Nightmare Fuel / The Mandalorian

Spiders Are Scary even in a galaxy far, far away.

"Members of my escort have completed assembly of an E-Web heavy repeating blaster. If you are unfamiliar with this weapon, I am sure that Republican shock trooper Carasynthia Dune of Alderaan will advise you that she has witnessed many of her ranks vaporized mid-descent facing the predecessor of this particular model. Or perhaps the decommissioned Mandalorian hunter Din Djarin has heard the songs of the Siege of Mandalore, when gunships outfitted with similar ordnance laid waste to fields of Mandalorian recruits in the Night of a Thousand Tears."

— Moff Gideon

The Mandalorian keeps the rating low at TV-14, but despite that some of the deaths and Nightmare Fuel are pretty nasty.

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General

• We finally get the context of the Mandalorian's Disruptor Rifle. Anything hit with the Mandalorian's weapon is instantly turned to ash while pieces of the person's clothing fly away on fire or fall to the ground with nothing left inside of them. The show does a good job showing people's reaction to seeing their buddies hit with it, scattering like rats and seeking cover as their comrades explode into ash before their eyes.
  • To make matters worse, Wookieepedia describes them as firing "an energy wave consisting of disruptive, nonharmonic energy pulses that excited a target's molecules to the point that it destroyed the bonds that held their constituent atoms together, painfully." As the Star Wars universe canonically returns the "soul" of all beings to the gestalt Force upon death, this would logically be feeling the most excruciating pain possible across 100% of your body in the instant before oblivion.
• The flashbacks to the Separatists attack on Mando's family are brief but gut-wrenching.
• The number of times a rival bounty hunter or other scoundrel tries to kill poor little Grogu.

Season One

Chapter 1: The Mandalorian

• That poor Quarren from the first fight of the series. As the Mandalorian tries to drag him back into the bar with his wrist line launcher, the Quarren shoots him. Mando immediately shoots the door control panel, resulting in the struggling Quarren being gruesomely, slowly bisected by the closing door.
• A human landspeeder pilot warns the Mandalorian to stay off the ice and take off as soon as possible. As the Mandalorian's bounty watches the speeder fly off, a giant beast bursts out of the ice and eats the landspeeder and the pilot whole. The fact that there's a monster that can sense and attack a fast landspeeder flying several feet off of the ice is scary enough on its own, but then having to watch that same beast making its way towards you must be even worse.
• As the Mando's first bounty is poking through his ship after being taken into custody, he stumbles across a trio of frozen, statue-like prisoners hanging from the ceiling like haunches of meat at a slaughterhouse, and it slowly dawns on him that he's next on the rack. Then the Mando appears out of nowhere and shoves him into an alcove that starts to hiss and steam. Smash Cut to said bounty hanging alongside the others in a carbonite shell.
  • Carbonite freezing may not be lethal, but it is depicted as deeply unsettling at best and downright torturous at worst. Some of the prisoner's faces appear to be twisting in agony. It quickly establishes that, while our protagonist may not be a cold blooded killer, he is NOT someone to be trifled with.
    • In a later episode, the Mythrol says that he still can't see out of his left eye. As was demonstrated in Return of the Jedi, even perfect thawing after a year can leave the victim virtually blind for quite a while. One of the Infinities comics in the original EU showed that, if the thawing process is done incorrectly or with damaged circuitry, the prisoner (Han, in this case) can be rendered permanently blind.
• As Mando walks towards the hidden compound there is a brief shot of of a small creature locked in a cage watching a member of its species being roasted. That creature is a Kowakian monkey-lizard - a sentient being that has been used as a pet throughout the empire. Its lamentations show that it's fully aware of its fate. Later, in chapter 3 we see a brief shot of a woman eating the creature.
• While awesome, seeing how efficiently IG-11 dispatches the mercs is equally horrifying. 360-degree rotation of its head, torso, and limbs allow it to aim and shoot anywhere, and it does so with pinpoint accuracy, all while shrugging off most forms of blaster fire. It's no wonder the IG series of assassin droids are so feared across the galaxy.

Chapter 2: The Child

• Mando battling the Mudhorn. This beast is pretty much a Star Wars version of a prehistoric woolly rhinoceros, and it's quite intimidating in size. Even Mando's arsenal can't help him against the sheer power of a ferocious creature: he gets overwhelmed easily. If not for the Child's help, he could've been surely killed.

