‘The Mandalorian’ Chapter 4 Recap: She Sells Sanctuary

After a stunning second episode that promised untold potential in Disney+‘s much-lauded, instantly meme-worthy The Mandalorian, it has immediately demonstrated a scary and precipitous decline. While last week’s installment could maybe be forgiven as more table-setting of a complicated lore balanced at the junction of at least four established mythologies, “Sanctuary” really has no excuse to be as bad as it is. Not only is it a cheap knock-off of a couple 1978 episodes of Battlestar Galactica (“The Lone Warrior” and “The Magnificent Warriors”), it’s an even cheaper knock-off of The Seven Samurai (with only two samurai), meaning that a series that once seemed to be heading towards noble imitation of the work of Sergio Leone and Kazuo Koike is now headed towards the less noble imitation of Glen Larson. For all the millions spent on this series, “Sanctuary” has all the hallmarks of a forty-year old television series on a budget with a screenplay by Jon Favreau that’s unintentionally hilarious and direction by Bryce Dallas Howard long on Baby Yoda reaction shots that are, alas, also unintentionally hilarious.

Worse than that, the focus on the infant puppet has the same effect as the focus on chimpanzee Bear in another Glen Larson product, BJ and the Bear which, like Battlestar Galactica, pillaged openly from western plots mostly dealing with our heroes getting involved in fighting some kind of crime at the request of beautiful young women. The beautiful young woman in “Sanctuary” is Omera (Julia Jones), a widow with a precious moppet who, as the episode opens, we see hiding from a group of fearsome aliens looking to [checks notes] steal blue shrimp from her village. Cut to Mando, stoically piloting his ship and telling adorable Baby Yoda to stop pushing buttons. But he won’t! What an adorable little ragamuffin, you guys. Later, Baby Yoda will waddle, will make friends with children, will put another frog in his mouth, the usual adorable stuff that has already made it the hottest gift this Christmas season. What Baby Yoda will not do is convince you at any moment that he has any kind of feelings at all for the Mandalorian because Baby Yoda does not have any kind of emotive power beyond ear wiggles and the Kuleshov Effect. Gizmo from Gremlins worked because Joe Dante is a genius. It’s a high bar.

When Omera tells The Mandalorian that the little thing will be “heartbroken” if it’s left behind, it lands as funny. It’s also funny that Omera is presented as a love interest to a mercenary who has taken all of her village’s money and best hut and refuses to take off his helmet in her presence. In terms of character-based romance, we’re a long, long way from the scenes inside the Millennium Falcon on that asteroid with Han chasing Leia around. I’m not suggesting that it’s impossible Omera would find the Mandalorian irresistible, just highly improbable and also the sort of thing that dangerously deflates Mando’s mystique. He’s a foundling of a ferocious warrior race transplanted now into an awkwardly-handled romantic triangle between an embarrassing character type and, on the other side, a warrior woman, Cara Dune, played by real-life fighter Gina Carano. Cara mentions being a rebel shock trooper during the Battle of Endor, which is good fan-pleasing backstory until it’s revealed that the baddies menacing Omera’s village have an AT-ST walker and Cara expresses skepticism that she and Mando can defeat it. Cara has witnessed a sloth of stick-wielding teddy bears absolutely decimate a bunch of AT-ST walkers, but she and the Mandalorian and a band of plucky farmers have no chance?

The tension of the piece, in other words, is extremely suspect. The character relationships are suspect as well: hastily sketched and poorly executed. I did like the little tidbit that the Mandalorian is only Mandalorian by dint of his actions and his armor, and that this new tradition of never removing your helmet maybe emerged from the necessity of a decimated race wanting to rebuild itself through rituals and the adoption of “foundlings.” The rest of it is essentially garbage as “Sanctuary” tries desperately to shoehorn in the development of three meaningful relationships in there among a couple of ridiculous training montages and a couple of terrible action sequences that make no sense in the planning and also no sense in the playing out. Everything hinges, you see, on the AT-ST walker walking into the shrimp paddy. It doesn’t make sense why it would and then it doesn’t make sense why it wouldn’t. In the interests of completion, I suppose, it also doesn’t make sense when it does. “Sanctuary” is a disaster. We’re at the halfway mark of the first season and already in a death spiral. Let’s see if the last four episodes figure out a way to pull it out.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Stream The Mandalorian Chapter 4 on Disney Plus