They already stopped off to pick up Cara Dune, and maybe the Armourer is still hanging around nearby. The point is, the time to tidy up his armour (which may have only been a day or two with Star Wars technology) was indicated on screen if you were paying attention.
And, of course, TPS reports. 
I’m surprised Mayfield decided to begin his freedom wandering off on a planet that seems to be nothing but the Empire’s contractors, angry native pirates, and poor villages. Can he even hitch a ride off that place?
I’d think he’d ask to be let off at the nearest busy space port.
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He clearly doesn’t quite believe they are actually letting him go. He probably wants to go while the getting’s good, before they change their mind, or he gets “shot while trying to escape”. It wouldn’t be entirely out of character for him to push his luck by asking to be taken to a better class of planet, but it’s not surprising to me that he didn’t.
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Where else would he go? He’s now wanted by both the New Republic and the Imperial Remnant, and all of his old criminal contacts are dead or in prison. Hiding out in a poor, backwater village on a poor, backwater planet, at least until the heat dies down, might not actually seem like a terrible idea to him.
I think I’m actually fine with Mando just wandering around showing us glimpses of the post-Imperial Star Wars Galaxy, getting into adventures with a string of celebrity walk-ons. I know I’m mis-using the term “EU”. Really what I mean is the extended canon of Star Wars outside of the films.
What I mean is that The Mandalorian is so entertaining that it makes the recent sequels so much more disappointing. There are a lot of interesting stories to tell in the Star Wars universe outside of the Solo and Skywalker families planning a heist to destroy another Imperial superweapon.
There HAS to be more to it than that. It was supposed to be a secure terminal tucked away in a secure location. The whole reason they brought Mayfield was because they needed HIS access to the terminal. Din should have had no expectation that his own face would work, unless there is some backstory here…
I don’t think that’s the case. They needed Mayfeld because of his knowledge of Imperial codes and protocols. They didn’t even know about the existence of the terminal until Mayfeld told them about it. Mayfeld’s the one that told Mando & Friends that they needed to access an Imperial terminal. He’s also the one who told Mando it would scan the face of the person trying to access it. And his objection to Mando trying it explicitly was that he would have to reveal his face, which he knew was against Mando’s code, not that the terminal wouldn’t recognize Mando’s face.
It’s pretty weird from our perspective, but a lot of Star Wars tech doesn’t make a lot of sense from a real-world perspective. It really does seem like the security protocol scans your face to make sure you’re not on the Imperial No-Fly List, rather than to make sure on an authorized user list.
Which, actually, makes a certain amount of sense given how information technology is portrayed in the Star Wars universe. The “HoloNet” doesn’t really seem to resemble our internet, despite the similarity in names. Information is often just not widely available, and is usually transported physically, rather than digitally transmitted (cf. the Death Star plans). There are a lot of people in the Empire, Imperial personnel are constantly being killed and, presumably, recruited. Given the low bandwidth in transmitting information that seems to obtain in the Star Wars universe, it’s going to be a lot easier to program security terminals with a periodically updated No-Fly List than to try to keep it constantly updated with the face of every single Imperial officer in the Galaxy.
Plus, you know, he grew up in a masked culture. He has NO idea how to control his facial expressions, as he never had to do so when everyone has a mask! He probably knows how to read facial expressions, but control of his own is probably not something he does.
All that makes perfect sense at a 30,000 ft view, but for this specific instance, they wanted to get the current location of Moff Gideon’s ship. Which means that terminal, and by extension every terminal, is in fact being updated with information on a real-time basis. So updating the list of Imperial officers with clearance should be a snap.
We don’t actually know exactly what information they got, or how recent it is. It’s possible that what they got from the terminal is basically just a log of transponder pings - very low bandwidth data. We know, from The Empire Strikes Back and this series, real-time or near-real-time tracking of a ship’s location is within their information transmission capabilities. Beyond that, information transmission capabilities in the Star Wars universe seem very limited.
Take Rogue One. The Death Star plans were physically stored on a specific data core, and the Rebels needed to physically steal that one specific physical data core. They then used a mega-engineering dish to transmit that data to a ship in low orbit, which took several minutes. That ship, in turn, apparently couldn’t transmit it - they need to create a physical copy, and moved that around by hand.
