That… was not where anyone assumed those Purge flashbacks were heading, I’ll wager. Huh.
Recap
Grogu is marveling over some hermit crab creatures when Din comes over and asks him to train with the Foundlings. The kid is set up opposite Ragnar Vizsla (Wesley Kimmel), who chooses darts at their weapon for the match. Ragnar gets off two shots before Grogu (with some extra encouragement from Din and Bo-Katan) defeats the kid handily. Immediately after, a raptor appears and snatches Ragnar away. Several jet-packed adults follow, but run out of fuel before they can get to the nest. Bo-Katan follows in her ship, and comes back with sensor information of the raptor’s nest and the surrounding area.
It’s decided that Bo-Katan will lead the party, and that they will land a distance from the nest and approach on foot, with a long climb up a cliff face so that they won’t warn the raptor with loud sounds. The group makes camp at the foot of the mountain and Bo-Katan learns that when the Watch has to eat, they retreat to separate areas where they can’t be seen by each other; she has the honor of staying by the fire to eat as head of the hunting party.
Grogu spends time with the Armorer back at camp, where she shows him the forge and tells him that it is a place to discover weaknesses. Grogu flashes back to his escape from the Jedi Temple during the Purge, being defending by a group of Jedi who then send him to Jedi Master Kelleran Beq (Ahmed Best). The duo leave via a speeder bike while being pursued by clones. They eventually make it through to a landing platform holding a Naboo starship and guard contingent; the crew keep fighting off clones as Grogu and Beq board the ship, take off, and enter hyperspace. In the present, the Armorer forges a roundel chest plate to protect Grogu as he grows.
The hunting party scale the cliff face and make it to the nest. Din detects heat signatures, leading Paz Vizsla (Jon Favreau) to clamber into the nest to rescue his son before they’ve properly scanned the area. The nest has three raptor babies in it; their mother returns and coughs up Ragnar to be their meal, and a fight ensues where the party works to free the foundling. Din eventually pries Ragnar from her grip, and the mother raptor is eaten by a dinosaur turtle below. The group returns with the raptor babies as new foundlings. The Armorer offers to repair Bo-Katan’s armor, making her a new pauldron. Bo-Katan asks if this one can have the mythosaur on it, and is obliged, as the symbol belongs to all Mandalorians. Bo-Katan suggests that she’s seen the living mythosaur, but the Armorer is skeptical of this.
Commentary
There’s every chance it didn’t register in the midst of your watch, so just in case: The Jedi who saves Grogu from certain death during the Purge flashbacks was played by Ahmed Best.
Which means I’m going to have to create a sidebar straight off the bat because this is a wildly complicated arc to bring into this show, and while I think the intention in creating it was a good one, I’m not sure it makes up for the things it’s attempting to make up for. I’m not sure anything could.
Best is the actor who played Jar Jar Binks in the prequel trilogy, back when he was a very young actor fresh off his ensemble work in Stomp. Jar Jar was pretty universally derided on landing, and the film’s audience and fans tended to claim that their problems with the character were down to Binks being a varietal of extremely aggravating comic relief. But there were certainly much larger problems at play here, and those lie entirely at the feet of George Lucas, who, in the best case reading of this, somehow failed to realize that he was building Jar Jar and his entire species off of racist caricatures and minstrelsy archetypes. (A less kind reading of this would assume that was intentional on his part, and that he saw no issue with this.) Best himself did not believe that he was enacting those caricatures in Jar Jar, a character that he had a heavy hand in creating by all accounts.
The backlash to Jar Jar was cruel, severe, and aimed directly at Ahmed Best. It was so bad that he admitted in recent years to feelings of depression and suicide ideation in its wake. It certainly left a mark on his career for the past two decades, where the majority of the work he found was only in enacting parodies of Binks. Then, in 2020, it was announced that Best would be playing Jedi Master Kelleran Beq on a game show called Star Wars: Jedi Temple Challenge, where he encouraged child “Padawans” through a series of obstacle courses to help them become Jedi Knights. And now, we’ve seen the first canonical appearance of Master Beq, as the Jedi who was apparently in charge of getting Grogu to safety when the Purge occurred. He executes this mission with panache for his very first live-action outing. Grogu stays glued to his side, feels safe in his care, and from the way this entire section is shot (often from the child’s vantage point, gazing up at Beq with no small measure of awe), it’s clear we’re meant to feel the same as Grogu.
