(Featuring The Mandalorian Episodes 2-5)
Disney has released four more new episodes of The Mandalorian on Disney+, leaving only three left to air in season two. These four new episodes have featured more exciting action sequences, interesting side characters, and an enthralling plot that all Star Wars fans have come to love about the show. The visuals are also a highlight, showing off beautiful landscapes on different planets, and bringing the amazing story to life. This Jon Favreau-directed masterpiece is truly a delight to watch.
In all four episodes, beautiful and highly detailed landscapes were on display. Episode two took place on a mountainous icy landscape with canyons, crevices, and caves. Episode three showed off a vast ocean world with a bustling city (a moon called Trask) which has never been seen before in the Star Wars universe. Episode four took place back on Nevarro from season one and episode five displayed the forest planet of Corvus which is where Mando found Ahsoka Tano. All of the landscapes in the episodes were sprawling and lovely and provided the perfect background. Different aliens and creatures have always been a Star Wars specialty, and The Mandalorian is no different. They show off creative alien after creative alien, bringing the Star Wars universe to life.
The show has also done a fantastic job with introducing interesting side characters to help our main characters on their journey. Ahsoka Tano, from Star Wars: The Clone Wars is a great example. The Mandalorian, Bo-Katan, told Mando about her, and Mando made his way to Corvus in the hopes that Ahsoka would be able to train Baby Yoda. Ahsoka is also able to communicate with Baby Yoda through the force and we get to learn his real name. She can sense the strong bond that Baby Yoda has with Mando, further showing us their great relationship.
In every episode, we either get to see characters from season one or meet new characters, such as the frog woman in episode two, three new Mandaloirans in episode three, and Ahsoka in episode five. All of these characters aren’t just there as filler, but instead have a real purpose in the show and are all able to help Mando continue to search for a Jedi to train Baby Yoda.
Action scenes, along with a thrilling plot, are also prevalent in the show. In every episode, there is either an elaborate chase, invasion, or combat scene that keeps viewers on the edge of their seats. The action sequences are all very well paced and creatively filmed. The show has one main goal that the characters are working toward (finding a Jedi to train Baby Yoda), but there are also different temporary goals along the way that are specific to the episode. There is a main antagonist for the entire series in Moff Gideon, and there are also smaller antagonists specific to each episode. The show does have a few episodes that stray away from the main plot, which can feel a little bit pointless, as it feels like no ground was covered in the entire episode. Despite that, those episodes are still exciting and entertaining, along with providing character development and adorable moments from Baby Yoda.
With only three more episodes left to air, it is going to be interesting to see where the show goes next. Will we meet another Jedi who will be able to train Baby Yoda? Are we going to get a season finale with another face-off between Mando and company against Moff Giddeon, or are we going to have to wait for season three to see them meet again? We will just have to wait and see.
Synopses:
Episode 2, “The Passenger”:
Episode two picks up right where episode 1 left off with Mando on Tatooine. He is riding his speeder bike over the sand, unaware of ambushers up ahead, who have tied a string between two rocks in the hopes of tripping Mando. Mando falls into the trap and he, along with Baby Yoda and all of their cargo, goes flying. Mando makes short work of almost everyone in the group of bounty hunters, but one of them survives and puts a knife to the neck of Baby Yoda. Mando makes a deal with the bounty hunter to give up his jetpack for the child, but he used a remote control to send the hunter into the sky before abruptly stopping it and letting him fall all the way back to the ground. Mando has no other option but to walk.
Carrying all of his luggage, he makes his way back to Mos Eisley to the cantina to once again meet up with Peli Motto. She was playing cards with a giant ant, who promised to give Mando information on where he can find more Mandalorians if he provides the money to bet for the game. Mando agrees, and even though the ant loses the hand, he tells Mando there is a frog woman who might know where some other Mandalorians are. The catch is, Mando has to transport the frog woman to the planet as well, and because she is carrying her last eggs to her husband, they cannot go into hyperspace. It was bound to be a difficult journey.
