The Mandalorian Review: Chapter 5: The Gunslinger (Season 1 Episode 5)
The Mandalorian Season 1 Episode 5, “Chapter 5: The Gunslinger,” goes on a hunt with a rookie bounty hunter.
One of the worst things that you can say about “Chapter 5: The Gunslinger” is that it feels woefully unnecessary as both an episode and as a piece of the larger story. Mando goes from beginning to end without any true character growth or getting closer to achieving a greater goal.
It basically needs to be accepted that this is and will continue to be going forward: “Mando goes on an adventure,” repeated again and again throughout every episode. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does leave the episodes feeling a bit inessential on any kind of micro or macro scale.
There’s a sameness here, where you could say the same things it does well in this episode that it has in all of the previous ones.
The action is well-done, the visuals are stunning, and Baby Yoda is adorable. There’s nothing about it that really justifies its existence as to why you’re watching this particular episode.
All of the avenues that it opens in this episode that could be explored in future installments end up getting closed by the end of it, and the only thing that ventures to that category is an obstructed tease that may or may not be Boba Fett.
One of the episode’s biggest saving graces is the target herself, Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen), who establishes herself so wonderfully as a foil with only a manner of minutes to do so. A lot of this goes to Ming-Na Wen’s performance of the character, who’s able to make the antagonism she brings to life in colorful ways.
You immediately buy her as someone that has worked for some of the most dangerous people in the galaxy and is incredibly adept at manipulating other people and getting out of unpleasant situations. Ideally, this is a character that we’d enjoy see pop up again to butt heads with Mando but that is not what happens here.
The decision to kill her during this episode is a bold one and not one that is ultimately successful for the series.
One of the biggest rules for killing characters is that should serve to make the show stronger or send it in new, interesting avenues. Killing off Fennec flies in the face of that because it then leaves you with Toro Calican as the ultimate antagonist of the episode.
This doesn’t work for a number of reasons, but the main one is that Fennec isn’t terribly interesting and is shown, multiple times during the episode, to be a phenomenal idiot. To have him be the one that not only kills Fennec but has to also go up against Mando simply doesn’t work as well as the show would like it to.
The main thing that we keep hoping for with The Mandalorian is that right now the series feels very small in its scope and that it soon starts to at least tease at something a bit larger.
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.