The Mandalorian agrees to return to Navarro to help clear up the Imperial entanglement that his double crossing has brought to the planet, but who truly can he trust?

This is more like it, though the show has had to wait to its two-part finale to really hit its stride in an all-to-brief season of eight half hours (give or take a few minutes). Everything that has been seeded in the previous six weeks is brought into play, though did we ever think that we’d seen the last of so many of the one-shot characters?

The show finally has a cast beyond The Mandalorian and ‘Baby Yoda’ (as the Internet has dubbed him), the latter being cute as ever and here revealing the strength of some of his Force powers. Greef Carga (Carl Weathers) and the Client (a hilarious Werner Herzog) return to bolster a heavyweight cast, and we finally get to meet Moff Gideon (Breaking Bad’s Giancarlo Esposito), who arrives in a gorgeous new TIE Fighter variant.

There’s plenty of fan service on duty, but can you legitimately complain that there can be too many stormtroopers on a show? I particularly enjoyed the throwback to A New Hope where Mando is manacled as a ‘prisoner’ and led by two bogus ‘guards’ – these Imperials really never learn, do they!

Verdict: Action-packed, and now with a driving narrative that throttles along like a speeder bike on Endor, The Mandalorian is finally the show it promised to be. The finale promises to be a cracker. 9/10

Nick Joy

A message from Greek Karga may offer a path to peace for Mando, but can his former employer really be trusted?

There’s a certain feeling of ‘getting the band back together’ to this instalment of The Mandalorian, as Karga reaches out to Mando with a tale of woe in the wake of his adventures – the Client has asserted his authority, grinding Nevarro under his boot heel, and Karga wants Mando’s help in reversing this, in return for which he’ll wipe Mando’s slate clean with the Guild.

It feels like an obvious setup, especially given the terms, and our hero obviously agrees, wandering back to a few familiar places to pick up various companions, not all of whom are actually wanted, as he makes ready to go back with both eyes firmly open.

As with the rest of the series, it doesn’t offer much in the way of real surprises, narratively, but it does pack in plenty of action and also makes sense of what might have seemed like completely incidental character work done earlier on. It’s a genuine pleasure to see the return of these faces we’ve already met, and a joy to watch the whole rag tag team work together and get to know one another.

It also does manage to serve up the odd genuine surprise towards the end, setting up a genuinely interesting cliffhanger as the credits roll, meaning that the final episode will definitely be one to look forward to. The stakes have been genuinely raised, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the resolution to all this carry on into what must surely be an inevitable second season.

Verdict: Compelling action and a fun return for familiar faces. I for one cannot wait to see the final episode. 9/10

Greg D. Smith