THE MANDALORIAN Season 3 Episode 2 Breakdown | Ending Explained, Star Wars Easter Eggs & Review

So, The Mandalorian is back, and as always, we’re bringing you a big breakdown from a galaxy far, far away. In this video, we’re going to be going over Season 3 Episode 2 and recapping all the Easter eggs, plot details, and things you missed. I just want to get straight into it, but please hit the thumbs-up button if you enjoy the video, and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel for breakdowns like this every day. We’ve also just launched a clips channel that is full of heavy spoiler highlights, so make sure you head over there right after this. Anyway, enough of me pushing my stuff. What you want to hear us go over is Episode 2, and we begin on Tatooine during the Boonta Eve celebrations.

The Mandalorian Season 3 Episode 2 Breakdown

We start off seeing fireworks being shot into the air, and celebrations like this, of course, happened at the end of Return of the Jedi after the second Death Star was destroyed. I’m pretty sure that this was outlawed under imperial rule, but the Hutts did control this sector until Boba took it over.

In the opening, we catch two V-35 speeders racing through the streets, and you might recognize this vehicle as something that popped up during A New Hope. The Boonta Eve Parade is something that we also witnessed during The Phantom Menace, with it being an annual event that took place during the celebrations.

Boonta Even Godhood itself came about when Boonta Hestilic Shad’ruu ascended to Godhood. This Hutt was the first to do so, and since then, its anniversary has been marked by this occasion. Also, I love how we can catch this guy doing donuts in the opening.

Anyway, we are, of course, visiting Tatooine since Boba Fett took over, and I think it very much mirrors Nevarro and how that’s become a more upper-class area.

Now we find ourselves returning to Pelli Mottos. Drop a few bills, then pop a few champagne bottles.

Anyway, she’s running a scam with some Jawas, and as we learned when we last saw her, she has a furry fetish. The Rodian that she’s talking to is now also wearing upper-class clothes, resembling Greef Karga’s glow-up since he became the Magistrate.

Sorry, High Magistrate.

I think this was just put in place to once again hammer home how the economy is thriving, but Peli has used this opportunity to make even more money. In the hangar, we can catch her BD droid once more, along with some Pit Droids who also debuted in The Phantom Menace.

We can also catch a periscope droid and R5, who becomes a big character in the entry.

It turns out the Jawas have taken his engine, and they’re basically stealing people’s stuff and selling it back to them.

Jawas are other creatures that I think might pop up from time to time, and we know from last week that they were the ones that gave Mando a piece of Mandalore.

He comes riding with a ship purring like a Nuzzle Shrew, and we watch as Grogu does a Jedi flip out of the cockpit. This is something that he, of course, learned from Luke, who was training him in the ways of the Force. It reminded me a lot of when Yoda did it during Attack of the Clones, and it’s sort of like poetry; they rhyme.

Peli brings up both Boba and then the Hutts, with her asking if they’re back. I totally forgot that they left the planet in The Book of Boba Fett, and I’ll never forgive them for saying that the Pykes scared them enough to leave. They ran the planet for centuries—what the heck?

I suppose there was a power vacuum after Jabba died, but either way, the planet now belongs to Boba.

Anyway, IG-11 needs a memory circuit, but with the Jawas being unable to provide one, he ends up going to Mandalore with R5 instead.

This is to do some spelunking, which I thought might be a reference to Batman Begins.

R5 is still completely busted up, and in case you missed our last video, then this next bit is for you. So R5 was the same droid that Uncle Owen originally tried to purchase all the way back in A New Hope. As he was going forward, his motivator busted up, and on the back of him, we could still see the oil leaking out.

Now there was actually a non-canon comic that stated he was a Jedi, and it said that he actually self-sabotaged so that R2-D2 could go with Luke and fulfill his destiny.

Here, though, we see the droid is scared to leave the hangar, even though Peli insists that it once fought for the Rebellion. Personally, I think that’s all a lie, and you could say that when it comes to getting Mando excited to take him, he’s a bad motivator.

