‘The Mandalorian’ Season 2 Premiere: What Does The Shocking Last Scene Mean?
Beware younglings, the following article contains SPOILERS for the Season 2 premiere of The Mandalorian.
The series premiere of The Mandalorian ended with a big cliffhanger — the surprising introduction of The Child (played by Baby Yoda). Attentive viewers had to assume the show would return for Season 2 on Disney+ with a similar surprise.
It didn’t disappoint. Casting rumors between seasons revealed that Temuera Morrison would appear in upcoming episodes of The Mandalorian. Morrison played Jango Fett, father of Boba Fett, in the Star Wars prequels, and when the original films were re-released on DVD in 2004, Morrison re-recorded Boba Fett’s original dialogue. There was also the matter of a mysterious character who was only seen from the knees down in the fifth episode of The Mandalorian Season 1, “The Gunslinger.” That character’s boots looked suspiciously like Boba Fett’s.
So, after all that, did Boba Fett show up in The Mandalorian Season 2 premiere?
Maybe? Probably? At the very least, Temuera Morrison definitely did. In the final scene of the episode, a cloaked figure watches the Mandalorian leave the scene of an intense battle with a krayt dragon. The mysterious observer turns and walks towards the camera, revealing that it is Morrison.
But who is Morrison playing? Since Boba Fett is technically a clone of Jango Fett, it’s possible he could be playing yet another clone of Jango. (Bippy Fett?) If you want to surprise viewers who expect Morrison’s return, and assume it means Boba Fett’s return as well, that would be the way to go.
The most likely answer though — particularly given this Mandalorian episode’s plot — is that this really is Boba Fett, having somehow miraculously survived his apparently fatal encounter with a Sarlacc pit in Return of the Jedi. Clearly, Boba Fett’s armor survived. It appears throughout the episode, long before Morrison’s cameo.
Mando arrives back on Tattooine looking for another Mandalorian who he believes can help him track down the rest of the Child’s race. Instead, he finds a man named Cobb Vanth, played by Timothy Olyphant, who is the marshal of a remote outpost named Mos Pelgo. Vanth says he bought the armor from some Jawas; later, in a flashback, he explains that after the Empire fell, slavers took over Mos Pelgo. Vanth escaped and wandered through the dessert for days, until he was found by some Jawas. As luck would have it, Vanth had run away with a container of silicax crystals — which he was able to trade to the Jawas for Boba Fett’s armor.
The story’s convenient and maybe a little fishy, but let’s accept it at face value. If it’s true, we don’t know how Boba Fett’s armor made it out the Sarlacc pit and onto the Jawa transport. The main plot of this episode offers a potential clue — along with what could be foreshadowing for how Fett managed to survive getting eaten by a massive hole in the ground with teeth.
After Mando finds Vanth, they wind up striking a deal: Mando agrees to help hims kill the enormous krayt dragon threatening Mos Pelgo in exchange for the Boba Fett armor. They team up with some Tusken Raiders and engineer a plan where they will lure the dragon into a trap of explosives buried in the sand. But the dragon survives the explosion, and Mando improvises another solution: He allows himself to be eaten by the krayt dragon with a bunch more explosives. Then he escapes from the creature using his jet pack and blaster rifle just before the explosives go off, killing the krayt dragon.
In other words, Mandalorian armor is strong enough to protect someone from whatever creepy digestive juices are inside a krayt dragon — which means it’s also strong enough to survive the creepy digestive juices inside a sarlacc pit. We don’t know exactly how Boba Fett got out — or how he lost his armor — but after that storyline, it would either be the most ingenious red herring ever devised or very questionable writing if Morrison wasn’t playing Boba Fett.
We’ll find out one of these Fridays, when The Mandalorian Season 2 continues on Disney+.
Gallery — The Mandalorian Season 2 Posters From Around the World: