What Does The Frog Say?

Does it say “Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding”? No, that’s what the fox says, apparently. The frog mostly says things that nobody can understand. But at least the subtitles are there to clarify things, so we can definitively answer this question. What does the frog say when she meets the Mandalorian? She speaks frog.

What does the frog say when her jar full of eggs is being eyed hungrily* by Baby Yoda? She speaks frog.

What does the frog say when she’s relaxing naked in a hot tub? Hey! Mind out of the gutter! This isn’t that kind of show! She speaks frog!

Now bear in mind that throughout this episode, nobody has any idea what the frog lady is actually saying, because nobody speaks frog. However, at one point the frog lady manages to rig up a translator using some pieces of a busted up droid that she finds aboard the Mandalorian’s ship, which translator she uses to guilt the Mandalorian into completing his mission, which is to ferry the frog lady and her eggs to her meet her husband in their new home on some random planet (which is not Dagobah, though it probably should be); but it sort of raises the question: If the frog lady has the technical know-how to cobble a translator together, why didn’t she already have one to begin with? Being able to speak the same language as your taxi driver would, presumably, make the trip go a lot more smoothly. Although not being able to speak the same language as your taxi driver is pretty much a cliche**, so …

Now, as I mentioned a while ago, my wife tuned out everything Mandalorian-related almost as soon as I showed it to her, because, you know, blasters and explosions and such. However, she did eventually notice the “frog lady” (mainly because I stopped the video to get up and take pictures of the subtitles), at which point she raised an objection:

Wife: “‘Frog lady’? That’s not a frog.”
Me: “What?”
Wife: “Look at the head. It’s too narrow. The snout is too long. She looks more like a lizard or a gecko.”
Me: “Well, I—”
Wife: “Don’t these people know what a frog looks like?”

At the end of each episode of The Mandalorian they play concept art behind the credits, which I usually watch, because I find the concept art interesting. A number of the panels from this episode included the frog lady.

Me: “She looks a little more like a frog in the concept art.”
Concept Art:

Wife: “No she doesn’t. She still looks like a newt.”

So I can only speculate that perhaps, somewhere before the episode began, the frog lady ran into a witch:

And, sadly, she did not get better.

* Am I the only one who was a bit put off that Baby Yoda’s eating the Frog Lady’s eggs every chance he got was played for laughs, when the whole point of the episode—and why the ship was being forced to travel at sublight speeds—was that The Mandalorian was supposed to be protecting the eggs so they could hatch on the Frog Lady’s new home planet? Apparently not.
** At least, it was 30 years ago.