The Mandalorian and Grogu’s Dejarik/Chess Fight Explained

But setting all that aside, one thing that did stand out to me both as something worth explaining and being a microcosm of the film’s problems is the scene where Pedro Pascal’s Din Djarin, aka The Mandalorian, fights alongside Rotta the Hutt in a gladiator arena. The event is called a “dejarik match,” and features one of the film’s most elaborate references to Star Wars lore, specifically the holographic chess game seen in A New Hope.

What the hell is dejarik, you say? I’m glad you asked! Let’s get into it.

Dejarik, aka Holochess, Explained

During A New Hope, there’s a pretty famous scene where C-3PO and R2-D2 play a game on the Millennium Falcon with Chewbacca. If the phrase “let the Wookiee win” just flashed in your mind, you’re on the right track. This is the first appearance of dejarik, also called holochess, which is a two-player game that’s basically a cross between traditional chess and Dungeons & Dragons.

Each player gets several pieces (there are both eight-piece and 10-piece variations) representing various monsters like the Mantellian Savrip, the Kintan strider, or the Ghhhk, each with their own stats representing things like attack power, hit points, and movement speed. Players take turns moving their pieces around the board and battling until one side’s forces are exhausted.

Although dejarik plays only a tiny role in the film, basically being a background world-building detail, the game has sparked a lot of fascination from fans, some of whom have developed their own rulesets to play it since an official ruleset has never been released by Lucasfilm. Dejarik has also made further appearances in the Expanded Universe of both the Legends and canon timelines, including in shows like Clone Wars and Bad Batch, which have introduced new monsters not depicted in A New Hope. The Mandalorian and Grogu invokes the original film’s depiction of the game, but not as something Mando and Grogu play for fun; instead, dejarik takes on a whole new form as a type of arena match where it’s intended for the participating gladiators to get killed by the creatures.

The monsters from A New Hope appear in their living forms and are set loose in the arena, with only some laser grid fences preventing them from escaping into the crowds. Commander Janu Coin (Jonny Coyne), an ex-Imperial officer turned pit fight manager that Mando is hunting, has set up his indentured gladiator Rotta the Hutt (Jeremy Allen White) to die in the final match of his contract. Mando, who’s been hired to rescue Rotta on behalf of the New Republic, winds up in the arena alongside the Hutt, and they work together to battle the monsters. It’s an agreeable enough setup for an action scene, but the way it calls back to dejarik raises a lot of questions, many of which have unfortunate implications for the franchise’s creative priorities.

The Star Wars Nostalgia Problem

The way director Jon Favreau and writer/producer Dave Filoni use dejarik in The Mandalorian and Grogu exemplifies the franchise’s crippling obsession with nostalgia, which has been a problem with Disney’s Star Wars era as far back as The Force Awakens. While Episode VII successfully relaunched the franchise theatrically, it’s not exactly a novel complaint that the film trades a little too much in recycled plot beats and fanservice. That may have been excusable if it was a one-time deal, but not only has Star Wars continued to retreat to the well of empty calorie, low energy references over actual storytelling, the ripple effect of The Force Awakens’s success has bled into many other franchises, effectively making it the launching pad for a decade of half-formed legacy sequels and nostalgia-bait IP plays.

Sure, it may sound like a harmless thing for The Mandalorian and Grogu to reference dejarik in a vacuum. It’s a part of Star Wars lore, right? But consider how dejarik has been warped in its depiction here. Apparently dejarik is no longer just an in-universe game that people play with their friends; it’s also a template for a gladiator match, which doesn’t really make sense when you think about it. When Mando says “dejarik match,” it’s clear that this is something he’s heard of before, and that he also knows this means Rotta will die in the arena. Why are fixed death matches modeled on a chess game? What is it about dejarik specifically that made it the standard way you set up combatants to die in the arena? Last I checked, arena combat isn’t turn-based, and there’s hundreds of other monsters in the Star Wars universe you could set up doomed gladiators against. Why the ones specifically from a board game?

The answer, as with many things in recent Star Wars projects, is not based in character or theme but in the audience. Rotta is set to be killed in a match modeled on dejarik because it’s something the audience is assumed to recognize, so filmgoers can have a momentary jolt of “hey, I know that thing!” in the hope that they won’t realize how forced the inclusion is.

It’s far from the only instance of this creative instinct in the film, which is largely a collection of images and sequences meant to evoke better movies from years ago: AT-AT walkers in the snow like in Empire Strikes Back, X-Wings soaring to the rescue at the end like in A New Hope, or evil Hutts dropping their enemies into a pit to get eaten by a monster like in Return of the Jedi. That lack of confidence in making something original that doesn’t rely on pre-existing investment in older movies is a huge reason why Star Wars isn’t resonating as strongly with younger generations, something that Lucasfilm can no longer afford to deny.

The Mandalorian and Grogu may be Star Wars’ return to the cinema, but if it wants to return to its former glory, it’s going to need to start giving us new stories to get excited by, instead of reminding us of old ones.

Your move, Lucasfilm.