Chapter 3: The Sin

• The Mandalorian finding the Child's crib in the dumpster near the Imperial hideout. Unsurprisingly, this is where the Papa Wolf instincts really kick in.
• Mando walking in on the Child strapped to a table unconscious and being scanned for something. It doesn't appear to be harmful (at least not yet), but Mando is understandably horrified by the sight.
• As awesome as it may be, and as much as they may have had it coming, some of the Mandalorian's takedowns on the Stormtroopers are quite brutal. One trooper is throttled by the Mando's grapple before getting Impaled with Extreme Prejudice In the Back by his vibroblade in a clearly painful manner, and another is burned alive by his flamethrower. The sound of the trooper screaming doesn't help either. We don't get a glimpse inside the scorched and blackened armor, but it's probably not something you'd want to see anyway. (One can only imagine how it smelled).

Chapter 4: Sanctuary

• The episode begins with a peaceful village of krill-farmers going about their lives until a sudden thudding sound echoes in the forest beyond. Suddenly. they are attacked by Klatoonian bandits in a flurry of violence and blaster fire. It's all one woman can do to grab her daughter and cower beneath a basket in a krill-pond as the bandit leader walks right next to them, satisfied in the carnage he has brought to these helpless people.
• Upon learning that an AT-ST is in the area, Mando and Cara immediately try to gather the villagers and get the hell out of there. Later on, we get to see that their fears were vindicated. Just a few of the things were bad enough in Return of the Jedi when they were in broad daylight and had an entire army opposing them. With just the Mando and Cara on foot in the dead of night, it's a demonic juggernaut that simply cannot be fought on equal ground.
  • Demonic is the right word for it too. The AT-ST was either painted black or charred all over with the original gray showing at the edges and the lights inside of it are a orangish red color. The walker looks like a demon that's come to claim souls. It’s popularly speculated that director Bryce Dallas Howard took heavy inspiration from her experience with the T-Rex.

Chapter 5: The Gunslinger

• The Mandalorian coming back to the Razor Crest after finding some work in the Cantina only to find the Child missing from where he left it. Fortunately, the audience knows what happened and Peli immediately shows up with the kid when Mando starts shouting.
• The impaled stormtrooper helmets on display are implied to still be occupied. It makes one consider just how barbaric and savage things must have gotten when word got out of the Empire's fall and any illusion that the Empire could enforce their law and order in such a hive of scum and villainy crumbled. Pay Evil unto Evil or not, Tatooine's underbelly is horrifying to trifle with.

Chapter 6: The Prisoner

• We're treated to a full Mook Horror Show as the Mandalorian manipulates prison blast doors to separate his traitorous comrades and then picks them off one by one. Especially the shot of Mayfeld in a corridor with flickering lights as the Mandalorian silently gets closer each time they flash almost like a Weeping Angel.
  • Notably, Mando is only visible on every other flicker. He repeatedly disappears completely from the frame only to reappear even closer. There's no reason to even do it to Mayfeld, who hasn't noticed him, except to be more terrifying to the audience.
• After seeing the wide variety of grimy lived-in settings throughout the show (even the Stormtroopers wear battered and stained armor), the New Republic prison ship is unnervingly sanitary and orderly, with the patrols of gleaming polished guard droids being the only movement on the ship, besides the prisoners in their cells. It plays like something out of Doctor Who.
  • Nightmare Fuel on a subconscious level: In the Original Trilogy, the heroes were dirty and gritty, dressed in earth tones and using battered, cobbled-together equipment. The evil Empire had the slick, shiny, clean uniforms and ships and corridors. This New Republic prison barge leans hard into the same tidy, shiny aesthetic that defined The Empire.

Chapter 7: The Reckoning

• When the Mando and Cara are having a lighthearted arm-wrestling match, the Child misreads the situation and Force-Chokes Cara. While the Child's intent was to protect Mando, the situation still demonstrates that the Child is still a baby and can be dangerous if it uses the Force with no learned sense of right and wrong. One also has to wonder if the Child has seen Force Choke before to mimic it, rather than to use the Force on Cara in some other way, particularly since Force Choke is an ability associated with The Dark Side.
• The party is attacked in the middle of the night by wyvern-like creatures that carry off one of the bounty hunters and a blurrg. They're apparently extremely venomous, as a bite nearly kills Greef very quickly, and swoop in and out of the darkness with little warning.
• The Death Troopers, originally from Rogue One. Before we even see them, they're able to annihilate an entire room full of tense and alert troopers in about as much time as it takes to cross a street. Everyone they wanted to kill is dead and the only survivors are alive because they were intentionally spared. Not even Mando himself had any idea they were there until they opened fire. It's abundantly clear that these are foes even Mando can't take lightly.
  • As if that isn't bad enough, they're immediately reinforced by an entire army of Stormtroopers who are obviously far better drilled and equipped than any of the ones Mando has fought before. Our protagonists were sweating bullets at the thought of facing more than four at once, but as the street fills front to back with dozens upon dozens of troopers it begins to sink in just how screwed they really are.
  • Going along with this, their murder of the Client and his entire stormtrooper cadre. Not moments after explaining his Undying Loyalty to the Empire and trying to convince Mando that he would be better off helping them, he is unceremoniously killed by his Moff for the high crime of failing to have already captured the Child and being in the way. Just like Captain Needa before him, the Client's fate shows just how little loyalty buys you when your leaders only care about how much value you have in the moment.

