In the days since The Mandalorian’s most recent episode hit Disney+, more than a few casual observers of the wee Baby Yoda have taken notice of, and issue with, the Child’s voracious appetite. It’s something that’s taken a turn for the horrific right before his adoptive father’s eyes.
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It’s made very clear to Mando at the beginning of “The Passenger” that the Frog Lady’s delicate eggs he’s helping to transport to the only planet where they can be fertilised are immeasurably important to her. They are the only hope she has of continuing her and her husband’s genetic line. But over the course of the episode, the bounty hunter does a piss poor job of keeping the Child from getting his grubby little hands into the eggs’ containment canister and vacuuming them down his tiny gullet.
[referenced id=”1527701″ url=”https://gizmodo.com.au/2020/11/this-is-not-the-way-baby-yoda/” thumb=”https://gizmodo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/10/i3ckez90yc3efwlcuvhc-300×169.png” title=”This Is Not the Way, Baby Yoda” excerpt=”The second episode of The Mandalorian’s second season took its central bounty hunter and his infant space gremlin son from the deserts of Tatooine to a dangerous new locale as part of a mission to help save a family. But within its larger, horror-driven plot, “The Passenger” ended up drawing…”]
Though the Frog Lady herself never seems to notice that the number of eggs in the canister keeps shrinking, Mando knows that what the baby’s doing is deeply messed up. For some reason though, the episode plays it for laughs in a way that makes light of the fact that the Child is literally wiping out the Frog Lady’s family for snack time.
In response to the alarm raised by the Child’s new eating habits, Lucasfilm creative art manager Phil Szostak took to his Twitter account to comment on the matter and emphasise that “The Passenger” does take a number of beats to try and make the egg-eating palatable. Because the eggs were unfertilized, Szostak reasoned, the baby eating them could be likened to the way people commonly consume unfertilized chicken eggs.
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 https://t.co/Js51fLpE3C
— Phil Szostak (@PhilSzostak) November 9, 2020
We have to reiterate: that doesn’t make it better. This creature still has a limited number of viable eggs to bring to her husband for fertilisation. If none of them had made it — as was the whole point of the excursion — her line would be no more.
The “intentionally disturbing” quality of the baby’s egg pilfering becomes more disconcerting the more you sit with it because of what it says about The Mandalorian. Baby Yoda might really have just inhaled an endangered woman’s eggs like they were chicken nuggets as the writers’ idea of a joke, or this entire production is just a misdirect leading up to a moment later in the season when the baby miraculously vomits the eggs up when the Frog Lady desperately needs them.
Either way, it’s keeping Star Wars gross and weird.
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