Immediately on the ship, it is obvious that Baby Yoda can’t stop looking at the eggs, and he even starts eating them before Mando steps in to carry him away. They then run into some X-Wings looking for Imperials, and even though Mando isn’t one, he is wanted due to the prison break in season 1. This leads to a chase scene where Mando finds the closest planet, and after maneuvering through the icy landscape, he crashes, leading to the ice breaking and the ship falling.
The frog woman begins to worry because of the damaged ship and freezing conditions on the planet. Mando begins to try to rebuild the ship, but Baby Yoda grabs Mando’s attention and shows him the tracks of the frog woman. He follows the tracks to find her in a hot spring with her eggs in the water as well. Mando tells her that it isn’t safe to be away from the ship, and they begin to regather the eggs. Baby Yoda tries to eat one of the eggs again, but Mando tells him off. Baby Yoda then walks away from the hot spring, into what appears to be a large landscape covered in eggs. He opens one up and devours the spider looking creature that was inside. All of a sudden, the rest of the eggs begin to hatch.
The tiny spider looking creatures all begin to crawl out of their shells and scurry toward Mando and the frog woman. Just when you might think all the tiny spiders are bad enough, an enormous one, bigger than Mando’s ship emerges from the ice and lets out a roar. Mando and the frog woman frantically try to escape to the ship, but the spiders are fast. Killing as many as they can along the way, they finally make it back to the ship, but the spiders continue to find their way inside and completely infest the ship. They manage to fight their way into the cockpit and seal the doors, but it doesn’t seem possible for them to escape. Mando tries to boot up the ship and fly off, and he seems to manage to get it working. Just as they take off, however, the enormous spider jumps down, landing on the ship and pushing it back down to the surface.
When all seems lost, we see blaster fire outside the ship and we can no longer see the enormous spider. As Mando tries to get out of the ship to investigate, he finds almost the entire inside covered in webs. When he walks out, he finds the two pilots of the X-Wings firing at all the spiders who are still alive. They tell him that they reviewed the security footage from the prison in season 1, and they saw that he was able to lock up priority culprits and that he risked his life to save that of a new republic worker. They decide to let Mando go.
While Razor Crest is barely functional, Mando still manages to take off and get away from the planet. He thinks that they will be able to just about make it to the planet where they are headed. To end off the show, we see Baby Yoda swallow one last egg that he must have kept in his pocket, and the image of the damaged and flickering ship in wide open space.
Episode 3, “The Heiress”:
The episode begins with Mando crash-landing the very damaged Razor Crest on the ocean moon Trask. He pays an alien on the planet to try to fix his ship while he is out looking for the other Mandalorians he was told would be here. We also get to meet the frog woman’s husband and seeing their joy as they embrace is truly heartwarming . We also see a suspicious looking figure watching Mando from the docks.
Mando then walks into a restaurant to get Baby Yoda something to eat. He also meets an alien fisherman while there, who tells him that Mando can take all the fishermen to the Mandalorians for a price. Mando, of course, accepts, and next thing we know, Mando is out on a ship in the middle of the ocean. On the ship, they talk about a monster that they feed fish to, and they tell Mando that they will show him. They open the hatch and drop fish inside before we start to see the water bubbling and stirring. The fisherman then hits Baby Yoda and his cradle into the hatch just in time for the monster to surface and swallow Baby Yoda inside his cradle. Mando jumps into the hatch shortly after and all the fishermen scramble to close the hatch.
They begin to jab at Mando through the bars of the hatch, trying to stop him from holding on. We then see three Mandalorians fly down, land on the ship and start blasting at all of the fishermen. One of them opens the hatch and gives Mando a hand out of the water. Mando gasps, seeing that the creature has Baby Yoda, and another one of the Mandalorians dives down into the water. We hear a roar from the beast, and blaster fire, and then she flies back out of the water with the cradle in her arms. Luckily, Baby Yoda is unharmed.
Just as Mando begins to explain to them that he has been quested to return the child to the Jedi, the three Mandalorians take their helmets off, and one of them we recognize as the figure who saw Mando on the docks. Mando immediately thinks that they are not real Mandalorians, because they do not cover their faces, but one of them explains that she is Bo-Katan (who was in Star Wars: The Clone Wars) and was born on Mandalore. She continues by saying that Mando must be part of a religious extremist group who are trying to reestablish the ancient way. Mando then replies with, “There is only one way,” before flying off of the ship.
