Yes, the guy at the end of the new Mandalorian episode is [REDACTED]

The season 2 premiere of The Mandalorian ended with a mysterious man watching our hero speed away. Who is he? Read on, but beware SPOILERS.

The Mandalorian has finally returned to Disney+, and it’s like it’s never been gone. The premiere episode continued the adventures of Mando and Baby Yoda by pitting them against a fearsome sand dragon terrorizing the people of a small town on Tatooine. To stop it, Mando had to team up with a local marshal who had bought a set of Mandalorian armor off a bunch of Jawas a while back, although he wasn’t a Mandalorian himself.

The climax was all kinds of thrilling and fun, but the show ended on a note of mystery, as a mysterious man with weapons strapped to his back watches Mando ride off into the sunset.

Image: The Mandalorian/Disney+

Who is this man? If you stuck around for the end credits (or if you’ve been obsessively following the news about the show like us), you may already know. For everyone else, we’ll tell you below (but best leave now unless you want to be exposed to SPOILERS.

Still here? Okay, let’s cut right to it: that guy is Boba Fett, the bounty hunter from the original Star Wars trilogy who famously died after falling into a Sarlacc pit in Return of the Jedi.

We’d been hearing for a while that Boba Fett may show up in The Mandalorian season 2, played by Star Wars veteran Temuera Morrison. Morrison played Jango Fett, of whom Boba is a perfect clone, in the prequel trilogy. That was definitely him at the end, and the credits leave no room for doubt:

Image: The Mandalorain/Disney+

This raises some obvious questions. To start, how is Boba Fett alive? How did he survive the Sarlaac pit? For that, we can look to the Star Wars Extended Universe, a network of novels and comics active in the days before Disney took over the brand. In the 1996 story A Barve Like That: The Tale of Boba Fett, author J.D. Montgomery details how Boba escapes the pit by making psychic contact with Susejo, the first of the Sarlacc’s victims. Susejo has some control over the Sarlacc, and Boba Fett goads it into wrapping tentacles around his jetpack, which explodes. That frees him from the Sarlaac’s grasp. Then he uses concussion grenades to blow a hole through the wall of the beast and escapes.

Severely weakened, Boba is found by Jawa scavengers who steal his armor, but eventually he gets away. The armor, as we saw, is bought by Cobb Vanth, who himself first appeared in the comic Star Wars: Aftermath by Chuck Wendig.

Will The Mandalorian use this exact story? Maybe not — I can see them losing the bit about the psychic connection to Susejo — but as Cobb Vanth’s presence proves, they’re perfectly happy to incorporate material from supplementary Star Wars works.

The next question is: What does Boba Fett wants? Well, this episode went out of its way to establish how important a Mandalorian’s armor is to them. And now our hero has Boba Fett’s armor. Odd’s are he wants it back, and will do just about anything to get it.

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