Who was excited for space terror, hm? Anyone? (Not this guy, sadly.) Well, The Mandalorian was keen to get right to it this week…
Warning: Spoilers ahead!
Summary
Din Djarin gets jumped by a gang of thieves on his way back to the spaceport, but he dispatches the group and walks back into Mos Eisley. At Chalmun’s Cantina, Peli Motto is playing cards with a fellow named Dr. Mandible, who claims he can get him in touch with someone who can find him more Mandalorians, since Cobb was a dead end. The contact turns out to be an alien woman in need of passage with her eggs to the estuary moon of Trask, one sector over. If she doesn’t get her eggs fertilized by the equinox, her whole line will die—and Din has to travel at sublight because hyperspace will also kill the eggs. The Frog Lady’s partner has seen Mandalorians there, so Din agrees to help her. On the way to the moon, they’re bugged by a New Republic recon team, Captain Carson Teva (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) and Trapper Wolf (Dave Filoni, back again). Because the Razor Crest has no identification, New Republic or Empire, they ask for his ship’s log. Upon receiving it, they lock their S-foils, so Din dives toward the planet below.
He evades their fire, but ends up crashing to a lower level of the freezing world, breaking the ship substantially. The Frog Lady speaks a language he cannot understand, so she finds the remains of Zero and hijacks his vocabulator to communicate with Din, issuing a plea to get her and her eggs out safely. Djarin starts repairs on the ship, only to have Baby Yoda alert him to Frog Lady’s disappearance. She has wandered off further into the caves, finding a hot spring where she can keep the eggs warm. As Din is telling her to gather up the eggs and get back to the ship, Baby Yoda eats the nearby egg of a different species—a krykna, which is a sort of six-legged spider. The whole brood begins to hatch and more of them show up and chase the group back to the ship. They make it on board, and Din seals them into the cockpit, but a giant krykna shows up directly over the cockpit.
Just before they’re all about to die, the New Republic recon team shows up to clear away the krykna. They tell Din that they went through his record, and though there’s a warrant out for him, the fact that he apprehended three folx from the wanted register and put his life on the line to protect Lieutenant Davan (during the job with Ran’s gang) shows him in a favorable light. They elect to let Din go. He seals up the cockpit to the ship, as the rest is compromised, and they head out toward Trask again.
Commentary
This episode… leaves a lot to be desired. And that’s not just me being sad that they left Tatooine, so we didn’t get to see more of Boba Fett. *sniff*
Now sure, some of that is a personal preference; I’m never going to be a fan of the story that turns entirely on the Mandalorian having to fight a bunch of krykna because they’re essentially giant six-legged space spiders and I’m extremely arachnophobic. That kind of ruins my whole day right there. I’ll admit to the bias and get that right out of the way, since SFF is extremely fond of giant spider-like beings as a horror trope.
But even setting that aside, there is nothing going on in this episode The most high-stakes concern in the whole thing is Baby Yoda eating all of Frog Lady’s eggs. Which is fun for a comical aside, but also pretty callous to use as a point of comedy in the first place (on account of him making her line’s extinction more and more likely with every swipe). Frog Lady doesn’t even get a real name. She’s just there to pluck at Din’s heart a little since he cares about babies now. It’s too bad because the idea of a mom-and-dad team up episode could have been a beautiful thing. They should have taken her character more seriously and moved from there—two parents who will do anything to keep their kids safe. That’s a plot we don’t see enough in fiction in general, and certainly not in SFF as often as we should.
Instead, the episode takes an abrupt swerve into SF horror tropes á la The Thing and its ilk, and runs for the finish line with all due grossness and blaster fire and explosions. Never mind the fact that the ship is so seriously overrun by the horde of krykna that they should be dead a dozen times over. It’s all pretty rushed and sloppy at that point because there’s no real story to be had here. This episode brought the running time back down again, and that combined with the lukewarm premise make it all a bit disappointing. What’s stranger on top of it is that we’ve seen the series do better than this with mothers fighting to defend their children. The show didn’t make these mistake with Omera in last season’s episode “Sanctuary“. It’s almost as though they decided to go a humorous route with her because the concept of a “Frog Lady” was too funny to them. Which… this is Star Wars. Aliens are everywhere. Come on.