Chapter 8: The Redemption

• The Scout Troopers that harass and punch the Child. To them, it's a random oddity that they need alive but honestly couldn't care either way as they hit it twice to quiet it down, and then punch in the face when it bites one of them as the other smugly acts nonchalant about the payback. Then IG-11 finds them, as described below.
• One of the stormtroopers who go after the Armorer goes head first into the furnace she uses for melting beskar. Most certainly a horrible way to die, regardless of the guy's allegiance.
  • We've seen how deep the forge is (not very). The stormtrooper lands in it headfirst. His head drops below the rim. Then his shoulders. The forge is so hot, it's melting/incinerating him to nothing almost as fast as gravity can pull him into it.
• The flashback to the Mandalorian's past. Just after being hidden by his parents, he's discovered by a familiar face: a B2 Super Battle Droid, who wordlessly points its blaster at him, a child, and we see a shot of it from the young Mando's perspective just before it's destroyed by the arriving Mandalorian commandos. Here, there's not a single trace of Prequel-era comedy relief in the droid's portrayal. It's just a hulking, eerily silent machine about to kill a defenseless young boy.
• Moff Gideon is a No-Nonsense Nemesis par excellence; from bringing in enough firepower to wage war against a small nation just to face three (admittedly dangerous) people; to revealing he has access to personal (and in Mando's case confidential) information about them; to almost killing Mando in the ensuing firefight. How exactly did the Rebellion make any headway if people like him were in charge again?
  • There's also the mention by Cara that he was supposed to be executed for his crimes. Either he somehow escaped or there's a lot more going on than what's seen on the surface.
  • Finally, he's claimed a chilling prize from his role in The Great Purge: the Darksaber. Time will tell if he has any true skill with the blade, but it's safe to assume he didn't come by it through pleasant means.
    • Given that we last saw the blade in the hands of Bo-Katan and the Mandalorian rebels, it's likely that their uprising didn't end well for them.
• IG-11 proves to be every bit as effective in hand-to-hand combat as he is with firearms, but the results are... messy. First, he twists a scout trooper's hand 180 degrees with all the effort of bending a stalk of celery, and then whips said trooper over his head by his broken hand and onto hard volcanic rock with enough force to snap the shoulder. A second trooper is then throttled (by a "hand" that is essentially a power-driven steel clamp) before getting the back of his head repeatedly and brutally smashed into his speeder with enough force to deform the outrigger. We've seen Mando, Cara, and a full assortment of capable badasses throw down in unarmed combat before, but it's blatantly obvious that flesh and blood cannot compete with droids in that regard.
  • Assuming that the first trooper survived, it's doubtful that he'll receive any aid; Imperial troops are deemed utterly expendable and all his comrades have been wiped out. Imagine waking up with those injuries and realizing you've been abandoned.
• Gideon's description of the E-Web's capabilities is oddly chilling for how understated and matter-of-fact it is; it probably helps that when he talks about Cara's friends being vaporized by it mid-descent, and the stories of a Night of Thousand Tears Mando might be familiar with, their body language indicates they know EXACTLY what he's talking about and he's not exaggerating one bit.
  • Remember the first time we saw an E-Web? In The Empire Strikes Back, the Snowtroopers assembled one to try and keep the Millenium Falcon from escaping. This is an anti-infantry weapon with enough fire rate and firepower to threaten heavy vehicles and even small spaceships. Little wonder Greef says "It's over" as soon as he sees it.
• Cara shows fear over the potential of a ‘Mind Flayer’ being used on her if she surrenders to Gideon because she’s a ex-Rebel Shock Trooper. Greef claims with a hint of uncertainty that it was wartime propaganda. Given how The Empire has operated in the past Cara’s fears might be justified.
  • Also considering what happened to her homeworld, it's little wonder she believed it existed. Considering they made the Death Star, God knows how much technology like that The Empire created.

