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.
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 fertilized 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.
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 emphasize 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.
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 fertilization. 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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