Last week, season 2 of The Mandalorian premiered and Din and the Child continued on their journey to find the Jedi. Their travels took them back to Tatooine, in search of a Mandalorian rumored to be living in the city of Mos Pelgo. It turned out to be a sham, as it was just a man named Cobb Vanth masquerading as a Mandalorian in none other than Boba Fett’s old armor. The Marshal agreed to return the armor to Din in exchange for help defeating a krayt dragon, which the town teamed up with a local village of Tusken Raiders in order to accomplish. Keep reading to find out what happened in episode 2, “Chapter 10: The Passenger.”
We open exactly where the previously episode left off, with Din and the Child speeding across the Tatooine desert. Unfortunately, they’re headed right into a trap. A crew of bandits has set up a hidden rope across a narrow passage and they clothesline them, sending Din, the Child, and their things flying while the speeder bike explodes. One of the scavengers says to “get the Child,” so it’s unclear as to whether this may have been another targeted attack. The ragtag crew, like many others, has underestimated Din’s fighting skills; he picks them off fairly quickly. The last one standing manages to get ahold of the Child, holding a dagger up threateningly. Din Djarin, forever eloquent in his threats, says, “If you put one mark on him, there’s no place you will be able to hide from me.” He manages to strike up a bargain, giving the scavenger his jet pack in exchange for the Child. However, always two steps ahead of his enemies, Din casually proceeds to activate the jet pack remotely and sends the scavenger flying. Whoops.
They’re forced to make the journey back to Mos Eisley on foot, Din carrying the Child and all of their belongings on his back. Upon their return, Din finds Peli Motto playing a game of sabacc against the Killik Dr. Mandible at the cantina. In exchange for contributing 500 credits to his next round, Dr. Mandible agrees to share information with Din about someone that can connect him with a Mandalorian covert.
Din returns to Peli’s hangar, and the contact turns out to be an amphibian creature, unnamed but otherwise referred to as Frog Lady. The contact requests safe passage to Trask in exchange for the information. The bad news? She’s bringing along her eggs, because she will be meeting up with her husband so that he can fertilize them, and that means that they can’t use hyperdrive when they travel — it will kill them. Din isn’t pleased, because traveling fast is the only thing that’s keeping him safe for now, but he doesn’t have much of a choice. Frog Lady assures him that the Mandalorians are indeed there, because her husband has seen them.
After they take off in the Razor Crest, Din struggles to communicate with Frog Lady because he doesn’t speak her language. Meanwhile, the Child, full of … childlike wonder … curiously approaches the canister holding the eggs. Din exits the cockpit to rest, only to find the Child happily slurping away and eating them. Din admonishes him, and they settle down in Din’s quarters for nap time.
Din wakes back up sometime later to an alert beeping from the cockpit. Their travels have been interrupted by two X-wing pilots, who slowed down because the Razor Crest’s transponder isn’t emitting. Din tells them that, because he’s pre-Empire surplus, he isn’t required to run a beacon. They inform him that the sector he’s traveling through is under New Republic jurisdiction, and all craft are required to run a beacon. Thinking he’s off the hook, Din bids them farewell with an awkward, “May the force be with you.” However, they ask for him to send them a ping, because they’re out sweeping for Imperial holdouts. Din fumbles around, making up an excuse, though he eventually gives in. Unfortunately, the pilots then inquire if the Razor Crest was in the proximity of New Republic Correctional Transport Bothan-Five, and Din quickly nopes himself out of that situation.
As the pilots chase Din and his lack of hyperdrive onto the planet below, we see that they’re portrayed by The Mandalorian‘s Dave Filoni and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee of Kim’s Convenience. They banter among themselves they express their doubts in the Razor Crest’s ability to survive the atmosphere of the planet they’ve just entered, and repeatedly ask for Din to stand down and not to make them open fire.
Din manages to escape the pursuit, but at what cost? More damage to his ship, but of course. The Razor Crest just can’t catch a break. After a rough crash landing, Din goes to appraise the ship’s damage and finds the Child once again ruthlessly snacking on Frog Lady’s eggs. “How many did you eat?” he asks, and the Child burps in response.