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Also, there are a lot of plain poorly-conceived holes in this episode. Like, that crew in the desert that tries to knock over Din and take the kid, but then he defeats them and… walks back to Mos Eisley? Because they apparently didn’t have transport of their own that he could pilfer once they all died? Or Baby Yoda miraculously surviving a high-speed speeder wipeout, which was why the floaty basinet was so useful last season? Or the fact that Frog Lady doesn’t seem to notice eggs are going missing? (It probably doesn’t matter in general terms for species that lay a bunch of eggs, but this batch is pretty important to her.) Or the question of why the krykna back down once the big one is dead? Pretty sure they’re not a hive mind deal, so I can’t think why the smaller ones would up and vanish, even with that New Republic duo going in all guns blazing—in terms of sheer number, they easily had them all beat.
There’s another interesting aside within this episode about the fledging New Republic and how it’s expanding and handling the assertion of its power. Captain Teva lets Din go, even with the warrant on him due to his past deeds, and that’s nice, but we’re not getting a sense of how that fits into the New Republic framework of government. It’s just that vague sense of “out here on the fringes, the law is woolier, and your worth is determined by your actions” in that vague Western-esque way that seems like it’s trying to be deep without saying much of anything at all.
Things and Asides:
- Peli Motto is playing sabacc with Dr. Mandible, essentially the Star Wars version of poker, and the card game that Han Solo famously uses to win the Millennium Falcon off of Lando Calrissian. Motto beats Mandible with one of the rarest hands in the game, an Idiot’s Array—the unbeatable play consists of The Idiot card, a two card of any suit and a three card of any suit. (Lando beat Chopper in a game of sabacc on Star Wars: Rebels using this hand, but that’s a whole other story…)
- Din tries to communicate with Frog Lady using Huttese, an understandable attempt since Huttese is the most common language used on Tatooine outside of Galactic Basic (do we still call it that?) and the Tusken Raider language.
- Getting to see Djarin bunk in that little alcove with the kid in his sleep sling is just a cutest thing.
- The krykna were first seen on Star Wars: Rebels, and honestly, they were handled far better on that show. (They were also easier to stomach because they were animated, which took some of the edge off.) On that series, the krykna turn out to be native to Atollon, the planet the Alliance uses to set up Chopper Base. The rebels have to use sensor markers to keep the krykna at bay, and at one point, Kanan Jarrus and Ezra Bridger have to retrieve a Sith holocron from a cave full of them, using the Force to keep them calm.
- The droid Zero is from season one’s episode “The Prisoner”, as are the references to Lieutenant Davan, the New Republic Correctional transport, and Dave Filoni’s pilot character, who appeared at the end of that episode.
See you next week!
Emmet Asher-Perrin always planned to learn sabacc one day, but the time and the will and the proper deck of space cards have yet to materialize. (Yes, this was a childhood goal; yes, they’re predictable.) You can bug them on Twitter, and read more of their work here and elsewhere.
Quick point – they never fire on him. They keep telling him to stop running and things like “Don’t make us fire on you!” but never shoot. I think this is a pretty important thing to note – keeping the New Republic forces as “good guys” (at least for now).
I agree with your overall assessment of the episode, though. Spiders-chasing-the-heroes horror has never been my thing. I’m not arachnophobic, it just isn’t my thing. And you could see it coming a mile away.
I’m willing to cut this episode a bit of slack, though, because there were a few episodes in Season 1 where it seemed like nothing happened at all, but certain plot elements did get moved into position for the final few episodes. I’m guessing the big payoff for this episode might be that Frog Lady’s family comes to the rescue or the New Republic pilots come into play in some way.
