Report: ‘The Mandalorian’ Season 2 Will Feature ‘Established’ Skywalker ‘Star Wars’ Characters
Paul Tassi Senior Contributor
Dec 30, 2019, 10:32am
Season 2 of The Mandalorian is coming, and with it, established characters from the Skyawalker saga, reportedly.
www.forbes.com
Yes, don’t worry,
The Mandalorian season 2 is coming and it was pretty much a sure thing from the start, with the second season being drafted before the first had even aired. It’s an added bonus that most everyone seems to like the show, making it a huge streaming hit, but that seemed like almost a guarantee, given the talent involved and how much Disney was investing into its flagship Plus show.
Last week, Jon Favreau confirmed that season 2 was coming in fall 2020, meaning we won’t have to wait more than a year like we sometimes do with other prestige series. Shorter seasons and shorter episodes may help with that, as instead of say, ten new hours of
Game of Thrones, we’re shooting for more like 4-5 hours of
The Mandalorian with its ~35 minute episode runtime, on average.
We got some hints about where the show is going when it returns in the finale (
spoilers) which includes a search for Baby Yoda’s home planet, a mystery
Star Wars has never solved, not even in the expanded universe. And also the continued presence of Moff Gideon and his Darksaber, a stolen, legendary Mandalorian weapon that has great significance in the Dave Filoni
Clone Wars/Rebels shows, which are canon enough to make the weapon now show up here for presumably a major arc.
But
according to insiders speaking to Deadline,
The Mandalorian may be a little less removed from the “major”
Star Wars stories as of next season:
“Insiders have hinted that several established characters from the Skywalker saga’s feature films mythology will make appearances during the show’s sophomore season.”
The Skywalker saga mythology technically contains the prequels, the original trilogy, and the new trilogy. Rogue One and Solo are debatable “Skywalker” movies given their almost complete absence of Jedi (minus a pair of Sith villains in brief cameos in each), but it’s all the same universe and general storyline. So what does this potentially mean for
The Mandalorian?
First, we need to remember when
The Mandalorian is taking place in the grand scheme of the
Star Wars universe, which isn’t always the easiest thing to tell just by watching the series. But there is a distinct answer.
Star Wars often measure time in “ABY” as in, After the Battle of Yavin during
A New Hope. By that metric,
Return of the Jedi takes place in 4 ABY.
The Force Awakens begins in 34 ABY.
The Mandalorian is in between that at 9 ABY, five years after
Return of the Jedi (hence all the scraggly Imperials around) and still 25 years before
The Force Awakens.
As such, the possibilities are pretty wide open for who could show up in that period of time. No, I absolutely do not think we’re going to see any Harrison Ford or Mark Hamill cameos as Han or Luke here. This is
Star Wars, so “established” characters can be anyone from a droid you glimpse in
Empire with its own Wookiepedia entry to an alien you see in the background of a bar scene that spawned his own expanded universe novel.
I have a few guesses here, namely that the definition of the Skywalker saga could be expanded to include Dave Filoni’s
Clone Wars, as that show is centered on well, Anakin Skywalker, and we already have a Darksaber plotline running. Though the insiders do specify “films” I suppose.
Another possibility is the long-fabled return of Boba Fett, with the idea being that he escaped the Sarlacc pit and went on to survive, something that happens in the old expanded universe, but I don’t believe it’s canon in the new one yet. There’s still some debate about the one episode of
The Mandalorian that shows a mysterious figure approaching the corpse of the slain assassin played by Ming-Na Wen. That
could be Moff Gideon, but some still think the jingle of Fett’s spurs you can hear indicate that Boba himself may be stalking our new Mandalorian friend.
I am actually somewhat hesitant to get excited about “established” movie characters showing up in
The Mandalorian, because I think one of its strengths is using the existing universe to its benefit without the need to rely on established “big name” characters. Rather, it creates them in its own right, whether that’s our central Mandalorian, Cara Dune, Greef Carga, IG-11 or of course, Baby Yoda. I’m just not wild about the idea of special guests from the main universe invading, though I suppose I should have faith that Favreau, Filoni and the others know what they’re doing.
We will likely not hear anything else about this for a while, but season 2 seems like it will be something not to miss either way.
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