Sure, Baby Yoda looks cute, but the adorable Star Wars pistachio threw a scare into our heroes this week when he unleashed a choke hold on muscular Cara Dune after mistaking her arm wrestling competition with The Mandalorian as an actual fight.
He is no longer the curious tike watching them brawl in the street while sipping his bone broth. Maybe baby has seen just a little too much violence since being on the run, and he decides to put an end to Gina Carano‘s character Vader-style before Mando distracts him with an armored hug.
The action comes in the middle of director Deborah Chow‘s Chapter 7, titled The Reckoning, after Pedro Pascal‘s Mando has gone back to recruit the former Rebel shock trooper to join him as he returns to Navarro at the invitation of Greef Carga to settle accounts by wiping out the Imperials who are still sending emissaries to chase him and babyface around the galaxy. The plan: bring the child as bait, kill the client as his stormtrooper entourage, and all will be square with the bounty hunter guild. “I await your arrival with optimism,” said Carga, played by Carl Weathers.
It’s the best offer Mando has gotten in a while, but he doesn’t trust it. Recruiting Cara Dune to accompany him tilts the odds in his favor. She’s initially reluctant to come out of hiding, but when she hears the target is an Imperial, she’s ready to throw down. “I’m in,” she says instantly. But they need another — a babysitter, because violent raids on a gang of disgraced soldiers is no place for a baby.
Mando goes back to the only other being he trusts the Ugnaut Kuiil (voiced by Nick Nolte), who has refurbished the fallen assassin droid IG-11 (voiced by Taika Waititi) into a kind of rustic butler. The droid-averse Mando can barely stand to be around the robot, let alone accept tea from it.
“Is it still a hunter?” Mando asks.
“No,” the pig-like alien said. “But it will protect.”
Kuiil tries to reason with the masked hero: Droids aren’t good or bad, but rather “neutral reflections of those who imprint them.” As he explains his process in rehabilitating and reprogramming the droid, using patience and “affirmation,” Kuiil actually ends up giving Mando some pretty good parenting advice. Kuiil agrees to accompany Mando and Dune back to Navarro, guarding the child while they undertake their raid.
He reveals that he was once an “indentured servant” of the Empire, and he will accept no payment for this help. He is doing it only “to protect the child from Imperial slavery.”
Aboard the Razor Crest, things take a bad turn. Baby mistakes Dune and Mando’s sport for an attack, and he closes off her air passage with a wave of his tridactyl claw. Even the unshakable Kuiil is freaked, recalling Mando’s story about how the baby had lifted the Mudhorn beast using apparent mystical powers. Kuiil said he heard tell of such abilities when he was with the Empire, which makes Dune, an AWOL Rebel, distrustful of him.
She only relents after the alien recounts the agony he experienced as a slave, and by the wound is too deep to heal.
Kuiil, Mando, Baby Yoda, and Cara Dune rendezvous with Greef Carga and his crew.