This Star Wars article contains spoilers for The Mandalorian.
The Mandalorian has featured no shortage of baddies for its armor-clad protagonist to contend with, but the season’s penultimate episode might present the Mando’s toughest challenge to date: Moff Gideon, who is played by Giancarlo Esposito. You might recognize Esposito as Gus Fring from Breaking Bad, but here he’s an intimidating Imperial warlord, dressed in black and ready to exterminate the bounty hunter scum on Nevarro, as well as anyone who fails him (as the Client quickly learns).
While we first got a glimpse of Gideon in the trailers for the show, episode 7, suitably titled “The Reckoning,” gives us our best look yet at the villain, as he arrives on Nevarro in a brand-new Outland TIE fighter to acquire the asset — aka Baby Yoda, who can’t seem to catch a break — from the bounty hunters. He doesn’t come alone, of course. Gideon also commands a platoon of stormtroopers and scout troopers as well as a squad of terrifying Death Troopers, the elite infantry unit first introduced in Rogue One. It’s with this superior force that Gideon quells insurrection on Nevarro, the same force that’s now ready to turn Mando, Cara, and Greef into bantha poodoo.
There’s little else we really know about his backstory except that not all people on Nevarro view him as a threat. As the Client suggests before his death, there are those who’d welcome back the order offered by an Imperial presence. Some believe that instead of the chaos found on the planet, there would be “peace and prosperity” under Imperial control. Certainly, Nevarro seems like a much quieter place since the Empire quadrupled its presence there, but not for entirely good reasons.
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“In a way, you might call him an underworld character,” Esposito said of Gideon in an interview with Slashfilm before the start of the series. “You may also look at him as a savior, as someone who might bring back some order to the world after it’s all collapsed.”
But we all know that the Empire doesn’t just occupy a place without also completely taking away its freedom. Judging from his first appearance, it doesn’t look like Gideon is a particularly lenient leader. How could he be? After all, the Imperial remnant has continued to lose star systems one by one to the New Republic, which now controls much of the galaxy.
As far as what Gideon’s ranking means, a moff is an Imperial governor in charge of a sector of space under the Empire’s control. You likely first heard the term “moff” in A New Hope, thanks to Grand Moff Tarkin, who was the leader of the rest of the “regional governors,” another way to describe moffs. After the Emperor dissolved the Imperial Senate, the moffs were in direct control of their individual sectors. It’s unclear if Gideon still rules over an entire sector of space, but he does have a strong hold over Nevarro at the very least.
We’ll likely find out way more about this new Imperial villain in the season finale next week!
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John Saavedra is an associate editor at Den of Geek. Read more of his work here. Follow him on Twitter @johnsjr9.