Anyway, because it’s Boonta Eve, Peli will give it to Mando for half price and throw in a free oil bath. We’ve seen these before in the saga, and C-3PO took one after Luke bought him and R2.

Now we cut to nighttime to see the celebrations still going off, and it’s such a cool way to start the episode.

Titled The Mines of Mandalore, this sees Mando and Grogu next heading to, well, you guessed it.

The Mines of Mandalore in The Mandalorian

They arrive at Mandalore, and Din Djarin brings up how the planet used to be luscious and green. This is the case too, and like Tatooine, it was filled with tropical rainforests and rivers. However, centuries of civil war decimated the planet and turned it into a barren wasteland. The Mandalorians also used to be sworn enemies of the Jedi, but then a Mandalorian Jedi named Tar Viszla rose up. Wielding the dark saber, he united the people, and this is why it has become such a precious item.

Out in space, Mando also points out his home planet, Concordia. At the end of the Mandalore war, this was turned into a mining base by insurgents, which wiped out most of the moon’s forest. Eventually, these were abandoned, though, and the moon once more started to thrive until the next Civil War. The winning side exiled the losers to the moon, which is where they remained. It was a bit like Australia when we Brits used to send prisoners there, but overtime they became far more civilized than our Aussie cousins, having that.

Concordia built up its governor and became a prosperous place until further civil wars fractured the alliances.

This idea of the Mandalorians constantly being at odds with each other is something that Bo-Katan touched upon last week, but I can very much see her and Mando bringing everyone together. They both represent opposite sides of the divide, but if they can work together, then everyone can. Now that Mando has been, quote-unquote, redeemed in the living waters, I’m thinking that he could return and bring them together.

Mando also points out where Bo is, and he gives a lesson to Grogu.

This foreshadows him having to reach out to her later on, which we’ll talk about in just a bit.

Now Mando has to travel through a storm to get to the surface, and we learn that the magnetic field around the planet has been disrupted by the fusion bombs.

First mentioned in the 1977 Star Wars comic issue 53, it’s possible that these weapons were also used during the Battle of Mindor. They’ve completely messed up the planet, and we can also catch giant green gem-like structures now popping out of the surface. This is made of the same material that the Jawa gave to Din Djarin, and it’s clear that they visited it, highlighting how the air is safe to breathe.

As they land, we see several rocky formations, and shoutouts to our editor Matt for pointing out that these look similar to Palpatine’s throne on Exegol.

The destruction of Mandalore is also reminiscent of the glassing in Halo, and it’s transformed the planet to have this almost mirror-like surface.

But something lurks in the caves and crevices, and after R5 stops responding, Mando goes in to investigate. As he jumps down, we can also catch the Sundari, which we get a better look at later on in the episode. This was the capital of Mandalore, and it was destroyed during the Night of a Thousand Tears. This was playing upon the Night of Broken Glass, which happened during the Second World War in the ghettos against the Jews. The event completely destroyed the Sundari and most of the planet, leading to the wreck that we see it as here.

Now as Mando goes deeper underground, he comes across several creatures, and these reminded me a lot of the Salt Vampires from Star Trek. I also got a lot of vibes from the Morlocks in The Time Machine, and they add one of the many horror vibes to the entry.

Similar to them, these humanoid creatures lived underground and attacked from dark caves. Known as Alamites, they don’t stand up well against the Dark Saber, but it’s clear that Mando still has a lot of difficulty wielding it. Bo, on the other hand, doesn’t, because she’s used the weapon before and has found the inner peace needed to do so. Mando still feels at odds with himself due to not having bathed in the living waters yet, and it’s possible that next week he may be able to wield the blade finally.

He and Grogu dive off the edge and into the lower parts of the city, and this reminded me a lot of the descent in Waterworld. We’re very much traveling into a lost and forgotten land that was once a thriving metropolis. You compare this to how it looked in Clone Wars, and the city is a shadow of its former self, now shrouded in darkness. It very much juxtaposes Nevarro and Tatooine, and whereas they’ve thrived, this place has gone to waste.

All that is left, though, are creatures lurking in the darkness, and we come across several as they drop in.

