- Title: The Mandalorian – Chapter 18: The Mines of Mandalore
- wiki: link
So, maybe don’t have your main bad-ass character be so inept he needs to be saved twice within a half-hour? In some schizophrenic narrative storytelling, we learn our Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu have left the Mandalorian moon of Kalevala without journeying to the planet as promised. Instead, Din picks up the side quest he quickly abandoned to go Mandalore in the first place. Looking for the supposedly important droid part on Tatooine doesn’t keep his interest all that long however, as he takes the first droid Peli Motto (Amy Sedaris) pushes on to him in a segment that’s completely out of place given the sequence of events of the season premiere and completely superfluous to events of this episode where the Mandalorian’s own scanners would easily have sufficed.
The awkwardness of events is obviously to get Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sackhoff) into both episodes. Where she served no real use in the first episode of the season other than a cameo, here she’s called on by Grogu to rescue Din who is captured deep in the Mines of Mandalore (which give the episode its name) by an odd techno-organic creature. After freeing him, the trio continue the tour into the Living Waters where Bo-Katan rescues him again and makes a discovery which may shake the foundations of her understandings and beliefs about Mandalorian customs and mythology.
The episode is notable for putting Din Djarin into situations he constantly needs to be saved from for what is arguably a completely unnecessary quest, the appearance of a mythosaur under the waters of Mandalore, further inconsistencies about just how much Grogu understands about events and communicating to others and is able to accomplish on his own, and the superfluous return to Tatooine which doesn’t fit into events. As to whether or not Din’s journey was successful in the eyes of his cult, or what seeing the mythosaur means for Bo-Katan, we’ll have to wait and see.
