The Mandalorian Review: Chapter Two (Season 1 Episode 2)
The Mandalorian Season 1 Episode 2, “Chapter Two,” slows down the plot to spend time with a baby and fight Jawas.
“Chapter Two” is a mass of contradictions, a collection of things that work when it shouldn’t and that’s really the big thing about it. The Mandalorian works almost in spite of itself. It has these individual parts that maybe shouldn’t work as well as it does but manages to anyway.
Ultimately, this is an episode that you could explain in a manner of seconds and get across that it does in the span of a little over a half-hour long. In fact, a different episode would have this be a small bumper, perhaps taking place over the first few minutes.
“Chapter Two” drags that out for its entirety and it’s thoroughly entertaining all the way through, but you get to the end and ask yourself what the point of it is, and the answer to that might not be so clear.
In the moment, it does everything well. It feels brisk, efficient, and exhilarating, never bothering to ask yourself what it’s building to. The rub is that it isn’t actually building to anything at all. It’s almost as if it’s killing for time, which would be insane for the second episode of a series to do.
Again, however, the episode is able to function really nicely in spite of that, even if it does feel like it could have been cut down severely and added onto the next episode. If nothing else, it delivers fantastic action sequences and that’s practically half the reason it exists in the first place.
There’s an element of this that feels like it is meant to be something like The Clone Wars, in either of its iterations, where it can be this small concise animated adventure that allows you time to spend with that particular character before it moves onto the bigger conflict in that arc.
In fact, some of this might even work better if it was animated. That’s partly due to how freer and more grandiose these stunts and action moments might work as a cartoon, but there’s also how it could likely help with how the titular character never takes his helmet off.
Pedro Pascal’s voice for that character is still really solid but we’re missing something when we can’t see his face at all — and this has nothing at all to do with how handsome Pascal is (mostly). The Mandalorian is lacking the ability to emote and really see what that character might be thinking or feeling at any moment.
It’s part of the reason why the eye-slits and mouth are uncovered on superhero shows because we need that glimpse into their interiority. Without it, they’re, at best, a canvass for us to project onto and, at worst, an impenetrable wall.
One of the strongest points of the episode can be found in no other place than the baby, whose true nature is still unclear but has some sort of force sensitivity and eats alien frogs. Regardless of what they actually are, they are some of the most entertaining bits of the episode.
The use of the animatronic practical effects for the baby gives it a really nice lived-in feel so that when the baby gets up and bothers the Mandalorian, it feels like an actual presence and makes it that much cuter. There’s no way around that; the baby is cute, and we’ll revolt if anything bad happens to them.
What did you think of this episode of The Mandalorian? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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The Mandalorian airs Fridays on Disney+.
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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.