THE MANDALORIAN: SEASON 2
★★★★ OUT NOW / DISNEY+ EPISODES VIEWED 2 OF 8
DIRECTORS Jon Favreau, Peyton Reed
CAST Pedro Pascal, Timothy Olyphant
PLOT Entrusted with returning his ward, The Child, to a group known as the Jedi, The Mandalorian (Pascal) starts scouring the galaxy for fellow Mandalorians. En route, he gets into scrapes with ice spiders and the sheriff of a small desert town who’s wearing strangely familiar armour...
THE WAY, THIS IS.
Relatively hot on the heels of the success of the first season, which debuted late over here on Disney+, along comes a second slab of The Mandalorian, aka ‘The Further Adventures Of Mando (because, let’s face it, nobody but nobody is calling him Din Djarin) And Baby Yoda’ (are you going to call him The Child, no matter how much Disney’s marketing arm wills it to be so? Thought not).
The first season was, arguably, the biggest success of the post-lucas Star Wars era, with co-creators Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni bringing us a grittier, grungier galaxy far, far away that felt exciting in truly unexpected ways. It introduced new characters and concepts, while tipping its helmet to lore, often folding in deep-cut references in a way that felt organic and which didn’t punish the casual viewer. And even if you thought that from time to time it flirted with cliché or felt like it was treading on quicksand, you had the pleasure of watching Pedro Pascal’s stoic man of honour wandering into small towns and using his fists, wits and blaster to set things right, like ‘Jack Reacher In Space’. And if that didn’t lure you in, no-one could escape the cheeky charms of the ever-cooing Baby Yoda; more powerful than any tractor beam.
The first season was absolutely focused on this unlikely father-son relationship. And the second season so far continues that pattern, locking us into the POV of this lone wolf and his cub as he heads to Tatooine for an episode which riffs on Westerns even more heavily than usual, and then a mysterious ice planet where he encounters the kind of icky monster in which Star Wars specialises. Those relentless, web-vomiting ice spiders would give the Rancor nightmares.
This brings with it all the strengths and weaknesses of the show to date. If there’s a Mandalorian formula, it’s very much in evidence here as Mando finds himself, two episodes in a
row, on an unfamiliar planet, forced to team up with unlikely allies to face down huge alien creatures. That will dismay those who want more of Giancarlo Esposito’s Moff Gideon, or who were tantalised by the sudden appearance of what seemed to be Boba Fett, freshly un-sarlacced, at the end of the first episode.
But when Monster-of-the-week is done this well, it’s hard to quibble. The krayt dragon that Mando takes on in the first episode, as well as nicely ticking that fan-service box, manages to head into Tremors and Dune territory without violating either, and his partnership with a guest-starring Timothy Olyphant as Cobb Vanth, a local lawman who, if he were any more laconic, would be dead, is joyful. It seems almost certain that Olyphant, who shows up wearing Boba Fett’s old armour, will be back for more.
The first two episodes — directed by Favreau, assuming helming duties for the first time on the show, and then Peyton Reed — are statements of intent, designed to reassure us that, despite the show’s enhanced reputation (evident in the increased calibre of Special Guest Stars and Special Guest Directors), things aren’t going to change very much. Those deep-cut references continue, for instance, incorporating elements from the original trilogy, the prequels (check out Cobb Vanth’s sweet ride), the Filoni-supervised animated shows, and even the recent spate of novels. If you watched Season 1 and 2 back-to-back, without a break of several months, you wouldn’t be able to see the join.
Even the temptation to turn it into The Baby Yoda Show has been resisted, with the little green bairn barely featuring in the first episode. The second is more Baby Yoda memetastic, although even then, his troubling appetite for an innocent frog lady’s spawn might be Favreau’s attempt to warn us that not as cute and wholesome as he appears, is he.
Instead, Mando continues to dominate the action, and somehow a character whose face we can never see continues to hold our attention, with Pascal hitting the right world-weary notes in his voice work, while the walking around/shooting-anything-that-moves side of things continues to be expertly handled by the actor and his team of armour-plated assistants. Only time will tell if we get to see his face again, or if his helmet hair will rival Olyphant’s, or how Boba Fett will fit in. But these two episodes are a good start. Hold on to your jetpacks.
VERDICT So far, very much a case of second verse, same as the first. But it’s good to have the small screen’s most unlikely pairing this side of Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville back in action.