‘The Mandalorian’ Chapter 11 Recap: Star Wars Is Better Down Where It’s Wetter

What would you do for family? Would you uproot your entire life for them? Would you dive headfirst into danger to help them? Would you respect their more intense religious beliefs? Would you seek vengeance on their behalf? Would you give up your life? The Mandalorian gets into all that in Chapter 11, an installment appropriately titled “The Heiress.”

For a show that started out about a completely isolated bounty hunter, The Mandalorian is coming into its own as a dissection of the role family plays in a galaxy far, far away—I mean, family beyond the Skywalker lineage, that is. Lord knows family is not new territory for this franchise! But Mando’s kind of family, one we make rather than being connected by blood (and midi-chlorians)? That’s pretty new.

Last week ended with a de facto family unit—Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), Frog Lady (Misty Rosas), Baby Yoda (our hopes and dreams), and Frog Lady’s egg tank (not snacks!)—setting a course for the estuary moon of Trask after a frightening skirmish with some spiders. Chapter 11, written by Jon Favreau and directed by Bryce Dallas Howard, opens with our cast reaching their destination and being shaken from slumber by a rocky re-entry. Of course the guidance system has been busted to bits and the Razor Crest has to land manually. Nothing is ever easy for our lead! That’s the way television works, and Din Djarin really should’ve thought about that before taking on this starring role.

After a bit of teamwork and a lot of external damage, the Razor Crest finally reaches the docks—and then promptly plops over into the water. It’s a hilarious bit of physical comedy from the spaceship, punctuated by an A+ sigh and head shake from a Mon Calamari dock worker that is probably my new fave reaction GIF.

Djarin and his passengers are fished out of the brink. Djarin asks the dock worker if he can fix the Razor crest, to which the dock worker says—and remember this—”Nah.” He can get it to fly but, woof, the Razor Crest is more full of holes than [insert your least favorite Star Wars story here]’s plot. This dock worker is up front about his capabilities! But Din doesn’t hear this, maybe because he’s distracted by the most beautiful sight of the entire episode: Frog Lady’s reunion with Frog Gentleman (John Cameron)! Let Disney know that we riot if these two don’t get a family show (Frog in the Family? Frogily Matters? The Froggy Bunch?). But Mando isn’t the only person keeping their eyes peeled on the docks. A mystery woman played by Mercedes Varnado (a.k.a. Sasha Banks) has her eyes trained on Mando. More on her in a bit.

As promised, Frog Gentleman directs Djarin to a nearby inn where he can buy intel—and some chowder for Baby Yoda. Honestly, after last week where it was heavily implied that the little guy’s going hungry, every episode of The Mandalorian needs to lay out Din Djarin’s meal plan for Baby Yoda. We just want to know he’s eating well! Baby Yoda’s reaction to his bowl of chowder is the same as mine: skepticism. Rightfully so, as there’s a damn facehugger in his bowl! I’d rather eat clams!

Din’s Mon Cal server does as promised, though, and sets him up with a Quarren fisherman who knows where to find the mysterious Mandalorians.

Cut to: Star Wars on the high seas! It’s actually wild that we’re 43 years into this franchise and there are still settings we’ve yet to see, like this one. It’s Star Wars by way of Seattle and more Herman Melville than Joseph Campbell, and it’s fantastic. It’s also yet another reminder of the budget of this show, and how we’ve literally never seen a sci-fi TV show that looks like this before. It makes me realize that so many of those shows, the Star Trek series and Battlestar Galactica, take place primarily on spaceships party because it cuts down the cost of building sets and shooting on location. The Mandalorian, however, just goes everywhere. Not only that, it fills the screen with aliens, in this case an entire crew of squid-faced Quarren sailors. It’s just astonishing.

Anyway—the Quarren are assholes. They stop to feed a sea beast called a mamacore and immediately shove Baby Yoda’s pod into the water. He’s swiftly gobbled up by the creature and Din blasts into action—and then the Quarren slam a metal grate down on top of him, trapping him in the water. Turns out, they just wanted his beskar armor! Seriously, it’s like Din Djarin is flying around the galaxy wearing a suit made out of a million dollars cash and the newest Jordans on his feet. Also, like, that Mon Cal waiter totally set him up, right? I hope Din didn’t leave more than a 20% tip! Seriously, waiters are underpaid and deserve fair wages even if they are going to set you up on a murder cruise.

But Din Djarin has no reason to fear because the Quarren actually did exactly what he wanted them to do: they led him to the Mandalorians!

A trio of them jetpack down and quickly take out the entire crew, and then free Din and rescue Baby Yoda on top of that. What a family reunion! Let’s make some introductions. These three are the previously seen Sasha Banks, playing Koska Reeves (and not Sabine Wren, sadly); Simon Kassianides playing Axe Woves; and—big deal alert!—sci-fi legend Katee Sackhoff as the fan favorite Mandalorian leader and the episode’s titular heiress, Bo-Katan Kryze.

If you haven’t watched Star Wars: The Clone Wars or Star Wars Rebels yet, Bo-Katan is a recurring character who undergoes a serious storyarc across the two shows. She started as a trooper in the Death Watch splinter cell and evolved into the noble ruler of Mandalore, challenging not only the Death Watch but Darth Maul and the Empire. She’s a major deal, and she was the last known owner of the Darksaber, the black lightsaber that we saw Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito) carrying in the Season 1 finale.

The puzzle pieces are falling into place! This is when another major puzzle piece locks in, as this trio unlocks their helmets.

