Thoughts on ‘The Heiress’

Welcome back to my breakdown of The Mandalorian Season 2 episodes, this time Chapter 11 ‘The Heiress’. I guess I should start disclaiming at the top:
YAR, HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. READERS, YE BE WARNED.
When I watched the episode the first time, I was definitely subconsciously picking up on the Apollo 13 reentry sequence vibes…that film is too imprinted on my brain for me to not notice, but I didn’t make the connection for the reason behind it – this chapter was directed by Ron Howard’s daughter. Well then, of course it makes sense she would pay homage to her father’s masterpiece!   Some of my friends have also picked up on the Firefly/Serenity vibe of a falling-apart spaceship slowly shedding parts. Seeing as we’ll never get more Firefly, having Firefly stuff in other properties works fine for me.
As the ship is trying to set down on the landing pad, I noticed the sound of the Razor Crest’s engines ‘coughing’ and trying to turn over is the same as Anakin’s podracer in Episode I doing the same thing, which is some nice continuity.

In general, I really like the nautical feeling of this whole chapter. The synopsis was something like “Mando braves danger on the high seas” so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but when he arrived at what was essentially a seaport town, it started to make sense, and the latter half of the episode is essentially ‘Mando turns pirate!’ I love all the Mon Calamari and Quarren dock workers, with their waders and knit fisherman’s sweaters! It’s so refreshing to include a location so geared towards the ‘common’, especially as it creates a great opportunity for a ‘GFFA living historian’ to interpret some seaside skills (rope splicing? lobster pot baiting?) in an authentic manner.

While the majority of the workers in the port seem to be the above-mentioned offworlders from Dac, I did spot some humans in the mix, so if you don’t want to deal with the added difficulties of wearing a rubber mask, you don’t have to feel like you’re compromising.

Note that the port still has an overall dark blue-green color scheme, as do the people there: nobody’s wearing bright or light colors. I think I even saw some non-humans wearing knit hats in the background, which is a hilarious look I don’t think we’ve ever seen before.

I didn’t realize it until reading this great article on alien biology, but it is weird to see Quarren with Prequel-style 3-fingered hands, when the OT example seen in Jabba’s palace (Tessek) had the more squid-like suction-cup fingers.
The ‘innkeeper’ MonCal sounds basically like Admiral Ackbar, so I wonder why the first MonCal we met sounded so…strange? I’m so used to hearing Ackbar’s voice, so was the other one female? (Her weird croaky, muttering voice actually reminds me of how I imagine a crow would speak English.) I like how the ‘Mon Calamari flan’ from S01E01 make a reappearance here, and they have a wonderful gelatinous sound to them!

The Child has a plain wooden spoon to poke at his chowder…no need for anything fancy for something as basic as a spoon. Most of the overlap between the Fine Handmade Crafts and Star Wars circles is usually limited to cutesy cross-stitch, knitting, or other purely decorative knick-knacks instead of anything very functional. Hmm…now I wonder if I’d have better luck selling the spoons I carve if I marketed them as ‘Baby Yoda Chowder spoons’??

That mini-facehugger-in-the-soup moment was pretty cute…after Titular Mando tells the Child not to play with his food, he takes out his vibroblade—which doesn’t appear to be switched on—and brings it near the critter, which drops back into the bowl. I’ve watched the shot multiple times now, and it didn’t look like the critter was injured by the knife, so I’m still not clear what exactly was going on there.

I like the design of the boat and it’s so rare that we get to see something so utilitarian and Earth-like, though it still manages to be SWarsy; I could easily buy it as one of the utility trawlers from Galactic Battlegrounds.

A couple times in this episode, when the other Mandos take off their helmets we hear a high-pitched squeal, which I don’t think existed before 2005, when it showed up two or three times in Episode III.

And then Bo-Katan shows up.
Now, approximately ALL of the other channels and reviewers I follow lost their collective shit over this character appearing…while my response was more or less “Who?” I had completely forgotten she first appeared in The Clone Wars’ fourth season, and was only familiar with pictures of her from Rebels and post-Season Five TCW (neither of which I’ve seen). As I’ve said before: I approach post-Disney content incredibly warily, especially if they contradict the established EU and fixate on a tiny recurring cast of elite characters, both of which are my main concerns with this season as a whole…‘fan favorites’ being trotted out tend to make me roll my curmudgeonly eyes reallllly hard.

They refer to Titular Mando as a ‘child of the watch’, and since we Know from last season that he was rescued by Death Watch, I figured this is who they meant. However, per her TCW appearance BoKatan was also with Death Watch and her current crew now seems much less hardline, so maybe that’s not what they refer to? It seems the confusion could’ve been avoided if they’d just picked a different word.

