Is Baby Yoda Bad to the Bone? This Week’s ‘The Mandalorian’ Has Us Wondering

There’s one thing we can all agree on: Baby Yoda is by far the breakout star of 2019. The Mandalorian is a huge hit for Disney+, sure, but Baby Yoda’s popularity transcends all of that. He’s the meme king of the year, even for people who haven’t watched a minute of The Mandalorian. But as popular as Baby Yoda is, we actually don’t know a lot about him. TBH, we haven’t really learned much about the little scamp since the first episodes of the series. With Season 1 wrapping up soon, it’s about time The Mandalorian started delivering some cold, hard, Baby Yoda truths–and “Chapter 7” delivers!

SPOILERS ahead for “Chapter 7” of The Mandalorian, by the way, as if that wasn’t clear already.

The penultimate episode of Season 1 reunites our antihero (Pedro Pascal) with a bunch of allies he’s made along the way, which means we get a lot of introductions and reintroductions. The Mandalorian takes Cara Dune (Gina Carano) to meet Kuill (Nick Nolte), and we learn that the Ugnaught engineer rebuilt the bounty hunter droid IG-11 (Taika Waititi) into a much more docile (but still deadly, apparently) version of himself. And then Kuill sees the creature that started this entire mess, the one whose presence on his planet brought a cadre of mercenaries and nothing but destruction: Baby Yoda.

Upon seeing the little guy again (Kuill hasn’t seen him since “Chapter 2”), Kuill remarks that “it hasn’t grown much.” Mando posits that the child may be a “Strand-Cast.” That’s a new term for Star Wars, but it seems like it may mean a creature cast from a DNA strand, or a type of clone. Why not just use the term clone? After all, clones are very much a thing in Star Wars (remember that whole war?). This is just a wild guess, but the captions for this scene capitalize Strand-Cast, which may indicate that this may be a specific type of cloning.

But whatever–all that cloning stuff doesn’t really apply here, at least not to Kuill. The diminutive elder doesn’t think Baby Yoda is a clone or a “Strand-Cast.” Kuill worked in gene farms and believes he’d know a clone if he saw one. “This one looks evolved. Too ugly.” So if Kuill’s hunch is right, Baby Yoda is not literally Baby Yoda. Instead, the child is either a baby of Yoda’s still unnamed species, or perhaps Baby Yoda is Yoda’s baby. The former seems more likely to be true, but hey, you never know! Kuill could still be wrong!

That’s not the only major development in the Baby Yoda saga. After a few episodes wherein our fave sidekick sat on the sidelines, sipping on bone broth, Baby Yoda used the Force again–and he wasn’t very nice!

Upon seeing the Mandalorian arm-wrestling with Cara Dune, Baby Yoda lashed out and Force-choked the Rebel shock trooper. Mando had to scoop up the powerful tyke and declare, repeatedly, that he and Cara are friends. This stunned everyone on board, and even those of us at home. The Force choke is inextricably tied to the Sith, as it was Darth Vader’s preferred and sometimes fatal intimidation move. That’s not to say that the Jedi couldn’t Force choke as well; Luke used it on a Gamorrean guard upon entering Jabba’s palace in Return of the Jedi. So while this doesn’t necessarily make Baby Yoda a Sith-in-training, it does mean that he’s very powerful and should probably have a good influence growing up.

Thematically, this moment ties in with the larger point that The Mandalorian seems to be gearing up to make in its final two episodes. Just like IG-11, a murder droid rebuilt and programmed to serve tea, Baby Yoda will need strong mentorship to instruct him to not use his powers to hurt others. You can even see the nature/nurture them playing out in The Mandalorian himself, as he’s someone who was adopted into Mandalorian culture and is currently undergoing a crisis of conscience. Was he born to be a bounty hunter? Or is this something that he was built to do? Can an IG droid be a pacifist? Can a child be swayed from the Dark Side? Can a bounty hunter learn compassion?

Hopefully we’ll get some answers when The Mandalorian closes out Season 1 next week, on Friday, December 27.

Stream The Mandalorian on Disney+