The Mandalorian Review: Chapter 3: The Sin (Season 1 Episode 3)
The Mandalorian Season 1 Episode 3, “Chapter 3: The Sin,” continues to not be terribly interesting while also being wonderfully executed.
The Mandalorian is a bit of a conflicted series. While it can’t be said that it does anything that might be considered to be outside of the box, it’s a thoroughly entertaining romp. Its pace is so small, so minuscule, that by the end you’re left wondering what’s happened and that tends to come up a little short.
At this point, the best thing that can truly be said about the series is that it has gotten us to entirely care about an animatronic baby that we would die for. Is that a feat in and of itself, though? Couldn’t any show do that?
Baby Yoda is amazing and adorable but that’s not really a feather to put in The Mandalorian ‘s cap.
That becomes a difficult thing to reconcile when you start thinking about The Mandalorian‘s reason for existing as a show.
What is this show’s purpose? Three episodes in and it’s entirely clear what the series is doing as a whole. As it stands, it seems most like an action show that uses plot as an excuse to have these sequences, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
That simply means that the story itself doesn’t really matter all that much. Our perception of the show will have to adjust and realize that things will happen in these episodes so that Mando can shoot someone or blow something up.
If the action is where the value of this series comes from, then that will ultimately be okay because that part of the show is exceptional. These scenes where Star Wars becomes a John Wick film works really well in that this a version of that universe that we hardly ever get to see.
Since Star Wars is a story that is so often explicitly told in a Jedi’s point-of-view, the kind of action we typically get is the variety that’s more typical of a samurai movie with swordwork and choreography. What The Mandalorian gives us instead are sequences that are much more brutal and violent where the enemy is vaporized or burned to death.
One of the things that makes it most difficult to get a handle on The Mandalorian is the fact that it’s very uninterested at this point in explaining a lot of the in-world mechanics that it’s operating in. This is most apparent with the Mandalorians that are found in hiding and specifically what the situation there is
Through Star Wars: Rebels, we know that Mandalore was liberated from the Empire and put back under its rightful leadership. The difference between that event on Rebels and now with The Mandalorian should be around eight years, give or take a year.
The question here is what happened with the Mandalorians since that liberation? The tribe that Mando is with seems to be in hiding and an unknown element to the rest of the population on the planet. A possible key comes from the fact that these Mandalorians operate under a code where they’re not to take their helmet off.
Ignoring the fact that this is an excuse for the show to put off showing us Mando’s face — which, quite frankly, is a dumb choice — it’s also contradictory to how that race has been shown in the past. Particularly in The Clone Wars and Rebels, the Mandalorians are shown more often than not without their helmets on than not.
It’s possible that this a tribe with its own set of values separate from Mandalore at large and that they are, in fact, on the run from their own body of government. The fact that this episode and the premiere have dwelled so heavily on the existence of the Mandalorians without actually telling us anything about their status quo has to be a minor failure on the show’s part.
Let’s talk about Baby Yoda for a little more.
As the name might suggest (and that we still don’t really know what to call him yet), it has been widely theorized that Baby Yoda is a clone of the deceased Jedi master. While there’s still no evidence of that, there is a small clue that might point to something more concrete.
When Mando takes Baby Yoda back from the Empire, the doctor that is doing work on him is wearing a piece of clothing with a Kaminoan symbol on it. For those that don’t remember, Kamino was the race that engineered and cloned the warriors that were used as the army for the Republic during the Clone Wars.
To put it simply, the Kaminoans were really into cloning. While this doctor doesn’t look at all like those cloners, it is possible that he learned some of their methods and it’s a detail that feels too purposeful to be coincidental.
That makes it all the more unsettling within the show because this yet another mystery that the show is setting up, but The Mandalorian doesn’t feel like all that interested in explaining itself.
What did you think of this episode of The Mandalorian? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Critic Rating:
User Rating:
The Mandalorian airs Fridays on Disney+.
Follow us on Twitter and on 
Instagram!
Want more from Tell-Tale TV? Subscribe to our newsletter here!
Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.