The Mandalorian 2×3 Review: Chapter 11 – The Heiress

‘Chapter 11  – The Heiress’ has delivered the long awaited plot of the second season that we’ve been looking for.

I’ve been enjoying the second season of The Mandalorian quite a bit, but I’ve been hoping to have some more contact with Mandalorians and a stronger pushed towards the overarching season 2 plot.  ‘The Heiress’ gave me that in an even larger quantity than I had been expecting and moved us forward to a pretty large degree. 

I knew about several casting rumors involving other characters for quite a while, but somehow completely missed that Katee Sackhoff had been cast in the show, bringing back the character Bo-Katan Kryze.  Imagine my surprise when when that helmet came off and my big gay crush from a decade ago was on screen.  My heart nearly stopped.

The fact that she is able to portray the same character both in animation and in live action is honestly a great gift.  Sackhoff is incredibly talented in both formats and I can’t imagine it any other way.  If other casting rumors pan out, however, she may be the only one who could carry her character over from one format to another.  And, well, since Ahsoka has been officially name dropped now and it’s no longer a spoiler, I’ll be super interested in seeing if the casting rumors on that front end up being true.

It turns out one bit of casting speculation we got wrong is the role of Sasha Banks.  It appears that she’s playing a character named Koska Reeves and not Sabine Wren.  Whether Sabine will appear at all or if this casting rumor is the origin of this specific line of speculation is a bit unknown at this point.  As you can see by my surprise with Katee Sakhoff’s appearance, I’m a bit out of the loop on some things here.  So I guess we’ll just let this play out, eh? She’s one of the most popular Mandalorian characters so it’d make sense if she popped up, but who the heck knows.

Bo-Katan, along with her two other Mandalorian companions, request help from our Mando on their mission before they help him on his own.  This led to some amazing Mandalorian fighting sequences reminiscent of later seasons of Rebels.  The Mandalorians are a pretty exciting group of people so I was delighted to have these sequences.  Sometimes you just need a kick-ass battle, ya know? And the Mandalorians delivered.

The mythology of the Mandalorians also has a chance to get straightened out in ‘The Heiress.’  Many have wondered why our Mando and the other Mandalorians he associates with refuse to take off their helmets while other characters, such as the Mandalorians in Rebels, had no problem doing so.  Turns out he’s just in a really strict sect that’s looked upon as sort of a cult by other Mandalorians.  This makes sense.  It gives our current show a chance to make their own rules and lore while not contradicting already established canon.  Well done!

I suspect we’ll see more of Bo-Katan and her crew.  They made it clear they were looking for the Dark Saber, which Moff Gideon has.  And Moff Gideon isn’t going anywhere for a while, clearly.  He’s still mucking about and throwing wrenches in our Mando’s plans. If I were a betting person, I’d put money on Bo-Katan and crew being back in the picture before the end of the season.

Or… is this just my big crush on Katee Sackoff talking?  I’d love to have more of her on my screen. I don’t really know.  Maybe it’s a mix of both.

As the season progresses, the Razorcrest is taking pretty terrible beatings.  At this point it’s basically being held together by ropes and prayers.  Whether or not he gets to a place that can repair it properly, or he just has to get a new ship entirely remains to be seen.  At this point, his ship is basically iconic (strange to say about something that’s only a year old, but here we are) and I can’t imagine it’ll get entirely replaced, but man, this thing isn’t gonna last much longer.  Something has to be done.  It’s going to fall apart.  

And now for the most important part of this week’s review… was Baby Yoda cute?  Yes.  Yes, he was.  And our baby got food, finally.  Instead of delicious Chicky Nuggy, though, he got a weird chowder thing with an actual living being in it.  Not that this would bother our baby, though.  He ate a live frog last season, after all.  And by the end of the episode he was eating whatever weird tentacle critter was roaming around the Razorcrest, too.  So honestly, this was the perfect meal for him.

This does make me circle back around to last week’s episode, however.  In my review I noted the dark tone over our cute Baby Yoda scenes, as have many other reviewers, as he is eating the last of a species’ eggs.  Somehow our criticism of the dark tone of the cute moments has been interpreted as some sort of ‘cancellation’ of Baby Yoda.  Vanity Fair even ran an article titled ‘Baby Yoda Canceled Amid Accusations of Genocide‘. 

Are y’all kidding me with this?  We aren’t cancelling Baby Yoda.  Noting a tone of a moment or offering up criticism doesn’t mean we’re throwing out the whole thing.  I’m certainly not going anywhere.  In fact, the only reason I’m not going to rewatch last week’s episode is because of my severe arachniphobia.  I’m not going to toss my love of this character out the window because he’s a hungry baby who has no concept of species extinction.  He’s a baby. 

Honestly, saying we are cancelling for ‘genocide’ is on par with some of the crap right-wing pundits spew on their platforms. It’s incredibly silly.  Everybody just chill for a moment and realize criticism and commentary can happen without wholesale cancellation, okay?  Cool it.

By the end of the episode, our Mando and Baby Yoda depart Trask and are on the way to the city of Calodan on the forest planet of Corvus to meet Ahsoka.  I’m incredibly excited for this development.  Next week’s episode will be directed by Carl Weathers, who played Greef Karga in the first season, so that should be pretty interesting too.  I can’t wait!

Author: Angel Wilson

Angel is the admin of The Geekiary and a geek culture commentator. They earned a BA in Film & Digital Media from UC Santa Cruz. They have contributed to various podcasts and webcasts including An Englishman in San Diego, Free to Be Radio, and Genre TV for All. They identify as queer.

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