Season 2, Episode 2 of Disney’s The Mandalorian “The Passenger” certainly made up for lost time on the Child content from last week’s “The Marshall”, didn’t it? The episode begins with confirmation that there must still be a price on his adorable little head, with the latest in a long line of dead people who thought to try to kidnap him, and he’s a constant presence throughout, rather than the more background role he had in last week’s round of dragon slaying.
But, in between the fraught attempt to get through a random traffic stop and the frankly unnecessary amount of horrific alien spiders, watching “The Passenger” brought to mind one of my favorite things about the relationship between our principle protagonists, and indeed, a strength of the show in general: The Child isn’t a paragon of goodness who redeemed the jaded bounty hunter.
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Point of fact, the Child is… a child. He looks cute and unassuming, sure, but he’ll also eat (at least!) four babies while your back is turned. Our hardened mercenary main character is the one who frequently must (attempt to) stop him from doing something innocently horrifying. He’s Force sensitive, and decently powerful already, but he’s also not above violating Science Fiction Rule Number One, which is Do not Attempt to Interact with Seemingly Abandoned Eggs on an Alien Planet. (Was anyone else convinced he was about to get Facehuggered?! And for the record, a Lucasfilm creative art manager, Phil Szostak has mentioned that the Child eating the eggs was “intentionally disturbing, for comedic effect.”)
It makes for a more interesting dynamic than your typical “this bad guy found someone cute and it made him realize being bad wasn’t very nice!” fare. To go back to the long line of dead people who tried to kidnap the Child, Mando literally drops one out of the sky for putting a knife on his little monster, and they both shrug about it and continue on.
What’s more, Mando having a soft spot for his little green pal isn’t the only sign of goodness we’ve seen from our (anti)hero, as the end of this episode directly references moments from last season’s episode 6 “The Prisoner.” With the decision to save the life of a prison guard (and beat up and imprison the crew he was helping break into the prison in the first place), Mando earns himself and the Child (and their amphibian tagalong) a free pass from the most dedicated Republic Highway Patrolmen we’ve yet to see in Star Wars. These moments harkening back to past episodes really help expand the connective tissue for a show that’s largely problem-a-week.
In a previous piece I mentioned that the cliffhanger of one episode will probably matter to the next, but that’s not always been the case with this show. We still don’t know who the mysterious figure in the desert from last season was, let alone the one at the end of last episode. (Are they the same person? Probably! Is it Boba Fett? I sure hope not!) Little ripples turning into big waves like this though, do give this show’s universe that lovely “lived-in” feeling that it could have lacked by merely being a show about a guy in cool armor with cooler toys trying to be an insanely competent servant of the court.
Pacing continues to be a fascinating element to this season as well. Two episodes in and we’re only maybe about to see another Mandalorian, even though one has been promised at the beginning of every episode! As usual, the diversions along the road are more than enough to make up for how long the road is to get there. Who needs to see another Mandalorian when this episode has a giant ant named Dr. Mandible?!
But the main strength of this show is that isn’t trying to be an epic space opera in scale. Just a man(dalorian) and a Child, trying to dip their way through the obstacles the galaxy throws at them. Even if those obstacles are gigantic spiders that could probably have been avoided please kid don’t poke any more eggs.
Observation Points is a semi-regular discussion of key details in our culture.
