3x03 Chapter 19: The Convert

[7.8/10] This is going to sound a little odd, but the bulk of “The Convert” felt more like an episode of Andor than it did of The Mandalorian. I’m not complaining though. One of the things I like about the other show is that it gives us a look at people’s lives away from the movers and shakers of the galaxy. The sense of place of the Star Wars galaxy improves when you get to witness how normal people live their lives, where the world acts upon them more than they act upon it. Which is all to say that I wouldn’t necessarily have asked for an episode on the life and times of Dr. Pershing, but I’m glad we got it anyway.

I like it as a slice of life story. One of the big questions that's been underexplored in Star Wars is a simple but important one -- what do we do with all the ex-Imperials? The new canon has plenty of examples of former Imps who decided to break good: Iden Versio in Battlefront II, Yeager in Resistance, Sinjir in the Aftermath Trilogy. But few folks who tried to just become regular folks in the regular world. Pershing’s participation in the amnesty program, the humdrum life that he leads, and his desire to finish his work, all bring this down to a smaller, more personal scale that makes a onetime operator for the bad guys sympathetic in an intimate, down-to-earth way you don’t often get in an operatic franchise. It’s a breath of fresh air, honestly.

I love the fact that he genuinely thought he was doing some good. He had a understandable, personal reason for getting into cloning and genetic engineering. He wants to continue his work, and is willing to break the rules to do it because he seems to genuinely believe it could help the New Republic, and to him that's what matters most of all.

Well, that and a friendship that blossoms and helps make him feel seen and at home in uncomfortable circumstances. One of the things I like about “The Convert” is that it shows how Pershing is worn down by his situation. There’s something downright Office Space-esque about his rigid, cubicle-centered work life. His living quarters are bland and gray. He has freedom to go to the public event in the square, but for all the vaunted freedom of the New Republic, there’s still rules in place, particularly for those less-than-trusted former members of the Empire. When Pershing’s monotony is only broken by sycophantic aristocrats fawning over his Ted Talk, you can understand why he wants to color outside the lines.

Well that and the fact that he’s encouraged by someone who seems to get him in a way few others do. I’ll confess that I barely remember Elia Kane from prior episodes of The Mandalorian, but I like how she’s used here. She seems like a kindred spirit, one who encourages Pershing, who helps him, who gives him a case of the yellow travel biscuits he misses, and who treats him like a human being, not a curiosity. After subsisting in a world of cruelty, rank, and rigid expectation, someone who would help him to cut loose and be his own person is a trope, but a heartening one.

Which makes it seem extra cruel and unjust when Kane turns out to be working for the Amnesty enforcement group, and that her whole friendship and encouragement of Pershing turned out to be a case of entrapment. She seems to have ulterior motives -- Pershing knowing too much about Gideon’s work, perhaps. But the simple fact of Pershing trying to do good, being led into breaking the rules to do it, and punished for it by the person who talked him into it feels harsh and unfair in a palpable way.

The New Republic is supposed to be a paradise, or at least an improvement on the uncaring oppression that existed before. “The Convert” posits that it might be for some people, but that many who lived through the age of the Empire are as penned in now as they were then, that different ways of wearing people down emerge, even if they’re wrapped in a smile and a gentle reassurance rather than in open cruelty and jackboots.

Therein lies the connection between the main story of “The Convert”, featuring Dr. Pershing’s new life and his sad fall, with the bookends of Din and Bo Katan escaping from an Imperial warlord’s forces and reconnecting with the enclave of the Children of the Watch.

Because there are two converts here, each who have markedly different experiences and find themselves in very different spaces. Pershing is converted from the Empire to the New Republic. Bo Katan is converted from her ambivalence toward her people’s traditions to The Way.

Pershing finds that his supposed friend is, in fact, a turncoat who just wanted to trap him and use the Empire’s tools to wipe his mind away. Bo Katan finds that Din is an honorable man, who sticks his neck out to protect her and her home, when he didn’t have to. Pershing is stuck in an impersonal world, where he’s driven by droids, counseled by droids, policed by droids. Bo Katan finds a place where she is ultimately welcomed by her fellow men and women, with real human beings who bring her into the fold.

Most of all, Dr. Pershing comes to a place where he is theoretically welcome and a citizen, but where he’s kept at arm’s length, restricted, continually judged and nudged into being something other than what he is or wants to be. At the same time, Bo Katan walks in as a skeptic and an outsider to the Children of the Watch, but simply by having been cleansed in the same living waters and not removed her helmet, she is not only accepted and embraced by her fellow Mandalorians, but also granted the freedom to leave without questions if she so desires. There is a freedom and an acceptance that distinguishes them, despite their theoretically similar positions.

That's heady stuff, the kind of intimate worldbuilding and social comparisons that are more the provenance of Cassian Andor’s show than Din Djarin’s. Nonetheless, I’m please to see The Mandalorian take a page out of its sister series’ book, and give us a look at the corners of the Star Wars galaxy, and the kind of people and experiences, that aren’t normally in focus.