Origami Tie Fighter

Deborah Chow, you have restored my love of The Mandalorian. Episode seven, the penultimate chapter of the first season was nothing short of sublime, righting the wrongs of previous episodes by swinging back to the intriguing original plot and bringing in a squad of familiar faces.

If I wasn’t four months late to the party, and, you know, if I was actually part of the Lucasfilm story group, it would be as if Chow, Filoni, Favreau and co had listened to all of my requests from the past three weeks.

Episodes four, five and six were fun Star Wars adventures, but I was beginning to grow frustrated at the lack of narrative development. These were effectively isolated stories.

Right from the outset – in fact, right from the recap – Chow’s episode dives back into the heart of The Mandalorian‘s first season. The Imperial Client is desperate to obtain The Child, having been robbed of the prize after Mando’s change of heart in episode three. Mando and his rescued buddy have been on the run ever since. That is until familiar face Greef Karga returns to screens with a fresh message for Mando and a promise of a team up.

Mando’s motivation is his crimes against the Bounty Hunters’ Guild being pardoned if he is to assist Karga in killing The Client and ousting the Imperial occupation on Navarro. Quite rightly suspecting that a team will be required, Mando recruits the brilliant Cara Dune from episode four, the honourable Kuiil featured in the opening two episodes and his newly obtained Droid companion – a repurposed IG-11, made famous in the climax of episode one.

Finally we have a crew aboard the Razor Crest – an ensemble of the series’ best characters, no less. Not just a bunch of bounty hunting mavericks forced to work together. Mando’s team is fantastic and I only wish we’d managed to assemble the crew earlier in the series; but, of course, it’s better late than never.

Nearly each team member had a role to play in the mission. Mando entered Navarro under pretence as Karga’s prisoner, while Dune was pitched as the assailant who captured the Guild’s most wanted. That way, all three of them could enter the town with the plan to blast their way out.

Kuiil’s mission was to sneak The Child back to the Razor Crest while Mando carted a decoy into town. Intriguingly, IG-11 is the only member of the crew not to have played a role in the mission so far, seemingly awaiting Kuiil’s return to the Razor Crest.

The fact that the Ugnaught never made it back – gunned down in the episode’s climatic conclusion by scout troopers who managed to intercept one of Mando’s messages, subsequently managing to grab The Child – perhaps IG-11 will be the little one’s saviour in the season finale. It would make for quite the turnaround from the season-opener.

With Mando, Dune and Carga seemingly trapped in an impossible position, pinned by countless stormtroopers and a determined Moff Gideon – who most certainly knows how to make an entrance with his ‘origami’ Tie Fighter – and The Child in Imperial hands, it makes for a remarkable cliff-hanger heading into the series finale.

And that’s a position I did not expect we’d find ourselves in after three disjointed weeks. A blockbuster penultimate episode that brought together highlight characters from earlier in the series, picked up the loose thread of The Child’s force sensitivity, and delivering a shocking death, all while leaving our heroes facing unassailable odds.