We’ve known from the third-season trailers for The Mandalorian that our protagonists would eventually be returning to the planet Nevarro to fend off Greef Karga’s (Carl Weathers) home city from the invading forces of Pirate King Gorian Shard (Cinderella actor Nonso Anozie).
So it wasn’t too much of a surprise when those telegraphed events came to fruition in this week’s episode, entitled “Chapter 21 – The Pirate,” but it was still fun and occasionally unpredictable to see specifically how they played out.
“The Pirate” begins with Greef doing some city-planning work over a holotable when Shard’s pirate vessel appears overheard, sending the citizens of Nevarro into a panic. When the ship starts bombarding the city, Karga attempts to call in some help from the New Republic and our old friend Captain Carson Teva (Kim’s Convenience star Paul Sun-Hyung Lee). At the New Republic base where Teva is hanging out we get cameo appearances by the pilot characters played by The Mandalorian directors Dave Filoni, Rick Famuyiwa, and Deborah Chow, plus a shocking cameo by none other than that lovable Lasat Zeb Orellios (Steve Blum) from Star Wars Rebels. From there, Carson goes to Coruscant to meet with a New Republic bureaucrat (Saturday Night Live alum Tim Meadows) who declines to help after some prodding in the wrong direction by the duplicitous Amnesty Officer Elia Kane (Katy M. O’Brian). Teva’s next stop is the Mandalorian covert, which he was able to track down thanks to the tenacious astromech droid R5-D4, who he says he served alongside in the Galactic Civil War. After some discussion among the covert and an endorsement by “Heavy Mandalorian” Paz Vizlsa (voiced by series creator Jon Favreau and performed on-set by Tait Fletcher), the Mandos are ready to strike, and thus begins the mission to take back Nevarro.
Most of the remainder of the episode is a very fun action sequence that sees the Mandalorians dropping into Nevarro City for a ground assault while Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) distracts Gorian Shard’s airforce with the N-1 starfighter. There’s some welcome comic relief in the form of the Anzellan droidsmiths (Shirley Henderson) and once again I can’t help but want all of Shard’s very neat-looking crewmembers in action figure form as soon as possible. This episode’s director was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse helmer Peter Ramsey, who I don’t believe has worked in live-action before, so it makes sense that the sequences that work best are the most heavily choreographed one that would have largely been assembled in pre-visualization, rather than the dialogue-heavy ones that come across as somewhat stilted and hamfisted here. It’s a thrill to see our heroes take back the city streets of Nevarro by force, but the most interesting parts of “The Pirate,” story-wise, come in the episode’s denouement. It seems our covert has found a new, at least relatively giant monster-free home for the time being, back where they started in The Mandalorian’s first season, and also Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sackhoff) has been given the go-ahead to remove her helmet by the Armorer (Emily Swallow) not to mention the task of reuniting all the various scattered Mandos out there in the galaxy in an effort to reclaim Mandalore.
I’ll admit that I’m a tad bit confused by the Armorer’s sudden change of heart re: helmet removal (not that I’m complaining about getting to see Sackhoff’s face more often), but I soon found myself distracted from that rather unforeseen turn of events by Carson Teva’s further adventures in eerily empty space. The good Captain comes across a derelict ex-Imperial shuttle and upon further investigation (via a nifty feature of astromech droids that to my knowledge we haven’t seen before) finds that it’s the New Republic prisoner transport that was carrying Moff Gideon to Coruscant for trial. Carson confirms that Gideon’s body is missing, but in doing so he makes an even more disquieting discovery: remnants of Beskar, indicating that the wayward warlord may actually have been abducted mid-journey by Mandalorians. What does this mean for the three remaining episodes of the season? I’m at a loss to venture a guess, but I’m glad to know that Teva is on the case. In the meantime, I thought this was another entertaining installment of The Mandalorian with some very interesting developments in the overarching plot, but at the same time I am pretty glad that we’ve now gotten past all the stuff we saw in the trailers and consequently have very little idea of what to expect from here on out. To me, Star Wars is the most fun when anything can happen, and we got a little taste of that this week, so I’m definitely looking forward to more in April.
New episodes of The Mandalorian are released Wednesdays, exclusively via Disney+.