The Mandalorian Review: Chapter 12: The Siege (Season 2 Episode 4)
The Mandalorian Season 2 Episode 4, “Chapter 12: The Siege,” returns to Navarro to team up with some old allies.
That description makes the episode sound a bit slight and like it’s a lot of the other less meaningful, side episodes of the series, but it kind of is. It’s masquerading as a bigger episode than it is — mainly because it’s going off of the energy of the last episode — but really it’s just another episode of Mando on an adventure.
That’s not necessarily bad, either. That’s what most of the series has been. The cognitive dissonance that comes into play, in this case, is that it feels like we should be building off more of the momentum. It’s hard in one breath to say that we’re going to see Ahsoka Tano soon and then have an episode that’s just going back to basics.
This episode has been likened to a back-door pilot for an eventual Cara Dune spinoff and it’s hard to dispute that assertion. So much of the episode does center around that character, from the action setpieces to the dialogue to Mando himself disappearing for a significant portion of the episode.
That last point really forces us to wonder: why are we watching this? It’s minusculely pushing the wider conflict along and it’s not entirely a bad thing to be spending time with Cara and Greef Karga but so much of this does feel like “been there, done that” territory.
The action is all good and it flows really well but never did this feel like an episode that needed to involve Mando, which is good for Star Wars overall but less so for The Mandalorian itself.
We should address the elephant in the room and acknowledge that the overall feeling towards Gina Carano, who plays Cara, has changed since the last time we saw her character. It is difficult to really root for the character in the same way we did last season when we now know how dangerous the actress’s political and scientific beliefs are in real life.
Of course, Carano and the character she plays are separate, distinct things but it is also something that can’t be ignored, especially when we’re talking about her having a continued role within this series and the franchise at large. That’s a problem when, as we’ve said, so much of this episode features her.
The discomfort is compounded when she’s actually quite good in the role. Carano, for all her faults, does seem to have the character pretty well nailed down at this point and can deliver the necessary action and dialogue with relative ease.
This is a struggle that probably won’t get any easier as the series goes on. The thing that a lot of us would probably want is for the character to eventually get recast but we might just have to deal with this character that we really like being played by someone that we don’t.
None of that dampens the excitement for what’s soon to come when we are finally introduced to Ahsoka Tano on this show and everything that will come from that during the next episode.
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.