Dr. ThurmThurm’s The Mandalorian Chapter 14 Review
It was another exciting week for the Mandalorian with a big action set piece, the return of a long-lost Star Wars legend, and a good bit of plot advancement. While I have some gripes with the episode there’s no denying it’s importance in terms of Star Wars history and for what comes next in the series.
Chapter 14 titled “The Tragedy” reverses a mistake from 1983 when Return of the Jedi killed off fan favorite character Boba Fett. The infamous bounty hunter is back from the dead and more badass than ever. One of the biggest mistakes the original trilogy made was never giving him his own action set piece to really show off his skills. For 40 years fans have assumed that Boba Fett was awesome because that’s what we were told, but never shown. Thankfully that is no longer the case because The Mandalorian just gave us about 20 minutes of Boba Fett dunking on storm troopers. It was glorious. If we hadn’t just seen Ahsoka terrorize people last week that might be the best action sequence they’ve done yet. If you had told me last year I’d be talking about Boba Fett and Ahsoka Tano in the same paragraph when talking about The Mandalorian I’d have damn near had a heart attack. It’s amazing to see this team led by Jon Favreau continuously deliver on the thing’s fans have wanted to see for decades.
Other than that I was happy to see the stakes raised this week. It was starting to feel like Mando was a bit invincible but he lost in a major way and I can’t wait to see him bounce back. The Razor Crest has been destroyed and Grogu has been captured by the empire which is a real gut punch after the seeing their bond grow over the last few episodes. I care about this character more than ever and seeing him in a cage fighting for his life is heartbreaking. We’ve never seen Mando this low before but with Boba Fett, Cara Dune, and Fennec Shand’s help next week the empire probably doesn’t stand a chance.
I did have a few problems with this episode, however. I wasn’t surprised to see Robert Rodrigues was the director this week as some of the worst shots actually reminded me of his earlier work. I can’t really put into words, but there’s a bunch of shots throughout this episode that just don’t work for me. Shot’s that should look good but instead look stiff and corny. I talk about this show all the time displaying imagery that just shouldn’t look as good as it does, and this is the reverse of that. These shots make it obvious we’re watching a tv show and take me out of the experience. It may be because there’s more cg this week than others but I’m not quite sure. It’s never bad, it’s just not as good as some of the amazing cinematography we’ve seen this season. There are also some coincidences in timing here that make the script standout. Cases where one character is knocked out so a different character can have an action scene. A rock moves just in the right direction for action shot to occur. Small stuff like that. There was a lot of ground to cover in what was this season’s shortest episode so I can see why some shortcuts may have been taken.
All in all, this was an awesome episode of the Mandalorian and finally gives Star Wars fans the Boba Fett they’ve wanted to see for decades. The stakes are higher than ever, and the rest of this season is set to deliver more of what fans want to see. Chapter 14 of The Mandalorian gets a strong recommendation from me.
Check back next week for my review of Chapter 15 of The Mandalorian. For more content follow me on Twitter @DrThurmThurm, as well as Twitch and TikTok @drthurmthurm. Thanks for reading.