At this point, “Where did you get that armor?” is close to becoming Mando’s new catch phrase. He believes that true Mandalorians never take off their helmet and he is fully gagged by this reveal. That’s when Bo-Katan reacts with a groan, similar to when you find out that one of your cousins has gone into the religious deep-end and now avoids using pens and gives all their money to a spray-tanned “messiah” on Facebook. Our hero Din Djarin is part of the Children of the Watch, an extremist religious cult that wants to turn back the clock on Mandalorian culture a few thousand years.

I! Have! Been! Waiting! For! This! Moment! For everyone that’s watched all the cartoons, the whole “This is the way” stuff was a major head-scratcher in Season 1 (albeit a gift to every single journalist in need of quick blurb copy). Mandalorians didn’t have a “way” and they always took off their helmets. Sabine Wren wouldn’t spend all that money on hair dye if she couldn’t show it off, and that’s how we knew Bo-Katan wore that techno headband. Sidenote: give it up to Katee Sackhoff’s wig in this episode!

Din doesn’t like this. His family reunion went pear shaped and he blasts off to pout elsewhere. He doesn’t realize that you can’t escape this show’s theme, and the brother (re: family) of one of those dead Quarren sailors shows up to get revenge. Fortunately for Djarin, Bo-Katan and her crew don’t give up on family. They save him and sit down for a drink with a main course of exposition. Trask is a black market planet filled with Mandalorian weapons—weapons that the Empire is buying up. Bo-Katan wants all the weapons back so that she can return to Mandalore and restore order to the cursed world. Step one will be to board an Imperial freighter that’s taking off and ransack it. She needs Mando’s help and, to make the deal sweet for him, she even knows where to find a Jedi.

Before taking off, Djarin leaves Baby Yoda with the frog couple, which is like dropping a baby fox off at the hen house and telling him to “mind your manners.” When Baby Yoda peers into the egg tank, he watches one of the fertilized eggs hatch. He looks so happy—but he also doesn’t not look hungry.

Now it’s time for a good ol’ heist! The Mandalorian quartet rockets onto the ship and immediately get to work executing a few railing kills and a lot of stormtroopers. Let this be a lesson, Din: when someone hires you to take out just a squad of stormtroopers, you are always going to be going up against an army of stormtroopers. This keeps happening to you!

We all know you can’t have a bunch of cannon fodder troopers without some Imperial officers—and this is how Bosch becomes Star Wars canon. Yeah, Titus Welliver himself, Lost’s Man in Black, is an Imperial officer. It’s absolute perfection. Knowing that his ship’s about to be looted, he orders his crew to book it for the outer atmosphere and into hyperspace.

Meanwhile, another officer—played by longtime Conan O’Brien writer Kevin Dorff, a guy you have seen on at least one of your favorite comedy shows—has a squad holed up in the cargo hold ready to blast the invaders to bits. But as soon as the Mandalorians arrive on the scene, Officer Dorff traps them between two doors—right in the cargo control room. The timing of this sequence, the way Welliver’s face drops when he hears where this dumb dumb locked his prey, and the smash cut to all of the Imperials being sucked out of the opened cargo bay door… it’s perfect.

Also this entire sequence made me realize that if Marc Evan Jackson isn’t cast as an Imperial officer before The Mandalorian is through, there is no cosmic justice.

Now Bo-Katan has control of the cargo hold and all the weapons. Mission done, right? Wrong! Din Djarin, you know the terms of the deal are always gonna change! She doesn’t just want the weapons. She wants the freighter, too. And when Djarin complains about it, she stares him deadass in the eyes and says, “This is the way.” Ice cold!

As the Mandos begin phase two of their takeover, Moff Gideon enters the Imperial Zoom to tell Titus Welliver that it’s over. Done. No chance of recovery. Long live the Empire, because your lives are cut short. Titus shoots his crew and begins a nosedive into the water. But our Mandos, they—specifically Din Djarin, because he’s gonna do his job even if you screw him over—overcome even more stormtroopers and bust into the cockpit. While the rest of her team tries to pull the freighter out of its descent, Bo-Katan whips a knife at Titus’ throat and demands to know if Moff Gideon has the Darksaber. But Bosch knows what’s up. He knows Moff Gideon, the guy that wasted his own troops last season, isn’t gonna have mercy on him. Imperial Officer Titus “Bosch” Welliver clenches his jaw and ignites some sorta electro-lockjaw suicide device, taking all his tea with him.

But hey—at least they got the weapons and the freighter! Plus, Bo-Katan can be 99% sure that Gideon has her saber. And, because Bo-Katan is a beloved hero from the cartoons and can’t be left looking like a total jerk, she comes through on her end of the bargain and tells Mando where to find a Jedi.

She’s on the forest planet of Corvus in the city of Calodan, and her name is Ahsoka Tano. This is it, folks. Shit’s about to get legendary.

Din picks up Baby Yoda from the frog house, where he is thankfully just playing with the frog baby, and returns to the dock. There he finds the Razor Crest looking… uh, almost exactly how he left it. He is somehow shocked that a thousand credits couldn’t restore his ship to its pristine, Naboo-y chromium glory! The dock worker told you “nah,” dude! Lower your expectations to meet reality! But at least the Razor Crest can fly—and, uh, Din will never run out of nets or ropes again? After one last skirmish with a facehugger, father and son blast off towards the must-watch Star Wars event of 2020: Din Djarin meets Ahsoka Tano.

This is the way!

Stream The Mandalorian on Disney+