Agree that this episode was disappointing. Also had many of the same questions. Even with a reduced runtime, this dragged. The spider attacks did nothing for me. Neither did the Alien egg reference. I was actually hoping for a facehugger to get the Annoying Child at that point. This is the first time I came close to disliking him/her (still not sure if it was ever established which).
That’s not a good thing. Maybe the season so far is a victim of it’s own success. I’ve never been satisfied with endless SW nostalgia, easter eggs, and callbacks. I need an actual story with maybe an actual theme. Pure adventure is fine, just not taking up a whole episode.
My son started crying in the middle of this episode fwiw so yeah.
Agreed, this episode was pretty meh. I don’t mind the standalone episodes but I just felt this didn’t really offer much. Maybe Frog Lady (definitely annoying we don’t even get a name) will continue to be important though, since presumably by the next episode they are still traveling together.
I also found the Child eating the eggs to be fairly tasteless humor. I get that they’re not fertilized yet but still. I imagine for those with infertility (especially those who actually have banked their eggs) it felt even more off-color.
I also asked my husband ‘why is he walking back? Didn’t the raiders have a speeder they took out there????’
And basically yes to everything else regarding the rather shallow, tropey plot. There no real stakes since it’s only the second episode, and the amount of damage the ship took stretched my disbelief. The glimpse of the NR government was interesting and I was hoping they were going to be a bigger part.
The episode was very Peter Jackson-y, for better or worse.
Don’t sweat the Frog Lady not being named yet. Remember it wasn’t until the second to the last episode of the first season that the Ugnaught revealed his name.
If this series is to show us the rough edges of the “frontier” then we should come to expect this western attitude towards proper identity. Heck, Clint Eastwood can thank his movie career for it.
Oh! I do want to say I giggled a little at ‘…and also with you’ being the canon response to MTFBWY.
I didn’t catch this myself until I re-listened to check (I noticed it on a reddit thread)but this is the first time a Williams motif has been incorporated into Goransson’s soundtrack – the March of the Resistance is used as the X-wings depart from the cave. I didn’t catch it at first in part because it’s definitely got a different feel (that matches the feel of the show). It’s really cool! (I’m also pretty sure that the music as the Razor Crest is leaving is totally lifted from another episode but I don’t remember which one).
I wonder if the show is subtly setting up the Child to be a little more sinister (or at least neutral) than he appears. It’s possible that it is just meant to be ‘cute carnivore’ baby, or maybe even learning how to control his impulses. But, you know, it could also be totally subverted and go the other way. (Speaking of names…I guess I shouldn’t complain about Frog Lady when Mando hasn’t even named the Child yet….and yes I know Mando has a name too ;) )
As a probably belated or unnecessary FYI, you can purchase a sabacc deck with instructions from Galaxy’s Edge.
Also, thank you for the weekly review, always enjoy reading them after watching to see if my opinions are shared!
Seeing mentions of how on the nose it was for the director of Ant-man to direct a show full of bugs. Guess he’s director of the next episode too.
They pretty much turned me against this little green beast in this one. Eating the eggs of sentient beings!
What next, he gets a little peckish and Mando wakes up without a few fingers?
OP: the fact that Frog Lady doesn’t seem to notice eggs are going missing?
Count me as someone who was more horrified at the Child’s eating the eggs, than I was horror-struck by a bunch of fake spiders (real one don’t bother me a bit). The humor was tasteless, but I let it pass. But then for Frog-mom not to notice that some of these precious possible-progeny had gone missing? That’s what broke me out of my suspended disbelief. What were the writers thinking? She would be counting and re-counting every time she had been separated from them!
I don’t get why people are horrified about Baby Yoda eating the eggs. Of course he would do that. He’s a little kid, therefore a little monster constantly sticking things in his mouth. He’s had no discipline, no real training. Remember he also tried to choke Cara last season. He doesn’t understand everything in this world.
I found the episode to be entertaining and engaging, but when it ended, my wife asked, “That’s it?” And I realized it was more a collection of events than a complete and coherent story, like the last one was. The ‘humor’ of the egg eating was a little much for me, I was glad those eggs weren’t fertilized.
