The Mandalorian is starting to feel more and more like a video game with the way the episodes are building the season's structure. While the pilot episode provided us with a comprehensive and stylish introduction to the main quest and characters, Chapter 2 went out of its way to feel isolated, like a quick side mission with some tutorial content. After Chapter 3 expanded the title character's motives and raised the stakes on his primary quest, this fourth episode suffers ever so slightly from "second planet syndrome," with a new side mission curated lovingly from a familiar film plot, designed to be applied like a temporary tattoo onto our existing characters and formula.

Yeesh. This sounds like I hated it. On the contrary, I love it! While "Sanctuary" is the first episode to feel constrained by television budget and scale--for a fact, this is pretty much an episode of Firefly right down to the disturbingly small amount of extras--this seemingly unimportan…