The Mandalorian is the first-ever live-action Star Wars TV series, and it is a hit. It follows a hard-as-nails Mandalorian bounty hunter (Pedro Pascal) who discovers he has a soft spot for an adorable little green guy known only as the Child, or as the internet has named him, Baby Yoda. Together, they spend a season taking jobs, making friends and outrunning the Imperial remnants who want to harness Baby Yoda’s Force powers for no-doubt mysterious purposes.
Disney is working on the second season of The Mandalorian right now, and even with Hollywood held up by the coronavirus, it looks like the new episodes will arrive on time this October. And when they do, longtime Star Wars fans will be in for a treat, as The Hollywood Reporter has it that none other than Boba Fett will show up.
Boba Fett is also a Mandalorian bounty hunter first introduced in 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back, where he hunted down Han Solo and delivered him up to Jabba the Hutt encased in carbonite. Then, in 1983’s Return of the Jedi, he died in a pretty off-hand way when he fell into a hungry sarlacc pit.
That could have been the end of things, but fans have never quite been able to let Boba Fett go. He was too cool, too badass, too mysterious — a random yelping death at the hands of an unseen sand monster never seemed quite grand enough. He appeared as a child in the Star Wars prequel movies, where we learned that he was actually an unaltered clone on the Mandalorian Jango Fett. Now, actor Temuera Morrison — who played Jango in 2002’s Return of the Clones — is coming on The Mandalorian as Boba.
In fact, we already saw Boba Fett in the first season of the show, technically. In the episode “The Gunslinger,” our hero hunts a bounty on the planet of Tatooine. The bounty, the mercenary Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen), ends up dead in the desert, but at the very end of the episode, we see a mysterious shadowy figure bearing Boba Fett’s trademark spurs approach her lifeless body.
Fans speculated that this was Boba Fett back when the episode first aired, but now it seems beyond doubt.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Boba Fett is expected to have only “a small role” in The Mandalorian season 2, which is fine with me. One of my favorite things about the show so far has been that it hasn’t leaned very heavily on established Star Wars mythology, instead introducing us to a new cast of characters with their own goals, but with Rosario Dawson (probably) joining the case as fan-favorite character Ahsoka Tano, the Darksaber coming into play, and now this, it’s starting to feel a little crowded.
Then again, the first season was a blast, so I’ll assume that creators Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni know what they’re doing. Here’s looking forward to October!
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