The Mandalorian goes spelunking in a surprisingly productive episode

So much for those epic quests, huh? Last week’s premiere set up what I thought would be the two main storylines this season—finding a new memory unit for IG-11 and then getting Din Djarin to Mandalore so he could bathe in the Living Waters beneath the Civic Center—and this week’s episode just… kinda checked off both of those boxes. I guess that’s what sets the Mandalorian from The Mandalorian apart from certain book-based colleagues: He gets shit done.

First, Din paid a visit to his best friend Peli Motto (could you imagine just a few years ago saying that Amy Sedaris would be a fixture of a Star Wars TV show?), who was in the middle of scamming some poor Rodian in the midst of Boonta Eve celebrations. Boonta Eve, of course, is the day Tatooinians celebrate the time a Hutt named Boonta Hestilic Shad’ruu became a god, but obviously everyone knows that. (It’s also a traditional podracing holiday, which is probably how most people are aware of it.)

Din asks Peli if she has a memory unit for an IG unit, which in Star Wars is like asking for one of those old iPod cables with the wide plug, so she offers to give him R5-D4 instead. He initially refuses, saying he wanted IG-11 so he could send him spelunking into the depths of Mandalore and figure out whether or not the planet is really “cursed” (and here we thought Din wanted to rebuild IG-11 so they could be friends, or maybe so he could ask if a second season of Our Flag Means Death will ever happen), but Peli convinces him to take the astromech droid because of his experience working with the Rebellion. (I’ll have more to say about that below.)

And that’s apparently that for IG-11, who will now just rot in the hands of those Babu Friks from last week, because Din Djarin, Grogu, and R5 wasted no time in hopping over to Mandalore to finish up that quest. TV seasons are usually longer than two episodes, but like I said, Din Djarin gets shit done. Or he would, if he weren’t occasionally a bit of a dummy—and I mean that as a compliment. One of the nice things about this show is that Din Djarin can be overly naïve and optimistic, because his faith in his fringe Mandalorian cult is so strong that he constantly assumes it will protect him.

But before Din gets in trouble, he lands on the surface of Mandalore—which is bombed to hell and looks like shit but does not seem to be ravaged by a magical curse, hmmm—and sends R5 out to do some recon. I loved this sequence, which kept the camera either in Din’s cockpit or pointing at him from outside, meaning we get these big wide shots of the planet’s surface as R5 rolls away further and further from the ship, which steadily increases the tension. Throw in Din and Grogu watching R5’s position on a little motion sensor screen, and it’s a nice bit of Jaws/Alien drama.

R5 gets scared by some troll monsters (we later learn they’re called Alamites), and Din hops out to go help…even though they really do a number on him at first, and he just barely survives by poking at them with the Darksaber. But it turns out that the air on the planet is breathable, so Din and Grogu drop down into the Civic Center (I maintain that it’s weird that they called it that) to look for the mines that contain the Living Waters. This is where Din’s naiveté gets him in trouble: He finds an old, discarded Mandalorian helmet, and rather than being suspicious, he picks it up and falls into a trap where a big crab robot snatches him up and carries him away.

Grogu tries to go help, but it turns out that the crab robot actually houses a smaller cyborg-like creature with spindly limbs and tubes who has a big collection of old Mandalorian junk, and he spots Grogu and chases him off. We never do find out what this guy’s deal is, but he’s definitely a creep. He tries to steal Din’s blood for some reason! That’s gross!

Din sends Grogu off to ask Bo-Katan for help, which requires Grogu to use the Mandalorian navigation skills that Din keep telling him to learn. Actually, he just points at a map and R5 does all of the work, but Grogu’s a 50-year-old baby. We can give this to him. They show up at Bo-Katan’s castle, and she’s doing the exact same thing she was doing last week: sitting on a big chair and having a bad attitude. But when she realizes it’s just Grogu who came to see her, she agrees to go help.

Once back on Mandalore, Bo-Katan effortlessly wrecks the troll guys that gave Din a hard time earlier, even spotting them waiting for her to pass by at one point, and then she quickly executes the spiny mecha creep with the Darksaber before he can drink all of Din’s blood—proving, again, that she’s probably better suited to rule Mandalore and wield the Darksaber than Din is.

Bo-Katan helps Din back to the surface and heals him with some kind of special soup, and even though she doesn’t believe in the stuff about magic water that the Armorer instilled in Din, she agrees to take him to the Living Waters and smirk condescendingly while he goes through the ritual to atone for removing his helmet in front of Bill Burr. There’s a potentially interesting moment where Din insists that they, as a people, are nothing without the Mandalorian creed, so perhaps Bo-Katan’s arc here will involve becoming a religious fanatic like he is? Katee Sackhoff could leave the helmet on permanently instead of wearing that big headband.

Together, they reach the Living Waters, and she seems to get a perverse little thrill out of how anticlimactic the whole thing is, going so far as to sarcastically read an old plaque commemorating the important cultural site and how it was once the fabled lair of the Mythosaur, which legendary hero Mandalore The Great supposedly slayed—which is why an image of the great horned beast can be seen on a lot of Mandalorian stuff (like Boba Fett’s armor).

Obviously that’s just a bunch of hooey, though. There’s no Mythosaur. But…then again, what pulled Din under the water when he tried to do his ritual, knocking him unconscious for the second time this episode? And what’s that big monster that Bo-Katan spots when she goes down to rescue him? Some kinda freakin’ Mythosaur?!

Stray observations

• I think this stuff about the Mythosaur and the Living Waters Beneath The Civic Center are pretty dumb, and they stink of the kind high-fantasy nonsense that Dave Filoni’s Star Wars stories are riddled with (something tells me Jon Favreau didn’t write “the Mythosaur” on a whiteboard at any point), but I am…intrigued by this. If they’re immediately dropping the quests laid out in the premiere in favor of something weirder, I’m hesitantly onboard. Just as long as we don’t see any ancient Jedi temples with magic powers that extend far beyond anything ever seen in regular Star Wars stories (Filoni’s most frustrating trope), I’ll be okay.
• Peli insisting that Grogu said actual words to her was adorable. His babbles were more word-like this episode than usual.
• When the alligator creatures in the tunnels below the Civic Center sprout wings and start chasing Grogu, I wrote “they fly now” in my notes. Funny, right? They fly now! Ha ha ha.
• Bo-Katan talking about her father was interesting. Her family was important in the Clone Wars cartoon, but I think this is the first time a Star Wars has mentioned him specifically. Also, when she tries to make small talk with Grogu and mentions meeting a few Jedi in the past, we the viewer know that one of them was Ahsoka Tano. Grogu knows her!
• Alright, let’s talk R5-D4. He’s the droid that Uncle Owen tried to buy before settling on R2-D2, thus setting the events of Star Wars in motion (and dooming Owen), but both the old Star Wars canon and the current Disney Star Wars canon established that he purposefully blew himself up to help R2-D2 get the Death Star plans to Obi-Wan. Then, as explained in the weird, canonical fan-fiction-y book From A Certain Point Of View (in which famous Star Wars fans contributed short stories about side characters), R5 was so touched by R2’s commitment to his mission that he escaped the Jawas and went off in search of a way to help the Rebel Alliance. That’s what Peli is referring to when she hands the droid off to Din. And Disney thought it was making things easier when it gutted the old EU canon.