Just to clarify: I was not horrified that the Child decided to eat them—that was perfectly natural for him or any other little critter, sentient or not. What horrified me was that they were being consumed, i.e., that Frog-mom was losing something that ought to have been precious to her. And then, when there was nothing to indicate that she even noticed or cared, well that was what I finally rebelled against.
Oh, this episode was painful to watch. I’m ok with small, regular sized spiders, but I literally was groaning and shrieking for every scene involving the egg-eating and the spiders. EEEEWWW. I was watching the last half of the episode through my fingers. Weird that it ended the way it did tho – like this was purely a bunny trail, with no real connection to the bigger story…. hopefully next week gives it some further meaning and consolation for us viewers who are not horror lovers.
I actually really enjoyed this episode, with the exception of Frog Lady not noticing that some of her eggs were missing. Maybe Frog Lady can convince Mando that children need to be watched pretty continuously at that age or they get into things…
I’ve embraced the lack of forward plot that seems to be a theme in many of these episodes. The simple silliness of Mando failing upward as a single parent is enough for me. For now. If they try to squeeze 8 episodes worth of plot into just a few episodes at the end of the season, my opinion might change
The thing is the joke would still be there if it had been about Mando rescuing the eggs from Baby Yoda’s constant attempts to eat them.
Then, the rebel pilots could have dropped plot exposition about how the spiders normally won’t attack even a small, damaged ship but that they must have damaged some eggs and the brood mother could smell it on them, which made her lead the attack (and killing her means the others wander off).
Last scene, Baby Yoda (who is just a baby and can’t grasp certain life lessons, no matter how obvious) tries to get an egg again. Mando, who may or may not be reacting in his sleep, closes the baby’s sphere. Mama Frog pulls her eggs a bit closer, so we have the image of her protecting her round eggs and Mando protecting his round egg/metal sphere.
This would also suggest he’s getting better at the parenthood thing, which would be nice (although they might have to backtrack on that in later episodes because plot).
Presumably Frog Lady didn’t intend to raise two dozen children. A lot of species produce lots of eggs as backups but only expect a few to get fertilized; she may not have thought of each one as a perfect precious snowflake.
It also looked like she produced more in the hot spring.
I want to know how Mando keeps affording these ship repairs.
“[T]here is nothing going on in this episode The most high-stakes concern in the whole thing is Baby Yoda eating all of Frog Lady’s eggs. Which is fun for a comical aside, but also pretty callous to use as a point of comedy in the first place (on account of him making her line’s extinction more and more likely with every swipe). Frog Lady doesn’t even get a real name. She’s just there to pluck at Din’s heart a little since he cares about babies now. It’s too bad because the idea of a mom-and-dad team up episode could have been a beautiful thing. They should have taken her character more seriously and moved from there—two parents who will do anything to keep their kids safe. That’s a plot we don’t see enough in fiction in general, and certainly not in SFF as often as we should.”
YES! To the above, from me. This episode was just a bit of damp squib, made worse by the badly underused frog-lady, and the abhorrence of using her impending extinction at the hands of a 50 yo alien with the munchies for comedy. WTH?!?!! What was the message here? How did it differ from blasting the goon into the stratosphere on a rocket and letting him fall to his death, for comedy? Was any of it ACTUALLY comical or was it just laughing at others misfortune – more callous than comedic IMO?
My other main query was how does the Mando know to say ‘May the Force be with you”, but not know what that ACTUALLY means, and then, because in other respects he’s clearly a smart chap, not make the link between that and his 50yo baby alien’s powers?
@Laotseboi : Yes to all of that. The killing of the little bandit was gross (comedy deaths are almost always bothersome to me) and the eating of the precious eggs was abhorrent. Once I realized that the Frog Lady wasn’t even going to notice, it removed any feeling of there being stakes. Plus, how on earth do you crash in an ice cave, make a few mentions of freezing to death, then lie down in the now-open cargo hold for a little nap? As for his final “MTFBWY” salutation, it makes a hash of the scene where the armor smith tells him of the enemy “wizards called Jedi” who fought their people – as if he wouldn’t know about that? As if that all didn’t happen like 20 years ago? It’s just like people in A New Hope sneering at the Force. Just 20 years ago they were a big part of the government, and your own Empire fought a war against them?
