Last week’s episode of The Mandalorian saw Mando about to finally make some progress in his mission to get the kid back to his fellow Yodas. He finally knows where a Jedi is, and he’s set his course to her location.
But this being The Mandalorian, obviously there’s first there’s going to be yet another side quest. And this one comes loaded with so much Classic Star Wars Bullshit. But it’s fine. As we learned last episode, you get what you paid for.
So it seems Mando’s decision to have the first longshoreman he saw fix his Razor Crest was indeed a poor one, and the system of netting is not holding up so well. With Baby Yoda’s help, he’s trying his own repairs—specifically, the Classic Star Wars Bullshit repair of just plugging things in differently—but it doesn’t work out. After a brief peek under his helmet, revealing Pedro Pascal actually came on set at least one day, Mando decides he’s going to have to get his ship properly fixed. He’s off to reunite with Carl Weathers and Gina Carano on the planet that most loves the Red Hot Chili Peppers—Nevarro.
Carano is marshal there now, and she’s currently beating the shit out of some dumb-looking jackasses who were divvying up some illicit money and also about to eat a possessed mink. But by the time Mando arrives, she and Weathers are already at the city gates waiting for him. Weathers immediately falls back on the failed, pre-established system of assigning literally the first bug-eyed dude one sees to repair the ship.
The three go on a little tour of the cleaned-up town, where they’ve now set up a school. Mando reluctantly leaves baby Yoda there so they can “talk business.” All the kids there are for some reason in awe at Baby Yoda, as if they don’t see weird-ass freaks on the regular. Also, that the class is entirely human children raises some questions about whether Nevarro has segregated schools. Instead of answers, we get Baby Yoda stealing a sleeve of macarons from another kid. After all the stews and goops of The Mandalorian, finally they’ve moved on to delicate French pastries.
Meanwhile, the human trio make it to Mayor Apollo Creed’s office, and we get another reunion. It seems Carl Weathers did not kill the merman Mando delivered him in the very first episode, and now Horatio Sanz is doing the city’s bookkeeping to pay off his debt.
Carano asks if they can talk business, and it’s like, oh god, what now, you loon? That having “the Force be with you” is a conspiracy to let the liberal Jedi track you?
Turns out, it’s just that across the planet, there’s an old Empire base they want to blow up. (Some Classic Star Wars Bullshit in how planets are uniform and can be circumnavigated by speeder in like an hour twenty.) Weathers claims that there’s only a small skeleton crew manning the station—and, hey, gotta blow a little time before the Razor Crest is fixed up anyway. Mando agrees.
So these guys make Sanz drive them in his own speeder, and there’s no reason they do this besides that they actively hate this little shit and love treating him like garbage. They make him come along on the whole damn adventure, too, always browbeating him to do all the button-pushing, even though he’s clearly a detriment to the mission. He’s just this doofus cartoon comic relief, dragged along through sheer contempt for his pudgy blue existence.
They get there, and it seems it’s not such a skeleton crew after all. From here on, the whole mission is pretty much just pure Classic Star Wars Bullshit. They hack a damaged panel to get in; they’re there to blow up a reactor core; the Empire station has deep pits with weird little walkways; the Stormtroopers are predictably inept at hitting anyone—you get the idea. Not a lot new to see here. The most memorable part of the journey to overheat the reactor is that Carano knocks a guy out and Weathers excitedly rushes to steal his vape pen. (They apparently call them code cylinders.)
So once the mission’s complete, with the reactor soon to explode, the group starts to get out of there. On the way, something gives them pause, though: what looks like some kind of Elephant Man floating lifelessly in a tank. It seems this is where the Space Nazis have been doing their inhuman experiments, and soon a little hologram of Werner Herzog’s scientist friend from last season tells us just what those experiments are. Delivering some more Classic Star Wars Bullshit, he drags out the Prequels hokum, explaining that the blood he drew from Baby Yoda has a high M-count. Midichlorians are back, baby! And apparently being injected into some unlucky fellas.
Herzog’s pal also reveals that Giancarlo Esposito is still alive. This was already stated in a Mando-adjacent conversation last week, when Captain Bosch preferred killing himself to betraying his boss, but it turns out whatever Esposito’s name is was never said, so you got us, Favreau. Mando immediately fears for Baby Yoda.
“Guess I better… jet!” And he takes off in his jetpack .
When the team first got to the base, Sanz mentioned how a heavily armored transport sitting there would go for a lot on the black market, and Chekhov’s Gunboat now makes its use apparent. With Stormtroopers pinning the three down, Carano makes a run for it and hops in the driver’s seat of the vehicle.
“Get in, losers. We’re doing a final set-piece.”
They hop in and she finally gets to do the ridiculously goofy driving shit she missed out on in Fast & Furious 6. She steers that thing right off the side of this base, plummeting 20 stories and onto Sanz’s ride. She is presumably pleased about that, because everyone loathes the merman, and she just drives off. Some troopers on speeders give chase through a narrow canyon (as is Classic Star Wars Bullshit), but Weathers is able to take them out with the craft’s mounted blasters.
TIE fighters are soon in pursuit, and it’s looking like the team won’t make it back to the city. But don’t worry: a little Classic Star Wars Bullshit is on the way to help. Like Han in the Death Star run, Mando is suddenly just there, zipping in in his unusually-quickly repaired ship and shooting down the pursuers.
Baby Yoda subsequently pukes the macarons as a disgusting blue fluid. His digestive system is made only for slop, eggs, and grotesque marine life.
Weathers radios to Mando that they should get drinks or whatever, but Mando explains that he must clean up this little freak’s vomit and get on with his main storyline quest. He flies off.
In a denouement, the episode reiterates the spider episode’s lesson that the former Rebels are just a bunch of cops now. One of the X-wing guys from the aforementioned episode soon shows up on Nevarro to interrogate Weathers and Carano about the blown-up base. Like, what, you knew there was a residual Empire presence on the planet, and instead of taking care of that, you’re now just going to look into the noise complaint or whatever for it exploding? Fuckin’ cops.
Off on an Empire ship, we see the bug-eyed repairman (the second one, that is) holo-Zooming in to give a report to an officer. The rat bastard assures her that he secretly installed a tracking device on Mando’s ship. Why do these people keep hiring the first bug-eyed idiot they see!?
The officer passes the update on to Esposito, who’s like, “We will be ready [for something or other].” Director Carl Weathers does a slow dolly back to reveal just how prepared they are, and… it sort of looks like it’s just some more vacuum-formed plastic armor. Haven’t they tried that already?
