2x07 Chapter 15: The Believer

[8.0/10] Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way here first. The action in “The Believer” is great. There are two major set pieces in this one: the tanker run from the pirates into the Imperial base and our heroes’ escape from the very same base, and both work quite well.

With the former, there’s the coolness of locals leaping onto the top of the vehicle and Mando having to fight them off without his usual armor or weapons. We get to see his resourcefulness apart from his wonderful toys, and the narrative device that Mayfield can’t go too fast to get away or the rhydonium will explode creates challenges for both of them.

With the latter, it’s just good meat and potatoes Star Wars action. The narrow escape on the side of the building has thrills. Sending stormtroopers blasting into walls and falling into dams is true to the roots of the franchise. And Fennec and Dune picking off troopers so that Mando and Mayfield can make it onto Slave I is a great setup.

(Not for nothing, I gasped when Boba Fett used the same sonic charges his dad used in Attack of the Clones. But I was also perturbed that the rhydonium explosions were the wrong color!)

But what I really liked about this one, and what made it stand out among episodes this season, is its seemingly lean into moral relativism and shifting perspectives, before coming down on the side of some inviolable principles at the end of the day.

We get that through Mayfield, who paints himself as a “realist” and gives Mando a speech not unlike DJ’s to Finn in The Last Jedi. He talks about how somebody’s always ruling and someone’s always being ruled, and how the internecine conflicts of galactic powers don’t always matter much to the people on the ground.

There’s some truth to that, akin to a popular (albeit reductive) political cartoon making the rounds about how people being bombed by the United States likely don’t have strong feelings about which party wins the Presidency. It sounds like Mayfield just trying to handwave away his own prior service in the Empire, which makes it self-serving enough to write off as potentially accurate (albeit lacking in some nuance), but probably just something he tells himself to absolve him of his sins and help him “sleep at night.”

And yet, as it’s often done this season The Mandalorian plays with our perspective a bit. We see Mando don a stormtrooper outfit and fight off local “pirates.” But it doesn’t take much to conclude that these people aren’t raiders, but rather people trying to disrupt the Empire from destroying their home planet to extract its resources. Are their lives and their struggle worth less than Mando and Grogu’s? “The Believer” puts it at issue.

It becomes a particularly live concern with the uneasy imagery of a crop of tie-fighters, stormtroopers, and other imperial soldiers getting the Big Damn Heroes moment as they save Mando and Mayfield from their attackers. The salutes and whoops the pair get when they make it safely into the base and disembark are eerily reminiscent of the end of A New Hope, when Luke and Han received a similar reception, both underscoring Mayfield’s point about the futility of which side’s on top and, at the same time, making the audience uneasy about what Din and Mayfield are accomplishing, and for whom, to get what they want.

What they want are the coordinates to Moff Gideon’s ship, which can only be obtained from an Imperial Terminal inside that base, which conveniently requires a facial scan. Mayfield tries to call off the mission when he sees his old commanding officer in there, afraid of being recognized and punished. So Din does it himself.

In the process, he proves Mayfield’s point to a degree. For all Mando’s supposedly dogmatic principles (recently dented a little by Bo-Katan), he is, true to Mayfield’s pronouncements, willing to bend them when something truly matters to him. He’ll trade his Mandalorian helmet for a stormtrooper’s when it’s the only way to sneak into an Imperial Base. He’ll break his code and show his face to a living soul because it’s what’s necessary to save his surrogate son. For all his scumminess, Mayfield recognizes that practicality that most folks embrace at some level.

But he also breaks his own rules. Despite fearing what will happen to him if he’s recognized, Mayfield steps in to save Mando from being dressed down and exposed by his former commanding Imperial Officer, in a tense scene. More to the point, when the officer invites them for a drink, Mayfield can’t help recall his old division from Project Cinder (Hello Battlefront 2 fans!) and questions how a similarly mercenary, malleable “for the greater good” perspective in his commander led to the deaths of thousands of his comrades and others.