Beyond that…the simple fact is that, as portrayed in the episode, the terminal clearly didn’t need to identify Mando as a specific, known Imperial officer for him to access it. It just needed to scan a face.
My assumption is that there was enough security just to get into the base (DNA Scanners, and special protocols only Mayfield knew) that they didn’t add extra security to the terminal. The scan was just a record so they can look up who was accessing certain data later on. Which I will think come back up again.
Of course, it’s been a long running theme of Star Wars that Imperial security is pretty much a joke and usually all you need is a trooper uniform.
I fell a little behind on episodes so I’m late to the conversation, but just wanted to pipe in. I was so bummed when the Razorcrest got demolished. Loved that stupid ship. But I guess I’m glad that Mando grabbed Grogu’s favorite shifter knob.
Someone upthread mentioned that it does seems a little weird that Moff Gideon is this massive force inside the Imperial remnant with his fingers in every major scheme. I’m curious how this fits inside the greater arc and how he relates to Thrawn, Snoke, Hux et al. Does he not report to somebody? Why did he have to use Mando to get the child in the first place if he’s got access to these massive resources?
I also have questions about the Imperial forces at the mining camp. They seem to be part of the old, boring Imperial infrastructure. Just work-a-day folks there to feed raw material into the machine…but if the Empire is fractured and the New Republic are the folks paying the bills, why are these guys operating in the open as if it’s the status quo. The scene in the opening episodes with the Client and the dirty, beat up Stormtroopers hiding out and working under the radar fits my expectation of the new world order. Even a secret laboratory performing genetic experiments makes sense too, since that was hidden is a supposedly abandoned mine. But this installation, setting aside the local raiders, seems to be operating a little too nonchalantly. Someone needs to be paying the bills for all these guys.
I got the impression the facial scan system wasn’t to confirm the user as authorized. I think it was more likely checking against a wanted list type database. Cara Dune, being a former rebel, would have triggered it. So would Fenec. And obviously Boba Fett, being identical to the source for the original clones, would have triggered it.
I think it’s a sort of distributed power structure. All those people you mention all separately report to Palpatine, rather than working in a top down manner. Sort of like how Moff Tarkin and Vader both worked for Palpatine in ANH, but didn’t have a formal relationship with each other.
Palpatine is dead. All the Moffs are pretty much on their own and it’s a power struggle between them. And it looks like Gideon is currently top dog.
Rise of Skywalker didn’t explain the whole thing clearly enough for me to fully understand it. Maybe his physical body is in some sort of hibernation but he can still control things with the force? Isn’t this the time period where he is slowly starting to work on corrupting the young Ben Solo?
'E’s not dead, ‘e’s restin’. 
But, yes, I agree, after Palpatine’s death* in the second Death Star, and the defeat of the Empire as a monolithic entity, I would imagine that there’s a lot of Moffs, admirals, etc., all fighting to assert control over fragments of the remaining Empire. Each one may still control a few (or even more than a few) systems, even as the New Republic grows its control over most of the galaxy.
*- As far as anyone knew, he was well and truly dead at this point, but The Rise of Skywalker established that he had somehow survived through Dark Side wooj, and secretly worked to re-establish his power base.
That could be one element of it. Another might be to record whoever accesses its data. And yet another might be to rule out ‘automatic’ downloads, by droids—kind of like a captcha ruling out bots (who knows, maybe they learned something from losing the Death Star plans). And finally, the Empire is massively xenophobic, so it might also have a use in limiting access to those with a human face. Security comes in tiers, and perhaps the information on that terminal was in the ‘prove you’re a human being’ tier we’re all well familiar with, if for slightly different reasons. I mean, how many times would the Rebel’s plans have been foiled if R2 had encountered a face scanner?
“No one’s ever really gone.”
:sigh:
This is the issue I think. There are a lot of people fighting for power. The new canon books outline a fair but of it. And each person has a little fiefdom to themselves that they are trying to expand. Gideon seems to have multiple irons in the fire which would be uncommon and would make him a target for the other brokers.