Season Two

Chapter 9: The Marshal

• The creatures lurking in the darkness during the cold open; they never emerge into the light, but their bloodshot eyes track Mando with a keen interest. From what little we see, they're at least as large as wolves and scare the hell out of anyone at their mercy. And of course, the less you see of a monster, the more terrifying it is.
• Way back in A New Hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi imitated the cry of a Krayt Dragon to scare off the Tuskens attacking Luke. This episode, we find out why they ran. Its initial attack on Mos Pelgo churns up the sand in the main thoroughfare and when the head emerges, it's huge, enough to swallow a bantha whole. Mando, Cobb and the Tusken Raiders locate its den, which was a former Sarlacc pit until said Krayt Dragon ate it. They attempt to lure it out with another bantha but it decides to eat the Raider escorting the bantha instead. During the final confrontation, it's able to force its head through the top of the mountain above its den. It's also smart enough to go deep underground to launch a surprise attack from a new direction.
  • After the party sufficiently anger/stress out the Krayt Dragon by pulling it out of the cave with harpoons, it starts vomiting up stomach acid that fatally burns anything unlucky enough to get hit. And shortly after there's how Mando kills it: rigging all the explosives on a bantha, letting the Krayt Dragon eat said bantha and himself, and finally blowing it up from the inside. We get a lengthy, gory shot of the resulting carnage as the Tuskens pick through the Dragon's exploded rib cage to harvest meat.
  • Supplementary canon material shows that greater Krayt Dragons like this one have the same body plan as they did in Legends, meaning that the immense form the episode shows us is only the Dragon’s head and neck, with an enormous ten-limbed torso and a tail longer than the entire rest of the animal buried under the sand!
• The implications of the episode's ending; Boba freaking Fett is now hunting Mando, determined to take back his armor. There's also Fett's appearance; just like in the old Expanded Universe, it's made clear that Boba was horribly scarred by falling into the sarlacc pit back in Return of the Jedi, suffering severe acid burns and gashes from blowing his way out. Accordingly, his head is Covered in Scars and looks partially melted.

Chapter 10: The Passenger

(AKA: The Arachnophobes' Favorite Episode)

• The caves of the ice planet turn out to be full of krykna-like spiders, a swarm of spider-like ice creatures that chase down the characters and quickly overwhelm the Razor Crest. Most of them are tiny but the biggest ones are large enough to completely cover the ship and stop it taking off. The way the largest one rams its legs through the cockpit and presses its mouth against the glass evokes memories of the T-Rex attacking the tour vehicle in Jurassic Park.
  • The design of the spider creatures is horrifying it general. Their body shape resembles a virus with a Lamprey Mouth, and they looks like nothing in the Star Wars Universe.
    • They might not look like anything in the Star Wars 'verse but the eggs Grogu finds in particular evoke a certain other famous sci-fi monster. Which does not exactly lighten the atmosphere.
    • Actually they are the same (or at least look like them) spider like things from Star Wars Rebels.
• While the Child's eating of the Frog Lady's eggs was played for comedy, the reason the Frog Lady embarks on this journey is so that she and her husband can have children together and continue her lineage. Each egg the Child consumes adds more wrinkles to that plan.

Chapter 11: The Heiress

• The Child and its pram are swallowed whole by a giant sea creature. By the time Koska rescues the kid, it appears to be just barely in time to save the Child from being completely crushed as the pram was already halfway dented. What makes it horrifying is that it comes completely out of nowhere.
• Mando jumps into the water to try and save the Child. The Quarren sailors shut the grate and start hitting him with their weapons to force him back underwater. Hearing him struggle to breathe as he tries not to drown is terrifying.
• Even if they are the good guys, watching Mando and his fellow Mandalorians tear through the squad of Stormtroopers on board the ship makes it clear just how dangerous they are, especially as a group. It's such a mismatched fight that even though there were only four of them, a trooper believed there was more than double their number because of the damage they were doing.
• Moff Gideon once again establishes his position as The Dreaded, without even showing up in person. The Imperial freighter captain shoots his two pilots in the back and then takes a high-tech Cyanide Pill equivalent rather than give up any information on Gideon to the Mandalorians. Bo-Katan said if he told her what she needed to know, she'd let him live. The captain's response before taking his own life? "You might. But he won't." Long live The Empire...

