The finale of The Mandalorian's inaugural season proved to be a massive Pandora's Box
of lore, paving the way for all the future conflict to define Mando's return in the second
season.
Let's take a look at how much bigger Mando's story has become and what it will mean for
the next hotly-anticipated season, whenever it arrives.
Within the action-packed shell of The Mandalorian chapter 8, a rich, succulent nugget of characterization
for Mando was slowly revealed.
His brush with death gave us the first opportunity we've ever had to actually see Pedro Pascal
in his role as the Mandalorian, when IG-11 removes his helmet to save his life under
the amusingly convenient technicality that the droid isn't a living being which means
Mando wouldn't wound his honor by revealing his face to him.
"So, what happens if you take that thing off?
They come after you and kill you?"
"No. you just can't ever put it back on again."
It's a deeply humanizing moment for our hero whose full name has now been spoken on-screen
to show his face in his most desperate moment, visibly frightened and lost like any other
person in the face of death.
Additionally, it's particularly special because IG-11 came to represent a mirror for Mando
and the kind of man he used to be.
After a little help shaking off the grim reaper, Mando had bestowed upon him an official signet
to represent his complete identity within the Mandalorian creed, and finally got a slick
jetpack of his very own.
Being of no traditional Mandalorian clan himself, he has become his own collective unit with
the Child a.k.a. Baby Yoda as a Clan of Two, and was given his mission: return the Child
to where it belongs.
That said, it's become painfully clear that, if the Child belongs anywhere, it's with Mando
but again, that's the overarching emotional journey we're going on with our favorite chrome-domed
hero as he continues fully realizing that.
Underneath his Mandalorian armor, the character fans have fallen in love with over the course
of the series' first season is named Din Djarin.
Mando's canonical name snuck out into the public eye some weeks ago, so you may have
already heard it if you were paying attention, but at the end of the day, his true moniker
isn't of any terrible consequence or meant to be a forbidden secret.
The importance in revealing his name now on The Mandalorian chapter 8 is both to underline
just how dangerous Moff Gideon is, and also to compound the humanization of Mando's character
that occurs within the episode.
Nobody hanging out with him on-screen needs to call him by his name, but we should hear
it in this particular episode's context, after we've learned many of this man's deepest truths
and see him at his lowest.
Moff Gideon likely knows very little about Mando as a person and only knows his name
because it's on an official governmental list on Mandalore, but Moff and everything he represents
makes for the perfect kind of pre-packaged Instant Villain for our helmeted hero.
"You may think you have some idea what you are in possession of, but you do not."
Moff is directly representative of the Mandalorians' galactic genocide and the society that robbed
pre-Mandalorian Din Djarin of his original family, which we have finally gotten to witness
in its totality, and that's before we even get into the threat the governor represents
to the Child.
Truly, Moff Gideon is the spectre shadowing Mando's entire existence as a person consistently
robbed of a permanent home and family.
It's perfect narrative poetry: this is the thing and person from which Mando must defend
his new, tiny clan and we'd say he's doing a pretty good job of pulling it off.
On the season 1 finale of The Mandalorian, Moff Gideon emerges from his wrecked TIE fighter
and reveals the real twist by holding the mythical Darksaber.
That sure was a last-second lore drop, wasn't it?
For those unfamiliar, the Darksaber is an ancient lightsaber dating back over a millennium.
The handmade weapon of the first Mandalorian inducted into the Jedi Order, the Darksaber
was stolen in the midst of the Old Republic's slow, war-ridden demise and then returned
to Mandalore.
It stayed there for centuries to become a generational token passed down to descendants
of the Viszla clan that once ruled the home planet.
Very, very long story short: When the Empire fell, the Darksaber was in the possession
of a Mandalorian woman named Bo-Katan, leader of the pro-Republic Mandalorian forces.
However, that's where the trail ends just before the Battle of Yavin and the official
fall of the Empire, somewhere between eight and 10 years prior to this episode of The
Mandalorian.
Bo-Katan obviously no longer possesses the Darksaber, and we can only assume she would
give it up over her dead body.
Ominous, huh?
It's a curious turn for the Star Wars franchise to pass the lore baton from an animated series
back to a live-action one in such a big way, and onto such an utterly blank page, too.
This is doubly true when you consider that animated series like The Clone Wars and Rebels
were primarily aimed at children and The Mandalorian really isn't.
When the Empire fell, Mandalore was in a state of civil war.
No further canonical information exists, so The Mandalorian is gleefully seeking to fill
those pages up on its own terms.
This is no small side story anymore; the show will enter a new phase in its second season
as a full-throated, major piece of canon thanks to the Darksaber reveal.
If Bo-Katan is indeed dead and the Darksaber has been stolen from its people, what's the
political state of Mandalore, post-Empire?
The Republic-led forces seemed to be on the ascent along with the rest of the Rebellion,
but the heart of the conflict for the Mandalorians in the past several canonical decades was
whether or not to become more pacifist and relinquish martial culture.
How much does that matter to the plot of The Mandalorian?
And how in blazes did an Imperial Remnant governor get ahold of the MacGuffin that the
Darksaber represents?
We'll be sitting on our hands for the next several months waiting to find out when the
second season of The Mandalorian arrives, hopefully sometime in 2020.
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