Last week’s episode of The Mandalorian caused quite a stir among people who are sensitive about bizarre, tonally deaf jokes about casual genocide. “The Passenger” featured a running gag wherein The Child, better known as Baby Yoda to everyone who isn’t a Disney marketing representative, happily devours several of the Frog Lady’s eggs, which she makes very clear are the last hope for her species. The whole point of the episode is to carry her and her eggs safely to her husband so they can rebuild, and it’s intercut with Baby Yoda just absolutely housing egg after egg, completely oblivious to Mando’s scolding. The episode treats Baby Yoda’s ravenous genocidal hunger like a bit of wacky mischievousness, and to be honest folks, that’s pretty fucking weird.
The social media response to Baby Yoda’s murder thirst has been pretty varied, from people who think it’s hilariously dark to just plain dark to flat-out weird. (I’m in that last camp, the creative impulse behind this gag is baffling to me.) Luckily, Lucasfilm creative art manager Phil Szostak took to Twitter to… absolutely not explain the decision at all.
Szostak’s tweet reads: “For the record, Chapter 10 of #TheMandalorian makes it clear that the Frog Lady’s eggs are unfertilized, like the chicken eggs many of us enjoy. But obviously, chickens aren’t sentient beings and the Child eating the eggs is intentionally disturbing, for comedic effect. #StarWars”
Ok, a few things here. Firstly, whether or not the eggs were fertilized was never the issue, my guy. It’s the fact that the episode takes the time to place the Frog Lady’s plight front and center, and then bizarrely undercuts it by having The Mandalorian’s feloniously adorable flagship character cram the meager remnants of her race into its greedy maw. How are we supposed to feel about that? Are we still supposed to like Baby Yoda after this? Because if so, that’s a weird thing to have Baby Yoda do for the sake of a joke. This segues neatly into my second point, which is that Szostak says “...the Child eating the eggs is intentionally disturbing, for comedic effect.” It is indeed disturbing for all of the reasons stated above, but the comedic effect here is “that baby eating those other babies is so egregiously terrible I can’t help but laugh.” So again I must ask the question, “What the hell is the goal, here?”
To be clear, it’s not that I’m personally offended or horrified by Baby Yoda slurping down Frog Lady’s final hopes for saving her race from oblivion like a gym rat slamming a protein shake. I don’t care about that. In fact, it is deeply funny to me. What I’m hung up on is how truly, inexplicably bizarre it is as a narrative choice. I cannot stress enough that the episode treats its cute main character callously devouring Frog Lady's potential family like a throwaway joke, and it’s so out of tone with the rest of the series that it’s jarring. That said, I am pro Baby Yoda wiping out entire species to satiate its terrible hunger, so hopefully we’ll get to see a few more civilizations meet their end at the bottom of its adorable Sarlacc-like belly. For more on the Baby Yoda controversy, click here to read Collider senior editor Vinnie Mancuso's dissection of how truly wild this whole egg-eating thing is.