Sunday 23 June 2024

The Mandalorian Marathon - Chapter 21: The Pirate


We're five episodes into this season and finally coming back to a thread from the first episode. Despite that fact, this is still a strong episode.

The "Pirate King" Gorian Shard launches a full-scale invasion of Greef Karga's town on Navarro, and he's forced to flee with the townspeople. He gets a message out to Carson Teva of the New Republic's Adelphi Rangers, trying to appeal for backup. Carson travels to Coruscant to directly appeal to his superior, who is reluctant to muster a fast response due to Navarro being an independent world. He then locates the Mandalorian covert through R5 and appeals to Din to help his friend.

The first portion of the episode is tense, with Carson trying to get through to his superiors, which includes a meeting with Elia Kane (who suggests using the pirate attack as a way to convince Navarro to join the New Republic). It goes to show that the New Republic's obstructive bureaucracy is probably no different from the Empire's. When he finds the Mandalorian covert, Paz suggests killing him outright to protect the covert's secrecy until Din intervenes. And when Din talks to the rest of the covert about intervening, Paz speaks about how he previously came into conflict with Karga's hunters back in the first season. You think he's going to speak against it, until he talks about how Din and Bo-Katan helped him save his son and offers support.

The second half is largely a battle sequence as the Mandalorians retake the city. Din and Bo-Katan use their craft to deal with Gorian's ship and fighters, while Paz and the Armourer lead the ground forces. When you get down to it, sometimes you just have to have some action. It's also nice to see Karga give the Mandalorians a heroes' welcome, after his previous conflict with them.

We also set up the story for the remainder of the series, as the Armourer tasks Bo-Katan with uniting the other Mandalorians in a bid to reclaim their ancestral homeland (allowing her to remove her helmet in the process).

When all that's resolved, we get a tense final scene as Carson stumbles across a derelict ship. It plays out like a horror movie as he sends in a probe to investigate, learning that Moff Gideon was extracted by Mandalorians. Having watched Rebels, I was reminded of Clan Saxon, a Mandalorian clan who served as Imperial viceroys.

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