Countdown to ‘The Mandalorian’ Season 3: Revisiting Chapter 10 “The Passenger”
As we start to gear up for the release of The Mandalorian season 3 on March 1, 2023, we’re taking a look back at each episode of the show so far through the lens of concept art. This will be a weekly series of reviews until the premiere of season 3 next year. You may find our previous entries in this series here.
While we will be revisiting all of the artwork displayed in the episode’s credits, bear in mind that this is not a fully conceptualized review of the episode. We still have those from when each episode came out, and we’ll link to them at the end.
It’s hard to imagine Chapter 10 ever being considered anything other than the one with ice spiders. That isn’t a bad fate for an episode that also gained notoriety for Grogu’s mishandling of some eggs upon release. No matter which of those talking points you associate with The Passenger, it remains a really fun side adventure as the search for more Mandalorians goes on.
The episode opens with Mando still on Tatooine after the showdown with the krayt dragon of the last episode. On his way back to town, he is attacked by a group of bounty hunters who are after Grogu. A quick skirmish ensues, and the end result leaves our heroes hitchhiking the rest of the way.
Once there, they find Peli Motto playing a game of cards against Doctor Mandible, who allegedly is on a hot streak. If you’re looking at the concept art above, Peli’s body language is certainly not indicative of someone who is losing a lot of money. She even brings Mando in on it and scams him out of some credits. Eventually, he learns of a Mandalorian covert and is tasked with transporting the individual who can help him find his people.
Enter “Frog Lady”. Interestingly, the concept art shows a potentially different idea early on. Instead of Frog Lady, the character is more representative of her husband, who we meet in the next episode. Perhaps the change was a matter of preserving continuity as we actually met Frog Lady back in Chapter 5 when Mando first visited Tatooine.
Whether the original intent was to have her husband serve as the episode’s “passenger” or not, it certainly ups the ante in terms of narrative impact to have the mother of a dying species come aboard the Razor Crest.
There’s always a catch, and Mando is forced to travel sub-lightspeed in order to preserve Frog Lady’s eggs. With the Razor Crest out in the open, the New Republic soon comes knocking. One of the pilots is shown to be Dave Filoni’s Trapper Wolf from Chapter 6, which means suspicion grows after the prison break situation from that episode.
Mando goes on the run after the X-wings lock their S-foils in attack position.
The chase forces Mando to utilize some fancy flyboy tactics above Maldo Kreis. Diving into the frozen canyons to try and shake them, Mando manages to escape… when he crash lands. However, the Razor Crest’s weight isn’t enough to prevent it from plummeting through the icy surface into the caverns below. With the ship too damaged to mobilize and the New Republic still on the prowl, Mando tells Frog Lady that they are forced to keep warm and wait it out.
Not one to stand idly by as all mothers scared for her babies’ lives would be, Frog Lady takes control of Zero’s vocabulator, whose wreckage Mando kept after the events of Chapter 6. She implores Mando to get to work on fixing the ship and to finish the job.
One of the episode’s biggest themes, which is perfectly encapsulated in the concept art above, is the innocence of a child and what a parent has to do to protect it. Mando is taken away from his repairs when Grogu pulls his attention to Frog Lady’s footprints, which head deeper into the caves. He would find her and the eggs bathing in a hot spring, which gave her children a chance to live. Her species clearly can’t live in this environment, and she’s willing to venture into unknown waters to protect her own.
It’s not explicit in the art, but there’s something about how Din is walking and looking at her that screams his inner thoughts. “I don’t understand this parenting thing one bit. I could never do what she’s doing.” Of course, part of his development this season is learning what it takes to care for someone in that way, but we’ll save that for later in the series.
From the completely innocent and helpless… to another child just not knowing any better. This episode also sees Grogu find his own innocence tested as he gets himself into trouble after repeatedly trying to eat Frog Lady’s eggs. After being denied another one, Grogu wanders around and starts digging into the other egg that lies inside the cavern. Try as they might, all parents know they can’t protect their kid from making poor choices 100 percent of the time.
The ice spider sequence was clearly the thing everyone was most looking forward to, as five of the ten pieces from this episode are focused entirely on them. The team finally got a chance to bring to life one of Ralph McQuarrie’s original Star Wars concept pieces, and they took full advantage. The spiders are said to originally have been considered for Luke to encounter while on Dagobah.
Star Wars Rebels was arguably the first show to bring the creature to screen with a rendition of a krykna spider on Atollon, but The Mandalorian‘s take is undoubtedly closer in concept and realization.
The above concept art again sees who appears to be Frog Lady’s husband, but other than that, this image is pretty spot on at conveying the utter terror of the moment.
On the run from a seemingly endless horde, Mando does what he can to stem the tide. He shoots, kills with fire, and uses whatever else he can throw at them. The bigger spider stalks them from above the tunnel, but falls victim to Mando’s bombs. They make it back to the Razor Crest, but not before even more of the ship is compromised.
On their last legs, they attempt to make a desperate escape. Mando fires up the ship. Everything is working, they’re going to get out!
And then another gargantuan spider lands directly on top of the Razor Crest. In the concept art above, we see this specific angle a pair of times: once with the giant spider’s huge eyes, and the other where it puts its mouth and rows upon rows of teeth against the window, trying to smash the rest of it in. The smaller creatures as seen in the art only ever crawl across the glass, content to get into the ship via the exposed hull if they so choose.
With all hope lost, Mando, Frog Lady, and Grogu watch as the giant spider is moments from doing whatever it wants to them. Then, help arrives as the New Republic finds them and shoots down the rest of the spiders. It really is quite convenient that no matter the size of spider, they go down with a single blast.
You can see in the final piece of concept art that there is no giant spider, while during the episode its corpse lays across the Razor Crest. Similar to the art though, it didn’t seem like they had that many spiders to kill. Mando’s final fire blast may have killed a majority, or perhaps the remainder went back into the caves. I’ll let you ponder the possibilities next time someone goes to Maldo Kreis and snoops around.
Anyhow, after the threat is finished, like the good cops our New Republic buddies are, they give Mando a break considering he just had a very, very bad night. After fixing up the ship just enough to at least get it flying to its final destination, the episode ends with a shaky Razor Crest dragging its way across the galaxy, ready to fight another day.
If you are interested, you can find our original review of Chapter 10 of The Mandalorian, from November 2020, right here.
Our “Countdown to The Mandalorian Season 3” series will continue next week, when we’ll be revisiting Chapter 11. Stay tuned!
Nate uses his love for Star Wars and movies in general as a way to cope with the pain of being a Minnesota sports fan. When he's not at the theater, you can usually find Nate reading a comic, listening to an audiobook, or playing a Mario video game for the 1,000th time.
