The Mandalorian’s Gorian Shard is a great Christmas tree-shaped character and a terrible pirate

polygon.com:

The Mandalorian is a deep well of great little characters and very weird guys. There’s the family that Mando saves and reunites in the second season’s second episode, there’s Nick Nolte’s Kuiil, and there’s even Grogu himself.

The first episode of season 3 added to this deep bench of weirdos with the tremendous Gorian Shard, a space pirate who looks like what would happen if Treebeard and Davy Jones had a kid. He may only be in the episode for a few seconds, but there’s plenty we can glean from his brief appearance, including the fact that we want to see him lose to Din Djarin a lot more often.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for The Mandalorian season 3, episode 1.]

Gorian Shard is a newly created character for The Mandalorian and therefore a character we know almost nothing about — a relative rarity in the increasingly familiar Star Wars galaxy. Gorian is apparently a space pirate of some renown, since everyone seems to be readily sharing his name as a status symbol, and we know he commands a crew of hundreds if not thousands, thanks to the fleet of fighters and massive spaceship under his control.

But what do we really know about Gorian? We know that Gorian is loyal to his crew, even the really dumb ones that die over disputes about where they can and cannot drink the newly gentrified Nevarro. That’s the sign of a truly great leader. We also know that he’s a committed investor in community spaces, like the saloon he apparently lent Greef Karga money to open, which Karga later dishonestly turned into a school.

While none of these really justify the quality of person he seems to keep in his employ, or make him seem particularly smart or competent (in a good way), they do give us a bit of insight into this