So he shoots the guy, in order to “sleep better at night.” Maybe it’s just personal for him. Maybe he just didn’t like the guy excusing the lost lives of thousands of people as the cost of doing business or part of some trumped up story about chaos vs. order (Hello to you too, Supreme Leader Snoke fans!) that Mayfield no longer buys. Or maybe he does believe in a few moral absolutes, ones that led to his disillusionment and cynicism about how this battle of civilizations in the first place.

Either way, it adds depth to the larger conflict that stretches across the Skywalker Saga, and depth to both Mando and Mayfield, exposing a little more of who they are deep down and what they’ll do when their backs are against the wall or something more than just the next bounty matters to them. It’s enough to earn Mayfield his freedom, for Cara Dune and for the audience.

The action is all a fun side dish to that, full of the sort of infiltration and extraction plans that good heist films are made of. But what gives The Mandalorian staying power is not just its exquisite textures or thrilling set pieces, but those exchanges and choices that complicate and widen the Galaxy Far Far Away, rather than make it seem smaller.

The episode was really action-packed with a lot of fighting and explosions. Cara uses her political influence to get the prisoner who may help them find the big baddie from prison, and the whole team (Mando, Bobba, Fennec and Cara together with the prisoner, apparently called Mayfeld - I don't know anything about him since I am not well-versed in Star Wars) sets off to find an imperial outpost where they can discover the coordinates of Gideon's ship (doesn't these things change? isn't the ship moving and travelling from place to place?). There is a very suspenseful sequence in which Mando and the prisoner have to transport some dangerous explosives in order to access the imperial outpost and are almost killed by pirates. This time both Mando and Mayfelf get dressed as a special kind of Stormtroppers transporting the explosive cargo (since they look different than ordinary Stormtroopers). The disguise is partly because it can make entering the outpost easier and partly because the helmet allows Mando to hide his face. He takes the helmet off, though, when he wants to access the coordinates as a facial scan is necessary, and Mayfeld fears he may be recognised by an officer present in the mess. Problems arise as Mando is accosted by the said officer before he manages to put the helmet on. However, there was time to get the coordinates or the whole expedition would be in vain. Mayfeld helps Mando to escape detection, and he ends up killing his former officer after he confesses that the explosives they had escorted safely will be used to cause a giant explosion to kill a lot of people and make others turn to the Empire for help. Mayfeld destroys these explosives on their way out. The whole expedition is very well organised, as the girls shoot at any troopers who may attack Mando and Mayfeld and Bobba gives them a lift from the outpost. It all goes a bit too smoothly, I wonder where is the catch.

The whole helmet thing seems to be a bit traumatic for Mando, as apparently he has committed a sin against his Mandalorian creed? I guess he only took the helmet before the scan because he was in front of the machine and not a living thing and also because he hoped he would be able to put it back before anyone sees him? I got the impression that all the time he was without the helmet, he suffered from scruples and pangs of conscience because of breaking his creed, from the looks of him, he was rather distraught. Though I must say he looks better with the helmet on since he is more mysterious then and I guess his voice reverberates nicely. I am not saying he is not handsome, but the helmet makes him different from any other man and is a vital part of his identity. I wonder whether his breaking the creed would have some metaphysical repercussions?

I also noticed that the jet pack is back after all and it wasn't destroyed in the battle of the previous episode. Though when he got disguised as an imperial soldier, I wondered whether it would not be a problem he wasn't using his armour as the jet pack would have come in handy during an escape.

I am not sure about Mando revealing himself to the big baddie Moff and telling him he's coming to save the baby. I guess it was a bad move from a tactical point of view, since now Mando and his friends have lost the element of surprise, which was crucial since they do not have strength in their numbers. Now the Moff guy is waiting for them, better prepared, and probably will guard the baby better or even transport him to some other place. I am afraid this may seriously impair their chances of success.

And I really missed the baby this episode, what is happening to him? is he alive? is he being tortured or mistreated in some other way? We don't know and the showrunners are to blame.