Author: Charles Murphy

Moff Gideon is playing chess. By the time Chapter 12 of The Mandalorian, “The Seige“,  comes to an end, Din Djarin looks like less of a worthy opponent to Gideon and more like one of his pawns. In the wake of yesterday’s episode, the internet was full of complaints about the pace of Chapter 12 and the fact that the Mando returned to Nevarro so soon. What was overlooked in those complaints was not only how this episode clarifies Gideon’s interest in the Child, essentially solving the series’ biggest ongoing mystery, but also simultaneously creates a new one…or two…or three.

Despite being the main antagonist of The Mandalorian, Moff Gideon’s intentions for The Child were about as clear as swamp water. Season One theories ranged from Gideon hoping to clone the kid to wanting to train him himself (there’s a theory that Gideon is force-sensitive). It turns out that Gideon’s true intentions seem to be more horrific than anything I’ve read to this point: he’s harvesting The Child’s blood. Courtesy of Doctor Pershing’s holographic report, we find out that Gideon’s plan involves transfusing The Child’s midichlorian-rich blood into test subjects in an attempt to create what we can only assume to be a Strand-Cast.

Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni are all about fine details, so if you find yourself asking what a Strand-Cast is, don’t feel bad. The concept, as far as I can tell, was introduced in what might easily have been a conversation you missed in last season’s penultimate episode, Chapter 7, “The Reckoning.” As Din Djarin and the debonaire Ughnauht Kuill (RIP) debate the nature of The Child, Djarin posits that “it might be a Strand-Cast”, a suggestion Kuill dismisses while joking that Cara Dune looks like she may have been farmed herself. Strand-Casts are bioengineered beings and both the Empire and the Sith have cornered the market on creating them. So while The Child isn’t a Strand-Cast, Gideon’s interest in him is related to creating them. Of note to both the time period in which the story is set and a connection to the sequel trilogy, both Supreme Leader Snoke and Rey’s father are resultant of the work done with Strand-Casts. Alternatively, Gideon could be looking to create an army of force-wielding Clone Troopers that may or may not be related to the episode’s final reveal: the Dark Troopers.

And here we find ourselves right back where we started: with no idea what Gideon is truly up to. In almost the same moment we can finally exhale as we find out why Gideon is after The Child, we are struck with the realization that the implications of his intentions much greater than we had originally anticipated. Is Gideon the bridge to the First Order? I don’t think so because he doesn’t seem to be a part of The Contingency that worked to “destroy” the remnants of the Empire in order to prepare the way for the First Order and, I thought, all the cloning/Strand-Casting took place on Exegol and members of the First Order were uninformed. Why does he have the Darksaber? What good does a relic that only matters to the Mandalorians do this man? What’s he planning to do with these Dark Troopers?

It seems obvious that Gideon is headed for a showdown with Ahsoka Tano and Bo-Katan Kryze but what seems less and less obvious is the true scope of his plans. We still know shockingly little about the man and yet he knows everything about everyone he comes into contact with but at the moment, he’s poised as the Grandmaster of the game of chess being played in The Mandalorian and, until the second half of Chapter 12, Din Djarin didn’t even know he was still in the game and now, he finds himself a pawn. While Chapter 12 may have seemed like a speed bump, the realization that Gideon’s need of The Child was little more than a small piece of a plan far greater than anything I’d previously conceived them to be has leveled him up. This man has grand plans and we’ve only seen the opening move.

Three days after it debuted, the buzz around Chapter 11 of The Mandalorian remains significant. Bryce Dallas Howard’s episode packed a major punch and did so in in a short amount of time but it’s something that we didn’t see on screen that fans who aren’t extremely well-versed in Star Wars mythology might want to brush up on: the Darksaber.

If you watched Season One of The Mandalorian but have yet to catch up on The Clone Wars or Star Wars Rebels, two animated series whose events are now canonical, you have seen the Darksaber before, though to be fair, you might not have known what you were seeing when you saw it. In last season’s final episode, when Giancarlo Esposito’s Moff Gideon used the Darksaber to slice his way out of his downed Tie Fighter, fans of the show got a look at the weapon while hardcore fans lost their minds. I don’t recall Gideon saying, “let me bust out this Darksaber”, so you’re excused if you didn’t know that’s what it was but now we know the purpose of that scene was to establish that the weapon was in Gideon’s possession and now, thanks to one brief bit of dialogue in Chapter 11, we know that Katee Sackhoff’s Bo-Katan wants to get her hands on it and is almost certainly on a collision course with Gideon. If you thought to yourself, “that looks like a black lightsaber”, you’d be correct. The Darksaber is in fact an old Jedi’s weapon and has a rich history, most of which has been told through The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels; however, now that it’s made it’s way into live-action along with Bo-Katan, who first appeared in The Clone Wars herself, it’s probably a good time to get a brief overview of the blade and why exactly Bo-Katan is after it.

Created by Tarre Vizsla, the first Mandalorian to become a Jedi, the Darksaber has changed hands quite a bit throughout its history and its power is certainly more symbolic than absolute. During the fall of the Old Republic, the weapon was “liberated” from the Jedi by Mandalorians belonging to House Vizsla and remained in their family for generations. When a civil war erupted on Mandalore between the pacifist regime led by Bo-Katan’s sister, Satine, and the traditional Mandalorian warriors, the pacifists prevailed and exiled the old school Mandos to the planet’s moon, Concordia. There Pre Vizsla, an ancestor of the Jedi, created a group of hardline warriors called the Death Watch who used and included Bo-Katan among their numbers. Led by Vizsla and the Darksaber, the Death Watch retook Mandalore, though as seems to be the way it goes on Mandalore, it didn’t last long. Later, during the Reign of the Empire that saw Mandalore under Imperial rule, another Mandalorian named Sabine Wren came into possession of the Darksaber and gave it Bo-Katan, who sought to use it as a symbol under which to unite the many splinter groups of Mandalorians and take back their planet from the Empire. At some point, Gideon took possession of the weapon and, as we saw in Chapter 11, Bo-Katan wants it back and hopes to finally restore Mandalore to its former glory.

Of course having the Darksaber come back into play just as Din Djarin comes face to face with the fact that he might just not know everything there is to know about Mandalore and Mandalorians was an incredibly clever move on Howard’s part because she has put the audience and Djarin in the same place moving forwards. Just as you and I have questions about the unknown history or Mandalore, so does our Mando and we’ll almost certainly come to understand them together.