The Mandalorian 2.5 Review - 7 Ups And 0 Downs From Chapter 13
5. The Villains
Lucasfilm
Apart from Werner Herzog's Client and Giancarlo Esposito's Moff Gideon, The Mandalorian has occasionally been found wanting for quality villains, or at least those that would approach a similar level to those two.
Thankfully Chapter 13 goes someway in rebalancing the scales, delivering us two fantastic antagonists in Michael Biehn's militia leader and Diana Lee Inosanto's Magistrate. With the former it's just great to see such a sci-fi icon getting play around in Star Wars, but the latter especially is both brutal and mysterious.
The Magistrate controls the local area and we soon learn from Ahsoka that she was a survivor of a massacre that took place during the Clone Wars. She then used her anger to build starships for the Imperial Navy, although what that has to do with Ahsoka is left until the closing stages of the episode.
One of the coolest traits of the new villain though is that she possesses a spear made of pure Beskar, which she offers to Din Djarin should he be able to kill Ahsoka. It's a striking weapon, one that the Magistrate uses in that brilliant climactic duel with Ahsoka, but it's even cooler to see it in Din's hands by the time the credits start to roll.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
