The Mandalorian is back this week with movie spoofs, Baby Yoda antics, and more in “The Passenger.” I know we could all use a break from the world this week. Let’s jump in the Razorcrest and go to a galaxy far, far away and talk The Mandalorian here on Fangirlish.
Movie Spoofs
One thing that Star Wars has historically done well is function intertextually. It’s an original work that draws from other source material while simultaneously telling its own story. It wasn’t surprising to me to see some nods to Alien, not only in the stylizing of Peli Motto’s character (Amy Sedaris) in the fashion of Ripley (as I mentioned last year), but it was so fun to watch Mando, Baby Yoda, and the Frog Lady (Misty Rosas) enter a cave that’s a hybrid of the wampa’s cave on Hoth and the cave on LV-426 where the Nostromo crew finds the Xenomorph eggs. When they all hatched, I yelled at the TV, “OH NO! BABY YODA’S GOING TO GET ATTACKED BY A BUNCH OF FACEHUGGERS!”
I wasn’t entirely wrong.
The spider/facehugger hybrids are GROSS. I’m not arachnophobic by any means, but it gave me the creeps to see just the sheer number of them. The chase scene conjured up not only images of Alien, but of its sequel, Aliens, which is a bit different from its predecessor. We aren’t just dealing with one critter here; we’ve got multiples. This intertextual referencing is commonplace in the Star Wars universe, so I won’t be surprised when we see things like this again later in the season.
Baby Yoda Antics
The Child is proving to be quite the handful. No surprise there, but my goodness, Mando needs to put a leash on the kid. Even so, it’s quite fun to watch Baby Yoda get up to no good. I guess he learned a lot from his Space Dad at the beginning of the episode (that stunt with the jetpack is both hilarious and terrible).
And More
While we’re just warming up with season two of The Mandalorian, “The Passenger” feels a lot like some of the earlier episodes last season. We have Mando and Baby Yoda traveling through space, doing episodic missions. While yes, this episode is slightly different, as the Frog Lady has some intel about other Mandalorians and Mando dropping her off is part of that larger quest to find other Mandalorians, “The Passenger” still felt episodic to me. I’m curious to see if we’ll get a few more episodes like this before the real action picks up or if we’ll really be picking up speed next episode.
