Last week's episode of The Mandalorian was the longest in the series at just under an hour, and this week's is barely half that. Despite its short length, this episode covers plenty of ground, telling the story of how Bo-Katan and the titular Mandalorian Din Djarin are able to deeply ingratiate themselves with the Mandalorian cult Djarin grew up in, and the powers-that-be have also deigned to give us a rare glimpse at Grogu's past.
Warning: There are copious spoilers ahead for The Mandalorian Chapter 20: The Foundling.
This episode of The Mandalorian picks up pretty much where last week's left off, with Din Djarin being accepted back into the Tribe and Bo-Katan being accepted for the first time after their adventure to Mandalore. The episode begins with the pair observing the various Mandalorians spar against each other, and Djarin thinks the time has come to get Grogu's Foundling training started with a duel against one of the other kids.
The practice duel goes well for Grogu, but moments later his foe is dramatically abducted by a gigantic lizard bird--one of the Mandalorians refers to it as a "raptor," but it's a new creature we've never seen elsewhere. And thus begins another Mando adventure as Djarin and Bo-Katan head off to rescue the kid, while Grogu stays home and has a flashback to a particularly stressful moment in his life: the night of Order 66.
Despite the short length, we've got a pretty solid selection of Easter eggs here, including one of the biggest and most surprising cameos we've seen so far on The Mandalorian.
1. Mandalorian Battle Circles
This opening segment of the episode, with the many Mandalorians sparring with each other and Grogu dueling with Ragnar, is reminiscent of the Mandalorian camp on the moon of D'Xun in the video game Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. In that camp, you see various Mandalorians sparring just like this, and to be accepted by these folks, the non-Mandalorian player character has to participate in a non-lethal duel with rules set by a Mandalorian--just like Grogu does.
2. Wrist dart launcher
The weapon for that training duel is a wrist dart launcher, a device we first saw on the arm of Boba Fett in the original trilogy that can fire a variety of different kinds of darts, from explovies to poison, though he never actually used it on screen. His dad, Jango Fett, on the other hand, uses it in the Clone Wars series, and we've seen it used a couple times previously on The Mandalorian. The wrist launcher is also a key weapon in the arsenal of the Bounty Hunter class in the online video game Star Wars: The Old Republic--that class uses Mandalorians as the archetype for its weapons and gameplay style.
3. Peaks of Kyrimorut
In the middle of the episode, Bo-Katan casually compares a very tall and narrow mesa to "the peaks of Kyrimorut." Kyrimorut is, or was, a remote mountain fortress on Mandalore. What's particularly wild about this shoutout is that Kyrimorut is a location created by author Karen Traviss in her novel Republic Command: True Colors. Traviss would use or refer to this place in three other novels, all of which are part of the old Expanded Universe and not currently canon. This episode of The Mandalorian is the first mention of Kyrimorut anywhere in Star Wars since Imperial Commando: 501st in 2009, and the first time ever that someone other than Traviss--who has not written for Star Wars since that novel--was doing the mentioning.
4. Baby Yoda's backstory
Since we first saw the Great Jedi Purge in Revenge of the Sith, we've seen Palpatine's Order 66 play out from a number of different angles over the years--including the pilot episode of The Bad Batch, which takes place on that day, and in the video game Jedi: Fallen Order. And now we get a new perspective, that of Grogu as he barely makes it out of the Jedi Temple and off Coruscant.
5. Ahmed Best helps out
But little Grogu didn't save himself. He had help, in the form of the Jedi Master Kelleran Beq, played by former Jar Jar actor Ahmed Best. Weirdly, this character actually originated as the host of the Jedi Temple Challenge game show on YouTube--and now he's canon.
6. Grogu escapes on a Naboo starship, and with the aid of Naboo soldiers
At the end of Grogu and Kelleran's exciting airspeeder chase, they arrive at a landing pad with a space ship and a bunch of soldiers. They die fighting against clone troopers while Kelleran and Grogu fly away. But what's particularly curious about this bit is that the ship and the soldiers are from Naboo. That detail is probably important to the plot somehow--remember that both Padme and Palpatine are from that planet--but we have no clue what it means yet.
7. Ragnar Vizsla
The name of this character, the son of the hulking Paz Vizsla, is a reference to the legendary Viking Ragnar Lothbrok. It's a fitting name because the Mandalorian warrior culture has always been at least partially modeled after the Vikings. Though this is the first time that comparison has been made explicit in-universe.
8. There's always a bigger fish
After Bo-Katan and Din Djarin manage to save both Paz and Ragnar from the clutches of that large flying dinosaur, the Mandalorians manage to knock it into a large lake--where, as we watch from above, a massive fish emerges from the depths and eats the beast like it's nothing. An unnecessarily expensive flourish, you might think, but this bit evokes Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon, and Jar Jar's journey through Naboo's watery core in that bongo in The Phantom Menace.
Twice during that journey they're attacked by a large aquatic monster, and both times they're saved by an even larger aquatic monster eating the one pursuing them--prompting Qui-Gon's memorable "There's always a bigger fish" line. It was impossible for me to not think about that sequence when the flying dino got what was coming to it at the end of this episode of The Mandalorian.
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