Even for a show with as wonderful a first few episodes as The Mandalorian, there really isn’t such a thing as a perfect season. “Chapter Five: The Gunslinger” is a stumble from the show and, though not a catastrophe, the first time the show has felt interested in something other than telling a quiet story. Let’s dig in.
1. Noise
This episode is notable for a few reasons, but the big one is that it is the first time that we’ve spent more than a scene with any characters who are interested in talking more than necessary. We encounter people who are talking not just to communicate essential information, but because they…just talk. It’s hard to describe, but I think if you saw the episode, it would make sense to you.
This is also the first time we get something approaching a classic Star Wars dogfight in space. We’ve heard plenty of blasters thus far in the series, but nothing to the scale and scope that we get in space. That actually segues well into my next topic:
2. The most Star Wars
This episode, hands down, is the most Star Wars episode of the show, and I mean that in ways that are both good and bad. On one hand, we get a lot of winks and nods to the past: Mos Eisley, the cantina, a dewback, the higher ground being somehow super important. Instead of being small bits of world building, they added up to feel a little overbearing. It was like someone hung neon signs that said “GET IT? YOU’RE ON TATOOINE!”
We also get an unfortunate Star Wars association, and that is ‘the special effects don’t look as good as we hope they would.’ This episode has the worst CGI of the series thus far, and by a longshot. There were some moments with Yodel where you could clearly see the puppet swapped out for a digital version, the stars through the spaceship looked so fake that I wonder if that wasn’t intentional, but especially the speeder bikes on the sand looked weirdly fake.
3. Amy Sedaris! Ming-Na Wen! Vinyl Jr!
This episode was also the most stunt-cast-y of the bunch thus far, and it was the first time that characters felt out of place in this world. Ming-Na Wen, perhaps best known for her role on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., was the exception to that rule, as she fit right in as a quiet and methodical fighter.
Amy Sedaris on the other hand, one of my favorite comedy personalities of all time, did her best to not go full Jerri Blank but couldn’t help but be herself as mechanic on Tatooine. Obviously, this is what the show wanted, or they would have hired one of the four billion women on Earth who aren’t Amy Sedaris, but it was distracting to see her in this role. It feels so condescending to say “she did the best she could,” but it did feel quite out of place.
Almost as out of place was Jake Cannavale, son of Bobby Cannavale (The Station Agent, HBO’s Vinyl), who played wannabe bounty hunter Toro Calican. His earring and New York swagger instantly put him at odds with the tone of the show. He’s supposed to be playing a clueless young hothead, which he does, but he does it in the least Star Wars way possible. It felt like if Harvey Keitel was hired as Qui-Gon Jinn; it’s just not the tone you expect from the franchise.
Let me say this: neither of the performances I’ve singled out were more distracting than Horatio Sanz in the pilot, but his part was both briefer and more open to a comedic take than either Sedaris’s or Cannavale’s parts. And I’m not trying to say that new tones are out of place in Star Wars, and that it must remain what it always has been. I really don’t want to come off like I don’t like these things because they feel different. Mainly, I don’t like them because they aren’t that good. Good and different is absolutely fine.
4. The Dave Filoni Effect
This is the first episode not written by Jon Favreau, but rather by The Clone Wars/Rebels honcho Dave Filoni. Filoni directed both this and the pilot, and so perhaps some of the more comedic aspects of both episodes can be traced back to Filoni’s involvement. And, when you realize who wrote this, it becomes clear that the tone of the episode is absolutely a throwback to Filoni’s animated work.
Continued belowThe broader characterizations would have felt totally at home in The Clone Wars, and the writing of set pieces that might not be so easy to pull off in live action all track here. And if you can adjust your brain to seeing this as a live action Clone Wars episode, it all fits together very nicely. That said, this isn’t the case. This is a Mandalorian episode that doesn’t work as well as the others. End of story.
5. Who is that caped figure?
Again, much like the Filoni directed pilot episode, this episode ends on a cliffhanger. We see a figure in boots and a cape approach the body of Fennec Shand (Wen) and lean down, but we do not see who it is. This is the sort of tease that must be either a character we know from the series or from a Star Wars film or novel. There is no way that this amount of care would be presented for a totally new character, right? If it is a new character, it must have some sort of connective tissue to a character we already know.
My guess? It Carl Weathers. But we’ll see, maybe even next week!