Mando returns to the docks, where he arrived before, and he is ambushed by the brother of the fisherman who brought him on the ship. They start to take out their blasters, but the other three Mandalorians once again show up and save Mando for the second time. Bo-Katan convinces Mando to talk and tells him that the empire has been using Trask as a black market trading post where they both buy and transport weapons stolen from Mandalore. She tells Mando that if he helps them invade an imperial ship, she will tell him where he can find a Jedi.
Mando decides that he can’t take Baby Yoda with him on this mission, and decides to leave him with the frog family, who is happy to help.
What follows is an exciting action packed invasion of the imperial ship. After having to fight through a lot of stormtroopers, they approach the bridge of the ship, where the captain radios Moff Giddeon, telling him that they have been invaded and are trying to exit the atmosphere in order to receive backup. Moff Giddeon tells him that because the invaders have taken so much of the ship, it isn’t an option anymore for them to receive backup. He then tells him, “You know what to do. Long live the empire.”
The captain turns and shoots the other two pilots on the bridge and steers the ship toward the surface of the planet trying to crash it. Just in time, the Mandalorians are able to take control of the bridge, immobilize the captain, and stabilize the ship. Bo-Katan asks the captain where the darksaber is, and if Moff Giddeon has it. To that, the captain responds: “If you’re asking, you already know.” Afterwards, Bo-Katan says that she will let the captain live if he leads her to Moff Giddeon, but he responds by telling her that Moff Giddeon wouldn’t let him live if he took her to him. He then bites down on something in his mouth and electrocutes himself.
Bo-Katan offers Mando the opportunity to come with them, but Mando refuses saying he needs to return the child to the Jedi. She then tells him that he needs to go to the forest planet called Corvus where he will find Ahsoka Tano. They then say to each other, “This is the way,” and Mando flies off.
Mando returns to the frogs’ home, where he picks up Baby Yoda. They were showing the child one of their own children from an egg that just hatched, and it is very cute. Mando returns to his ship to find it somewhat fixed, and after a bit of a bumpy take off, they make it off the planet and jump into hyperspace.
Episode 4, “The Siege”:
The episode opens with us seeing how damaged Mando’s ship still is, even after the repairs it received on Trask. He realizes that he needs to head to Nevarro to get his ship repaired. We then cut to Nevarro, where we get to see Cara Dune (from season one), who is now a marshall and was fighting criminals who stole money. We finally get to see her in action again, for the first time this season.
When Mando lands on Nevarro, he is met by both Cara and Greef Karga (also from season one). Karga tells mechanics to fix up Mando’s ship, and Mando gets to have a heartwarming reunion with his two friends. They walk into the city to show Mando the new school, and they tell him that they can leave Baby Yoda there while they talk, and Mando reluctantly agrees. In the classroom, the child sees that the kid sitting next to him has cookies (that appear to be macarons without filling). Baby Yoda sticks out his hand, hoping the kid will give him one, but the kid says no. Baby Yoda then uses the force to grab the cookies from the kid’s desk while he was looking away. Baby Yoda then eats one of the cookies; it is a really wholesome scene.
Karga and Cara explain to Mando that there is an imperial base still on the planet that may or may not be inhabited, which they need to take out in order to remove all imperial activity from their planet. Their plan is to sneak into the base and overpower the reactor to make it explode. Mythrol, whom Mando captured in the first episode of the show, is driving their speeder to the base, trying to pay off his 300-year debt to Karga. Karga promises Mythrol another 30 years off his sentence if he helps them break through the door. Mando, not wanting to wait, jetpacks up to the upper deck of the base. We hear blaster fire and see a stormtrooper fall off the deck just as the other three are able to make their way into the base.
The base obviously isn’t uninhabited, and there are imperial forces still working on the base. Once inside, they knock out one of the officers and take a code cylinder, which they can use to maneuver their way through the base. They have Mythrol drain the coolant lines on the reactor in order to set the base to explode.
