With the number of characters introduced in its second season, it’s fair to say that everything is fair game when you’re theorizing about The Mandalorian‘s upcoming episodes. But what this season has also shown us is that by the end of it there won’t be a single episode from season one that you could skip without missing something crucial to the overarching storyline. This means that not only do the most obvious story elements tend to come back in some way but that even the smaller details gain importance throughout the show.
We’ve already written how the focus given in Chapter 13 to how beskar can deal with lightsabers obviously wasn’t innocent. We got two fights where that became clear, and so audiences are now feeling that Mando’s armor is almost impervious to almost whatever Moff Gideon throws at it. But we’ve also mentioned why Gideon’s Darksaber might be able to slice through beskar and now Chapter 14 might have given us another hint on how the final confrontation between Din Djarin’s posse and Moff Gideon’s troopers might unfold. We were deprived of something that, had it not been left out, might have diminished the impact of that final fight and that was seeing the Dark Troopers in battle.
We know that beskar became highly sought after by Mandalorians after the Empire took most of it, as spoils of war, after the Great Purge. We also know that Empire operatives are still holding on to great amounts of the Mandalorian alloy. With the metal at hand, it would make sense that someone like Moff Gideon, who is highly knowledgeable of Mandalorian culture and weaponry, would make use of a material with such unique properties when building himself his own Dark Trooper unit.
In the previous episode, Din Djarin managed to defeat the Magistrate’s assassin droids with a single shot, showing us how droids can still be fairly easily killed. But had Mando and Fennec Shand reached the top of the mountain in time to engage beskar-armored Dark Troopers, we might have seen how their blasters wouldn’t harm them. And that is something that wasn’t really needed for Chapter 14, as Grogu being kidnapped was enough anguish for the moment. Leaving such a revelation to the last two episodes will make Mando’s situation even worse than expected, which will only make his expected retrieval of Grogu even more cathartic.