The Child eating the frog eggs may have been the entire point of this episode: establishing that eating sentient life isn’t a deal-breaker for him (them?). The Force is strong in that species… and The Force has two sides.
@18: “May the Force be with you” may just be a phrase detached from any real-world power, like “God bless you.” Nobody thinks a sneeze is really your soul trying to escape, but we say it reflexively anyway. If Din knows the New Republic folks follow this weird ancient religion, saying the equivalent of “Go with God” to slip out of a jam is in character..
New parent Mando is sleep deprived and willing to do almost anything, even crash into an ice cave, to get a few minutes of precious rest.
I can believe a toddler carnivore would not understand what he did was wrong. We saw him eat a live frog whole last season so we know frog is on the menu. The failure was Mando not stopping him cold; mostly all we got was some finger pointing.
The mother not seeming concerned was also off-putting as was how that ship could even begin to fly after the damage it took.
The lady says a lot of things that go untranslated, for all we know she’s saying “hey Mandhole, your little gremlin child keeps snacking on my eggs! Get your bucket head out of your bucket butt and parent!”
I really like the scene where she fixes the droid and uses it to translate. There is a terrible tendency to assume that lack of fluency means lack of intelligence, and it looks at first like we are supposed to think the lady is kind of dim. But the moment she gets a chance, she rewires an assassin droid, and lays down some verbal smack. That was good to see.
@10
Thank you
Newsflash folks, but babies ARE monsters with no sense of right or wrong! And that’s OK, it’s why it is incumbent on us to teach them.
However, this show is giving us plenty of reasons to question whether Djarin is up to that particular task, but that is a question for future episodes.
It was a fun episode, but yes characters were acting as the plot demanded instead of in ways that make sense. Like Lady Frog running off for a steam bath???? No sense, it just needed to happen so we could have the krykna chase. Her lack of concern over the fate of her individual eggs bothers me less than some. I don’t think she intends on seeing ALL her eggs brought to fruition, she just knows this is her last chance at the rodeo all that matters is SOME of them survive.
But the theme of parenthood was the point of this episode, and it forces us to ask interesting questions. Like what is the difference between Djarin and the Mama krykna, who lash out and destroy those who threatened to harm their brood?
@25. “Newsflash folks, but babies ARE monsters with no sense of right or wrong! And that’s OK, it’s why it is incumbent on us to teach them. However, this show is giving us plenty of reasons to question whether Djarin is up to that particular task, but that is a question for future episodes.”
That’s probably a definite “No,” since it’s taken 50 years for the slow learning/developing “baby” to get to the equivalent of a toddler. How long do Mandalorians live anyway? Unless Yoda’s species have a built-in growth spurt, Din will be in advanced age before Baby is “5 or 6.”
Maybe Disney saw the success of Baby Groot and some exec said “get me one of those.”
This may turn out to be a flaw in the setup…
@26, I don’t know that I buy that, I mean Bo-Katan is a very dewy 50 year old. I don’t know that we can or should impute Earth human lifetimes onto fictional characters in a different galaxy.
But if you want my theory, Disney’s long term plan is to jump the movies 200 years forward in time, and the first new one will be about a now adult Baby Mando/Jedi hybrid.
@27. Aeryl: “Bo-Katan is a very dewy 50 year old”
That’s what I’m talking about: relative aging. Developmentally, her 50 years is vastly different from the Baby’s. The Lil’ Guy/Gal has a couple centuries before reaching maturity.
Easy way around this would be to establish much faster planetary revolution of the Baby’s home planet. It’s gone around its sun 50 times, but it’s the equivalent of 3 Tatooine revolutions (made up example). Is there a standardized way to measure time in SW? Years, centuries…