The Mandalorian Review: Chapter 6: The Prisoner (Season 1 Episode 6)
The Mandalorian Season 1 Episode 6, “Chapter 6: The Prisoner,” goes on a heist with old friends.
On its own, “Chapter 6: The Prisoner” might be a perfectly fine episode. It’s serviceable in every way that matters. It’s nicely paced, the action is decent, and you have fun Baby Yoda moments along with excellent cameos. That’s certainly all that it tries to accomplish.
As a piece of this season, however, it is less successful. It runs into the same problem that some episodes have: it feels a bit inessential. It is really just the series making up reasons for Mando to get caught up in some new adventure that inevitably puts Baby Yoda in danger.
This would be fine, in theory, if it felt like these episodes were moving a proverbial ball up the field but every episode begins and ends with them in virtually the same place with no real sense of progression. The show feels particularly stagnant in that way, like it’s holding back from reach some higher or different level than what it’s currently on.
One of the biggest problems is that there’s hardly anything about this that really feels of a piece of Star Wars. Normally, proclaiming that a new Star Wars property doesn’t feel like Star Wars is a bit of a straw man argument, but it’s pretty valid in this case.
There’s not really anything here that’s adding to the world-building or the overall mythos of the Star Wars universe to an extent that warrants its existence. The Mandalorian has the opportunity here to touch on the state of the New Republic and fill in some of the gaps that exist between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, but it actively doesn’t do that here.
Instead, what it opts to be is a pretty standard heist episode, which is enjoyable but nothing any of us haven’t seen before elsewhere.
It’s too generic of a plot to feel worthwhile in any way and that lack of specificity does it no favors. A lot of the frustration here comes in with how little The Mandalorian truly wants to involve itself with its larger universe.
If it’s not going to inform us more about the current happenings of the Star Wars universe, then why set it in a period that we still don’t know much about?
Where much of this episode comes alive, on the other hand, is where a lot of the performances and cameos are concerned. Where Mando is very stoic and one-note, the crew that he finds himself in is quite colorful and delightfully rambunctious. It shows that if The Mandalorian is going to be this, he needs to be paired with strong counterparts.
The standouts are Natalia Tena (Osha from Game of Thrones) as Xi’an, a Twi’lek who has a prior relationship with Mando and an affinity for knives, and Richard Ayoade as Zero, a snarky robot that pilots the ship during the heist. Their performances and characters work extremely well against Mando’s no-nonsense nature.
Xi’an, in particular, represents a kind of grit and muck that we don’t often get to see from Star Wars outside of the cantina scenes from the films. More than that, she has a kind of feral intensity that we rarely, if ever, get to see from any of the characters within this universe, let alone female ones.
Ultimately, “Chapter 6: The Prisoner” is an episode that works more than it doesn’t but that doesn’t say a lot for its overall success.
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.