After months of anticipation, the long-awaited second season of “The Mandalorian” hit Disney+ on Oct. 30. Viewers will remember that the first season of “The Mandalorian” left off with Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) being tasked with the new mission of delivering “the Child” (famously known as Baby Yoda, voiced/sound edited by Matthew Wood and David Acord) to the Jedi. As no one has seen the Jedi for a good decade or so, this is no easy task—and this season of “The Mandalorian” is intent on making sure the audience knows that.

The Jedi—Force-sensitive beings associated with the good or the “Light Side” of the Force—make the most sense as new teachers and caretakers of Baby Yoda, who viewers will remember showed signs of being Force-sensitive. However, there are few Jedi left, as many of them have been wiped out in a genocide twenty years prior. In order to find the Jedi, Djarin decides to track down his fellow Mandalorians, the war-like people who, unfortunately, are just as difficult to find as the Jedi.

But moving aside from rumors, let’s get into what has actually happened on the show so far: season two kicked off with the classical western-meets-science-fiction bang that “Mandalorian” is known for. Djarin winds up on Tatooine based on rumors that a Mandalorian currently resides in one of its cities. While Djarin does not, in fact, find a Mandalorian, he does meet Cobb Vanth (Timothy Olyphant), the marshal of the small mining town Mos Pelgo. Vanth and Djarin strike up an alliance: Djarin is willing to help Vanth get rid of a krayt dragon in exchange for the Mandalorian armor Vanth bought off some Jawas. 

This episode, in short, reminds the audience why people fell in love with ‘The Mandalorian” in the first place. The ambience of the whole episode, what with the desert and the bar shootouts, mixed with the bizarre fantasy-slash-sci-fi of battling a literal dragon, plus the wholesome interactions between Djarin and Baby Yoda (i.e. Baby Yoda toddling after Djarin with raised arms), capture the attention of every single kind of person who got invested in “The Mandalorian,” and, to be honest, the Star Wars franchise as a whole. We’ve got the classic action scenes balanced with the found family trope—what else could Star Wars fans want? 

While the first episode kicked off the second season wonderfully, the second episode fell a bit flat because of the lack of narrative continuation. After winning back the Mandalorian armor from Vanth, Djarin takes up another task that he thinks might help him find his people. What instead happens is that Djarin transports an amphibian contact gloriously named Frog Lady (Dee Bradley Baker), who’s determined to retrieve the last eggs of her bloodline. A seemingly simple enough task, except of course, the eggs are located on an ice planet. As if that wasn’t bad enough,  Baby Yoda—as babies do—eats a spider’s egg and, in the process, wakes a huge army of spiders and, alarmingly, the mother spider. A whole sequence reminiscent of “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” ensues: ice spiders chase after the trio, and just as all hope seems lost, there’s a deus-ex-machina of some random rebel pilots who blast all the spiders out of the way on time. 

While admittedly action- and wholesomeness-packed in that regard, the second episode felt like a bit of a let-down given the previous episode. Granted, not every single episode is going to hit the same level of satisfaction, but the main frustration with the second episode was that nothing actually pushed the plot forward. Season one was admittedly filled with more types of these episodes—episodes that felt more like filler episodes than anything else, somewhat disjointed in storytelling, but that had, for the most part, been forgivable because the audience was mostly just as confused as Djarin in terms of what to do with Baby Yoda. But now that Djarin has an actual task to complete, the expectations were that the storytelling would feel a bit more cohesive. 

Of course, we are only two episodes into “The Mandalorian,” so perhaps we shouldn’t be too impatient to see where the show leads. Either way, here’s to hoping that this season will follow through with the way it started.