GA-GA FOR GROGU
The whole world has gone crazy for Mando’s sidekick. But could it be that his adorable emerald exterior conceals something darker?
WHETHER YOU CALL him Grogu, The Child, or his unofficial if slightly contentious nickname Baby Yoda, there’s one thing we can all agree on when it comes to the tiny green star of The Mandalorian: he’s cute as hell. Just about cute enough to make your heart burst, in fact. Look at him, chirping in pleasure as Mando whizzes through the air! Chuckle in glee as he uses the Force to steal a kid’s biscuits! Feel that warm and fuzzy glow as he nonchalantly chomps on the eggs of another specie— wait, what?
If you were one of those cooing as The Artist Formerly Known As Baby Yoda worked his way through Frog Lady’s last remaining eggs in Chapter 10 — if you rolled your eyes and tutted and said, “Boys will be boys” — then congratulations. You fell into Jon Favreau’s trap.
Ever since Grogu first appeared, right at the end of Chapter 1 of the show, disarming Mando with his big puppy-dog eyes and general chilled vibe, his chief weapon has been his cuteness. It’s almost as if he’s been genetically engineered in a lab (or a Disney concept-art workshop), designed to win over allies with those big baby blacks of his. It’s a trick that has even worked on his enemies — did Dr Pershing let him go in Season 1 because he didn’t want to kill the little fella and exhaust a potential supply of midi-chlorians, or because he couldn’t bring himself to harm something that utterly beguiling?
It’s an evolutionary trait that has worked wonders for, say, the PR of pandas. But Grogu’s cuteness masks a potential, more problematic, darkness within. One of the thematic preoccupations of The Mandalorian has been nature versus nurture. It applies to the title character — can he overcome the dogmatic principles instilled in him through growing up
with, essentially, a Mandalorian death cult, and assert his own personality? — but it also applies to Baby Grogu. Sorry, The Child Yoda. We assume that, because he wields the Force, is allied to (ostensibly) a good guy in Mando, and looks like Yoda, the kindest and wisest of all Jedi Masters, that he’s going to turn out on the side of the angels.
Ain’t necessarily so. Grogu, as innocent as he seems, has been through a lot in his 50 years. Ahsoka Tano essentially confirms, in ‘The Jedi’, that he managed to survive Order 66, and the purge of The Jedi and his fellow younglings, by the skin of his milk teeth. He’s then spent much of the time being buffeted around the galaxy, winding up time and again in the clutches of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people who have instilled in him a fair amount of fear, anger, and hate. All traits that could lead to the dark side. And traits that reveal themselves every now and again: a flash of petulance here, genuine anger whenever Mando is threatened by others. His dogged determination to eat Frog Lady’s eggs even when it was made very clear that he knew what he was doing was wrong was, on the surface, played for laughs. But here, Favreau is perhaps testing the waters, preparing us for the revelation that this almost unbearably adorable bairn might have darker edges.
For dire warnings about the churning maelstrom inside him, we need look no further than his genetic cousin, Actual Full-sized Yoda. The wizened Jedi Master didn’t plaster his hut on Dagobah with self-help posters, but if he had, “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering” and “Once you start down that dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny” might have been prominent. Could the rest of The Mandalorian — however long it runs — be about a battle for Grogu’s soul, as he himself struggles to resist the lure of the dark side?
Of course, whether Disney would ever commit to killing the green goose that lays the golden egg is debatable. But that Favreau, Filoni and co have managed to introduce this much nuance into a character who has still to utter a word is quite remarkable. And for what it’s worth, we suspect that Grogu’s sweet, caring nature — which wins out 99.9 per cent of the time — will ultimately prove victorious. But if his first words, when they come, are, “Die, Jedi scum,” we can’t say we weren’t warned. And by that point, it really won’t matter what you call him.