. Just showed up, told notorious Sith monster Darth Vader “you’re a good guy again” then helped boot the most powerful man in the cosmos down an elevator shaft. Anyone who is still faithful to the tyrannical ideas of the Empire is looking at that and going “I’ll have what he’s having” except, you know, in Werner Herzog’s voice. And if this kid is related to Yoda, then it’s descended from a top-five most Force-sensitive figure ofall time. Yoda was straightdrippingmidichlorians. Yoda was objectively, backed-by-hard-data one of the most powerful Jedis in existence all the way up until the moment he left the fight and lived as a hermit on a remote planet, a scenario identical to Luke Skywalker’s eventual path with the key difference being that no one ever complains about it. Weird!
Anyway: We still don’t know diddly dick about where this Baby Yoda came from in the first place. For now, due to a sheer lack of evidence, let’s temporarily table the idea that Yoda went against the Jedi code and just conceived a child. Just, for once in your life, stop imagining that. Please. And that includes addingFrank Oz’s voice to the whole thing, saying stuff like “do or do not, there is no try” right beforehand. Come on. This is serious stuff.
As we briefly touched on last week, and depending on who you ask, The Force may or may not be capable of popping out a baby all its own. That is, in the context presented inThe Phantom Menace, how Anakin Skywalker was conceived, although a later comic book update also suggested that Palpatine manipulated The Force himself to create Anakin, a little party trick he learned fromhisSith Master, Darth Plagueis the Wise. (You might’ve heard a tragedy about that guy.) The point is, The Force is kind of a wild slippery bench with no hard-and-fast rules, and you definitely don’t necessarily need to be a full-blown Jedi to tap into it. See: Leia flying through space, thatLast Jedikid summoning a broom, etc etc. It’s that hard-to-explain scenario that led to by far the best comedic misunderstanding of the New Trilogy, Han Solo’s exasperated “that’s not how the Force works”, which isHarrison Ford’s second finest exasperated line delivery right below the time hemercilessly dunked on the EIC of this very website.
To sum up…all of that: After two episodes ofThe Mandalorian, the only things we actually know about Baby Yoda is that A) He looks like Yoda, but isn’t necessarily related to him, B) He can use the Force, sometimes, but it knocks his little ass out, and C) Pascal’s Mandalorian is going through absolute hell to be the first person to get a few more answers than that.
Who Is The Mandalorian?
We touched on this very same question last week, but it appears that it’s gonna' be an on-going mystery throughout the series considering the Mandalorian’s whole “never take off the mask or tell people my name” schtick. Like, ifMad Menwas about an ad executive who also wore a mask 24/7 and strictly went by The Mad Man you’d be allowed to think like “okay but who is The Mad Man?” pretty much every week.
My colleague Tom Reimann, bless him andhis wonderful writing, is convinced that we’re actually following the post-Pit adventures of one Boba Fett. I respectfully disagree with the take, because A) Boba Fett’s legacy as the coolest bounty hunter in the galaxy who also got caned by a blind man into a slow torturous death is both hilarious and sacred to me, and B) Revealing that The Mandalorian is THE Mandalorian basically turns this show intoPatton Oswalt’sfilibuster pitchfromParks and Recreation.
I don’t think there’s enough evidence yet to make any guess as to who is under that mask, if it even is someone we know, but I am fascinated by this Mandalorian’s whole vibe. We’re told he’s “the best” more than once, but we’ve mostly spent time watching him get his Beskar-covered ass handed to him. An eight-foot-tall and roughly 500-pound Blurgg stealthily snuck up on him last week. Valiantly though he tried, this week he got tossed off the top of a Sandcrawler by a crew of Jawas, which is like losing a fight to the group of eighth-graders in your suburb who call themselves a gang because they wear wallet chains. Then, the pièce de résistance, getting utterly worked by that horned creature before being bailed out by a literal baby.
Because, there’s something going on with this guy, and I’m both charmed and intrigued by it. I want to make special note of an exchange between Mando and Kuiil because it stuck out so much to me I made note of it on both of my episode 2 watches:
Kuiil:“You need to drop your rifle.”
Mando:“I’m a Mandalorian. Weapons are part of my religion.”
What an oddly aggressive and sort’ve unrelated bit of exposition that answer is! It feels weird to me. Does that not feel weird to you? It’s like if a restaurant very sensibly asked you to take off your flip-flops and you responded “I am a Christan andJesus wore sandals” instead of just like, “No.”
It could, of course, just be a stilted piece of dialogue, butJon Favreauwrote the episode and Jon Favreau is…kinda' good at this stuff. So, to me, it’s a weird moment where the Mandal-ady doth protest too much, methinks. Paired together with the character’s general doofus-ness—and his very cryptic “I was a Foundling once” from episode 1—the real reason I don’t think he’s a Mandalorian we’d recognize, is because I don’t think he’s a Mandalorian at all.
Thoughts, queries, alternate idea-ries? Sound off below, and check up on the rest of our Mandalorian coverage withDave’s reviewand Werner Herzog’s thoughts on why the series is “cinema back at its best.”
