For better and worse, old ways die hard in The Mandalorian Ch. 19.
In which I try to make sense of this episode’s unusual structure.
The Short Take:
I have a lot of questions about what happened in the middle of this episode, but I’m excited for all of it. Thematically, it creates a complicated parallel.
Image Credit: Pop Culture Maniacs
[SPOILER WARNING: No amnesty for those who have not seen this episode!]
The Long Take:
I did not have 40 minutes of Doctor Pershing on my Mandalorian bingo card.
Initially, this episode looked to be a straightforward continuation of the Mandalore plot line we left off with last week. Bo waits patiently with Grogu as Din regains consciousness after nearly drowning in The Living Waters. But about 10 minutes later, we cut to Coruscant. Doctor Pershing, the scientist who tries to subject Grogu to experiments as early as Season 1 with The Client (Werner Herzog) and then again in Season 2 with Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito), stands before a stadium full of people to testify that he has been rehabilitated. He thanks The New Republic for a second chance. And from there, we go on, uninterrupted, for most of the episode, following Doctor Pershing as he tries to settle into a new life.
I’m going to admit, once I realized that we weren’t cutting back to Din and Bo-Katan and would continue on for an extended Doctor Pershing sequence, I felt like a child who had just had their favorite stuffed animal taken away from them, only to be handed a Rubiks cube. “Where are my Mandos?,” I wondered. Where is this going? It felt off, and weird. Like it wasn’t supposed to be happening.
Now I had to figure out what was going on with this new storyline. Sure, the reintroduction of Pershing and Elia Kane, a former communications officer for Moff Gideon, would likely mean that a new threat to Grogu was on the horizon. That the cloning research Pershing had attempted would start up again and so too would the hunt for everyone’s favorite baby. But why were we spending so much time with Pershing and the Amnesty Program, without cutting back to our main Mandalorian story until the last five minutes of the episode?
I will try to explain what happens with Elia Kane and Penn Pershing at the end of this episode soon enough. But first, as I look back at the episode as a whole, I see two thematically connected stories about isolation and trying to reintegrate into society when everything you knew before has been destroyed. About finding a sense of belonging in a new, post-Empire Galaxy. Both Bo-Katan and Doctor Pershing find themselves alone and unmoored by a loss of the familiar. They are both converts. In previous episodes, we learn that all of Bo-Katan’s followers have abandoned her. She sits alone on her throne in a nearly empty castle. Then, in this episode, a hoard of tie fighters bomb that castle, leaving her without a people and without a home. Meanwhile, Doctor Pershing moves into his new apartment in what’s called Amnesty Housing, where all of the rehabilitated members of The Empire must live. They seem very much like ex-cons on parole, getting a taste of freedom but with many controls and conditions. They are branded with new uniforms and pins that don’t actually look all that different from their old ones. No longer allowed to conduct scientific research, Pershing now works in an office (that visually echoes what we saw in Andor) that archives and catalogues old Imperial equipment. New job, new home, new everything. The life he knew before has completely vanished.
Image Credit: Polygon
We spend so much time with Doctor Pershing in this episode because we have to see him struggling with the day to day in order to understand how his reintegration into The New Republic is actually not going well, despite what his public talk might have indicated. With Elia Kane goading him on (again, more on that in a minute), he begins to yearn for his old life. He rationalizes rule breaking as helping The New Republic, but deep down he misses his former scientist self. He wants to get that lab not because he thinks it will make him a better citizen of The New Republic. He doesn’t even really do it because Elia tells him he should (though she is trying). He does it because it’s all he knows. Cloning research is who he is, and so he tries to get it back for his own personal satisifaction. And I do think that only through this uninterrupted 40 minutes that we get to feel that monotony and slow boil resentment that builds every time his parole officer/therapist droid asks him if he feels any anger or resentment towards The New Republic. A more condensed or cut up version of this story would not have had the same effect.
