The plot is really starting to ramp up on Season 3 of The Mandalorian. Bo-Katan (Katee Sackhoff) has managed to ingratiate herself pretty well with Din Djarin's Children of the Watch. Nevarro and Greef Karga (Carl Weathers) are once again under attack, this time by pirates, and a New Republic pilot wants to help--but the Republic itself doesn't. And Djarin himself (Pedro Pascal) and his cult-ish Mando pals seem very much like they're ready for more action after the battle with the lizard bird last week.
Warning: This article contains major spoilers for the March 29 episode of The Mandalorian, Chapter 21: The Pirate.
Remember in the Season 3 premiere when a few pirate thugs threatened Greef Karga and Mando, and then Mando had to kill all but one of them before sending the last one away with a warning for the pirate king Gorian Shard? Well, that creepy seaweed man has brought his big ship to Nevarro and has the planet under siege.
Karga manages to get off a message to the New Republic pilot Carson Teva, who has popped up several previous times on The Mandalorian. Teva wants the Republic to intervene, but they won't--and so he tells Djarin and the other Mandalorians about the situation in hopes that they'll deal with it. Inspired by an impassioned speech from Paz Vizsla and Karga's promise of land on Nevarro, the Children of the Watch embrace the chance to flex their muscle against the pirate king.
While Season 3 of The Mandalorian has certainly not thrown around references to other Star Wars things as often as past seasons did, we've still got a healthy collection of nods to not just the greater Star Wars universe but also to our own. You can check out this week's selection of Easter eggs below.
1. Greef Karga loads up an astromech droid with a distress message like Princess Leia did
It's an iconic shot from the original Star Wars film: Princess Leia leaning over R2-D2 after recording her message asking for help from Obi-Wan. Near the beginning of this episode, we get an odd visual reference to that moment with Greef Karga leaning over another astromech droid in identical fashion to start recording his message of distress for Carson Teva.
2. Zeb from Rebels
When Teva receives the message at whatever remote New Republic base he's living on, we see him chatting with a large CGI alien guy--this is Zeb (Steve Blum), one of the main characters from the Star Wars animated series Rebels. He doesn't get to actually do anything here, but the fact that they did the work to animate him should give Rebels fans hope that he'll appear elsewhere in this show or the upcoming Ahsoka series in the future.
3. Cameos by Deborah Chow, Dave Filoni and Rick Famuyiwa
In that very same scene, we have blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos by three major real-world power players behind Star Wars television: Dave Filoni, showrunner for The Clone Wars, Rebels, and The Bad Batch animated series; Deborah Chow, showrunner and director of the Obi-Wan series; and Rick Famuyiwa, producer and director on The Mandalorian. The three of them are hanging out on the opposite end of the bar from Teva and are very easy to miss--the shot above with them out of focus in the foreground is our clearest shot of them during this scene.
4. Tim Meadows
When Teva travels to Coruscant in person to convince the Republic to help Nevarro (there's no way this was actually faster than calling), the person he hits up is a colonel played by the ever delightful comedian and SNL alum Tim Meadows.
5. Carson Teva knew R5-D4 from the Rebellion
When Teva flies to the Mandalorian covert to ask them to help Nevarro, Din Djarin wonders how he found them. "Someone I served with in the Rebellion is amongst your ranks," Teva says, before R5-D4 announces himself as the spy. While we have no idea about the specifics that Teva is referring to in this timeline, this is a clear nod to R5's obscure history in the old defunct Expanded Universe. After the incident with R2 and the Jawas in the old continuity, R5-D4 worked as a spy for a Republic intelligence officer on Tatooine for years.
That officer wasn't a character in a story, though, but rather the in-universe author of a bunch of Star Wars Role Playing Game sourcebooks. Believe it or not, those sourcebooks actually were canon and helped establish a lot of baseline aspects of the Star Wars universe.
6. Echoes of the Super Star Destroyer crashing in Return of the Jedi
At the end of this episode's big battle between Gorian Shard's pirates and the Mandalorians, Din Djarin and Bo-Katan take out the engines on Shard's large flagship, sending it toward the ground in flames just like the Super Star Destroyer plummeted into the Death Star during the battle at the end of Return of the Jedi. But this isn't just a visual reference. This episode of The Mandalorian also borrows the sound of the Super Star Destroyer falling--a tone that gradually increases in pitch as the ship approaches the surface.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.