Things begin to heat up in The Mandalorian Chapter 14 as the Mandalorian and the Child head to Tython.
Warning! Spoilers follow for The Mandalorian Chapter 14.
Color me surprised after watching this week’s episode of The Mandalorian, season 2 episode 6. Titled “Chapter 14: The Tragedy,” I was sure we were in for a filler episode, seeing as the previous episode (“Chapter 13: The Jedi”) really moved the plot forward. Surely we were due for a breather this week, right? Wrong!
Thankfully, this episode exceeded expectations, and Jon Favreau (along with episode director Robert Rodriguez) put on yet another spectacular show. Granted, the pacing in the middle was a bit slow, but I’ll have time to address that in a second.
This episode immediately starts out with Mando and the Child hovering over the planet of Tython and ready to descend to find the magical Jedi rock. There, the Child (Baby Yoda, Grogu, et al.) is to sit upon said rock and send out a call via the Force to see if a Jedi will respond and come to train him. You can feel how bittersweet this moment is for Mando, even the underlying score Ludwig Göransson composes already compels the waterworks to start queueing up. Still, with Mando so emotional in that moment, it makes you feel like the endgame for this series will mean Mando will never leave Baby Yoda. But we’ve probably got a lot of time before this series ever comes to a close.
Once on the planet, with Baby Yoda eventually able to send out the call in a meditative state, we have the arrival of a maskless Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) and the return of Fennec (Ming-Na Wen), who is most certainly not dead. I’ll admit, while I did applaud the moment I knew it was Boba Fett in those mysterious robes, this presentation of him kind of ruined the allure of Boba Fett for me. Boba Fett was like the kid in the back of the classroom who didn’t say much and just looked cool doing his own thing. Now, with the mask removed and speaking more lines, it didn’t quite feel like the same character. But perhaps Favreau’s imagining of Boba Fett will grow on me. Despite all that, it was still nice to see him back in his armor, and thankfully that gave him some Cool Points back again before the end of the show.
If I were to find another fault in this chapter, as I mentioned earlier, the episode did seem to stagger toward the middle. We only had less than 34 minutes of storytime this episode, and the long shootout with the stormtroopers felt like it dragged on a little too long. It felt more like watching a match on Star Wars Battlefront II, and didn’t come close to being as cool as the takedown of the Imperial ship with Bo-Katan in Chapter 11. The good thing about The Mandalorian is that the action was still cool, and Boba Fett and Fennec certainly proved themselves to be bad*ss warriors still.
The end of the episode offered the most excitement and a twist that I didn’t expect to happen this episode. With the tracking placed on Mando’s ship, Moff Gideon and his crew were able to arrive on the planet. And with their Hammer Drones— I mean, Dark Troopers, the robotic fiends snatched Baby Yoda and took him away for good.
Overall, the story was left on a huge cliffhanger. What is Mando going to do to get Baby Yoda back? Luckily, Mando has some new allies in both Boba Fett and Fennec, and it’ll be awesome to see what they can do when they’re teamed up for real. We may also have the return of Bill Burr from the prison break episode in season 1, seeing as the Mandalorian wanted to know his whereabouts at the end of the episode.
With only two more episodes to go at this point, we’re really building up toward a climactic finale. Last season, both episodes 7 and 8 were both high-intensity chapters, and I don’t doubt it will be the same for season 2.
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