Chapter 12: The Siege

• We are finally given an idea as to why Moff Gideon wants the Child: Din, Cara, and Greef find a room full of clone bodies in storage tanks and intercept a recent message from Dr. Pershing. In the message, the doctor explains how they have harvested blood with high midichlorian levels from a "donor" — the Child — which has been infused into test subjects. These subjects' bodies rejected the blood and ended up horrifically deformed before dying altogether. If the experiments are to continue, they're going to need more blood from the Child. The implication is that Gideon sees the Child as essential for creating an army of Force-sensitive supersoldiers, and possibly resurrecting Emperor Palpatine as seen in The Rise of Skywalker.
  • What's worse is that Dr. Pershing said he only extracted a limited amount of the child's blood in order to avoid killing him. However, as he says this, it's implied that for the experiment to be successful he's going to need the child's entire blood supply. Regardless of whether they immediately drain the Child of his blood or wait until he's older... it's very clear they're going to kill the kid one way or the other.
  • Listen carefully as the team analyzes the bodies: you can hear a low, droning choir in the background. One very similar to the Leitmotif of... Snoke.
  • One of the clone bodies floating in the tank looks disturbingly similar to Snoke.
• The episode features some of the most gruesome deaths for Stormtroopers and Scout Troopers seen so far in the franchise, such as falling down a jagged cliffside, being crushed against a canyon wall, and falling into a pit of lava.
• At the end of the episode, Moff Gideon is informed that his henchmen have a tracker on the Razor Crest. Pleased, he turns back to his more current project; an entire battalion of Dark Troopers. Consider what absolute nightmares these things were on the battlefield in Legends (especially once they reached Phase Three), with a handful being able to take out Jedi. Then consider what kind of damage a sociopath like Gideon could do with a small army of them. Poor Mando has no idea how outmatched he really is against Gideon and his Imperial Remnant.

Chapter 13: The Jedi

• In general, this episode does a lot to emphasize just how scary and inscrutable the Force and its wielders are to the average people of the galaxy. The opening fight scene plays out like a horror movie, with Ahsoka of all people coming off like some vengeful, unkillable wraith that sweeps through the trees and cuts down any of Morgan Elsbeth's men that dare get in her way. The town governor and Elsbeth herself are the only people town who don't seem absolutely terrified of her.
  • The opening scene even looks similar to Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker's final scene in Rogue One. While Vader looked like a lightsaber wielding Jason Voorhees, Ahsoka here looks like a lightsaber wielding Batman. Like master, like padawan.
  • When Din reaches Ahsoka's coordinates, she winds up suddenly leaping out of seemingly nowhere to attack him before finding they're not enemies. If you wonder how she knew he was there, look in the trees; resting on some of the branches, Morai can be seen watching Din as he approaches, like a familiar searching for a witch's enemies.
  • Even Ahsoka's lightsabers are kinda eerie here; the dark, burned out landscape and scenery of Corvus makes her white sabers stand out so dramatically, they almost look blindingly unnatural and eldritch.
  • Lang's attempt to hunt down Ahsoka in the streets of the town is a classic Mook Horror Show as she picks off his men one by one in the narrow alleyways with only distant screaming alerting him to their fate, and then leaving him to stumble upon the corpses.
• After taking down Elsbeth, Ahsoka demands to know the whereabouts of her boss: Grand Admiral Thrawn. Forget Moff Gideon! There's a genius Chiss military officer out there wrecking havoc.
  • Its even worse if one remembers Thrawn's first appearance in the original EU; a major plot point of that series was cloning experiments involving the Force... very similar to the sort of thing we just found out Gideon is doing. For all we know, Gideon may actually just be Thrawn's lackey, which raises some pretty terrifying questions about what Thrawn was getting up to after the events of Rebels.
  • And if that's bad, all that Ezra did to get Thrawn out of the picture may have ultimately amounted to nothing, since he's still pulling strings behind the scenes. One only knows what happened to the poor boy if the Chiss managed to somehow escape from his trap. Or even worse, the fact Thrawn is still out there means that he may have laid the seeds for Palpatine's inevitable return via his actions in this very moment.
  • And to make matters worse, the Thrawn Trilogy falls in nearly the exact same spot on the Legends' timeline as The Mandalorian does on the Canon one.
• Ahsoka refuses to train Grogu after seeing what happened to her master Anakin, deciding that the risk of the same happening with someone as powerful in the Force as Yoda is far too great, and it's better to just let his abilities stagnate.

