‘The Mandalorian’ Season 3, Episode 6 Review: So Many Cameos

The Mandalorian makes a pretty bizarre detour in this week’s episode, ‘Guns For Hire’, and amps up the cameos. The show has always used cameos of either famous actors or famous Star Wars characters, but this episode really goes above and beyond—and not in a good way.

I did like some things about Chapter 22, but mostly this felt like an excuse to shove Jack Black, Lizzo and Christopher Lloyd all into an episode together. For reasons. On top of those three, we get some Ugnaughts which make us fondly recall the early days of the show, when Kuill helped out Mando in his gruff way. “I have spoken,” Mando says to these droid mechanics at one point, which made me smile.

We also meet back up with Bo-Katan’s people: Axe Woves (Simon Kassianides) and Koska Reeves (Mercedes Varnado aka Sasha Banks). They’re working for Jack Black and Lizzo’s characters—Captain Bombardier and the Duchess—who are royalty, basically, of the democratically run planet of Plazir-15. Bo-Katan (Katee Sackhoff) wants to enlist the Mandalorians to her cause but she and Mando (Pedro Pascal) have to solve a mystery for their hosts first.

This involves rogue Battle Droids that have been repurposed as worker droids but have started behaving erratically and violently. Since Captain Bombardier was once an Imperial (but went through the seemingly ubiquitous rehabilitation program) his government isn’t allowed to have an army or even armed guards, so they rely on outside help from privateers and, in this case, our Mandalorian adventurers.

They investigate the case while Baby Yoda hangs out with the Duchess (who later knights him in one of many bizarre moments in this bizarre episode). In the end, they discover that head of security Commissioner Helgait (Christopher Lloyd) is behind the bad business. He’s a Count Dooku-era Separatist, we learn, and isn’t happy with this little Utopia where droids do all the work and nobody knows how to take care of themselves. (You can add the Battle Droids to the list of cameos, by the way).

Their job done, Bo-Katan and Mando go to the Mandalorians where Axe tells her she’s no longer in charge. She lost the Darksaber—and besides, he’s had a taste of power and would like to keep it. So she challenges and beats him but he scoffs at her and tells her she should be challenging Mando for the Darksaber. Mando, however, has other plans. Just like the rest of us, he believes that Bo-Katan actually won the Darksaber from him already when she defeated the alien/droid hybrid on Mandalore and saved Mando’s life. She retrieved the Darksaber and used it in that fight and now it’s hers. Everyone agrees and he hands it over. Bo-Katan is effectively restored to her rightful place as leader of the Mandalorian people.

It just took a totally unnecessary side-quest to get there.

I don’t hate “monster of the week” or side-quest episodes, but this season they feel more out of place than usual. For one thing, this whole season has just felt weirdly aimless and this comes so late in a season that’s only eight episodes long—and very nearly over! Had this come earlier, it would have been much better, but right now it feels like a strange diversion this late in the game.

I’m really not a fan of the Jack Black / Lizzo cameos either. Lloyd was fine. He’s basically perfect in every cameo he does, but that’s because he doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb. Star Wars isn’t Marvel but it sure is feeling that way lately. This felt less like a Star Wars episode than a hybrid of Star Trek and Thor: Ragnarök—minus the thought-provoking moral lessons of the former and the laughs and action of the latter. I just don’t really get what the point of all this was. I’m sorry, but I guess I would really just prefer more smaller, lesser-known actors in Star Wars. The occasional big name has always been there from the beginning—Alec Guinness, for instance—but it starts to feel a little too silly when we’re stuffing episodes with so many celebrities.

Would it work as a cartoon? Definitely. In a season with 16 or 20 episodes you can spend all the time you like on bottle episodes, diversions, silly cameos fetch quests and whatever goofy stuff you like. But we only have eight episodes in Season 3 and this felt like one squandered (not to mention the squandering of Bryce Dallas Howard’s directorial talent).

I don’t mean to be super down about The Mandalorian but honestly I’m just not feeling it much this season. It doesn’t feel like the same show as before. It feels too . . . Disney-fied. The space spaghetti western vibe is all but gone (even with lines like “He doesn’t take kindly to strangers”) and the show’s story is moving along at a crawl. I love Bo-Katan, but this feels more like her show these days than Mando and Grogu’s, and I’m not sure it really works. Maybe if The Mandalorian had actually ended with Season 2 and we’d gotten a new show called Bo-Katan or Mandalore or something, I wouldn’t as bothered. Maybe The Mandalorians kind of like Aliens vs Alien.

I don’t know. It just feels really off to me.

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Scattered Thoughts:

• They really telegraphed the bad guy this episode didn’t they? Helgait? His name sounds like HELL GATE! Plus, he shakes his fist at clouds and yells at children to get off his lawn, basically.
• Absolutely no discussion on the ethics of using droid labor and what that means for this society when we get to the end of this episode. It’s like a Star Trek episode minus everything that makes Star Trek so good.
• What on earth was the point of the intro scene with the Quarren and the Mon Calamari forbidden lovers? Just to show that Axe and his people are mercenaries? This felt like it would go somewhere later in the episode but it just . . . didn’t. Very odd.
• Knighting Grogu was really silly. Maybe it was meant to be silly? It just made no sense. He didn’t do anything to deserve it. She should have knighted Bo-Katan and Mando. I get that maybe this is a hint that Grogu will become a hybrid Jedi Knight / Mandalorian or something but still. Did not love this scene. (Not as bad as Jaime knighting Brienne, though, and what followed).
• They’ve really increased the number of aliens in this show by . . . maybe too many. I like having cool aliens but they’re just everywhere now and they stop feeling quite as cool or interesting when they’re ubiquitous.

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