Emmy Catch-Up: The Mandalorian

Every year, I watch the six submitted episodes of every series I don’t regularly watch that’s up for one of the Emmy series prizes. This year, I’m watching the entire season of every series nominated in the top category.

The Mandalorian: Season 1, Episode 6 “Chapter 6: The Prisoner” (B-)

This show seems very repetitive to me, and in this case we just got more criminals all fighting for the same prize who, unsurprisingly, had an axe to grind with the Mandalorian. I recognized actor Mark Boone Junior from “Sons of Anarchy” right away as the man who seemed most excited to see him, Ran, although he was later revealed to have engineered the whole thing with the goal of his old friend ending up dead. I didn’t realize it was Clancy Brown from “Carnivale” and “Billions” under all that makeup as Burg, whose bear hug beat-down was an impressive way of dealing with an active threat. Using his ship and having to bring Baby Yoda along meant an invasion of personal space, and it tuned out that the droid he hated so much was actually the one least intent on killing him. What’s hard to believe is that the Mandalorian goes to such lengths not to be bad, leaving Xi’an, Mayfeld, and Burg alive rather than killing them when he had the chance, and yet he’s still able to stay ahead and survive. He obviously wasn’t always like this or he wouldn’t have earned such a formidable reputation. Even the fate that befall Qin and Ran wasn’t so terrible because he was indeed an escaped prisoner and ended up with a trio of X-wings coming after him to track him down and fire when they saw they were about to be attacked. With just two episodes left in this season, I imagine that the Mandalorian still has more enemies he knows and doesn’t know just waiting to come after him.