Man, I tell you what, I loved this episode. Now I know a lot of folks are like, you love everything, Mr. Know-It-All. No. But come on, guys. I come at these things from a very positive standpoint, because my feeling is, look, I can be a critic, but I’m a fan first.
So, finally, episode five, and we find ourselves moving in a direction that’s much more in line with where I felt we were going to be at the beginning. This is one of those times where you don’t know you want something until you get it. Now I wish this had been episode three, and that we’d scooted a lot of the things that were going on early a little further forward, or possibly even tightened some things up. We’ve literally had three 30-minute episodes. One of them was 28 minutes before the credits.
If you haven’t been keeping up and watching, I’m going to spoil this whole thing.
Gorian Shard Comes for Nevarro
The episode starts with Gorian Shard, our good old Mr. Seaweed over here, the way Mrs. Know-It-All said it once before, and he is out for blood. He goes back to Nevarro and confronts Greef Karga. It’s really funny, because while they’re talking there’s this moment where Karga is literally saying to him, hey man, those guys shot first. And I was like, Star Wars. It’s great.
Karga says we can talk this all out, and the droid actually asks him, do you want me to start negotiations? Karga’s like, no, we’re not going to set a precedent of doing that. He’s dedicated to being the high magistrate, but what he’s really dedicated to is seeing Nevarro stay independent. So he ends up having to do the one thing he really wishes he didn’t have to do. He has to call for help.
And by the way, they bombed Nevarro. Sorry, my ADD is running wild. It’s one of those things where you see it happen and you’re like, how did places survive not being just blasted into glass? And then Mandalore doesn’t seem so strange anymore, because the pirate’s doing it with a former Imperial ship.
The Ranger, Coruscant, and a Cameo I Wasn’t Expecting
He calls the Adelphi rangers. Remember those guys? Blue Leader, or Blue as they call him, is the guy he reaches, and it’s a quick little conversation. Hey man, I need your help. It’s this weird ranger drinking outpost station, this bar they all hang out at, kind of like the PX for aliens in a galaxy far, far away.
His partner tells him, look man, I can’t imagine they’re going to want to do anything. And he says, well, maybe they can’t exactly ignore me if I’m there. So he heads back to Coruscant.
That gets us a cameo I was not exactly expecting, which was Tim Meadows. He plays a clerk. And out in the hallway, who do we see? Elia Kane.
So that bridge episode from a few weeks ago starts to make a little more sense, in that Elia Kane is definitely being placed there. I thought she was just a zealot who’d been converted. I was wrong. Mrs. Know-It-All was right. She said it after that episode. She goes, she’s dirty. And I was like, really? Yeah. She’s there for Moff Gideon, who, like we found out the week before, never arrived at his trial and hasn’t been seen since.
Tim Meadows denies the request, because Elia Kane, the communications officer who was super dirty to our boy Dr. Pershing, steps up and she’s like, oh, I’m sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing. Nevarro hasn’t signed the charter for the New Republic. They’re independent. Which immediately puts the clerk on, see, that’s a problem, because we barely have the resources to help the worlds that are our protectorates. It’s just a tiny place in the Outer Rim.
Come to find out, Blue firmly believes the Empire is rising again. We don’t know how prescient that is yet, but at some point you had to expect they were going to begin the march toward looping us around to the sequel trilogy. At some point or another we’re going to get the vestiges, or the beginnings, of the First Order.
The Covert Answers the Call
He apparently used to serve with someone who’s at the covert, so he goes and finds them. When he arrives they’re very much like, well guys, we have to kill him, he knows where we are. The Mandalorian comes out and he’s like, what’s going on? And the ranger says, I just came to tell you your buddy’s in trouble. Paz Vizsla is literally like, he’s seen us, we can kill him. And Mando’s like, no, he helped me once, I’ve got to let him go.
So the whole encounter is dude basically standing there saying, listen, y’all gotta help.
