After just under a year of waiting, the second season of The Mandalorian, the original series Disney + set in the universe of Star Wars, comes back to keep us company with 8 new episodes, which will be released weekly. The episode "The sheriff", Written and directed by Jon Favreau - the creator of the entire series - which brings back the Mandalorian Din Djarin and the Child (or Baby Yoda, as he was named by popular acclaim on the internet) in search of the tribe of the little one, between a bounty to collect and a mission to complete.
The Mandalorian: where do we pick up from?
Din Djarin (o Command, as he is often affectionately called) is a bounty hunter belonging to the Mandalorian creed who, during one of his missions, comes across a mysterious creature: the Male child. Despite his wandering and fleeting nature, Din can't help but get attached to the funny little green guy who, moreover, seems to know a fighting technique that no one has ever seen before (the Force). Between one mission and another, the Mandalorian decides to take the Child with him on his dangerous adventures, taking care to always protect him, with the aim of find his tribe and make him return to his fellow men.
In the first episode of the second season, Din Djarin seeks information on the tribe from which the Child, i Jedi, with the aim of bringing him home and resuming his activity as a bounty hunter in peace. To do this, Din seeks the help of other Mandalorians who can guide him in his enterprise. A guy Gor Koresh he says he is willing to help him, in exchange, however, for the armor in Mando's Beskar. After a fight with Koresh and his henchmen, Din manages to extract valuable information from him: there is a Mandalorian in Tatooine, in Mos Pelgo, a mining town plundered by the Tusken. Here, Mando discovers that the alleged Mandalorian is actually a impostor: It is Cobb Vanth, a man who helped the village get rid of invaders, as well as the owner of an armor well known to Star Wars fans: Boba Fett. Angered by this disrespect for the Mandalorian order, Din orders him to hand him the armor; Cobb Vanth reluctantly agrees, as long as Mando helps him defeat a an enemy far greater than them.
This first installment of The Mandalorian re-proposes it balanced storytelling which we already enjoyed in the first season, consistently with the first two Star Wars feature film trilogies. Taking advantage of Tatooine's hot, desert climate, Jon Favreau takes the opportunity to give more tones western to the episode, especially in the battle that closes the episode, combining them with the sci-fi elements typical of the saga, between droids and speeders. However, in this first installment of the original Disney + series we don't notice a real plot advancement, in continuity with the episodic and fragmentary nature of the previous season's episodes. In "The Sheriff" you throw the premises of the arena (or at least part of it) in which Mando will find himself acting and of any new allies or enemies who could play a less negligible role in the future.
Jon Favreau can't help but wink at all nostalgic fans of the saga: it is emblematic, in fact, that the season starts in Tatooine, where it all began in Episode IV back in 1977. The episode is also full of easter eggs and references to the past: one of them, the armor of Boba Fett, which is already at the center of several theories about its presents within the TV series. Besides the armor, another point in favor is the presence of an (at the moment) unknown character played by Temuera Morrison, the actor who played in the prequel trilogy Jango fett, the one from whom Boba Fett was cloned and who could return in a big way in The Mandalorian. The potential to show a larger slice of the Star Wars universe is all there, benefiting from the multiplicity of episodes of the TV series to delve into what feature films have overlooked.
