The Mandalorian S2E8 - Chapter 16

Babu Phrik?

 

Hey Hey??

 

My oldest friend!

 

So glad Gideon didn't get killed off. A good villain to hate that has potential to be much more and Esposito gives an awesome performance as always! Really hope he becomes a bigger presence with more screen time in season 3 than just an episode with cameos in a few episodes

 

Found the theme used for Luke in this episode on Spotify and had it playing while I was playing as Luke in Battlefront II..

 

It was great seeing Luke but man this is the thing that keeps us in this OT loop. It should have been somebody else. Ezra Bridger or Mace any other surviving Jedi.

 

No. He's been trained as one, but never officially recognised. Unless he is knighted, he will never be a Jedi.

Mace Windu is dead, and should stay that way. We've already had one important moment of Anakin's life undermined, I'd quite not like another to be undone.

 

I watched it 3 times already with seeing some episodes before and it works better for me... The Luke bit lines up nicely with his canon appearance on Pilio in BF2. I just wonder, how it goes with Grogu afterwards inbetween Mando and the Sequel Trilogy.

I am actually fan of Luke in sequels, it was suprising and made sense to me, as I am an old fan growing up on old EU and still like Thrawn Trilogy and Dark Empire till this day. But Luke in other EU stories was this rudiculous omnipotent hero, that looked still or almost the same up to his 90s, marrying a 90s foldout redhead and I never liked it, as much as Mara Jade was OK when written by Timothy Zahn, who is excellent writer.

So Luke shutting himself of because he found how the Jedi failed and also seeing himself as doing more harm than good in the end, made sense. And he got redeemed actually, setting up the legend going against the First Order singlehandedly, altough as a force projection and nothing in the ST contradicts him being one of the most powerful Jedi. It’s just that he’s not slicing trough stuff like in Mandalorian which people were expected him to do and were bitter about it?

 

Time has past. Ezra could be a Jedi at this point in the timeline. Maybe a different order of Jedi. Mace being alive doesn’t change anything because Anakin still betrayed him and killed all those people. It was Palps that would have failed to kill Mace. The point is take the story in a new direction in the same universe. It could have been a former inquisitor that turned back to the light side. Kyle Katan Mara Jade. Why expand the universe with Mando and then narrow it by going right back to Luke. How about the hood reveal is some young person we have never met then a 2nd hooded figure walks up it’s Luke and he congratulates his padawan.

 

What was the other moment?

 

"The Dead Speak!"

 

He's a Jedi, albeit only a Padawan, he hasn't been officially knighted.

 

As Gideon says, "assume I know everything". That will be an interesting thing to see. He could easily hold a lot over Din, Bo Katan's and even Cara Dune's heads. I wondering if Din Djarin and the Mandalore will be key in finding out what the Imperial Remanent is up to militarily, and in terms of the cloning experiments (with Grogu's) blood. Possibly Din could be the one to let Luke and the New Republic know which will make sense narratively as Luke eventually went looking for Exegol and the Emperor.

 

Just thinking about this episode, which closes out two seasons...

Dr. Pershing says about the darktroopers, "These are third-generation design. They are no longer suits. The human inside was the final weakness to be solved. They're droids."

It's such an interesting commentary on Din's complicated relationship with himself.

One of the first things we find out about the Mandalorian in the first minutes of the first episode of the show is that he hates droids. And yet one of the first things we find out about him in the second episode is that he sees himself, in a way, as less than human.



He's tending the wound to his flesh with a soldering iron, the same one he uses to fuse the wiring of his armor. The machinery of his armor, if you will.

Grogu comes to try to heal him like he would a person, but Din is having none of it.



Din has been spending a great deal of his life trying to evolve past the human inside the suit. He hates droids, but he is trying to become one, in a way. (There's a metaphor for self-loathing in there somewhere.)

But when Din yields to a compassionate impulse and spares Grogu's life, and then later takes on the responsibility of caring for and protecting him, he slowly but surely becomes less cold, less machinelike. Suddenly Din has friends, which he never seems to have had before. He realizes he is longer than person he was with his old gang...he finds himself mentoring a younger man...he finds himself in a family, albiet a tenuous and temporary clan. IG-11, though a droid, shows him that humanity is a beautiful thing Din too can aspire to.

In season 2 his horizons expand vastly as a person--he learns more about the value of negotiation, that sometimes there a greater good can result from working with people of different beliefs, but most of all he learns to love this little child, and to love him so much that he will do anything, at great cost to himself, to achieve what's best for Grogu.

When Din encounters the darktrooper in this chapter, he's really encountering the Din he might have become--the Din with the human weakness solved, a fighting machine. And though it isn't exactly Din's love and humanity that defeats the darktrooper (because, you know, beskar spear), it is Din's motivation to save the child that keeps him going through the fight.

It's beautiful to me that in some of our final scenes in this chapter, the "human weakness" inside Din's suit is finally exposed--Din's face, weeping. The Child who tried to heal him finally does when he asks his father to remove his helmet so they can say goodbye, so they can bond together as people do.



The droids whose human weakness was evolved out of them to make them indestructible were destroyed, but the man who grew beyond his droidlike qualities became fully human--loving and selfless.

And if I am not mistaken that is exactly the way we define Good in this galaxy far, far away.

That's so Star Wars, guys!

 

I would love to hear their take on it too. And on all the other symbolism and character arcs they've thrown in there!