Warning: This post contains major spoilers for the premiere of The Mandalorian.
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The Mandalorian‘s gorgeous premiere was full of references and touches from the galaxy far, far away, with the series taking place in a fully realized Star Wars setting. With such attention to detail, clearly nothing on the show makes it on screen by accident. And that’s an important and meaningful standard, since a famous character might have been hiding in the shadows. If he was, it could have huge ramifications for The Mandalorian, because we might have just seen Boba Fett.
Vanity Fair was the first to spot that at the 18:31 mark in the episode, during which, as Pedro Pascal’s character walks underground through a small Mandalorian community, we see another figure dressed in the same iconic armor of his home planet. Standing in the darkness on the right side of the screen is a person wearing Boba Fett’s armor. Here’s what it looks like on the show:
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Here’s the same shot brightened to highlight the figure on the right:
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While other characters in the background of this scene are also wearing Mandalorian armor, this figure most closely matches the color scheme and armor of Boba Fett. Notice the red in both his helmet and his left forearm, which you can see in this shot from Return of the Jedi.
Lucasfilm
While it might seem far from definitive, VF’s edited photo shows the shadowy figure with a blaster dent in their helmet that matches the one in Boba Fett’s. This certainly appears to be the infamous bounty hunter.
That might sound like a crazy amount of detective work for fans to uncover something that is otherwise hidden, but there’s a zero percent chance show creator Jon Favreau and Lucasfilm would have put this in without knowing it would be found. They were almost certainly counting on it being discovered. There will be millions of eyes on this series, with every single frame dissected. The premiere, with its insane amount of meticulous details, made clear that’s what we should be doing. In the context of the show, both what’s on screen and the way it will be consumed by modern audiences, hiding Boba Fett’s armor in a nearly impossible to spot cameo isn’t crazy at all.
That doesn’t tell us what it means though. This could be nothing more than an Easter egg, a fun reference to the character who made Mandalorian armor famous in the first place. By making it so obscure, Favreau and the episode’s director Dave Filoni may have been giving fans some super buried treasure to go looking for.
Lucasfilm
But if this was not just a callback it could have far bigger ramifications for the show. It is Star Wars canon Boba Fett died in Return of the Jedi. Only in Star Wars legends did he escape the sarlacc pit with the help of his jet pack. If we really did see his armor in The Mandalorian‘s premiere, either a) the sarlacc spit out his armor, which was found by someone else who now wears it; or b) Boba Fett truly did escape. How safe is Boba Fett in a world where Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia just defeated the Empire? Where can he go when thousands of his out-of-work clones are now spread across a galaxy that reviles them?
Whether someone adopted his imposing identity—which would have tremendous value in a lawless world—or Boba Fett still lives, the character wearing that iconic armor would make for an intriguing and potentially monumental addition to the series. And it’s only fitting we saw a famous bounty hunter hiding in the shadows of The Mandalorian.
Featured Image: Lucasfilm