Think about what they were setting up for us last week. That shot of all the Mandalorians along the coastline, working out and practicing and honing their skills. Oh yeah, all of that was for a reason. And the entire mission with the whole dinosaur thing, the pterosaur. All of that was designed to show us they’re ready for bigger things.
They answer the call because of Paz Vizsla. Din Djarin is in the middle of kind of beseeching everyone, because he knows he’s got no right to just say let’s go, and then Paz Vizsla gets up. And I’m thinking, oh, Paz Vizsla, you’re going to be a jerk, aren’t you? He proceeds to list all the reasons why not. And then he twists it quick on him. Din Djarin risked his life to fight and protect my son. Bo-Katan was strong, she did not give up, and she’s upheld her honor. He’s just like, I’m going.
And Mando’s basically outlining it for them: they’ve offered me a tract of land. What if we didn’t have to run anymore? What if we had a place we could call home, finally?
Taking Nevarro Back
So they go, they fight back, and they take back Nevarro. It’s a wonderfully well choreographed setup. You get the Mandalorians coming down and taking out the pirates that are actually in the street, and at some point you see Karga and what people he has all drawing weapons, because they’re coming back. They corner the few pirates that are left.
Meanwhile, Bo-Katan and Din Djarin take out the giant starship that’s floating in the atmosphere. That’s the one thing I’ve never understood about the science of Star Wars, but whatever. That’s literally me being nitpicky, because normally I’m a Star Trek fan.
And Greef Karga does exactly what he said. From this stretch to that stretch. You may not have a home planet, but now you’ve got a home. It was very poignant.
I genuinely felt like this was an excellent opening to more things. They’ve really set up a whole bunch of stuff.
Bo-Katan Takes the Helmet Off
That’s when the Armorer asks to talk to Bo-Katan. Bo-Katan comes in, and the Armorer says to her, remove your helmet. Bo-Katan’s like, what? I said remove your helmet. Do you respect my station? Yeah. Then take the helmet off, girl. And sure enough, she does.
And the Armorer says to Bo-Katan, you can bridge both worlds. You can help others find the Way. We all must walk the Way together.
I think on one level the Armorer is talking about the Way the way we know it, their classic phrasing that we’ve known for three seasons. But more importantly, I think she’s trying to say the way is us, together. So yes, this is the Way, the way I’ve always said it, but that way is going to take them someplace new. I believe that 100 percent. She wants Bo-Katan to lead them, and I’m down. I think it’s great.
So they all walk out together, and she’s got no helmet on, and the Armorer explains it. We have to come together, all tribes. We’re not going to change who we are, other than we’re going to learn to live with others like ourselves. So you’ll have a society of Mandalorians where some take their helmets off and some don’t, but both respect each other and both come together. Because it is time, she says, to retake Mandalore.
The Button
Then we cut to a button on the episode. The Adelphi ranger, Blue, on the way back, encounters a wrecked Lambda-class shuttle. It’s a former Imperial ship converted into a New Republic prison transport. And it matches the flight logs of the one that was going to take Moff Gideon to trial. Gideon never showed up at trial, so we know he escaped. Bam.
And then they find the most damning piece of evidence. Shards of beskar armor. The guy says it: so Moff Gideon was taken by Mandalorians. And dude’s like, it would seem that way.
Oh yeah. It’s so good.
The Verdict
The Mandalorian Season 3 Episode 5, “Chapter 21: The Pirate,” lands at an 8.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
I liked it. I liked it a lot, man. A solid eight and a half. I think it’s worth the watch. The story beats move forward. I would’ve liked to have gotten this episode sooner, but I’m down. I’m enjoying where they’re going. It feels like it’s flowing toward something much more now, and I think you’re going to get the Mandalorians building their culture back up, or at least the beginnings of that.
I don’t really know where the Mandalorians are in the sequel trilogy. They don’t really address that much. So we may end up leading up to it at some point, or they’re going in that direction, and we’ll have an idea.
Let me know what you thought of the episode. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
