here is one basic test that The Mandalorian – the biggest original TV series on the Disney+ launch roster – passes. It is cool. The monsters are cool, the spaceships are cool, the robots are cool. The landscapes: whoa. The interspecies bar fights: crackin’. This show was expensive – reportedly $15m (£12.9m) an episode. While that does not guarantee an uninterrupted stream of memeable zingers, based on the first two episodes, that is what Disney has got. In case you have been self-isolating on an arid moon, we are in the Star Wars universe here, located temporally between the last of the original trilogy, Return of the Jedi, and the first of JJ Abrams’ sequels, The Force Awakens. The atmosphere is thick; the evil empire is only five years in the past. On the outer reaches of the galaxy, things are tense and lawless. We track the titular bounty hunter, who, like Boba Fett in The Empire Strikes Back, is hidden behind a helmet that reveals nothing of his face. That is the ceiling on the show’s appeal: Pedro Pascal, the lead actor, is limited to dialogue and movement. The Mandalorian, show and character, is not especially charming. But Pascal is playing an emotionally ascetic mercenary. The show is not meant to be charming. It is meant to be cool. In any event, two things are established by a lithe preamble in which the Mandalorian despatches a whole saloon full of miscreants in order to capture a chatty blue creature he has been paid to arrest. First, this is a western. Second, Pascal can do a fair bit with dialogue and movement. He is a badass, for sure, but he is also cynical and purposeful, with a weary wit. He is Robocop. He is Clint Eastwood. He is Ryan Gosling in Drive. He is not messing about and neither is the series, as an over-the-odds, off-the-books job takes our man to a secret bunker crawling with black-and-white stormtroopers, which feels like walking into an underground club in 50s Paris and finding it full of uniformed Nazis. Also in there is … Werner Herzog! The casting of Herzog as the Client, an imperious – and indeed imperial – iceman for whom you do not want to be working, announces that The Mandalorian is not afraid to take a gamble, high-stakes though every creative decision under the Star Wars banner is. It is the first of a run of wins, as Herzog’s lethal eccentric is replaced as the Mandalorian’s foil by Nick Nolte as the voice of dignified, jowly vapour farmer Kuiil, a survivor of the empire’s jackboot. His catchphrase – “I have spoken” – lends him the air of a septuagenarian history teacher who effortlessly keeps command of the class. Then Nolte hands the baton to Taika Waititi as IG-11, a leggy pedant of a droid whose hips can rotate through 360 degrees and who keeps threatening to self-destruct when he and Mandy get into a Butch Cassidy predicament. All this is the work of the writer and showrunner Jon Favreau, who was Monica’s cage-fighting boyfriend in Friends and the guy from Swingers and Chef, but who is somehow also the director of Iron Man, Iron Man 2 and the remakes of The Jungle Book and The Lion King. In other words, he knows how to helm an entertainment mothership reliably, but is not so afraid of breaking it that he can’t mess around. As a result, you can’t tell whether a sly joke or a colossal set piece is incoming, but you know whichever it is will be effective. The Mandalorian’s best creation, and the twist at the end of episode one, preceded it on social media (since Disney+, and this show, launched in the US in November). The Child, immediately given the obvious moniker Baby Yoda by fans, turns out to be the illicit quarry on which the whole series will turn. Our pal the bounty hunter has to look after a tiny, excessively cute 50-year-old infant (species age at different rates, don’t-cha-know), whose floating crib is another example of Favreau using groundbreaking effects technology to come up with something simple but profoundly satisfying. In episode two, which is given over entirely to the Mandalorian extricating himself from a gaggle of annoying, thieving Jawas, we see a little of what an adorable, large-eared toddler version of Yoda is capable of, as the Force rejoins us and we return to familiar Star Wars folklore. But that is a crutch the show has the confidence to regularly toss aside. The ideal TV spin-off should bow to the franchise that bore it, then strut off on its own without looking too fretful about whether the die-hards follow. In this case, they surely will: The Mandalorian is too cool to resist.