Best is wonderful in this role, and I truly hope he enjoyed the experience and any other appearances that materialize from it. I also hope that he got an exorbitant paycheck for his trouble. But can we really call this a decent mea maxima culpa on the part of Lucasfilm and Disney given the effect Jar Jar had on his life? Let’s just say, it’s a particularly interesting flex on their part to take their most beleaguered actor and thrust him into the role of saving their most beloved IP… er, I mean, cargo. Sorry, character.
Which is to say that I have nothing but cynicism for the role the studios are playing here, and nothing but love for Best in this and any other role he plays. I hope he shows up in a flashback for every episode of The Mandalorian unto the end of time, I hope he gets his own spin-off series and toy residuals, I hope they erect a statue to Kelleran Beq in every Disney theme park and—look, the point is that this is a start, but it’s not nearly enough.
And I have further plot-relevant questions here, namely being why was Grogu so carefully protected to the point where Beq had a ship explicitly waiting for them… which is Nabooian? The other Jedi know to explicitly send Grogu to him, and he has this escape route figured ahead of time? Those are Naboo security forces, and they clearly know Beq and were waiting for them—and were willing to die to protect them—so that seems important. (Watch this all lead to a popular fan theory that Beq is from Naboo because he is actually Jar Jar in disguise… I’m serious, that is bound to pop up sooner rather than later.)
As to the other side of this episode, being the rescue of Ragnar and the murder of a mother raptor—which, again, I get that she was ultimately eaten and we’re supposed to be okay with it because the Watch adopts her kids, but also no, and how are you going to feed those giant baby dinosaurs, and why did you give them such a boring species name—there are a lot of very basic logic holes in this plot that we couldn’t possibly gather enough cotton wool to plug.
For example, the raptor snatches Ragnar up in her claws, but later coughs him up to her kids? That’s… not how birds grab food to store, friends. If she was planning on saving them for the kiddies, she likely would’ve plucked him off the ground with her beak, but more to the point, if she’s barfing him up, then she was storing him in her crop, which should have been bulging a ton because that kid is not small. Also, was he unconscious? Did he not even attempt escape when he was about to be eaten? Now I wish the episode had been from Rangar’s perspective inside the raptor?? Like I get that you wanna make the goofy joke, but you’ve gotta earn it all the way through and think about it from every angle.
And yes, this bothered me that much.
Also, the Watch seems to know a ton about these animals and their behavioral patterns (how long the kid will stay alive, how well they can hear, how to approach their nests), but still have no idea how to avoid being eaten by them? It’s all just super convenient in that for-the-drama way that’s getting tiresome. Not to mention the fact that we yet again had a half-hour episode that easily could have stretched longer if people had one or two conversations? Just interacted like people instead of soundbites for a change?
Still, maybe now that Din helped save his kid, Paz will stop being such a pain in the butt to him. So that’s something.
Bits and Beskar
- Okay, but I did like the joke where it seems like Grogu is using the Force to move the rocks and it turned out to be hermit crabs. In fact, if the entire series was just a sequence of running jokes where you thought Grogu was using the Force and it turned out he wasn’t, that would be brilliant. It’s already too weird watching him bounce around like a Gummi Bear.
- Yet again, the people causing all the trouble in Din’s cult are the Vizslas—no surprise there at all. Also, Paz’s heavy infantry armor set is so weirdly constructed that it makes his head/helmet look tiny and it bugs me every time I look at him. This is not important, I’ve just needed to say it for years now.
- In Jedi Temple Challenge, Kelleran Beq sported a purple lightsaber to honor Mace Windu, but it looks like they’ve gone with green here. (He also picks up the blue of his fallen comrade because he’s known to be adept at double-saber wielding.)
- So the crocodile beast from the opening is called a dinosaur turtle? …No. No thank you. Between this and “raptor,” I’m forced to assume the placeholder script names for the animals are being written into canon. You can do better than this.
- I love Bo-Katan casually floating the idea of seeing the mythosaur to the Armorer and her being like “babe, you were high af, I don’t know what to tell you, we’re not getting enough oxygen in these helmets.” It’s okay, Bo, we know you’re the Mandalore.
That was the halfway point of the season, so next week one can assume… who knows! See you then.
