What a Babu Frik'in weekend this is for a galaxy far, far away. Just a few short days after J.J. Abrams brought the entire Skywalker Saga to a pretty divisive close with The Rise of Skywalker, Jon Favreau and Co. closed out the first season of the first-ever live-action Star Wars series, The Mandalorian. Now, Rise of Skywalker has the clear advantage in the amount of lines rendered unnecessarily horny by Billy Dee Williams, but I feel like The Mandalorian was the more satisfying conclusion overall; "Redemption" was an action-packed family affair directed by Taika Waititi that opened up more than a few avenues into season 2, but also answered its fair share of questions. First and foremost: Who is the Mando under the mask?

Surprise! He looks just like Pedro Pascal and his name Din Djarin. (Which, hilariously, Pascal himself accidentally revealed like two months ago, the scamp.) Mando's past was revealed in grand fashion by Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito), season 1's ultimate big bad who seems to know everything except that "until nightfall" is an absurdly long time to let captives hang around when it's only like, 3 in the afternoon. The massive Wild West shootout on Navarro was The Mandalorian's fieriest set-piece so far, but things only took a turn for the emotional once the action moved into the sewers. Mando's clan is mostly gone, routed by the Empire after they jet-packed their way into the public eye back in episode 3, but The Armorer (Emily Swallow) stuck around to harvest all that sweet, sweet Beskar left behind. She gives Mando a sigil, the Mudhorn—ensuring that every day Din Djarin can proudly look to his armor and remember the time an alien rhinoceros just absolutely fucked his entire day up—and a new mission: Return Baby Yoda to his home planet, wherever that may be.

IG-11 (Waititi), reprogrammed to protect Baby Yoda at all costs, valiantly braves a lava river and activates his self-destruct protocol to kill a squad of Stormtroopers, clearing the way for Mando, Greef Karga (Carl Weathers), and Cara Dune (Gina Carano) to walk right into a TIE fighter attack courtesy of Moff Gideon. One genuinely thrilling jet-pack altercation later and Gideon's ship is in the dirt. Din Djarin and his beautiful green son blast off into the cosmos to find out how Baby Yodas are made, and we're set up for an already-greenlit season 2.

But first! "Redemption" ends on an image that got Dave Filoni fans a-screamin' and opened up a few dozen questions as we leave season 1 behind. Such as:

Is That a...Black Lightsaber?

Folks, that's the Darksaber, and fans of Clone Wars and Rebels know its an artifact that screams "MANDALORIAN" even more than helmets, jet-packs, and a tendency to die in hilarious, wacky ways. Strap the eff in, because the history of the Darksaber is a wild ride.

The weapon is, in fact, a lightsaber, a one-of-a-kind model constructed in the time of the Old Republic by Tarre Viszla, the first Mandalorian to be accepted into the Jedi order. Wielding his black-bladed saber that's shaped like a pirate sword for no discernible reason other than the fact it whips ass, Tarre Viszla ruled over Mandalore as "Mand'alor", because apparently the only thing you can't craft with Beskar is a thesaurus. After Tarre Viszla's death, the Darksaber—and, thus, the Mand'alor title—was snagged by Clan Viszla, passed down, and ended up in the hands of Pre Viszla, leader of the terrorist organization known as Death Watch. Because Pre Viszla was also kind of an idiot, he made a pact with Darth Maul and Savage Opress, a man who looks like literal Christian Satan and another who is named—and I simply cannot stress this enough—Savage Opress. One sudden but inevitable betrayal later and the Darksaber belonged to Darth Maul, who used it to take control of Death Watch. From there, the imposing weapon hot potato'd its way around, with the two main rules being that 1) You had to earn it by defeating its former owner in honorable combat, and 2) To many, winning the Darksaber also meant claiming the Mand'alor title. The last time Star Wars fans saw the blade, it belonged to Bo-Katan Kryze, leader of the Mandalorian crew called the Nite Owls and liberator of Mandalore from Imperial rule. 

That is, until Moff Gideon sliced his way out of a TIE Fighter with it in the closing moments of "Redemption". That one act adds a whole heaping dose of intrigue to Esposito's character. In the Star Wars timeline, it's been 18 years since Bo-Katan Kryze was given the Darksaber. If, during that time, Moff Gideon came to possess the weapon the correct way—correct meaning "killed Bo-Katan Kryze real hard"—he's technically the official leader of the Mandalorians. If it's one thing this episode established, it's that Din Djarin is all the way in on the Mandalorian "creed". My dude was about to blast a droid's head off because the rules say he can't even show his face to a robot. Assuming season 2 will see Gideon tracking Mando and Baby Yoda across the galaxy, our main character will also eventually need to reckon with the fact he's running from his own allegiances. 

How Important Is Din Djarin's Origin Story to All This?

Extremely. As my eagle-eyed colleague, Dave Trumbore pointed out, that helpful crew of Mandalorians who rescued a young Din Djarin from a Separatist battle droid attack were rocking the sigil of Clan Viszla. You may remember that name from the above entry you were just reading two seconds ago. There were a couple different versions of Clan Viszla over the years, but the most notable was the decidedly not chill era when it was mostly Death Watch members, aligned with the villainous Count Dooku and led by the Darksaber-wielding Pre Viszla. It just so happens that the Mandalorians who passed down the Darksaber from generation to generation are the very same crew that inspired Din Djarin to renounce his family name and devote himself fully to the Mandalorian code. A path that, of course, led him to taking on the new owner of the Darksaber. This...completely tracks with the way stories are told in Star Wars, a franchise that established that the only constant in the vast immenseness of outer space is that everyone is somehow related to each other. 