Chapter 14: The Tragedy

• Just the mere fact that the episode is entitled "The Tragedy" is enough to fill many a fan with dread.
• As he's trying to help Grogu make contact, Din looks up and sees something no criminal ever wants to see in the sky: Slave I on the approach. Boba Fett is coming, and coming for you.
• Grogu is now in Gideon's hands. There is no way that can lead to anything good.
• Sure, he might be on the protagonist's side this time, but Boba Fett proves that he's earned his reputation as the galaxy's best bounty hunter when he battles Gideon's stormtroopers. Initially, he's armed with a gaffi stick, which he uses to brutal efficiency, hitting troopers with enough force to shatter their armor. Even those who survive his initial attack are remorselessly dispatched with a follow-up, and we're given a lovely shot of one of his victims lying on the ground with his helmet bashed in and his limbs splayed at awkward angles. Once he gets his armor back, Boba slaughters the remaining stormtroopers single-handedly and with deadly precision.
  • One shot in particular that stands out: After brutally killing several stormtroopers, Fett spots one that's down but not quite out. He slowly walks towards the trooper, with a close-up of his gaffi stick dragging along the ground behind him in a shot that looks like something straight out of a slasher-horror film. Then he hits the guy across the face hard enough to not only shatter his helmet, but cause his entire body to flip 180.
• Din, who left Grogu for just a moment, realizes the Dark Troopers are going to snatch him. He gets there seconds too late and is Forced to Watch as they take him away and successfully deliver him to Gideon. He can't do a single thing to stop it and knows that Gideon is only going to harm his adopted son.
  • As the Dark Troopers fly off with Grogu, you can hear him screaming.
  • Even worse, Mando makes it clear that he's not going straight after Gideon: he needs to spring Mayfeld from prison for some added firepower first, which will likely take all of Chapter 15. God alone knows what horrors poor little Grogu will be subjected to in that time.
• The final scene of Grogu in the cell, throwing a Force-fueled temper tantrum as he brutalizes the two stormtroopers assigned to guard him. We see now what Ahsoka was so afraid of, as the obviously angry child flings and trips the troopers around the room, even moving them around like People Puppets.
  • Notice one of the stormtroopers making a choking sound. But he doesn't seem to be reaching for his neck, rather his hands are reaching for his chest, suggesting Grogu is using the Force to compress his lungs, or even his heart!
• Moff Gideon's attitude during the final scene is dripping with Faux Affably Evil and it makes him creepier than any amount of Drunk on the Dark Side evil cackling could ever hope to be.

Chapter 15: The Believer

• The Juggernaut cargo transport in appearance is perhaps the most menacing looking armored vehicle on Morak.
• The episode's major action scene is a takeoff on The Wages of Fear, with Din and Mayfeld having to fight off pirates while transporting highly volatile Rhydonium that will go off in a huge explosion if it's agitated too far. We see this happen to another transport at the start, making clear just what the danger is.
• Valin Hess. The man is one of the more fanatical Imperials we've seen so far, not helped with his Soft-Spoken Sadist voice and bulging eyes. The way he talks to Din and Mayfeld makes you think he's about to out them as impostors at any moment, especially since Din feels very vulnerable from breaking his Creed and Mayfeld is worried that his former boss may recognize him.
• Din having to remove his helmet in general. It may be Nightmare Fuel more for him than it is for us, but the sheer horror and discomfort he shows in sacrificing his identity in a desperate attempt to find Grogu again (and going against The Way to do so) is hard to watch.
• The cafeteria shootout is this both from the POV of the protagonists and the unwitting Imperials, either a tense infiltration on the very verge of going horribly wrong if they are discovered or a chance to relax and have some lunch ending in a mass-shooting by infiltrators.
• Gideon receives a call from Mando, who is very pissed. Mando makes a chilling Ironic Echo back at the Imperial, making it abundantly clear that he'll get Grogu back even if he has to go through every last Imperial to accomplish it. One YouTuber translates Mando's message as "I'm going to rip you to pieces. Very slowly". For the first time in the show, Gideon even looks afraid.

Chapter 16: The Rescue

• The Dark Troopers are some of the most dangerous combat droids ever built. Din Djarin can barely defeat one of them — and then he and his allies end up facing an entire platoon of them. They would've all died if not for a certain Jedi's Big Damn Heroes moment.
  • They're the closest Star Wars ever got to a Terminator in terms of being a robotic Implacable Man. Din uses a blaster, his flamethrower, and his Whistling Birds against just one and it shrugs it all off. They later also demonstrate enough strength to punch their way open through thick metal blast doors gradually.
    • To further the Terminator vibes, the droid is absolutely ruthless, throwing Din around like a rag doll. Its very first move is to brutally twist Din's wrist to disarm him, lift him into the air, and repeatedly punch him hard enough that his helmet caves in the wall with every blow, eventually cracking open a pipe. Good thing Din's armor is made of Beskar, because if it wasn't for that helmet, one punch from that droid would've turned his head into chunky salsa, similar to how a different Pedro Pascal character met his end.
  • Whenever they march or move together, the Dark Troopers do so in near-perfect unison, not unlike the formations of B1 battle droids in the prequel films. But whereas the B1s were skeletal and fragile, so much that a single blaster shot could often take one down, the Dark Troopers are large, heavily armoured juggernauts that are immune to blaster fire, and have the strength to punch their way through triple-layered blast doors.
  • The Season 2 premiere suggested, when Din allowed Peli's pit droids to inspect the Razor Crest, that IG-11 had helped Din overcome his fear of droids. Unfortunately, the Dark Trooper seems to reawaken that fear, judging by Din's petrified delay before attempting to escape the Trooper's grasp.
• Luke Skywalker shows that he's inherited something else from his father: The art of unstoppable hallway rampages. Though an entire ship, culminating with him force-crushing a Dark Trooper to about half its volume. Seems that Ahsoka wasn't the only one who inherited that side of Anakin.

