‘The Mandalorian’ Tries To Do An ‘Andor,’ With Mixed Results

This week’s episode of The Mandalorian is an hour long, but with maybe 10 minutes of actual time with Mando, Grogu and Bo-Katan themselves. Spoilers follow.

The episode begins with a pretty beefy dogfight and ends with the redemption of both Mando and Bo-Katan, given that she also accidentally bathed in the Living Waters, but in between we have a surprise left turn.

The bulk of the episode is dedicated to Dr. Pershing, the nervous scientist who was reluctantly experimenting on Grogu in season 1, but now we see has gone through some sort of New Republic rehabilitation program to become a low level office grunt and avoiding actual prison.

While I am okay with “slow burns” and I really appreciated Andor, which at times was extremely slow, I didn’t quite like what the show did with this episode, and not just because it stepped away from Mando for so long.

At least one part of the episode felt extremely obvious from the very first shot of Kane, the former Gideon lieutenant who is also in the rehab program, who was very, very clearly trying to befriend Pershing and encourage him to restart his research with ill-intentions.

I will say that the end surprised me in the sense that I expected Kane to either subvert Pershing’s research into cloning work for the fragments of the Empire, or just outright kidnap him and force him to work for them again. Instead, she wiped his mind of all his pending “breakthrough” knowledge of cloning, presumably so the New Republic couldn’t use it. Not that they were letting him do that research anyway, nor seem in any way interested in it. I suppose the idea is that he was too much of a risk.

Kane doesn’t just kill him, presumably, because she also wanted to get in good with New Republic higher ups who now see her as an asset for selling out the “traitor.” It’s just that Kane being bad here felt so obvious, I’m not sure we needed an entire hour to watch this unfold.

As for what’s happening here, there are a few theories. One is that this has something to do with the Jedi frozen in amber we saw back in Kenobi, and then of course the concept of taking samples from Grogu in season 1 in the first place. When we think “the Force” and “cloning” the obvious thing that comes to mind is the resurrection of Emperor Palpatine, an event which has already come and gone in the new Disney trilogy. If that is the plan, however, I do think The Mandalorian and the D+ Star Wars universe could be better spending its time than attempt to justify a slapdash retcon employed in the final chapter of a badly planned Star Wars trilogy. So I hope something else more pressing is happening.

The actual Mando storyline is more interesting, as I believe we are seeing further seeds planted for the arrival of the Big Bad of this corner of the universe, where we will see Admiral Thrawn pulled out of the old EU and planted into this new era. The line about that being too many ships for a random Imperial Warlord seems clearly about building up a bigger threat, and we know that Ahsoka is going to be focusing on Thrawn as well when that series arrives.

So no, I don’t think this episode of The Mandalorian handled the logistics of the Rebellion/Empire as deftly as Andor, and I’m not sure this was worth the time it took to tell this small sub-story. But we’ll see where things go from here. I’m hoping in more surprising, less obvious directions.

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