Let’s Talk About THE MANDALORIAN Chapter 6 “The Prisoner” Which Tells a Super Entertaining Jailbreak Story
The latest episode of The Mandalorian, entitled “The Prisoner,” was an incredibly fun and awesome installment of the series. The episode had some fun playing with the classic “jailbreak” western genre trope, even down to the team-up and then betrayal aspect of it. I loved that it focused on one man using his badass skills, wit, and experience to outfox an overwhelming number of adversaries.
The episode was also filled with some great new characters! The story opens up with the Razor Crest on a small space station where the Mandalorian is looking to take another job for some quick credits. There he teams up with an old partner in crime, a man named Ranzar “Ran” Malk played by Mark Boone Jr. from Sons of Anarchy. He’s got a job for the Mando, and it’s non-guild work that includes a team of other mercenaries.
The three other mercenaries include a cocky cowboy character named Mayfield (Bill Burr), a Twi’lek character named Xi’an (Natalia Tena from Harry Potter), a Devaronian named Burg (Clancy Brown), and a droid called Q9-0, a.k.a. Zero (Richard Ayoade from The IT Crowd). Together they would travel to a New Republic maximum-security prison transport that is supposed to be manned by droids to break out a prisoner, another Twi’Lek named Qin (Ismael Cruz Cordova), who is also the brother of Xi’an. He is in prison because the Mandalorian left him behind on a previous job.
As the job starts to come together and they embark on the mission, the Mando gets more and more annoyed by this group of villainy and scum, and you could feel what he was feeling as he was thinking to himself that this little gig with these people was getting worse by the minute. His suspicions were confirmed when the team he embarked on the job with turned on him.
After all the help the Mandalorian offered them, after he took our a team of droid guards like a badass and helped them get the prisoner, the double-cross came, and Mayfield shoved the Mando into the cell that Qin was in and locked it. As all this is going on they were on the clock to get out of the prison transport as a tracking beacon had been activated by a human guard that alerted the New Republic to their institution. They were in a time crunch to get off the ship before a team from the New Republic get there.
Of course, the Mandalorian managed to get out of the cell and start to hunt down the characters who betrayed him one by one. This is a great sequence! The whole scene was perfectly set when the Mando headed to the control room and switched the transport to emergency red lighting, which set a horror movie-like mood. As the Mando was going after this ragtag crew turned on him, the droid Zero came across some information regarding the Mando and began to hunt down The Child, who the team was accidentally introduced to earlier in the episode. It was kind of amusing seeing the Mando get some crap from these guys about his little pet. Anyway, Zero was looking to kill the kid, but The Child knew he was in trouble and hid
My favorite scene with the Mandalorian hunting the members of the team that betrayed him was when he confronted Xi’an and got in a knife fight with her. He took down the others pretty easily, and there was another great scene where he shot his flamethrower off in Burg’s face while they were fighting. In the end, he didn’t kill any of these characters, he just shoved them all in a cell on the prison transport vessel, and as you might imagine, they were pretty pissed. However, he did keep Qin so that he could turn him in and collect the bounty.
When Mando got back the Razor Crest he was just in time to blast a hole through Zero who was about to kill The Child. When The Child found himself cornered, though, he was about to use his Force powers to take out Zero. Since the Mando showed up and took care if it, he never got to. It would have been interesting to see what The Child would have done, though!
The Mandalorian returned to the space station where Ran was waiting for him, he turned in the bounty and collected the reward without having to explain why he didn’t come back with anyone due to a “no questions asked” policy. The Mandalorian didn’t waste any time getting into his ship and flying away, and as he did Ran headed over to the coms stations and put in an order to kill the Mandalorian. But with Mando being the sly and smart guy that he is, he placed the tracking beacon that was activated early on the prisoner transport onto Qin. When they realized this, three X-Wings dropped out of hyperspace and, after a brief discussion, blasted the space station.
It was pretty awesome seeing these New Republic X-Wings show up. They were piloted by producer and director Dave Filoni as Trapper Wolf); the director of the episode, Rick Famuywa, as Jib Dodger, and series director Deborah Chow as Sash Ketter. So that was cool!
I loved this episode and thought was very reminiscent of the kind of story you might see on Star Wars: Clone Wars or Star Wars: Rebels. It’s not surprising that this would be the case because this episode was written by Christopher Yost, who worked on Rebels. He also wrote Thor: Ragnarok and worked on several Marvel animated projects over the years. I’ve always enjoyed his writing style so it was great to see that he got to write an episode of The Mandalorian. He and the creative team did a great job on this one, and I can’t wait to see what’s next!
What did you all think of this latest chapter of The Mandalorian, “The Prisoner”?