The Mandalorian Review: Chapter Eight: Redemption (Season 1 Episode 8)
The Mandalorian Season 1 Episode 8, “Chapter Eight: Redemption,” gets involved in a standoff while we learn more about Mando’s past as a Mandalorian.
While chunks of this first season have been a bit imperfect and aimless, it would be difficult to claim that it has been unsuccessful or unenjoyable. Even when the episode itself may not have been all that great, it was still fun.
That may not be the most important or substantial thing you can say here, but it is a noteworthy point.
Being fun is neither an indictment nor something that absolves, but it should always be noted that making anything fun is far from easy. Again, that doesn’t make it bad or good; just simply what it is. In truth, there are far worse things something can be than imperfect but fun.
At least this is a good ending, unlike other Star Wars properties we could mention. As a pivot from this first season to the next, it’s particularly well done. At the same time, it does a good job of bringing up the lore that has been set up and either ignored or not addressed by the previous episodes this season.
The most interesting is Mando and his connection as a Mandalorian. We have gone past the notion of Mandalorians being a firmly set race of warriors and have now gotten into the idea that being one is more of a state of mind. It’s the closest that Star Wars has gotten to a kind of religion, outside of the Force.
Being a Mandalorian is a creed, as Mando puts it at one point, and that opens up some rather interesting avenues for the universe to explore.
It does what “The Last Jedi” did for the Force in that it democratizes it. No longer do you have to be of a specific bloodline or these people born to a world. If you have the right spirit, then you can have an identity in it, too.
The episode also gets more into the fate of Mandalore and allusions to what happened to it since the time that Bo-Katan Kryze rose to power on Star Wars: Rebels. Something called the “Night of a Thousand Tears” is mentioned during the episode, an event that heavily implies that the Mandalore we remember may be no more.
Another interesting revelation is that Cara Dune originally hailed from Alderaan, which was obliterated by the Death Star during Star Wars: A New Hope. It helps to explain her particular kind of aimlessness since the New Republic is not fighting the Imperials any longer.
Her planet is gone, she has no home, and it’s not a stretch to say that since the destruction she has taken up arms against the Empire out of revenge. Without that single-minded goal of crashing onto worlds and hunting down an enemy, she doesn’t have much of a purpose anymore.
Perhaps the most interesting part of this episode doesn’t come until its final moments, which is no slight against the rest of the episode because it is quite good. This comes in the form of Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito), who cuts through a crashed TIE fighter with nothing other than a Dark Saber.
The Dark Saber has a long history, but to make it simple: the Dark Saber was the symbol of an important house on Mandalore until the Jedi fought them and took it.
Eventually, the Dark Saber came back to Mandalore — once on Clone Wars and again on Rebels — where it returned to Bo-Katan Kryze and became the rallying cry of Mandalore’s uprising under her leadership.
This further cements on Mandalore’s ultimate fate because if Gideon now possesses the Dark Saber, then that means it was probably pried violently from Bo-Katan and that bodes unwell for the rest of that civilization.
Beyond the practical implications of the Dark Saber, it existing on this show is nothing less than completely cool.
It’s one of those things that looks great on a storyboard or animated, but you’re not quite sure how it’ll look in live-action. The good news is that it still looks incredible and distinct enough from how we recognize live-action versions of lightsabers.
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.