We Need to Talk About Baby Yoda
Spoiler warning: the following story contains spoilers for the seventh and penultimate episode of the first season of The Mandalorian. Stop reading now if you haven't watched yet.
Baby Yoda has been a beacon of joy and hope in The Mandalorian.
But how much do we really know about Baby Yoda?
The skills he put on display in the penultimate episode of the show's first season raised many questions.
Baby Yoda! Those two words alone have been enough to get everyone's attention for the last month and change. The small green Mandalorian character has been one of the true breakouts of the year, a beacon of light in our dark world making for wonderful memes and general joy. And yet...there's much we don't know about this tiny 50-year-old Star Wars character, primarily its powers, and its intentions. And the seventh episode of The Mandalorian has made us wonder that more than ever.
We've previously seen Baby Yoda's connection with the force on display; in the show's second episode, the little green guy gave Mando an assist by picking up a creature with the force, helping him eventually defeat it. But in the seventh episode, things start to get unprecedented. At one point, when The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) and Cara Dune (Gina Carano) are harmlessly arm wrestling, Baby Yoda instinctively force chokes Cara, perhaps thinking that Mando was in danger. Regardless of intent, the force choke is something we've only ever seen used as a tool of the dark side—primarily, Darth Vader.
We also see Baby Yoda use a power that hasn't been seen before in Star Wars; when Greef Karga (Carl Weathers) is attacked by a creature from the sky, he appears to be in grave danger. We see a major cut on his arm, and Cara talks of the poison spreading in his body. It looks like Greef is a goner—until Baby Yoda steps in. The Child (how Baby Yoda is officially referred within the show) comes over, and heals Greef's arm in a Wolverine-esque fashion. We've seen (the real) Yoda in six movies to this point (The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, all three prequels, and as a force ghost in The Last Jedi), and never once have we seen his species display this sort of ability.
So it raises a number of questions. Just how powerful is our cute, beloved Baby Yoda? And with these latest developments, is Baby Yoda to be entirely trusted? Obviously, Moff Gideon and whoever he's working with and/or working for know more than we do. There's something big planned here, whether it's extracting powers, or something even more involved.
We could also, perhaps, look to the timeline for answers. The Mandalorian takes place after Return of the Jedi, but before The Force Awakens. Could something involving the remaining Empire figures, like The Client and Moff Gideon, lead to either the emergence of Supreme Leader Snoke, the Knights of Ren, or the return of Emperor Palpatine, who we know already has a presence in The Rise of Skywalker? Could Baby Yoda be Snoke?
All we can do at this point is wait for next week's season finale (which will come onto Disney+ on 12/27). Luckily, there's that whole Rise of Skywalker thing happening in the next couple days to bide the time.
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