‘The Mandalorian’ Gets a Special ‘SNL’ Guest Star and Veers Off-Course

THIS POST CONTAINS spoilers for this week’s episode of The Mandalorian, “The Pirate.”

The Mandalorian is a show that likes to keep things simple whenever possible. And it’s hard to imagine a more fundamentally simple story than “heroes rescue community under siege by pirates.” It’s a framework the show has used very successfully in the past, going all the way back to Mando and Cara Dune’s initial team-up early in Season One. In many ways, “The Pirate” leans hard into this kind of straightforward, classical adventure structure. Gorian Shard’s men look even more like olde-timey Earth pirates than when we saw them in the season premiere, Shard’s ship has a variation on the classic captain’s wheel, etc. The action on Nevarro is crisp and well-presented, highlighted by the Armorer taking out the sniper’s nest singlehandedly with only her hammer and tongs as weapons. This is the stuff the series can pretty much do whenever it wants, even if certain aspects — notably Gorian Shard continuing to look like a cross between Pizza the Hutt from Spaceballs, Swamp Thing, and Davy Jones from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies — are fairly silly.

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But “The Pirate” also has some more ambitious ideas on its mind, in both plot and theme. And it’s there that the results get a bit murkier.

Paul Sun-Hyung Lee returns as Carson Teva, veteran pilot from the Adelphi Rangers, who crossed our heroes’ paths a few times last season. When the pirates attack Nevarro, Greef sends a distress signal to Teva(*), and Teva in turn heads to Coruscant to get approval to help an independent planet in distress.

(*) The scene where Teva watches the message features the first live-action appearance of Zeb Orrelios, the hulking Lasat soldier who was a core part of the Star Wars: Rebels ensemble. (Here he is in action.) Zeb has not only survived the rebellion, but found a home fighting on behalf of the New Republic. Will he get more to do down the road — perhaps on the Ahsoka spinoff, which will involve her looking for one of Zeb’s old crewmates — or was this just a brief cameo to please fans of the animated shows?