Just about every other episode of The Mandalorian leans full force into genre conventions. And it feels like every mission that isn’t about fighting a monster in a cave or retrieving a person involves saving some downtrodden town’s bedraggled masses (sometimes by killing a monster in a cave!) “The Jedi,” the fifth episode of the series’ second season, falls right in step. This time the stock “rescue the town; retrieve the quest item” story has been crammed into a samurai mold. But while the format isn’t much of a surprise, the episode does deliver one shocker: Baby Yoda has a name, and it’s stupid as shit.
We’ve known for a while that animated hero Ahsoka Tano would show her overly-busy face, and writer-director Dave Filoni wastes no time dragging out his Clone Wars character. The episode’s cold open sees a walled town defending itself from an orange-and-white painted Rosario Dawson as she sneaks through the fog dispatching some faceless troops around its gate. At the top of the massive wall, the Magistrate (Diana Lee Inosanto) and Michael Biehn are just standing there scowling.
“Alright, Rosario Dawson, please stand still and turn on your lightsabers so we can see you,” the Magistrate asks. Dawson does, and it’s pretty cool. These are maybe the best looking lightsabers we’ve seen on screen. They’re white, a little flickery, and they properly, dramatically cast light, so well done on that. There have been a lot of dumb attempts to make lightsabers look cooler than they did in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but it turns out simplicity is what works.
Dawson makes her own ask, “Tell me where your master is, or I’m going to kill you. But I’ll give you a day to consider this, because I get that it’s a big decision.” She leaves to take her uncomfortable blue contacts out.
Shortly after, Mando and Baby Yoda (name coming soon!) roll up and conveniently land right near this dump of a town. They approach the wall’s door, and Biehn is still just standing around there. He seems to be the number two guy in the whole place, and this is apparently all he has to do. It’s honestly pretty pathetic.
He lets Mando in, and we see that this place is just as much of a shithole on the inside. Now we get why Biehn stands around on the wall all day: because there is nothing at all going on in this place. There’s basically no one around—and for good reason. It’s all just a gloomy green haze, and the only things outside the walls are a bunch of dead, leafless trees. From the looks of things, you’d guess their main industries were street food, passive torture, and sticks.
Almost immediately after getting inside, some soldier guy is like, “Hey, the Magistrate wants to see you.”
Mando heads over, and it turns out the Magistrate is inside ANOTHER, inner walled-off area. It’s like, what’s with all the walls? What are we even protecting here? This seems like a lot of physical barriers for a koi pond surrounded by miles of branches.
She explains how she needs this Jedi killed, and Mando is all, “Sure, but what do I get out of it?”
The answer? A spear made of Beskar. He could melt that down and finally get his metal codpiece! If Boba Fett had a codpiece, Mando sure as hell better get on that.
He agrees, and Biehn apparently tells him how to find his target. (“Go through some dead trees, now you’re gonna see a big dead tree, and you’re gonna wanna hang a left there…”)
When Mando gets out to a nondescript patch of detritus, Tano ambushes him. They have a brief scuffle that sees Mando blocking her lightsabers with his armor. Given the opening scene of The Phantom Menace, it seems like the lightsabers should be interrupted by, and possibly begin to melt through, the plating, but they just sorta clang off it here like metal on metal. I’m not going to pretend to understand nor care all that much about the physics of Star Wars, but as a novice viewer, it seems off—yet becomes central to the episode’s climax. Oh well!
Anyway, Mando is like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s just calm down here and check out this little gremlin I brought.”
So she spends the evening Force-chatting or whatever with Baby Yoda. Her main takeaways are that he was trained by Jedi before being hidden, and also his name is Grogu. Presumably it’s a nickname, like the NFL’s Gronk. His full name is probably, like, Yoda Grogukowski Jr., but we’ll have to see how that pans out.
Mando and Tano give Grogu a test to move a little stone, then a little ball, and it’s the least impressive Force display we’ve ever seen. It’s like, yeah, no shit he can move a two-ounce wad of metal. He stopped a terrible rhinoceros monster; he Force healed Carl Weathers; let’s stop fucking around here. Despite his succeeding at the test, Tano says she can’t train him because there’s already too much fear and anger in him, and it’s like, what Grogu are you talking about? This kid has never been angry or afraid of anything. He just waddles around and eats shit.
Mando explains how he was sent there to kill Tano, but that he doesn’t really give a shit either way. He’ll just as readily help her kill the Magistrate if she’ll help him finish off his Mandoquest. She agrees.
They all head back to the town and Tano handily jumps the entire wall and starts hacking all these footsoldiers up. Mando also somehow gets in and ends up joining Biehn in his daily task of standing around bored. Tano fights the Magistrate and… she wins! She demands the Magistrate reveal the location of Grand Admiral Thrawn, but it doesn’t seem like that happened.
Thrawn is one of these recurring franchise villains who has appeared in books and the Rebels animated series but otherwise no one has heard of, and it seems his blue visage will be showing up now. The Mandalorian is so quickly devolving into rote fan fiction, the fan being Filoni as fan of himself.
Mando also takes care of his adversary, and it ain’t no lie. Baby, bye-bye, Biehn.
Consequently, some old man—as the only remaining townsperson who had a speaking role—is made the new magistrate. Good for him. He’s a single dad, and he could probably use this.
Tano offers Mando the fancy spear, and he refuses. She’s like, “No, seriously, just take the spear. I literally have two laser swords. If you don’t take it, it’s going in the recycling.”
Mando takes the spear back to his ship and returns with Grogu, thinking Tano will have to train him now.
“I cannot train him,” she reiterates in the same monotone, wooden performance she’s delivered the entire episode. It’s a shame she wasn’t in the movie prequels, because she’d have fit right in.
Though she refuses any direct help, instead deciding to just sorta wander off back into Stick World, she does assign Mando his next main story quest: go to a Jedi temple, where mayyyyybe some other Jedi will answer the call of training Grogu. Truly the Jedi have fallen when they start dealing out the classic customer service pass-along.
