Baby Yoda Watch: Grogu Is Going THROUGH IT

The Mandalorian has constantly left us wondering what is happening with some of our favorite characters. Grogu and his past are no exception. The minute that he met with Ahsoka (Rosario Dawson) in season 2, we knew that he shared a history with the Jedi that we didn’t get to see in the prequels, so I’ve been excited to see them explore that in The Mandalorian.

So far, we’ve seen Grogu doing a lot of following Din around, being a good kid, and taking care of his father. And while this week’s episode of The Mandalorian is no different, we do get to see a little bit more of Grogu this time around.

When Grogu decided to come back to Din Djarin, he wanted to be with his dad. That means honoring the way of the Mandalorians and, more specifically, the Children of the Watch. We’ve seen Grogu following his dad around throughout season 3 as Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) tries to redeem himself in the eyes of his clan, and Grogu has carried his own weight. He’s gone to get Bo-Katan (Katee Sackhoff) when Din was maybe going to die in the mines of Mandalore and he’s made sure to do whatever his dad told him to.

Spoilers for episode 4 of The Mandalorian, “The Foundling,” lie ahead

In episode 4, titled “The Foundling,” we got to see more of Grogu’s story. And while the title of the episode isn’t fully about Grogu, it does give us a look into the past that he shared with the Jedi.

Hanging out with crabs

The episode starts with the Mandalorians all training on the beach outside of their hideout. Grogu is just sitting and looking at the water, and at first, it looks like he’s trying to make the rocks around him move. Going back to training like he did in previous seasons, it felt like an odd step backwards when we’ve seen Grogu throwing people out of caves.

Still, he sits, surrounded by rocks until one starts to move … because they’re crabs. And if Grogu loves anything, he loves trying to eat—or hug—creatures he shouldn’t.

Eventually, Din takes a break from training the Foundlings and comes over to get Grogu. In that moment, the crabs know it is their chance to flee and do so as quickly as possible. Which isn’t fair to Grogu, he has grown. He didn’t instantly try to eat you. He might have just wanted to hang out and play for a little bit while the bigger kids trained.

Din picking Grogu up isn’t just a sweet moment between father and son. Instead, it’s Din grabbing Grogu so he can start his training in the ways of the Mandalorians.

Training with the Foundlings

Just when you think that Grogu has his life figured out, Din throws him into a fight with some paint rockets, and it isn’t going great at first. Grogu is put into a duel with Paz Vizla’s son and the two are staring at each other when it is pointed out that Grogu doesn’t even have a helmet. It is because he cannot yet speak the creed. So he’s training but he can’t don his helmet quite yet.

Still, Din wants him to try and show the other Mandalorians what he can do. The problem is that Grogu doesn’t really know where to start with this duel.

So he just looks like a big ol’ baby who got handed a weapon, and he’s not sure what to do with it, so he keeps looking back up at Din Djarin for guidance. But as Din says to him at once point, “Don’t look at me, look at him,” so Grogu has to figure out what to do to win this three-point battle.

Which doesn’t go that well at the start.

Or in the second round when he gets shot again and is just staring at Din like, “do you believe this stuff?” So Din gives him some encouraging words.

Din tells him to show them what he can do, so Grogu Force-jumps over his opponent and then jumps back, shooting him three times and winning. In his defeat, Paz Vizla’s son walks to the edge of the water and a giant alien raptor comes and takes him away, forcing many of the Mandalorians to go on a quest to save him—leaving Grogu behind.

Revisiting his past

When Din and Bo-Katan head off to make a plan with the other Mandalorians, they leave Grogu behind because it is too dangerous and there are other Mandalorians there who can look out for him. It means that Grogu is left with the Armorer (Emily Swallow), who talks to him about what the Mandalorians do with bits of leftover beskar.

She’s hammering a piece of beskar and talking to Grogu, but clearly something about the noise she’s making is triggering him. With each hit of her hammer, Grogu flashes back to another time in his life and looks incredibly sad about the entire thing.

Finally, one last strike hits and Grogu is transported in his mind back to when Order 66 was carried out in the Jedi Temple, back when Grogu was just a baby in his twenties. We know that he trained with the Jedi when the order was issued and that he escaped and was kept hidden until Din was sent to find him by Greef Karga (Carl Weathers, who also directed this episode).

And we’re thrown right into the chaos of Order 66. Grogu is watching as the Jedi are fighting to get him to an elevator that is meant to keep him safe, and while Grogu watches all the Jedi die around him, he does make it to the elevator, where he sits with his blanket awaiting his fate.

That is, until the door opens and Kelleran Beq (Ahmed Best) is there, ready to save him. This is exciting for fans of the series because Best is known for playing Jar Jar Binks in the prequel movies, and seeing him as a Jedi who is ready to protect Grogu is just a really sweet way of bringing Best back into the world of Star Wars.

When Kelleran finds Grogu, he has a lot more of the Clones to fight off in their quest to get Grogu to safety, but he does eventually get them to a speeder bike and gets them out of there. And then we get to see Kelleran and Grogu just flying through Coruscant together. This does mark the second time in this season of The Mandalorian that we’ve returned to Coruscant, even if it was just a memory from Grogu’s time there.

They do eventually make it to an escape ship that is ready to go, and Kelleran is preparing to fly himself and Grogu to safety even as TIE fighters are coming after them. And that’s the last we see of it as Grogu looks up into the sky as they go into hyperdrive.

So we don’t know what happens to Kelleran, or if he’s still out there and we’ll meet him again. But now we have more of an idea of how Grogu ended up escaping from the Temple and getting to safety so Din could eventually find him.

Grogu got his armor

Grogu is brought back out of his dream and into reality where the Armorer is still crafting beskar armor. She gives Grogu his second piece of armor: A chest plate that has the Mudhorn signet on it, just like the one on Din’s armor.

All of this happens while Din is off trying to save the Foundling that the raptor took. When Din succeeds, he brings back the raptor babies with Bo-Katan so that they have a new set of Foundlings to deal with. But the first thing that Din does is go to his son.

And Grogu really has a lot to tell his dad after that trip because it was a doozy.

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Another episode of The Mandalorian, another adventure for Grogu.

(featured image: Lucasfilm)