How Does Baby Yoda Fit Into All This?

Easily, because Baby Yoda is very smoll and compact and can fit quite nicely into most places. "Redemption" is the first episode of The Mandalorian that speaks the name "Jedi" out loud in relation to all those magic mind tricks Baby Yoda has been pulling. (Slightly unrelated, but I would bet good money “Come on, baby, do the magic hand thing" is something Carl Weathers has said upwards of 100 times in his life.) Interestingly enough, The Armorer immediately describes the Jedi in the context of being enemies to Mandalorians, and boy, she ain't wrong. The Jedi and the Mandalorians have a long, storied history of trying to kill each other, a conflict that basically shaped the Mandalorians into the high-tech race of ass-kickers they are today. During the initial skirmishes between these two clans, the Mandalorians discovered that fighting space wizards who can move stuff with their minds is kind of hard; the unique, impenetrable armor of the Mandalorians is pretty much a direct result of not wanting to be chopped in half by a lightsaber. So the Mandalorians entered a new age of combat class and technology, but they also lost their home planet in the process. The final battle of the Jedi-Mandalorian War took place on Mandalore, an absolute all-out cluster-bang that completely effed the planet into a state of un-livability. 

Tensions are fraught, is what I'm saying, which makes the genuinely adorable team-up between The Child and The Mandalorian a new, modern-day version of bringing balance to the Force. But there's also an intriguing wrinkle to the whole thing that helps explain one of my bugaboos with Disney's new Star Wars trilogy. You may recall that in The Force Awakens, Rey (Daisy Ridley) believes that Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) is a myth. That is...objectively ridiculous. Return of the Jedi takes place in 4 ABY and The Force Awakens takes place in 34 ABY. That is 30 years. Imagine if a sorcerer blew up the Pentagon in 1989 and now, in 2019, people were like " you know I'm not sure that really happened". 

However, The Mandalorian only takes five years after the Death Star 2.0 was destroyed, and still, Mando is unsure what a Jedi is. It gives a clearer idea of how much the galaxy is aware of what the heck actually happened on Endor. We know that Luke Skywalker defeated the Empire, turned his father back to the Light Side, and introduced a new generation of Jedi because we were there. To the normal folk on the Outer Rims, it's some complex, hard-to-discern coup happening thousands of parsecs away that you hear about from a friend of a friend's Twitter. "Pretty sure Ewoks just killed the president, lol  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯".

So What's Going to Happen In 'The Mandalorian' Season 2

First things first, we are definitely getting a season 2. Jon Favreau just confirmed a Fall 2020 release date along with a photo that shows either a completely new character or a horrifying look at what happens when Baby Yoda becomes Pre-Teen Yoda.

If "Redemption" accomplished anything, it was clearing the board and creating a clean slate for season 2. IG-11 blew up, Greef Karga is no longer an enemy, Cara Dune is off to do her own thing, and, tragically, it appears The Client died before we ever discovered how Werner Herzog would pronounce the word "Darksaber". (Also, I guess Ming-Na Wen's Fennec Shand is just, uh, still dead.) It's just The Mandalorian and Baby Yoda on a seemingly impossible search for home with Moff Gideon in pursuit, a conflict that should, at its core, deal with two questions:

1. Where Did Baby Yoda Come From? As we've mentioned before, over the course of 40 years George Lucas boldly never revealed what Yoda actually was. Does The Mandalorian have the moxie to answer of the last of the great Star Wars unknowns? And if so, how will it explain Moff Gideon's hunt for The Child?
2. How Did Moff Gideon Get the Darksaber? The only thing I know for sure is that if season 2 is flashing back to anything Bo-Katan Kryze-related, it'd be genuinely dope if Clone Wars voice actress Katee Sackhoff reprised the role. 

Bottom line, though, is that I'm genuinely excited for a second season of The Mandalorian. I was pretty down on a good portion of season 1, but it won me over with its sheer commitment to being the most Star Wars Thing humanly imaginable while still carving out a new corner of the galaxy for itself. More than that, though, I'm just glad we get to keep talking about Star Wars, period. Things have been, uhhhhh, kind of tense lately, between The Great Last Jedi Schism of 2017 and The Discourse following Rise of Skywalker. But I still find that Star Wars fandom is a predominantly wonderful group of people who have to tolerate a small, angry group of trolls who just happened to cobble enough money together to buy a megaphone. I didn't spend time on these Mandalorian guides because I enjoy having the same guy show up to the comments to tell me he hates my writing, although I do urge him to find a more fulfilling hobby. I did it because there are thousands of people across this here internet who just earnestly find it fun to discuss a space cowboy and his tiny green friend going on adventures, and at least a few dozen who also don't mind the occasional joke about Yoda partaking in Force-assisted coitus. There are more of us than there are of them, always.

See ya in Fall 2020.