Once I saw Lee Isaac Chung’s name pop up in the end credits as the director of this episode, everything clicked and made sense. Chung directed one of my favorite movies of 2020, Minari; it tells the story of a Korean American immigrant family that has to move to a rural town in Arkansas to try to make a living as farmers. The film focuses a lot on mundane yet meaningful interactions between this family and the people in the town. We see how hard it is for them to fit in. No one is unkind to them — quite the opposite in many cases — but they feel the sting of otherness just the same. I see the same attention paid to the small, mundane moments that add up over time in this episode of The Mandalorian. It’s not just about big, operatic battles. It’s about travel biscuits and insignia pins.
An uplifting reading of these dual storylines, with Bo-Katan’s journey to The Children of the Watch bookending Doctor Pershing’s attempted assimilation into The New Republic, is that Bo-Katan’s is the success story while Doctor Pershing’s is the failure. Pershing’s transgressions end with him strapped into a Mind Flayer, but Bo-Katan ends this episode having found a new home and family who are there for her when she has lost everything. She thinks she’s just going there to help Din testify and get redeemed, but in the process she also qualifies for redemption. (Shout-out to Dan Zehr of Coffee with Kenobi for noticing that she never took her helmet off after emerging from The Living Waters in last week’s episode.) They could be opposite sides of the same narrative coin.
Image Credit: Yahoo News
A more cynical reading might be that Pershing’s story here is a cautionary tale for Bo. The Children of the Watch welcome her with open arms, but will she be able to lead a more orthodox life? Will she be able to keep that helmet on? My hope is that she will agitate a little and help The Children of the Watch see that they can be just as bonded and just as much a community without keeping such strict adherence to The Creed. But it’s also possible that her attempt to do so only creates conflict and the very infighting that she lamented last week. Either way, I thought that the pairing of Mandalore and Bo-Katan with Coruscant and Pershing provided the episode with a rich subtext.
But what actually happened to Doctor Pershing, you may wonder. Elia’s actions and motivations at the end of the episode are a little ambiguous, but here’s where I’ve landed. She is in fact still working for Moff Gideon/those who still cling to the Empire, and has managed to fool The New Republic into thinking that she is a model product of the Amnesty Program. We see she’s following Pershing from the beginning of the episode, sizing him up so she can take him down. She’s just so good at acting like his friend that I forgot to be suspicious of her for a good while. (Space popsicles will do it every time.) To The New Republic, it might look like she was testing Pershing. Tempting him to see if he would keep on the straight and narrow. She’s a hero for turning him in, in their eyes. But what she’s actually doing is setting Pershing up so that he will end up in the Mind Flayer that is supposedly not actually a Mind Flayer but basically looks and works like one.
The ultimate goal in going extra crispy on the Mind Flayer settings, however, is a little less clear to me. Moff Gideon and Elia Kane may want revenge because Pershing did technically sell them out to Din when he and Bo were trying to rescue Grogu at the end of Season 2. Or they may want to kill him so that The New Republic doesn’t get a leg up over them in cloning technology, were they to change their minds and recruit him at a later date. Or perhaps the Mind Flayer at maximum strength will return Pershing to his “original programming,” thus making him completely loyal to the Empire again. In Season 1, Cara Dune says to Din that if the Empire catches her, they’ll upload her to a Mind Flayer. The word upload implies that maybe the Mind Flayer transfers knowledge and memories to cloud storage somewhere, so even if Pershing is a vegetable by the end of the procedure, Elia will still be able to take his mind in digital form back to Moff Gideon. So they get all his scientific genius without the inconvenient moral handwringing.
Image Credit: Star Wars News Net
In retrospect, part of my unsettled feeling in watching this middle stretch of the episode was less about not seeing Mando and Grogu and more about the generally “off” feeling that the portrayal of The New Republic generates. With the Mind Flayer scene, we see more blatantly how The New Republic may not be any better than the Empire if they’re willing to psychologically condition Amnesty candidates. But the very idealistic, better tomorrow music that played as Pershing gazed upon the sights of Coruscant often had a hollow, ominous effect. Like it was all for show. Theatrics to compensate for the same tyranny rebranded or under new management. In that way this portion of the episode reminded me more of Andor than what I typically associate with The Mandalorian, at least tonally. But I think the series will ultimately be better for it.