‘The Mandalorian’ Season 2 premiere recap: The 5 best moments

The Mandalorian Season 2 premiere has monsters, hijinks, unexpected alliances, and some memorable throwbacks to the Star Wars films.

It’s been a year-long wait for The Mandalorian Season 2 on Disney Plus, but fans have been rewarded with a season opener to remember.

Better put-together than the premiere last year, ‘The Marshal’ combines action, humor, and a distinctly Star Wars atmosphere to deliver a fun romp through everyone’s favorite galaxy, far, far away.

Of course, as excited as fans will be to see Pedro Pascal’s Din Djarin/ Mando, the return of Baby Yoda/ the Child was a huge draw.

While the Child doesn’t have much to do in The Mandalorian Chapter 9, there’s still plenty to enjoy. Here are our five favorite moments from the opening installment of the new season.

The Mandalorian Season 2 premiere recap: The Ambush

One can never accuse Mando of not learning from his mistakes. In the premiere season of the show, Mando was very much a shoot-first-ask-questions-never kinda guy. Well, he’s changed. For one, he has a young charge, the Child, and a new mission—to take the Child back to the Jedi.

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Shooting people isn’t going to help him get the answers he needs—aka, finding a Mandalorian who knows where the Jedi are. Of course, to get to that elusive Mandalorian, Mando needs to speak to some unsavory people.

Gor Koresh (voiced by John Leguizamo and performed by John Rosengrant) is a betting man but he’s also got information about the Mandalorian.

If we know anything about dodgy folk in the Star Wars galaxy, it’s that they can’t be trusted. Koresh ambushes Mando—he wants his armor, and who can blame him when it’s that shiny?

But, as we said, Mando’s learned from his past. He’s better prepared and takes out Koresh’s crew easily—the Child sensibly closes his cradle to avoid seeing his dad murder everyone. Koresh almost gets away but the great thing about Mandalorian suits is the utilities.

Strung up and terrified, Koresh spills the beans in no time—and Mando promises Koresh won’t die by his hand. Turns out the Mandalorian that Mando is searching for is on everyone’s favorite dust bowl of a planet, Tatooine. With the information in hand, Mando keeps his promise to Koresh—he walks away, plunges Koresh into darkness, and leaves him to the not-so-tender mercies of the planet’s wildlife. Brutal, but ever so cool.

The Mandalorian Season 2 premiere recap: Return to Tatooine

Tatooine is legendary in Star Wars—it’s the planet where Anakin Skywalker was discovered, the place Luke Skywalker called home, the last resting place of Darth Maul, and the planet where Rey adopted the name Skywalker. We’ve been to the planet before on the show, in Season 1’s poorly-received ‘The Gunslinger’. Fortunately, this return is much better.

Amy Sedaris’ Peli Motto is back and just as excited to see the Child. Her pit droids are just as useful (read: not useful at all) as they were in The Phantom Menace, which adds to the hilarity of the episode.

Though Motto has little to do here—a waste of a talent like Sedaris in a show that already lacks female characters—she does point Mando to where the elusive Mandalorian could be hiding. A settlement called Mos Pelgo that no longer exists on the map of the planet or in people’s memories. That’s as good a place to start as any.

The Mandalorian perfectly captures the dry desert atmosphere from the films. The look of the settlements and the cantina is a nostalgia trip for every fan.

The Mandalorian Season 2 premiere recap: The Marshal

Mos Pelgo turns out to be real and populated by very suspicious citizens. They’re not used to outsiders and they don’t like Mando’s presence—but they don’t threaten him, at least. That’s a change.

At a cantina with no customers, Mando finally meets the person he’s looking for—at least that’s what he thinks, initially. The man known as the Marshal (Timothy Olyphant) protects the city; he also wears a seriously dinged-up Mandalorian armor that has the distinct green, silver, and red coloring of Boba Fett’s armor. The Marshal is clearly not a Mandalorian, and Mando wants that armor back.

Face to face with Mando, in his shiny Beskar armor, the Marshal doesn’t stand a chance. Fortunately, he’s saved by seismic activity that damages the city. Clearly, Mos Pelgo has more things to worry about, and the Marshal needs Mando’s help to protect the city—in exchange, he will return the armor.

So, who is this Marshal? He was once just a fellow citizen of Mos Pelgo, Cobb Vanth—who Star Wars fans will remember from the book Aftermath. He was celebrating on the night the second Death Star went down. But when the Imperials left, the Mining Collective stepped in to fill the power vacuum, and they were just as brutal.

Vanth escaped the town with a bag full of silicax crystals—not that they did him much good in the desert. When Vanth was rescued by Jawas, he exchanged the crystals for the Mandalorian armor, which he used to save Mos Pelgo from the Collective. He’s been their Marshal ever since and protected them against other threats—all except the Monster.

The Mandalorian Season 2 premiere recap: The Monster

Tatooine is not a forgiving planet—especially not when there’s a krayt dragon on the loose. That’s the monster that’s been terrifying Mos Pelgo, and that’s not the only settlement it’s threatened.

