The Mandalorian is growing increasingly tiresome, and everything fun about the first season is slowly being undone by the second. Like Blade Runner 2049, a sci-fi-tinged genre pastiche has been strained to giving everything and everyone meaning. Anyone not killed on-screen is destined to return a few episodes later; every major event is deeply connected to the films and cartoons. And while The Mandalorian was ostensibly already a redemption arc for Boba Fett, making a guy in this cool armor do some cool shit, now someone has decided actual Boba Fett needs a redemption arc of doing cool shit too. It’s such a stupid show. But it’s fine, so here we go.
“The Tragedy,” The Mandalorian’s sixth episode of season two, admittedly opens with a derivation from the usual: Mando gets to actually accomplish a main story quest without some side-quest bullshit! He arrives at the shrine Rosario Dawson pointed him to: the Jedi’s nipple, a small protuberance surrounded by a stone areola and spires of rocky chest hair. He sets Baby Yo—shit, right, it’s GORGU now—on the nip, and Gorgu basically waits in the Force’s online lobby until another Jedi will join his game. This goes on for nearly the entire episode.
Meanwhile, Mando notices that he’s been followed to this tit planet’s nip. A ship approaches that looks like Christ on the cross in a sleeping bag, and we all know whose ride that is. (It’s Boba Fett’s.)
So, apparently Boba Fett kept his ship but somehow lost his armor, and instead of just taking it back from Handsome Cowboy himself, he’s gone through the more convoluted process of rescuing Ming-Na Wen in last season’s fourth episode, giving her C-3PO’s exposed electronic belly, and now confronting Mando. Why not? It’s also worth noting that the only reason we already suspected that Boba Fett saved Ming-Na was because of his armor’s distinctive jangling, and now we know he doesn’t even have his armor. Is he wearing spurs under the robe or what?
While Mando, Boba, and Ming-Na are negotiating how to get Boba’s armor back to him, some cargo ships of Stormtroopers approach. The three make an impromptu alliance and engage in a firefight that is pretty fun but very much the product of director Robert Rodriguez. Ever true to his cheap, low-budget origins, the outdoor battle is as Daylight as daylight shooting gets; no diffusion or fill lights or anything, just a digital camera pointed at the subjects. Were it not so cohesive, it would look like Money Plane.
During the fight, Ming-Na kicks a huge boulder down a hill, and some Stormtrooper just stands there at a turret shooting at it as it slowly runs him over. It’s such a Looney Tune.
Mando uses his little homing dart things on the guys, and it’s increasingly becoming apparent what a video game mechanic they are in this RPG of incessant missions. He never buys more ammo or anything, but it’s somehow explicit that he can use this Special Ability once a day, merely needing to Rest before it reloads.
Likewise apparent is Mando’s descent from talented mercenary to video game tank. Since he got his fancy armor, he’s like a Hellboy—not so much a great fighter as able to take a shitload of hits.
And we soon see that Boba Fett has similarly become a Hellboy. It’s not that he takes a bunch of hits, but that, like Hellboy, he now has a really bulky torso compared to his limbs. Not to body-shame the almost 60-year-old Temuera Morrison, but he does not fit in the Boba Fett armor at all. It is literally bursting at the seams. He doesn’t need to be here to begin with, and this is the saddest way to re-introduce him, a dad bod trying to fit into his old wedding tux.
In an effort to make up for how dumpy everyone made him look here, at least Morrison’s Fett gets to do some cool shit. He takes out a bunch of guys with his Tuskin Dental Instrument and ends up blowing up the ships that brought the Stormtroopers there.
Unfortunately, soon after, a new ship approaches. And this one is shaped like a butt plug.
It’s Giancarlo Esposito! He sends down the “Dark Troopers” vaguely teased a couple episodes ago, and for as well as the series has done in restoring the aesthetic tenets of the original trilogy, these guys look like dogshit. They’re like 1990s Terminator toys by way of the evil hockey team of Strange Brew. For being sort of built up, these guys could not be more of a letdown.
The butt plug ship also blows the shit out of Mando’s Razor Crest, and that is the most fulfilling part of the entire episode. After how preciously the Millennium Falcon was treated in the sequels, it’s nice to see a quickly-iconic ship scrapped in an instant. Not everything needs to be something! Even when everything and everyone else seems to be.
Anyway, these crap robots end up logging Grogu out of the Jedi Network and hauling his ass off to the butt plug ship. Mando heads over to the wreckage of his own ship and pulls out the fully intact spear he got last episode. It’s such a Chekhov’s Spear that it’s now even more surely going to be A Thing. Odds on Esposito dying in a spear vs. Darksaber battle are now like 2:1.
Instead of pursuing the USS Buttplug, Mando is like, “You know who we need to sort this out? Whoever Bill Burr played last season.” It’s seriously just all callbacks now, as further demonstrated when Mando heads to Gina Carano to carry out this request for Bostonian comic aid.
Off on his prostate-stimulating craft, Esposito has Grogu in a Leia cell. Grogu takes out some Stormtroopers with some Force bullshit, but then Giancarlo struts up with his DARKSABER. He turns it on, and it extends less like a lightsaber than a hardening dick—grows sorta slowly, and gets visibly thicker too. This thing is a fetish item, and everyone wants that big black saber.
We’ll have to wait and see who can take it.
