Season 3, Episode 6: ‘Guns for Hire’
For those of us who scan every frame of “The Mandalorian” looking for nifty new droids and alien creatures, this week’s episode offered a real bounty. Din Djarin, Grogu and Bo-Katan Kryze pay a visit to Plazir-15, an Outer Rim planet known for having a diverse population and a nearly all-droid work force, all sharing space within a spectacular domed city. “Guns for Hire” is an eye-candy smorgasbord.
Plazir-15 is touted as the Outer Rim’s “only remaining direct democracy” — a claim our heroes hear delivered in a cheerful voice as their ship gets pulled by a tractor beam into the city’s docking station. The planet’s elected leaders are also members of a royal family; and while they say they are committed to democracy they still live like swells. The comedian Jack Black plays the pompous ruler and former Imperial officer Captain Bombardier, while the pop star Lizzo is his extravagantly attired wife, the Duchess. Their head of security, Commissioner Helgait, is played by Christopher Lloyd of “Back to the Future” and “Taxi” fame.
It is baked in to the overall style of “The Mandalorian” that the acting is often hammy and the dialogue stiff, because the creator Jon Favreau is borrowing from the same old war movies and science-fiction matinees that inspired George Lucas to make “Star Wars.” That said, this week’s guest star trio blurs the line at times between “committed to the bit” and “theater kids unleashed.” Their characters are entertaining, granted. Any time Black can go into full Orson Welles mode in a role — with cocked eyebrows and a booming voice — he clearly relishes it. But they all also come off as pretty silly at times. So it goes with this show.
This is not a major liability though, because most of this episode is about Din and Bo-Katan doing what they do best: acting as hired muscle. Captain Bombardier and the Duchess promise to back the restoration of the Mandalore system within the intergalactic community and to grant these two Mandalorians an audience with Plazir-15’s private mercenary force, led by Bo-Katan’s former subordinate Axe Woves (Simon Kassianides). In return, the rulers need help with an investigation into what appears to be a “coordinated malfunction” among the planet’s droids.
This episode’s director Bryce Dallas Howard (a veteran of this series) has a lot of fun with a slapstick comedy montage of droids going haywire. And in general, this chapter has some fascinating looks at droid culture, including a trip to a bar called the Resistor, where the robots sip on a refreshing lubricant named Nepenthé. Because Plazir-15’s citizenry relies on their droids to maintain an idle, upscale lifestyle, Captain Bombardier is insistent that they be kept happy and functional. And the droids like this arrangement. They enjoy being useful — especially since throughout the New Republic former Imperial droids are getting scrapped.
This brings us back to one of the major themes of Season 3: the idea that the New Republic, however well-meaning, has been too quick to dismantle some of the Empire’s perfectly good infrastructure, and too inattentive to the often widely ranging needs of faraway planets. Perhaps there are ways to fuse the new ways with the old that the current administration is either too busy or too ideologically rigid to see.
This episode is low on big action set-pieces, although Howard and company do execute an exciting chase sequence after Din pushes a reprogrammed battle droid into going rogue. Ultimately, the Mandalorians’ investigation leads them back to Commissioner Helgait, whose devilish name should have been a tip off that he was up to no good. It turns out that this old faithful servant of Plazir-15’s blue bloods is actually a secret radical, plotting to disrupt the planet’s cushy lifestyle by infecting the droids’ Nepenthé with malicious nanobots, designed to restore the machines to their original warlike programming.
The episode ends with Captain Bombardier and the Duchess satisfied and Bo-Katan finally getting to complete her mission to retake command of her former army from Axe. In a somewhat pro forma coda, the two Mandalorians fight, Bo-Katan wins, and then Din announces that because she previously saved him from an alien creature that had taken his Darksaber, she is the weapon’s rightful owner — and thus, again, Mandalore’s rightful ruler.
Before the handover, Axe takes a swipe at Din for not being a pure-blooded (or indeed any-blooded) Mandalorian, and for being a religious zealot to boot. This kind of attitude as much as anything else may be what keeps the New Republic from thriving. Old prejudices — like old programming codes — are not so easily overwritten.
Noel Murray
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