A couple points about Bo-Katan and her companion Mandos (compandos?):
1: I would imagine that wearing braids crossed on one’s forehead can’t be comfortable to wear under a helmet.
2: I am generally opposed to the idea of gender-specific armor; realistically speaking, the idea of ‘female armor’ seems to be a completely modern fantasy invention. In addition to the above reasons for my ambivalent feelings towards Bo-Katan are comments made by Dave Filoni at SDCC2012, in which he explains his only reason for the character’s creation was “to give female fans more opportunity for armored cosplay”, to “give the ladies some cool armor.” Ugggghhh…I don’t have a problem with the character being female, but I really dislike that she was created purely to create ‘cool female armor’. Representation is great, make all the female characters you want! – but if you’re going to armor them, at least give them gender-neutral armor. (On the bright side, at least Bo and Braid-face’s chestplates are fairly conservative, at least compared to the standard ‘femtroopers’ I see!)
3: Dude-I-thought-was-Jon-Bernthal and Braid-Face have armor elements which are pretty boldly painted (his especially): a shade brighter and you’d be looking at serious deviation from the established aesthetic. Despite what much of the Mandalorian-costuming community seems to think, remember that Star Wars has always had a restrained colorscheme. I’ll probably be writing about this more in a separate post, but I hope to gods the show creators aren’t looking to fan creations for reference, because there’s major potential for some serious ‘reenactorism’ propagation there.

When the rescuers buy Mando a drink, we see Braid-Face actually using a spoon and a fork. Normally that wouldn’t be notable, but this is Star Wars, and while we’ve had a handful of dinner table scenes, there’s almost never any actual ingestion of food. It’s refreshing and helps to ground the setting…even if the idea of having a tentacle stuck to one’s face freaks me right out.

However, before we move on there’s something else on the table that needs to be addressed, and who else but me would care about something so seemingly trivial? Visible in the two separate shots above is a flip-top glass bottle, and I really hope this was a case of the prop-master shouting, “Get me a bottle, I don’t care what kind!” and not having a firm grasp on the galactic aesthetic. I can begrudgingly let a Klean Kanteen slide due to its vaguely ‘spacey’ design, but an 1874 ‘lightning’ bottle is so Earth-specific it yanks me RIGHT OUT of the universe as soon as I see it…keep them on the walls of Cracker Barrel or a country antique mall where they belong!

It’s nice to see a Gozanti freighter appear and get a namedrop. Aussie Mando (formerly Dude-I-thought-was-Jon-Bernthal) claims the troops on board “couldn’t hit the side of a bantha”, a take on the Earth phrase “couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn”, but the missing “broad” makes it just feel wrong.
ADDENDUM: I’ve since come across this exact phrase in the 1998 novel X-Wing: Wraith Squadron, so it actually has some EU pedigree!
Since it’s used twice this episode (when BoKatan’s folks first show up, and later when the Gozanti takes off), did anyone else note the use of fuzzy, industrial-style music? It took me back to my highschool goth-y days, and made me remember that when the Death Watch showed up in S01E08, they were accompanied by a wailing electric guitar. I’ve loved the experimental music design on this show, though I’m wondering how the use of more recognizable Earth elements will hold up.

I like that AussieMando wields his pistol with two hands (hopefully not teacupping), it’s a nice changeup from all the one-handed or dual-wielding we normally see in Star Wars. BoKatan’s double-pistol style may have worked in the cartoon, but here it looks goofy to me (plus, it makes combat look too easy for her. If you walk into a room with your arms outstretched and two fists full of steel blazing away, it kind of sends a message that you’re playing with the cheat codes on (see the Matrix films for literal examples).
For the record, I am Not A Fan of the Westar-35 blaster. The ‘realistic’ model is decent (though I hope they are, I can’t tell if they’re using it here)…but the original, animated style (popular in the Mando cosplay community—probably because it’s so simple!) is a big lump of HIDEOUS:

In profile, the freighter that the crew boards looks roughly like the OG (Original Gozanti) seen in Episode I, but as we see from the aft view it has these big ol’ Venator-looking wings on the sides that–in the onboard display at least–make it look more like the souped-up space shuttles from Armageddon. Further research shows this bastardization is a recent postDisney creation.

During the shootout in the freighter, I noticed one of the TKs looks to be holding his E11 backwards??? Either that or he’s managed to flop the magazine well onto the opposite side of the gun…What are we looking at here?

We get a nice POV shot from inside someone’s helmet, with a cool heat-vision effect. I know so much combat in Star Wars is unaimed (for cool points), but this makes me wonder how hard it is to aim a blaster if you can only see your targets and not the weapons’ sights.

That shot of the freighter almost hitting the water before heading back into atmosphere is pretty darn sweet, and I really like a really cool effect going on with the engine exhaust. Once Mando gets back to his ship, the shot from the alien brittle star’s compound eye-POV was a nice touch, although I was very unclear as to why exactly the cockpit was full of nets and ropes at the end…was that the MonCal’s idea of ‘redecorating’ or was it part of the repairs?

Anyway, since I’m pretty much immune to Filoni-fanservice, I thought this was overall a pretty solid episode. I would love to hear what you thought, so leave a comment below and I’ll see you next week!

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