Thoughts on ‘The Believer’

Welcome back to my commentary series on Season 2 of The Mandalorian; for this installment we’re breaking down Chapter 15 ‘The Believer’. Aside from the first episode, I haven’t been too especially fond of any of this season’s installments; after the on-rails themepark ride of ‘The Siege’, the poor direction of ‘The Jedi’, and the mindless action of ‘The Tragedy’, I had low hopes for the next episode. As we will see, having lowered expectations meant I was able to be pleasantly surprised.

The episode opens with a scruffy-looking Mayfeld on a New Republic prison work detail, where he’s busting up wrecked TIEs. Right off the bat, I’m onboard, because while Star Wars might refer to prisons from time to time, we almost never get to actually see people in prison, much less doing menial labor – it’s a nice bit of worldbuilding. (Off the top of my head, all I can think of is the Jedi Knight novella which saw Alphonso Obata incarcerated by the NR on Milagro, jackhammering a city glassed by orbital bombardment).

In this opening we see Boba has repainted his armor, and it looks…Not At All Star Wars-y. While one could easily make the argument that ‘Everything was new once’, seeing him with a refreshed paintjob and how weird it looks really underlines how key the ‘Used Universe’ look is to the Galaxy Far Far Away. If you, dear reader, have just finished assembling and painting your own Star Wars kit, don’t stop now!  It may feel wrong to intentionally ‘mess up’ something you’ve spent a lot of time and effort on, but if you really want to do right by the aesthetic, you need to bite the bullet and do some weathering and aging to really sell the look.

Also, is this the first time we’ve seen a light-up identification doodad? I can guess what all the fancy propmakers and Batuu-bounders will be upgrading to this winter…

Anyway, the gang got Mayfeld out of prison because he used to be an Imperial sharpshooter, and still knows Imp clearances and protocols. From an out-of-universe perspective, I have to assume they’re using him because people like to see Bill Burr (I’d never heard of him before this show), but realistically there HAVE to be better candidates for this team than an asshole who doublecrossed Mando last season…what happened to all the Imperials who defected to the Alliance? Did the New Republic run out of them?

There’s a scene onboard the Slave 1, which magically has a new internal layout every time it appears. This time around there’s a big rotating…thing…inside. Being the one ship that lands horizontally and flies vertically, the design has never been especially clear, so I wish the designers could just sit down and come up with a definitive solution.

Since the season’s goal is to track down Governor Preacher’s Son’s ship to rescue Baby Yoda, they have to log on the Imperial Database, which apparently can tell a user exactly where a given ship is. Mayfeld says he “believes” there’s a terminal on the planet Meerkat or something, which seemed weird to me. Assuming such a terminal is standard Imp hardware, shouldn’t there be one in like, every Imperial base? Why do they have to go to this one specific planet? It’d be like needing an internet connection to hack the FBI, remembering your highschool had one years ago, and driving halfway across the country to access it. Um, what do you want to bet there’s probably something way closer?

In the episode’s obligatory point-at-a-hologram briefing scene, we’re told the secret facility is for “refining” some volatile “rydonium” stuff. Sounds familiar: in Fallen Order Saw Gerrera briefed players that Imps were refining tree sap into some powerful ‘compound’ on Kashyyyk too. As Scorch would’ve said, “One’s an anomaly, two’s a trend”, so I guess refining mystery ingredients are the new post-Disney McGuffin: if this were an EU show in the ’90s or Oughts, they’d probably be doing something with empowering crystals.

Anyway, Mando and Mayfeld wind up having to commandeer an Imperial vehicle carrying some of the stuff. To pilot the vehicle—which they keep referring to as a ‘Juggernaut’ (it’s a wheeled vehicle, but it’s Not a Juggernaut)—Mando has to change out of his armor and put on the Imperial driver’s getup, which means when he gets attacked by pirates later on, he’s actually vulnerable and can’t rely on his indestructible shinysuit. (Props to Pedro Pascal’s subtle body language to show that he’s out of his element and uncomfortable wearing unfamiliar armor)

Before the pirates show up, we have a good monologue from Mayfeld about his thoughts on the role of galactic government that gets mirrored later on. One of the things I liked most about this episode was the great balance between character development and plot/action scenes. Unlike other times this season, there was no point in ‘The Believer’ where I thought, ‘alright, guess I can switch off my brain and just watch the pretty colors for the rest of the episode’.

As the fight on top of the vehicle continues, I got some serious Indiana Jones vibes—much as I did back in Chapter 2, which was also directed by Rick Famuyiwa. We really shouldn’t have to wait all season for this one dude’s episode to inject a little bit of realism and vulnerability into the show…other directors, take notes!

The alert panel on the vehicle’s dashboard reads out ‘warning’ – but this is Disney!Canon, so the letters are horizontally flipped, which is about the stupidest idea they’ve tried to introduce and sully the GFFA.

There’s a moment during the chase when Mando’s borrowed SE-14 blaster goes ‘click’…which feels really weird. One of my major complaints about the GFFA as a whole is that we never see anyone reload any weapon onscreen, but having one actually run out of ammo (at such an inconvenient time, naturally) might actually be more annoying.

The pirates are a species we haven’t seen before which I’m not really a fan of…they look kind of like someone repainted a Saesee Tijn mask and then left it in a hot car. During the fight, Mando gets one of the detonators away from one of them and manages to throw it at their skimmer, and it looks like it actually took some effort to throw, which lines up with real-world experience: just last weekend I poured three ounces of lead to correctly simulate the weight of one, and when you’re used to tossing baseballs around, a one-kilogram detonator is surprisingly heavy!

