It's no argument that one of the best things to come out of the Disney realm recently is The Mandalorian. It's given an amazing look at a different aspect of the Star Wars realm and it gave us The Child, AKA Baby Yoda—who is not actually Yoda as a baby.
Everything was going well for Baby Yoda. He was selling toys, becoming a plushie you could hug, and he was saving the galaxy using his tiny force powers.
And then... he found a jar of eggs.
Basically, in Season 2 Episode 10, "The Passenger," Mando agrees to take a frog lady and her jar of unfertilized eggs on a road trip to a new planet where her husband is making them a homestead. All good, right?
Wrong. Baby Yoda takes a liking to the eggs and throughout the episode snacks on them.
We know this frog woman is the last of her kind in the universe and she has a finite amount of eggs left, so every time he eats one, we are worried about what could happen next.
And it kind of made Baby Yoda into a villain for the episode.
Though it was very funny.
Well, people online didn't love the shift in the episode. Here are some examples from Entertainment Weekly.
"I'm a mom. It's not funny at all to hear mama frog lady go into great detail about how important & beloved her eggs are to her & have to watch them get eaten on 3 separate occasions for shits & giggles. Can't just *one* mom get to survive AND keep her kids?" one user tweeted.
Another wrote [sic], "for the record, the frog lady was very adamant about the fact that her eggs were important to her, and that it was her last and only chance to have kids, so it's actually closer to fucking up someone's [in vitro fertilization] which would be incredibly upsetting for a wannabe mom. it's not funny."
Credit: Lucasfilm
This caused such a stir that Lucasfilm creative art manager Phil Szostak tweeted some reasoning behind the move on Monday.
"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," Szostak wrote. "But obviously, chickens aren't sentient beings and the Child eating the eggs is intentionally disturbing, for comedic effect."
They say if you have to explain a joke, it's probably not funny, but I think people took this one a little too far. The Child is a complex character, and it seems like it has no idea that eating those eggs is the wrong thing to do.
Everything we've seen him do so far has been instinctual, from saving Mando's life to healing characters, to moving eggs closer to him. I don't think he's old enough to reason what he's doing yet.
I found this storyline to be a really interesting risk. Seeing Baby Yoda exterminate a species on the brink through naivete is a really dark idea. I love how it stirred the pot in an episode that was pretty cut and dry otherwise.
Giving the frog woman a personality and a sad backstory was a really risky bet. It's interesting seeing people react this way. When Star Wars anthropomorphizes animals or creates aliens, it's always tricky to see how humans react to them. We tend to like the ones who display some humanity, like Wookiees and Yoda. This was really a litmus test for the audience, seeing how far the writers can go with the story.
Did we really care about a frog woman? I would posit we didn't until she used the translator to speak to us. Which, again, great storytelling idea.
Did the eating of her eggs piss you off, or did you laugh about it?
Could this be a hint to Baby Yoda actually being a bad guy in the series?
Or is this more of an educational thing?
Those are all debates for the comments. Have at it.
