Tag: The Mandalorian

In The Mandalorian Chapter 12, “The Siege”, Mando arrived on Nevarro where he met back up with Cara Dune and Greef. Because Din Djarin rid the land of Gideon’s Imperial remnant at the end of last season, it has become a safe haven for bounty hunters to come to again. Greef told Mando that he needed help with a mission, but the place they are going is not any place for a child, so they drop The Child off at a school. Here the ever-hungry child gets his first look at space macarons in what was my favorite part of the episode. Mando, Greef, Cara and the Mythrol had to fight off a bunch of stormtroopers at an old Imperial base. When they got inside, they found a hologram of Doctor Pershing talking about The Child’s blood and why they want it. He is working with Gideon to create clones that essentially can use the Force; this is why they need The Child’s blood, which is high in midi-chlorians, to make Force-Sensitive clones. Finally, we heard at the end of the episode, Moff Gideon has a tracker on the Razor Crest as Mando heads to Corvus to find Ahsoka.

Din Djarin meeting Ahsoka will kick-start the second half of the season. Every scene from the trailer has been in the first 4 episodes, so that means we never saw anything from the second half of the season. While we are so excited to finally see Ahsoka, she may not be alone on Corvus, as you can read here in Joao’s article. Since Gideon is tracking Mando’s ship, we can assume that the Moff is not far behind him. That means that Ashoka will end up in Gideon’s crosshairs soon. Also, Bo-Katan is chasing Gideon, right? It seems like all of these characters are meant to collide with each other in the second half of the season.

Arlyn’s Assumptions

When Mando meets Ahsoka, she will be stubborn just like Luke stubbornly refused to help Rey in The Last Jedi. Once Ahsoka realizes that Din has The Child, sees what species it is and what it is capable of, she will be curious enough to give him a chance to talk with her. Seeing that she is a former Jedi she might end up training The Child one day in the future.

Chapter 13 of The Mandalorian streams tomorrow!

One of the fundamental components of what makes Star Wars… well, Star Wars, is its Jedi mythology, the lightsabers, the whole Force component. This is what many people want to see in a Star Wars property. Yet, in late 2018 when Jon Favreau revealed the first details on The Mandalorian, this facet of the Star Wars universe wasn’t alluded to at all, focusing more on how the show would “follow the travails of a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy far from the authority of the New Republic”.

However, when the series finally premiered it didn’t take long before unveiling how the Force would actually take center stage in the story they would be telling. After that Chapter 2 reveal, it took another six episodes for the Jedi to be mentioned by name by The Armorer, making their presence in the show was all but assured by having Din Djarin’s search for them a central part of the plot. Chapter 11 brought Din almost within striking distance of his goal when Bo-Katan disclosed the location of Ahsoka Tano, finally setting the stage for a reunion that a year ago no one knew they wanted but that now everyone seems to need.

As we’ve written before, The Mandalorian isn’t about instant gratification and Djarin’s journey would get sidetracked one more time, delaying that Ahsoka Tano live-action debut for one more week. But as the show has proven to us time and time again, there’s always something deeply relevant to the plot hiding in plain sight in these apparent sidequests Djarin and The Child find themselves in every other week. Speaking of this season alone, Chapter 10 “The Passenger” also seemed a bit unnecessary, but that was until we realize that it was that episode that, in the end, made the Razor Crest have to go back to Nevarro for repair work, thus setting the stage for Chapter 12. And it was in this last episode that, even though we didn’t see Din getting any closer to his end goal, we got what is sure to be regarded as one of the most plot-heavy episodes of the entire series when it’s all said and done, adding to the overarching storyline that few have done before. And ironically, the Force was a huge part of that. Again, we got what we needed, even though we didn’t even know we wanted it in the first place.

By veering away from the main storyline, by not immediately giving us the elements Star Wars is mostly known for, by delaying an appearance by the Jedi that will bring together (at least) two force-sensitive characters, by giving us what is easy to refer to as a simple “filler episode”, the future of the series became all the more clear, the stakes in the inevitable clash between characters were enhanced and the following episode, probably the most anticipated chapter yet, is now seemingly even more crucial as the show seems to be getting into its stride, with a more clear endgame. The tables are now most definitively set, the chess pieces are in place, and the second half of the season promises to become more than we expected, more than we wanted, but perhaps just what Star Wars needed.

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.

In The Mandalorian Chapter 11, “The Heiress”, the frog lady found her husband and hatched an egg, so that is one less The Child has to snack on and one job done for the Mando. After the frog family reunion, the Mando took The Child to a diner where he hoped to find someone who could take him to another Mandalorian, and in a way he did. When he attempted to kill Din Djarin, other Mandalorians came to save him. Eventually, we find out that the lead Mandalorian was actually Bo-Katan!  Bo-Katan told Din Djarin that she will help him find a Jedi to help find more of The Child’s kind. But this comes with a price. He has to help her with hijacking an Imperial ship. She sends him to the planet Corvus to find Ashoka Tano. Yup that’s right, Din Djarin is going to meet Ahsoka!

Ashoka is a former Jedi Padawan who was Anakin Skywalker’s apprentice. If the Mando wants to make it to Ahsoka, he will definitely have to get his ship repaired because it is in very bad condition. Even though he paid a Mon Calamari to fix it last episode. If we pay attention to the Season 2 trailer, it seems to be that he will be headed back to Nevarro to meet up with his old allies, Cara Dune and Greef Karga, again. We can assume that is what will happen in the next episode, though we don’t know exactly. Hopefully, they can help him restore his ship and he can resume his journey.

Arlyn’s Assumptions

Seeing that at the end of the last season he left the planet Nevarro during a huge battle it is definitely going to be weird returning there. Karga said that Nevarro was going to become a bounty hunter haven, so maybe bounty hunters from all over will be there. The bounty hunter that I think could be there is Bossk, who first appeared in The Empire Strikes Back. We’ve seen the series bring in characters from all over the place so far and another classic bounty hunter would fit right in. If Mando does find Ahsoka in this episode, it probably won’t be until the end.

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.