by Tanner Kocher
Chapter 5: the Gunslinger
Well, here we go again. The Mandalorian has this way of taking great concepts and making them boring. The episode isn’t terrible; it hits all the hallmarks of a good western, and has some inventive scenes, but I get so bored sitting through these episodes.
[Spoiler Warning Ahead]
To start, I want to talk about this episode’s nostalgia trip. From the opening scene, the entire episode becomes an homage to A New Hope, as it takes place on Tatooine. The production crew takes great care to make the city look as close to that original as possible, adding some anti-Empire flair in the form of Stormtrooper helmets on spikes. My personal favorite scene in the episode has Mando enter Mos Eisley Cantina. In the years since we last saw it, it has really slowed down. Even here, however, they just use the scene to reference Luke and Han meeting.
The other scene I thought was important involves Mando and Toro, the titular gunslinger, running into some Tusken Raiders. We get some interesting insight into their society. It would appear that they speak with colonists through sign language. I’ve always thought Star Wars had a problem with world-building, but this episode, revisiting such a memorable location, shows that the producers care enough to remind us that the world is living and breathing.
Now I want to talk about, probably, my least favorite character in modern Star Wars Canon, Toro Calican. In a universe of boring, one-dimensional characters, Calican swaggers onto the screen with so little motivation, and even less charisma. Arguably, the best thing about this character is that he dies at the end of the episode. He claims that his motivation is to join the Bounty Hunters Guild, but his true motivation is to betray literally everyone he meets in order to create tense situations.
Beyond that, the episode doesn’t have much going on. There’s a woman who takes care of Baby Yoda who doesn’t leave the planet with Mando, a galaxy-famous bounty hunter that gets captured in, like, 30 seconds, and a mysterious figure dressed in black that will probably be in one more episode before the end of the season. I get this one 5 out of 10, and hope that it just gets better from here.