The Mandalorian Review: Chapter 10: The Passenger (Season 2 Episode 2)
The Mandalorian Season 2 Episode 2, “Chapter 10: The Passenger,” gets trapped on an icy tundra with a monster.
At this point, it really feels like The Mandalorian has keyed in fairly precisely on the type of show it wants to be. This is a show that, for better or worse, wants to tell these smaller, self-contained stories of adventure. It’s a modest but very attainable goal that the show has set for itself.
That serves the series pretty well with “Chapter 10: The Passenger,” an episode that is at its core an — albeit fun — survival story after Mando agrees to ferry a woman, whose species resembles a frog, and her eggs back to a new planet for them to live. That goes off the rails when they crash beneath the surface on a planet that resembles Hoth.
The main throughline of the episode is taking a look at Mando’s sense of honor and how tightly or loosely he clings to it. One of the savvier moves it makes is invoking “Chapter 6: The Prisoner” multiple times throughout the hour.
It does that first with the X-Wing pilots questioning if he was at the prison, forcing the audience to think back on it and bring it to the forefront of his mind, and again when the Frog Lady (look, that’s what her credit on IMDb is) uses Zero the robot, with an excellent return from Richard Ayoade, to communicate.
Then it becomes a question of why the show is evoking that other episode and that idea solidifies during the end when the pilots not only confront him again but also bring up the actions he took to apprehend his three cohorts. It’s all this idea that he does have this ingrained, which the Frog Lady also confronts him about when he wants to quit.
Mando is someone who ultimately does the right thing even when it is an inconvenience to him or his greater goals. It’s a type that Star Wars is all too familiar with. It’s a riff on the Han Solo archetype: scoundrel with a heart of gold. That’s been built into his character from the beginning but it is particularly astute here.
The other reason to invoke this episode is the way that it turns horrific during the third act. As if it’s not enough to be on a desolate and frozen planet, it’s also infested with many, many spiders with horrible mouths and it is pure nightmare fuel. Both episodes have the same kind of turn to the more unsettling so the viewer is already in that mindset.
To this episode’s credit, it is particularly scary. The darkness of the tunnels they’re running in helps to make the effects of the spiders really work and there’s a real sense of dread with just the sheer number of spiders coming after them. Moreover, it’s not easy at this point to make Baby Yoda feel in actual danger and have that be effective, which it is in this case.
Speaking of which, Baby Yoda continues to be one of the brighter spots of the show, even if his insistence to eat multiple eggs as a comedic beat is deeply troubling.
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.
One thought on “The Mandalorian Review: Chapter 10: The Passenger (Season 2 Episode 2)”
This to me, is the most funny episode in the series so far.
Comments are closed.