The Mandalorian: Does this season 2 crew gift hint at a new story arc?

The second season of The Mandalorian, the first-ever live-action Star Wars show, is on the way — shooting is done and the team is working from home on post-production stuff — meaning it should still hit its targeting release date of October, however much the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the industry.

What can fans expect from the second season? Well, a Redditor posted an image of some gifts Disney gave the crew members for a job well done, and it may hold a clue or two.

Beware: There are potential SPOILERS below.

Okay, let’s break it down. The Redditor thenerdinator posted a photo on the Star Wars Leaks subreddit, an image of three items from the crew gift set:

"MANDO SEASON 2 crew gift has two sabers clashing. One seems to be the Darksaber hilt, but what’s the other? from StarWarsLeaks"

We’ve got an adorable coffee mug with Director Baby Yoda on it, and a water bottle with the words “HUC season 2” on it. (HUC is likely short for Huckleberry, the working title for The Mandalorian). But the interesting bit is that patch.

The Mudhorn clan signet is easy enough to figure out. In the season 1 finale, the Mandalorian armorer (Emily Swallow) created the symbol out of Beskar and decreed that Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and Baby Yoda would be a clan of two from now.

But then there are the two lightsabers behind it. The weapon on the left has the unmistakable hilt of the Darksaber, a legendary Mandalorian weapon currently in the possession of Moff Gideon, whom we saw use it to cut himself out of a downed TIE Fighter in the season 1 finale.

The other saber is a bit more tricky. To me, it looks like the one used by Anakin Skywalker during the Clone Wars. Once he became Darth Vader, he created a similar saber and used it before he died on the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi. Here are Anakin and Vader’s sabers side by side:

The lightsaber on the left belonged to Anakin before Obi-Wan — who took it from Anakin after he bested him on Mustafar — passed on to Anakin’s son, Luke. Later, Rey found it in Maz Kanata’s castle in The Force Awakens. Luke lost the saber after Darth Vader cut off his hand in The Empire Strikes Back, and it floated through space until someone found it.

At the end of The Rise of Skywalker, Rey buried the saber at the Lars homestead where Luke grew up. But, since The Mandalorian takes place years before the sequel trilogy, the lightsaber’s whereabouts could be a mystery.

The saber on the right belonged to Darth Vader. It went missing after he died on the Death Star II, and there doesn’t seem to be a reference to it again in Star Wars canon, outside of a mention of a red-bladed lightsaber that was found by acolytes of the Dark Side in the book Aftermath, but it’s not expressly referred to as Vader’s.

The unidentified lightsaber on the right of the patch has a vertical grip on the hilt, but doesn’t have the telltale belt clip that Vader attached to his weapon. If I were to make a semi-educated guess, I’d say it’s Anakin’s. But why would Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber be in The Mandalorian?

I can think of a couple of scenarios, one of which involves Ahsoka Tano, a character introduced in Star Wars: The Clone Wars and all but confirmed to be played by Rosario Dawson in The Mandalorian season 2. By the time of The Mandalorian, Ahsoka is an ex-Jedi and Anakin’s former padawan. Perhaps she’ll get ahold of his old lightsaber and uses it.

Then again, in Star Wars Rebels, which is set before The Mandalorian, Ahsoka is rocking two gorgeous white-bladed lightsabers, so there doesn’t seem to be much reason for her to have Anakin’s former weapon.

Perhaps Moff Gideon has the lightsaber — we know he has the Darksaber; maybe he’s a collector.

Or the lightsabers might not mean anything at all and are simply cool bits of decoration. But we prefer to do our thinking with our tinfoil hats fairly attached to our heads.

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