I really loved the horror aesthetic that this takes on, and it very much becomes similar to Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. That involved traveling into the belly of the beast in order to go about a major transformation, and this could end up cementing the change Mando has made with the darksaber next week.

Down there, we can see several lizard-like creatures lurking in the shadows, and they carry green eyes similar to the Alamites. It’s possible that the fusion bombers actually turned their eyes like this, but that might be a reach because we talk nothing but nonsense.

Anyway, as he goes further in, he finds a Mandalorian helmet, and when the first trailer dropped, many believed that this was Tar Viszla’s. He was the Mandalorian Jedi who crafted the dark saber and brought the people together. However, that isn’t the case, and instead, it’s bait so that Mando can get grabbed by a modified crab droid.

These machines were used by the Confederacy of Independent Systems during the Clone Wars, and they were heavily used on soft terrain like sand and dirt like what we see here. It carries Mando off, and we get a similar shot to what happens in Gladiator when Maximus is being escorted away. The droid carries a cage on its stomach, and inside lies a biomechanical droid that’s modified itself, similar to General Grievous.

I absolutely love the design of this creature, and it has flashes of massifs, Frenzy from Transformers, and so on. There are yellow pipes on its body, and these reminded me a lot of the ones that we see in Palpatine’s base at the start of The Rise of Skywalker. To me, they looked a lot like snake skin, and I love the design of this thing. The cyclops eye on it appearing like it’s the left one throws you off balance a bit, and it adds another dimension to the entry.

Grogu sneaks over to Mando, but he’s unable to free him, and Grogu force-flips out of there before returning to the surface. Like Ellie, he’s now out on his own without his dad, and we see one of the crocodile creatures lurch out at him, revealing its wings.

I think that this might be a slight redesign of the pterosaur from the Star Wars universe. They are also native to Mandalore and draw from dinosaurs, like what this crocodile creature here looks like.

Now one of the Alamites goes to grab Grogu on the surface, but he forces it down like it’s the like button before the bat swoops in and attacks. As Peli mentioned earlier, R5 has the ability to pilot the ship, and thus Grogu just has to point the way.

This takes us to Bo Katan, and I legitimately thought that she was just going to go out there and shoot him.

was all like.

Bo Katan in The Mandalorian Season 3

Let’s get rid of him once and for all. But nah, upon seeing Grogu is on his own, she’s shaken out of her apathy. Bo says that she wants to be left alone, but knowing how lonely this can be, she heads out to Mandalore with him. At this point, we see her ship, the Gauntlet, which I think is one of the coolest crafts in Star Wars.

The Kom’rk fighter has a class-one hyperdrive and four laser cannons with the capability of both forward and backward fire.

It cuts through the skyline, and I love watching the view as it passes over the destroyed Sundari. This is very much symbolic of how Bo feels at the moment, and she’s a shell of her former self just like that is. She longingly stares at it, and I love how you can see little details on the wings, such as them vibrating as they move through the air. When designing the concepts for the universe, Ralph McQuarrie wanted to give everything this lived-in feeling, which I think is definitely hammered home in moments like this. Watching the ship land just gives it this feeling of weight, and it’s such a cool moment.

Now, as Bo and Grogu head in, we watch R5 plug into the ship. This is a callback to the original trilogy, where R2-D2 plugs into the Millennium Falcon to help fix the ship. It’s great to see that the new series is still paying homage to the original trilogy in these little ways.

Bo and Mando have a conversation about the dark saber, and Bo tells Mando that he needs to defeat Moff Gideon in combat to take possession of it. This sets up the conflict for the rest of the season, and it’s exciting to think about how it will all play out.

The episode ends with Moff Gideon watching a hologram of Mando and Grogu, setting up the confrontation between the two characters. It’s clear that Moff Gideon is not going to give up the dark saber without a fight, and it will be interesting to see how Mando and Bo Katan take him down.

Overall, Season 3, Episode 2 of The Mandalorian was another great episode. It had action, adventure, and plenty of nods to the Star Wars universe. I can’t wait to see what happens next in this exciting series.