Official summary: The Mandalorian must ferry a passenger with precious cargo on a risky journey.
Trivia
Quite a few things from season 1 return and get names, or at least in-universe nicknames that can substitute for the moment as names until hopefully the upcoming The Mandalorian The Ultimate Visual Guide will give us proper names. These include:
Dr. Mandible is the insect-like alien we had spotted before in Chapter 5. He provides the Mandalorian with a new lead.
The frog-like species that we mentioned earlier in our episode guide for Chapter 5 as possibly a Rybet or a Chubbit returns also, but now with a female example of the species. Could this mean that the one seen in Chapter 5 was the husband of this frog-lady before he settled on Trask? The fact that Trask is the only planet hospitable to their species rules out the Chubbit possibility as their homeworld is Aridus, unless that one is destroyed or an alternate name like Moraband was. The Rybet have no known homeworld.
The Dave Filoni cameo Trapper Wolf returns, and he is joined by Carson, who the end credits completely identify as Captain Carson Teva, who was played by comedian Paul Sun-Hyung Lee. They also identify the prison ship from Chapter 6 as a New Republic Correctional Transport with the name/callsign Bothan-Five. The soldier Davan, who was played by Matt Lanter, receives a rank (Lieutenant) and Qin was known as prisoner X-Six-Nine-Eleven
Newly mentioned: skud pie, the estuary moon of Trask, Kol Iben (gas giant system), M-One-Eleven (Razor Crest code) and Adelphi (a New Republic outpost world).
And then there is a name that may have been taken away from something that was named in Season 1. In an interview for American Cinematographer magazine showrunner Jon Favreau and series cinematographers Baz Idoine and Greig Fraser mentioned that Maldo Kreis was the snow planet in the beginning of Chapter 1. However an Aurebesh screen seen in the cockpit of the Razor Crest shows that the snow planet from this episode is also called Maldo Kreis. Are they again on the same planet, but a new part of it? Or is this actually meant to be Maldo Kreis and the previous one no, meaning that it is now in need of a new name? Or is the Aurebesh screen a placeholder that appears since season 1 that we just could not have read clearly before? Which is possible, as I do tend to watch for Aurebesh screens and I recall similar ones to this one, that were not readable before.
Roasting the krayt dragon meat by using an engine bears in mind the Ronto Roasters restaurant at Galaxy’s Edge where 8D-J8 roasts the meat using a podracer engine.
Two episodes in, and we have two references coming originally from the Legends novel Darksaber. The white spiders you see chasing the Mandalorian and Frog Lady were first used in that novel in which they were identified as the knobby white spider. They were inspired by Ralph McQuarrie concept art for The Empire Strikes Back and would later find their way in Rebels as the Krykna on the planet Atollon. The way their eggs open, and stand together, brings into mind the Alien movies. Making this also the second sci-fi horror movie reference with previous episode’s Tremors reference.
The danger of travelling through hyperspace for some species, here the eggs of the Frog Lady, was also seen in Star Wars Tales #8. In that comic it was shown that the Felacatians could not stay in hyperspace too long as the stress on their bodies could cause them to transform into feral cat-like beasts.
The blaster rifle that Carson and Trapper Wolf use is a A280 rifle which was first seen in The Empire Strikes Back and can also be seen on Endor in Return of the Jedi.
Also seen or mentioned: Kajain’sa’Nikto, an alien of the same species as Scrapjaw Motito from The Force Awakens, a Gigoran, EV-9D9, Sabacc & Idiot’s Array, R5-D4, a WED-15 Treadwell droid, GNK droid, Huttese, “May the Force be with you”, the Slave One tracking a ship sound from Attack of the Clones (when Trapper Wolf says “I don’t know where he thinks he is going’ in that thing”), Carson’s tracking computer does sound like the one in A New Hope and Q9-0.
- Hardcover Book
- Szostak, Phil (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 256 Pages - 12/01/2020 (Publication Date) - Abrams Books (Publisher)
