The Mandalorian recap: Mando goes in search of one of his own
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'The Mandalorian' Cheat Sheet
Season 2 of 'The Mandalorian' is right around the corner. To celebrate the next chapter of bounty hunting, here are 10 facts you may not have known about the series.
After what felt like an excruciating wait without fresh Baby Yoda content to bless our pandemic-strewn lives, The Mandalorian and the internet’s favorite GIF generator have returned with an action-packed hour (written and directed by series Executive Producer Jon Favreau) that finally answered one of the longest running questions in the Star Wars fandom: Can you actually survive a sarlacc pit?
The episode opens as Mando and Baby Yoda (his name until we get an actual one) head down a darkened, graffiti-strewn alley. While we wonder if Sabine Wren has been in these parts tagging the walls with images of snow troopers, Rebellion symbols and what looks like an image of C-3PO, Mando is taking Baby Yoda to some unsavory places in search of other Mandalorians.
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He enters a secret fighting ring where two Gamorreans are going at each other under the eye of a rowdy crowd and an Abyssin named Gor Koresh (voiced by John Leguizamo). Koresh supposedly knows the location of other Mandalorians, and Mando hopes that finding the network of Mandalorian coverts will help him reunite Baby Yoda with his people. Koresh, however, seems more interested in acquiring Mando’s rare beskar armor and doesn’t much care if he takes it off of his corpse. Koresh might think he has the upper hands once weapons are drawn but this is Mando he’s dealing with and soon he’s outside hanging from a lighting pole and confessing that there is a Mandalorian in Mos Pelgo on Tatooine. And while Mando doesn’t know of any Mandalorian on that desert planet, most Star Wars fans are wondering if we’re about to see the galaxy’s most famous Mandalorian bounty hunter again.
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Heading back to the Skywalker’s ancestral home planet, Mando lands the Razor Crest in Mos Eisley and reencounters mechanic Peli Motto (once again played by the hilarious Amy Sedaris). While reacting like most of the internet over Baby Yoda, Motto tells Mando where he can find the mining colony of Mos Pelgo (with some help from R5-D4). Leaving the ship with Peli, Mando borrows a speeder and takes Baby Yoda across the Dune Sea, stopping to make camp with the Tusken Raiders for the night before making his way to the hard hit colony.
Once in town, Mando makes his way to the local cantina where he finds out that the Mandalorian he seeks is in fact the local marshal. While he finds the fact that the Marshal wears Mandalorian armor curious, he soon sees the man in question in the cantina’s doorway, wearing the very dinged-up armor of Boba Fett. While Fett’s armor survived the sarlacc pit, it’s obvious that he himself is not wearing it because the man under the helmet sounds suspiciously like Raylan Givens, another marshal in a galaxy far, far away.
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Once the Marshal takes off his helmet, Mando knows this is not a true Mandalorian and we get confirmation that it is indeed Justified’s Timothy Olyphant wearing Boba Fett’s armor. Getting past the delightful in-joke of Olyphant playing yet another in his long line of TV marshals, the Marshal reveals his real name is Cobb Vanth, (a character who previously appeared in Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath novels) and that he bought his armor off some Jawas. As we’ve seen, Mandalorians take their armor seriously and Mando demands Vanth return the armor. Vanth isn’t of a mind to do that since it helps him protect the town and it soon looks like we’re about to have a shoot-out. Seeing Olyphant in a gun battle is always a good time, but it’s interrupted when the entire town starts to shake and comes under attack from a monstrous-sized krayt dragon.
While Baby Yoda smartly hides in a jug, Mando and Vanth watch the dragon eat an entire bantha whole and decide to forgo their duel. If Mando helps kill the dragon that’s endangering the people of Mos Pelgo, Vanth will give him the armor back.
Since the dragon hides underground, Mando won’t be able to hit it with the Razor Crest so he and Vanth travel by speeder to where it lives. As they do, Vanth tells in flashback what happened to Mos Pelgo after the destruction of the second Death Star and how as soon as the Imperial occupation ended, the colony became a slave camp when it was raided by the Mining Collective. Vanth escaped the carnage and was saved by the Jawas who traded Boba Fett’s armor for the crystals Vanth stole on the way out of town. Suitably armored, Vanth drove the Collective out.
Since Vanth has long protected the people of Mos Pelgo from the Tusken Raiders as well, he’s a little perplexed when he discovers Mando has befriended those he considers the enemy. Resentments rise high but Mando is able to broker an uneasy peace between Vanth and the Tuskens since they both want the krayt dragon dead.
They all ride banthas out to where the krayt dragon sleeps in an abandoned sarlacc pit (it actually ate the sarlacc). The Tuskens have been feeding it banthas to make it sleep longer but when the dragon emerges this time, it eats the Tusken instead of the bantha (which seems only fair to the bantha).
After seeing the true size of the creature, they realize that they are going to need the people of Mos Pelgo to help kill it. And just like Vanth at first, the villagers aren’t too happy to be working with their former enemy. Mando speaks up for the Tuskens and helps broker the peace treaty.
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Though both sides are still suspicious, they all ride out to the dragon’s lair and start setting the enormous trap to kill it, targeting its belly since that is its weak spot. They lure the dragon out and its full size makes Daenerys’ dragons on Game of Thrones look like loth cats. It’s a truly spectacular sight as it thrashes around from the puny harpoon hits but it looks almost impossible to defeat, especially once it starts spraying green bile on all the fighters.
Standing back for the initial volley against the creature, Mando and Vanth eventually launch into battle using their jetpacks to get it from the air. Their weapons barely make a dent and it doesn’t help that it keeps disappearing underground and reappearing in a new place.
Mando realizes that it’s going to take a suicide run to take this beast down and sets off Vanth’s jetpack with instructions to watch over Baby Yoda who strangely keeps his Force powers to himself for this battle. Mando holds a charge laden bantha still and the krayt dragon swallows both him and the bantha whole. Baby Yoda obviously looks most concerned but the next time the dragon opens his mouth, Mando flies out and sets off the charges, killing the creature in a massive explosion. While Mando now has a lot of armor-cleaning to do, Vanth is suitably impressed and all the fighters rejoice.
The Tuskens raid their massive bounty finding a valuable krayt pearl amongst the carnage of the beast. Mando takes a bit of meat for himself and Vanth hands over the armor making a joke that he wasn’t the one who broke it in the first place. Vanth wishes Mando farewell and hopes that they meet again (and he’s not the only one who feels that way since Olyphant makes a charming addition to this galaxy).
As Mando takes off into the sunset on the speeder with Baby Yoda by his side, a lone figure watches him from a cliff. As the figure turns to camera, we see the face of the one and only Temuera Morrison, who played Jango Fett in the Star Wars prequels. What does this mean? Well, since Boba Fett was a clone of Jango, it means Boba Fett lives!!!!
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