They start to run out of the base and on their way they run into two people, who purged the hard drives and destroyed a control panel. They find out that the base isn’t a military operation, but a lab. After looking through radio transmissions, they discover that Moff Giddeon is still alive.
Mando, who is now worried about the safety of Baby Yoda, jetpacks back to the city while Cara, Karga, and Mythrol continue to try to escape the base. They steal a ground vessel and start to drive away from the base. Troopers on both speeders and in tie fighters are chasing them. They are just about able to take out the speeder bikes, but the tie fighters are still coming. They are struggling to shoot down the tie fighters from their vessel, but then Mando comes to the rescue in Razor Crest chasing and shooting down all of the tie fighters while Baby Yoda enjoys the ride in the seat next to him.
After Mando flies off, we cut to an imperial ship where we see a transmission from the mechanic who fixed Mando’s ship. It turns out that they left a tracking device on Mando’s ship. The woman who received the transmission tells Moff Giddeon the news and he asks if Mando still has the asset (Baby Yoda) to which she tells him yes. They end off the episode by showing a corridor of the ship filled with imperial death troopers, a ship which we will surely see again.
Episode 5, “The Jedi”:
In the opening moment of the episode, we get to see Ahsoka Tano, who is the first trained Jedi that we have seen in The Mandalorian, in action. She fights her way through troops before demanding surrender from the magistrate, Morgan Elsbeth, or she must face the consequences. Ahsoka tells her that she has one day to decide, before walking back into the darkness.
In the next scene, we are back on Razor Crest, Mando’s ship, where they are approaching the planet where Ahsoka is. He walks into the city where we just saw Ahsoka fighting, and meets Elsbeth. Elsbeth, knowing he is a bounty hunter, offers him a staff of pure beskar steel in exchange for the murder of Ahsoka.
Mando wanders into the forest in search of Ahsoka, and it doesn’t take him too long to find her. For a moment they cross blades before Mando explains that he was sent by Bo-Katan.
Then Ahsoka goes off and sits with Baby Yoda while Mando watches nervously from afar. While they sit, Ahsoka is able to telepathically communicate with Baby Yoda, and we finally learn that his real name is Grogu. Ahsoka also explains to Mando more of Grogu’s backstory of being raised at a Jedi Temple and being trained by Jedi Masters, until he was hidden when the Empire began to come to power. Ahsoka then tells Mando that it is too dangerous to train Grogu because of how long he has been hiding his powers and how much fear and anger he possesses. She is afraid that if Grogu is trained, he could turn over to the dark side.
Mando eventually comes to an agreement with Ahsoka that if he helps her infiltrate the city and free the prisoners that she will train Grogu. Mando and Ahsoka easily take care of the troops in the city leaving only Elsbeth and her right hand man, Lang. Ahsoka and Elsbeth clash in a walled off garden while Mando has a standoff with Lang. After an epic confrontation, Ahsoka is able to use her lightsabers to disarm Elsbeth, who was using the beskar staff (which can stand up to the strength of the lightsaber). Lang, hearing that Elsbeth had lost, attempts to trick Mando by laying down his weapon and then drawing a blaster from his holster, but Mando is too fast for him and Lang falls. They then cut back to Ahsoka and Elsbeth, and Ahsoka demands the location of Elsbeth’s master, Grand Admiral Thrawn, who was a post-Imperial villain in the animated series Star Wars: Rebels. They cut away from the scene before we hear the response.
After freeing the prisoners, Ahsoka gives Mando the beskar staff and he returns to his ship to get Grogu. Just as we think Mando and Grogu are finally going to be separated, Ahsoka once again refuses to train Grogu because of his strong connection with Mando. She does explain another way for Grogu to get trained though. She tells Mando that on the planet Tython, there is a temple with a strong connection to the force. At the temple, Grogu will have the option to reach out through the force, in the hopes that a Jedi will sense him and come to look for him.
Ahsoka says to Mando: “May the force be with you,” before Mando flies off with Grogu, and Ahsoka retreats into the forest as the closing shot of Episode 5.