Season Three

Chapter 17: The Apostate

• Pirates show up at the renovated school's doorstep demanding entry. Not the type of people you want anywhere near children.
• Remember the IG-11 droid? Its remains have been repurposed as a statue near Greef Karga's office. Mando's attempt to reactivate the droid turns sour as IG-11 reverts back to its original programming and tries to terminate Grogu on the spot. It only takes a heavy bust of Karga to put the killing machine down.

Chapter 18: The Mines of Mandalore

• Whatever the biomechanical...THING was. It starts out with it ambushing Din by using an old Mandalorian helmet as bait and trapping him in its droid body, then injecting him with something before dragging him off to its lair while Grogu can only watch. AND THEN later in the episode, it crawls out of its droid shell revealing it to be a horrifically emaciated mishmash of droid and organic bits before it goes on to stab Din with a needle and torture another droid until it starts draining his blood. Why it does this? Never explained.
• The sight of the Mythosaur in the Mines of Mandalore is as terrifying as it is awe-inspiring. As Bo-Katan is pulling Din back to the surface, her light shines upon an open eye of the Mythosaur watching her and a wide shot of the beast reveals it's massive, easily dwarfing both of them. Thankfully, the creature doesn't actually attack either of them, but it's still terrifying nevertheless.

Chapter 19: The Convert

• The reveal that Kane was manipulating Pershing the whole time to make him appear as an imperial sympathiser, whilst also taking the cloning equipment from him. You may see it coming, as she was previously shown to be one of the few who remained loyal to the Empire after it officially collapsed, and her attitude and behaviour throughout is very off. After Pershing is arrested, he gets positioned inside a machine that he insists is a Mind Flayer but is repeatedly assured is not. While we've never seen an actual Mind Flayer before, from what we've heard about them to be put in one is considered by many to be a Fate Worse than Death. While it doesn't seem to be that bad on a lower setting, after the Republic officers leave the room Kane increases the voltage on the machine to dangerous levels, ostensibly to erase Pershing's mind.
  • The clear sadistic pleasure Kanes gets from torturing Pershing and apparently destroying his memory. Its made clear she isn't just doing this because she feels she has no choice, she likes putting Pershing through this. And it's implied this is not the first time.
  • The very idea that the New Republic has built its own version of a torture machine that made its rebel operatives afraid of being captured. And according to hardened soldiers like Cara Dune, these machines were never officially confirmed to truly exist, yet the mere thought of them being real was terrifying enough, and now the New Republic are using them for their own purposes. It's one of few dark reminders that the New Republic may not be so different from the Empire after all.
    • The Calamari officer cheerfully saying that he knows the machine is perfectly safe, because he's had it used on him is absolutely not reassuring, in a scene where a room full of New Republic officials are absolutely unconcerned by this terrified man's insistence that they are placing him in danger.
• At several points in the episode Pershing can be seen touching his ear. Where are the emitters for the Mitigator/Mind Flayer located? At the victim's ears. Add to that the fact that Kane mentioned he's 'relapsed' and you have to wonder: how many times has Pershing gone through the machine?
• The Amnesty Program is essentially Operation Paperclip in the Star Wars Universe; former imperials recruited by the New Republic to help with the deconstruction of what remains of the Galactic Empire. While the program appears to be comfortable and most recruits are happy, there's still an air of unease throughout the entire episode, as many are overly friendly and keep insisting that what they're doing is all for the good of the New Republic. One may get the feeling that the entire situation is too good to be true. We eventually do see that the program is very far from perfect, as it's shown to use draconian techniques such as brainwashing to keep the people who "relapse" in line. And even after all that, it's heavily implied that there are spies for the Imperial Remnant operating within the program.
• When Pershing tells Kane he’s in to go for a mobile lab, a careful listener can recognize a low, deep male choir in the score. The same kind of choir that droned while Palpatine told Anakin at the Opera how his master used the dark side to find an unnatural way to cheat death, Snoke's theme, and the scene in Chapter 12 when Din and friends first found the test tubes at the outpost on Nevarro. Something is coming, alright…

Chapter 20: The Foundling

• During training, Ragnar is grabbed by a giant Raptor and carried off. Din, Paz, and two other Mandalorians take off after it, but their jetpacks don't have the fuel to keep up. Paz states: "It always gets away!", suggesting that this isn't the first time they've lost somebody to the monster. Sure enough, when they reach its nest, there is another helmet lying empty in the nest.
• The Raptor arrives at the nest and coughs up a meal to feed its babies: Ragnar, still alive. It took the Mandalorians all night to gather their war party, fly as close as they could to the nest and hike/climb the rest of the way. How long was that poor boy in there?
• The climax of the episode is pretty awful when you take it from the Raptor's point-of-view—especially as not only does it fail to have fed its chicks, it even ends up being eaten by the same Dinosaur-Turtle that plagued the Covert in the season premiere.