The Tusken Raiders have long been afraid of the dragon—Ben Kenobi imitated one to scare them off from an unconscious Luke way back in A New Hope. But it’s going to take more than screams this time.

Mando has an alliance with the Raiders and, with some difficulty, gets Vanth to agree to one, as well. The Raiders have a history of attacking Mos Pelgo but they’ll leave the people in peace if they work together to take down the dragon.

Easier said than done. The plan is to offer a bantha to the dragon as bait—draw it out and blow it up. But this is a smart dragon—it goes straight for the Raider and ignores the bantha. They’re going to need a bigger plan.

The Raiders are all in but it’s going to take all the citizens of Mos Pelgo to turn the tide in this fight. They take a lot of convincing and the truce is an uneasy one, but Raiders and humans stand side by side to fight the dragon at its cave, ready to blow its belly wide open with well-placed explosives. The dragon doesn’t fall for it.

A lot of luring—and deaths—later, they finally get the dragon far enough outside its cave to use the explosives. It’s still not enough—they end up making the dragon angrier. Now it’s not just eating people, it’s spitting acid at them that dissolves people in a fiery instant. Bad way to go.

Mando and Vanth have to be smart about this—Vanth lures the dragon towards them and an explosive-laden bantha. Mando activates Vanth’s jetpack to send him to safety while the dragon heads for Mando and the bantha, who are swallowed whole. Has this entire mission been an utter failure?

Nope! This was Mando’s plan all along. With the bantha lodged in the dragon’s stomach, Mando escapes the beast, his armor protecting him from the creature’s venom. Once he’s far enough away, he blows the dragon up from the inside.

Vanth bequeaths his armor, Mando takes it along with a chunk of dragon meat, the people of Mos Pelgo return home, and the Tusken Raiders find themselves a krayt dragon pearl. In the distance, a man we believe to be Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) watches the proceedings in silence before walking away.

The Mandalorian Season 2 premiere recap: Favourite Throwbacks

The Easter eggs start early on in The Mandalorian Chapter 9—from the graffiti on the opening planet which includes stormtroopers and a distinctive-looking golden protocol droid.

You can’t have an episode set largely on Tatooine without a host of throwbacks, and there were plenty of them here.

Mando and the Child’s return to Tatooine mirrors many an establishing shot of the planet seen over the years—a Raider on a bantha with a blue sky above punctuated by an incoming ship.

The pit droids were a mainstay of The Phantom Menace, but there’s another nod to the film in Vanth’s speeder—essentially, a repurposed podracer.

And those aren’t the only droids we’ve seen before—Motto’s R5 unit looks suspiciously similar to the one that R2-D2 sabotaged so Luke and Uncle Ben would buy him from the Jawas and reunite him with C-3PO.

Speaking of the Jawas, they still haven’t found a way to sell CZ droids, it seems—they were seen playing with a head during their rescue of Vanth. And that armor is undoubtedly Boba Fett’s—how the Jawas got that out of the Sarlacc pit is anyone’s guess.

As we mentioned, the Tusken Raider’s krayt dragon scream was exactly the same as Kenobi’s from A New Hope. That’s not the only familiar sound effect—Vanth’s guiding system’s lock-on sound is one fans have heard throughout the Star Wars universe.

Finally, the way Mando activates Vanth’s jetpack is similar to how Lando Calrissian accidentally did the same in Return of the Jedi. No Sarlaccs here though.

Final Thoughts: The Mandalorian Season 2 premiere is a solid start

The Mandalorian Chapter 9 was an enjoyable and action-packed start to the season. Olyphant’s Vanth looks like a lived-in character who belongs to the universe—his experience in the fellow Western-inspired Justified holds him in good stead here.

One has to ask, however: was it absolutely necessary to have yet another white man join a universe that is already packed full of white men? The Marshal could easily have been played by someone from a marginalized community.

In fact, having one of the rare, good characters on the show being played by a white man is frustrating—why was Ming-Na Wen’s Fennec Shand not given a flashback and character development like Vanth was?

Despite having a Latin-American lead, the larger cast of characters is still white men, with so few people of color that they’re noticeable when they appear.

Aside from the one scene where Sedaris speaks, only one other female character has a couple of words of dialogue. The show was criticized for having one female character speak in its premiere episode and it has learned little since then.

We know that ‘The Marshal’ doesn’t encompass all the characters we will see this season—Rosario Dawson, Katee Sackhoff, and Sasha Banks are joining the show, with Carl Weathers and Gina Carano returning, though there is significant controversy around some of these actors, as well.

Star Wars is not without its problems, but fans expect the creators to learn from their mistakes. While The Mandalorian Chapter 9 was undoubtedly fun to watch, this season has a long way to go to correct the errors of its past. We hope the show learns as quickly as its protagonist.

What did you think of The Mandalorian Season 2 premiere? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

The Mandalorian Season 2 streams weekly on Disney Plus.