Although it’s his infant companion, dubbed “Baby Yoda,” that has been commanding the most attention online, The Mandalorian’s most compelling character is its eponymous hero. Pedro Pascal has managed to craft a complex, conflicted character, despite being perpetually stuck under a face-masking helmet, through his use of subtle body language and telling line delivery.
The second season of The Mandalorian is confirmed to be hitting Disney+ later this year, so there’s still plenty of growth and development to come for this character. In the meantime, season 1 has given us a lot to work with. So, here are The Mandalorian’s 10 greatest moments (so far), ranked.
10 Cutting a guy in half with a door (Chapter 1: The Mandalorian)
The first episode of The Mandalorian brilliantly introduced audiences to its title character in the opening scene. The series is a “space western” in a much truer sense than Star Wars’ previous attempt at the genre with Solo. Like countless westerns, The Mandalorian opens with its outlaw protagonist wandering into a saloon and instantly ruffling feathers.
He gets into a fight with a group of guys who come over to give him a hard time, quickly dispatching the first couple with his impressive array of weaponized gadgets, and then mercilessly slicing the final guy in half with the saloon’s front door.
9 “This is the way.” (Chapter 3: The Sin)
“This is the way,” has become a rallying cry for fans of The Mandalorian. It’s what Mandalorians say to one another. It’s an age-old mantra recited by the Mandalorians, referring to their shared code of ethics. It makes a lot more sense with the later revelation that Mandalorians are not a species, but a group of people who follow a credo – or, “the way,” as one might put it.
And Mando’s fellow Mandalorians had a lot to do in the first season of The Mandalorian, like when they showed up to save him from Greef Karga and his band of bounty hunters after breaking the code to save the Child.
8 Climbing up a moving Sandcrawler (Chapter 2: The Child)
One of the great things that The Mandalorian has been doing is putting an exciting spin on familiar Star Wars iconography. In the original 1977 movie, when the Jawas abducted C-3PO and R2-D2 to sell on the black market, they charged around the Tatooine desert on a Sandcrawler.
But the Sandcrawler was shot from wide angles when it was moving, and when it was featured in closeups, it was parked. In the second episode of The Mandalorian, the titular bounty hunter climbs up the side of a moving Sandcrawler, tossing Jawas out of the windows, all while the Child follows in his little floating crib.
7 Priorities (Chapter 8: Redemption)
At the end of The Mandalorian’s season 1 finale, Greef Karga tells Mando, “When you’re ready to return, you will have the pick of all quarries.” But then, Mando looks down at the Child and says, “I’m afraid I have more pressing matters at hand.”
Star Wars fans went into this series with the expectation that it was a story about a lone-wolf gunslinger wandering the galaxy, because the Child had been left out of all the marketing materials. It actually turned out to be the story of a lone-wolf gunslinger who reluctantly becomes a father figure to a baby that some evil people want dead.
6 Yes, disintegrations (Chapter 2: The Child)
In the second episode of The Mandalorian, Mando fights his way through a bunch of Jawas, and finally uses his cool-looking gun, revealing what it does: disintegrates. Every time Mando shot a Jawa with his gun, they vanished from existence, leaving behind nothing more than a couple of sparks.
This was a callback to The Empire Strikes Back. When Darth Vader hired Boba Fett to track down the Millennium Falcon. He told him, “No disintegrations.” Fett’s history of disintegrating his targets was left ambiguous. In The Mandalorian, we got to see the weapon that does all the pesky disintegrating.
5 Removing his helmet (Chapter 8: Redemption)
As soon as it was established that Mandalorians never take off their helmets, it was only a matter of time before Mando removed his. It was a little like a “Chekhov’s gun” – the dramatic principle that states that if a gun is introduced in a story, it has to go off by the end – and in the season finale, when Mando took off his helmet, the moment felt earned.
The fact that Mandalorians aren’t a race, but rather a group of people who follow a strict credo, was an interesting twist that added a new dimension to the lead character and his determination to hide his appearance.
4 Slaying a hallway full of droid soldiers (Chapter 6: The Prisoner)
Hallway fights were a staple of Netflix’s Marvel series, from Daredevil to The Punisher, but there was an awesome one in The Mandalorian, too. In the sixth episode, “The Prisoner,” Mando infiltrates an interstellar prison with a band of fellow misfits. As the job goes awry, the emergency doors are shut and red lights illuminate the hallways.
The Mandalorian is confronted by a bunch of droid soldiers that he quickly dispatches. It’s been well-established that Mando doesn’t like droids – although a reprogrammed IG-11 seemed to change his mind in the season 1 finale – so he’s particularly aggressive and gleefully violent in this fight.
3 Killing IG-11 to save the Child (Chapter 1: The Mandalorian)
In the closing moments of The Mandalorian’s first episode, Mando and IG-11 break into a facility to take “the asset” back to the Client. However, things get emotionally complicated for the Mandalorian when he finds that “the asset” is a baby. He’d been told that the target was 50 years old, so he wasn’t expecting it to be so tiny and adorable.
As a droid, IG-11 doesn’t get distracted by human emotion. He was ordered to bring in the asset dead, so he immediately draws his blaster and prepares to kill the Child. And then, Mando makes a snap decision. He kills IG-11 to protect the Child.
2 Blowing up Moff Gideon’s TIE fighter (Chapter 8: Redemption)
The first-season finale of The Mandalorian needed a big moment of all-out action to go out with a bang. As Moff Gideon – played by Giancarlo Esposito, television’s go-to “big bad” – attacked the heroes in his TIE fighter (making TIE fighters look more badass than the Empire’s troops ever could), Mando flew up on his newly acquired jetpack, latched onto the ship, and took it down in mid-air.
Gideon survived the scuffle, but it was still a spectacular sequence. Gideon’s incredibly cool weapon, the Darksaber, will probably become a major plot point in the second season, so we have that to look forward to.
1 Breaking the code protect the Child from the Client (Chapter 3: The Sin)
The third episode of The Mandalorian, “The Sin,” was one of the best – and perhaps the most emotionally charged. It was directed by Deborah Chow, who will be directing every episode of Ewan McGregor’s upcoming Obi-Wan series on Disney+, so that show is clearly in safe hands.
The great thing about Pedro Pascal’s performance as the Mandalorian is that he uses body language to convey the character’s emotions. When he looks down at the missing gear stick knob on his ship after turning in the Child, we can tell what he’s feeling. He regrets giving the Child to the Client and wants to go back and save him, even though it means breaking the code. And that’s exactly what he does, and it’s awesome.
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