Chapter 21: The Pirate

• Carson comes across the eerie, derelict hulk of the shuttle that was meant to carry Moff Gideon to trial, with the frozen corpses of New Republic guardsmen drifting about in its interior. What's more, he finds a piece of beskar alloy embedded in its hull, raising disturbing questions about who exactly liberated Gideon and whether it's part of a ploy or not.
  • It can't be overstated just how eerie this whole scene is. Space scenes in Star Wars are, by nature, almost always bright, action-packed and/or loud because the franchise is centered around action and drama; here, all of those elements are stripped away to remind us that without dogfights and music, space is a void with barely any light, and you never know WHAT you'll find in it. The tension while Carson is scanning the wreckage is such that you expect something, anything to jump out from the inky blackness...but the truly dead ship seems to be the only thing for miles around, and that somehow just makes it scarier.

Chapter 22: Guns for Hire

• Din's provocation and chase of the malfunctioning B2 Super Battle Droid is eerily reminiscent of Deckard's chase of Zhora in Blade Runner—and while Din's Freudian Excuse is very well explored, it doesn't exactly cast him in a good light as the borderline Bigot with a Badge of his Good Cop/Bad Cop team with Bo-Katan.
  • The Battle Droid's showing isn't any less imposing when provoked. Despite having its blaster removed, It shows a speed and physical power the B2s were rarely seen using in the Prequel media. When this one's combat programming kicks in, it tears through the city like a methodical juggernaut with glaring red optic sensors, doing anything possible to put distance between itself and the Mandalorians, citizens be damned.
• Commissioner Helgait's act of betrayal. As Din and Bo-Katan continue to delve further into the "droid problem", they uncover the reason behind it - nano-droids with secret chain codes coming straight from the Central Control office. As he was confronted on the matter, Helgait had an opportunity to cause mass chaos within the droid-dependent population of Plazir-15 by pushing the red button (and sabotaging the droids' programming in the process). Thankfully, he got stunned before he had the chance to follow through with the threat.
  • Also, Helgait praises the late Count Dooku's work. Referring to him as the Separatist is putting it mildly.

Chapter 23: The Spies

• What other reaction is there when Moff Gideon finally makes his return? Pulling the strings all along, it's revealed that not only has he had a base on Mandalore this whole time, he also has a new regiment of beskar-armored Dark Troopers, and he has a suit of jet-black Mandalorian armor which is basically a customized Phase 4 Dark Trooper armor.
• Previously, it had looked like Gideon was just a lone operator. One who had managed to grab an awful lot of troops and resources for himself when the Empire fell, but a lone one all the same. Then we see the Shadow Council, and it turns out no, he's not. He's just one part of a network, including the very faction who will one day become the First Order. The remnants hadn't broken up, they just split their forces.
• The Shadow Council's stated motivation, like Hess before them, is that they genuinely, truly seem to believe that the people of the Galaxy, the people who rose up in armed rebellion against them, actually want the Empire to come back and are just waiting for the day. And in the meantime, they're prepared to do whatever it takes to undermine the New Republic to speed the process along.
• Paz Vizsla's death. He dies gruesomely at the hands of Gideon's Praetorian Guards.
  • The whole ordeal is nightmarishly pragmatic: even the physically imposing Mandalorian is significantly worn down from taking so much blaster fire. His heavy repeating blaster overheats to the point of melting, so he has to discard it and engage in melee combat. The only thing left for the Praetorian Guards is to effortlessly exploit the vulnerable spots of his armor and finish him off. Of course, Paz himself knew that he stood no chance against such an elite force - yet he chose to go down fighting.

Chapter 24: The Return

• The Reveal that Moff Gideon's clone troopers are clones of himself. His plan wasn't to use Grogu's blood to help clone Emperor Palpatine, but to infuse clones of himself with midichlorians so they could use the Force and become the ultimate super-soldiers. Does this man's monstrous ego know no bounds?
• As cathartic as it is, Gideon being engulfed in flames caused by the crashing of the cruiser is a horrible way to die. Wearing the nigh-invincible armor only makes it worse.

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