The pirates’ clothing seem…off. Aside from all the detonators, they are very primitively armed with crowbars and spears; their clothes are brightly colored, very clean, and definitely don’t have the ‘space pirate’ look that one would expect; I’m guessing they’re just local anti-colonial resistors. Although this mostly seems to be an issue with the middle group of pirates, these guys might be my new go-to example of how The Mandalorian operates on a very small costume budget, as well as a great example of how selling the GFFA look is difficult to do just by throwing together off-the-rack items…either items need to be altered, or the group needs a more cohesive look.

This one moment seemed really weird to me: one of the pirates arms his TD, sets it on top of one of the cylindrical canisters, and the thing just sits like it was glued there, while the vehicle is bouncing around. I know they’re heavy, but they’re not like, black hole heavy! Just put it in between two of the canisters!
Just when it looks like they’re outnumbered and outgunned, a couple of TIE fighters swoop down and blast the pirates – a nice moment of eucatastrophe that I found much more fulfilling than Mando showing up to blast TIEs at the end of Chapter 12.
Once they reach the Imperial base, we get into the real meat of the episode. Mayfeld continues to run around with his helmet off for some reason—did they think we wouldn’t know which one is him? Seems extremely sloppy, especially if he’s supposed to be some ex-Imperial now-criminal. Mixed in with all the stormtroopers and ‘shoretroopers’ at the base are what look like civilians in miners’ hard hats, which I don’t think we’ve ever seen before.

They have to access the special computer database, which is in the corner of the officer’s mess, but Mayfeld doesn’t want to go because he recognizes one of the officers (and actually served with him??); Mando goes in and we get this season’s obligatory Helmetless Pedro Pascal appearance when he has to get his face scanned. The logic behind this whole face-scanner thing make little sense to me…it’s not clear if it’s genetic or facial-recognition, but it seems designed to reject criminals (Shand), Rebel affiliates (Dune), Jango Fett lookalikes (Boba), but the Titular Mandalorian, indoctrinated childhood member of a weapon-obsessed warrior zealot cult, is allowed access no problem. Huh?
(A minute later, Mayfeld—presumably improvising—makes a mention of having to go “fill out some TPS reports”, which felt really out of place…I love Mike Judge, but an Office Space reference in the middle of a tense scene was a great way to ruin the mood and break the fourth wall).

Anyway, they wind up having to sit down with creepy Admiral Badteeth, and it’s a great scene that adds some nuance to the Empire’s point of view and Mayfeld’s character, while slowly building tension a la Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained especially). Their conversation revolves around something called Operation Cinder, which comes from the EA!Battlefront game, so I conveniently choose to ignore that part of the exchange. I still don’t see the wisdom of Mayfeld keeping his helmet off, especially when he says he served under this officer, and then starts referring to their service together, but I don’t know how big a unit they were in; let’s assume it was pretty large.

Eventually, Mayfeld blasts Officer Believer, and they have to shoot their way out of the base; I would’ve liked to see them use something with more firepower than those SE-14 peashooters. The entire sequence gave me some serious WWII-saboteur vibes, almost feeling like it could have been in an early Call of Duty game, what with the setting looking like a hydroelectric plant, the hilltop ladysnipers providing covering fire, and Mayfeld’s final shot* at the rydonium to cover their tracks. (*It seemed improbable to me, considering an accelerating starship probably doesn’t make the most stable firing platform, until I remembered that they set him up last season as a sharpshooter…talk about playing the long game!). I was very glad he called Boba’s jezail a ‘cycler’ and not a ‘Tusken rifle’ at least. Between Mayfeld and Shand, I would love it to see some more realistic rifle shooting on the show…everybody is just picking things off from a standing position, not even using a sling to add some stabilization…but whatever.

When the Slave 1 comes in to pick our boys up, there’s a weird thing that happens in the ship’s ‘throat’, where something seems to retract to open up into the interior. I definitely don’t think we’ve ever seen that before. On their escape, two TIEs give chase and Boba deploys the ol’ seismic mine last seen in Episode II…possibly the coolest sound design for a non-lightsaber weapon, but it loses something when it’s just slicing into a couple of TIEs instead of a bunch of asteroids. I feel like there was a real missed opportunity for Shand or Dune to make a comment, but instead they just walk away making dopey faces like, ‘Ho-hum, just another day at work.’

Dune lets Mayfeld go, which considering she ‘had to bend a lot of rules’ to get him out of prison, seems like maybe she’s not starting off on the best foot in her job as a Space Marshal. As Mayfeld is walking away we get a decent view of his vest, which looks to be made of an M65 field jacket with most of the sleeves cut off. As folks online are wont to point out, yes his jacket does appear to be sporting buttons. Yes, it probably shouldn’t, owing to George Lucas’ Prime Star Wars Costuming Directive (no visible fasteners). As I have to keep pointing out—this show has a relatively small costume budget and civilian softgoods are a prime place to save money. I wish costumers would use some common sense – if the rule of the setting is ‘don’t show buttons’, and a character shows up with some buttons on their clothing, it’s not that hard to pretend they’re not there and point a finger at the costume department.

Anyway, a little long perhaps, but that’s because this episode was a welcome change from much of the rest of this season. After this, there’s just one more to go, so we’ll see what the future holds next week!

Writing this site takes a lot of time and energy. If you’ve enjoyed reading, please consider supporting my work with a small donation below! Thank you!