Shortly after, Din states the ship’s main power drive isn’t responding and the hull has lost its integrity, so they’re going to be stuck there for a little while. Though he has given the Child a container with a meal in it, the Child looks wistfully over at the egg container, clearly craving the tastier snack. Concerned about her eggs, Frog Lady bypasses the droid Zero’s security protocols to access its vocabulator. In English, she tells Din that they can’t wait until the morning, because those eggs are the last brood of her life cycle, her family line will go extinct otherwise. As Din tries to tell her that the deal is off, Frog Lady fires back that she thought that honoring one’s word was a part of the Mandalorian code. Din, annoyed, grabs his tool box and heads outside to assess the ship’s latest damage.
As Din works on the Razor Crest, the Child attempts to get his attention and he realizes that Frog Lady has left the ship. They track her footsteps into a cave and find her lounging in a hot spring with her eggs. Din urges her to get back to the ship, scooping the eggs back into the container as the Child eyes them hungrily. Din scolds him before he can grab another quick snack, and the naughty toddler turns around and eyes a much more appealing meal — the large assortment of eggs that happen to be littering the cave’s floor. Sniffing the air, the Child takes off through the snow and cracks one of the eggs open to eat what appears to be a small spider. The other eggs start to rumble ominously, and even larger white spiders begin t0 hatch out of them. The Child comes running back to Din as the spiders scuttle about in the cave. And, as if the legion of newborn arachnids wasn’t nightmare-inducing enough, a gigantic one comes trashing out from a deeper part of the cavern. Whereas the first episode heavily leaned on the show’s western vibe, this slight horror angle is a fun and welcome addition to the series.
The spiders chase them back to the ship, Din shooting as many as he can along the way. Because it’s clearly “ruin the Razor Crest day,” the army of spiders follows them into the ship, pouring inside and crawling along every surface. They take cover in the cockpit, through Din struggles to get the doors closed as the creatures begin to slip in through the cracks. Frog Lady grabs a blaster and helps to protect the child, while Din toasts the rest of him with his flamethrower. Resigned to the fact that they’ll need to fly the ship as-is, Din starts up the Razor Crest and they begin to take flight, but the giant spider jumps on top and sends the ship crashing back down to the ground. Attacking the cockpit, it smashes its menacing mouth full of razor sharp teeth against the glass.
Shots from outside rain down on the gigantic spider, and it soon slumps over, dead. Din steps out of the ship to find that the two New Republic pilots have returned, and they proceed to kill the remaining spiders crawling around outside of the ship. They tell Din that they ran the tabs on the Razor Crest, and they confirmed that he has an arrest warrant for the abduction of prisoner X-Six-Nine-Eleven. However, onboard security records show that he apprehended three priority culprits from the Wanted Register. He also put own life in harm’s way to try and protect that of Lieutenant Davan from the New Republic Correctional Corps. Technically … he should be under arrest, but these are trying times.
Din casually offers to forego the bounties on the three criminals in exchange for help fusing the hull of the Razor Crest. Not interested in making a deal, one of the pilots reminds him to fix his “antique” ship’s transponder before they exit, leaving Din to make the repairs himself.
The Mandalorian climbs back into his ship, which is now decked out in spiderwebs galore. He informs Frog Lady and the Child that he’s going to fix up the cockpit enough for them to limp to Trask. With repairs as finished as they’re going to get, the Child climbs into Din’s lap as the Razor Crest stumbles and fumbles its way off of the planet.
Din Djarin: Wake me up if someone shoots at us. Or that door gets sucked off its rails. I’m kidding, if that happened, we’d all be dead. Sweet dreams.
The Child looks back at the egg canister hungrily, because all of this excitement has clearly left him hungry. Frog Lady places her hands over the container protectively before she, too, closes her eyes to rest. Turning back around, the Child pulls out an egg that it had been holding and swallows it.
Din’s journey to deliver the Child to the Jedi continues to stretch far ahead of him, as he continues to face obstacles every time he gains a new snippet of information. Though this pacing may feel slow for those looking for the quick plot gratification found in film scripts, the story is refreshing in that the challenges Din faces actually feel realistic. Based on how protective he has grown of the Child, it will be curious to see how he fares when they finally find the Jedi.
Episodes 1 and 2 of season 2 of The Mandalorian are now streaming exclusively on Disney+. Episode 3 will premiere Friday, November 13.
