‘The Mandalorian’s’ Season 2 Premiere Reveal Is a Baby Yoda-Sized Game Changer

The Mandalorian is back for Season 2 on Disney+, and the show wasted no time giving us major, major reveals. Who knew that krayt dragons had deadly vomit? What a surprise!

But just like the Season 1 premiere last year, the biggest reveal came at the very end of the episode—and it’s a reveal that’s every bit as major to Star Wars lore as the debut of Baby Yoda. So, who was that unmasked man and when will we see him again? Let’s break it all down and speculate about where the show is going from here. There’s a lot to unpack—and spoilers for the Season 2 premiere ahead!

Who was at the end of The Mandalorian Chapter 9?

If you haven’t heard yet (and maybe you haven’t—there are a lot more important things going on right now!), the shadowy figure at the end of The Mandalorian’s Season 2 premiere was, in fact, Boba Fett.

So, how can we be so sure of that? After all, we never saw Boba Fett’s face in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. How do we know that this is the face underneath that helmet?

We know this because of Boba Fett’s origin, as revealed in 2002’s Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones. That film established that Boba Fett is the “son” of Jango Fett—”son” meaning “unaltered clone.” The bounty hunter Jango Fett, who himself wore a suit of silver Mandalorian armor, was used as the genetic template for all of the clone troopers in the Republic’s army. The clone troopers were, however, engineered to be more inclined to follow orders and to age twice as fast. In return for handing over his entire genetic code, Jango had one request: he wanted a straight-up clone of himself, #nofilter. That unaltered clone was Boba Fett, a clone that Jango treated as his son. Boba was played by teen actor Daniel Logan in Attack of the Clones and Jango Fett was played by Temuera Morrison.

This is why we know that the shadowy figure is Boba Fett: that’s Temuera Morrison. As a genetically identical clone of Jango Fett, young Boba Fett would—duh—grow up to look identical to his father. We know that’s true because of how genes work, and also because Morrison’s also gone back and re-recorded Boba Fett’s few lines of dialogue from the original trilogy. So, there you go. That’s Boba Fett.

Will Boba Fett be in The Mandalorian Chapter 10? Will Boba Fett be in the rest of The Mandalorian Season 2?

The Mandalorian keeps everything a secret. They rarely confirm cast members ahead of time (remember that Timothy Olyphant and Morrison’s involvement in Season 2 was always reported by outside sources and never confirmed by Disney) and they don’t release teasers or previews for new episodes. They know we’re going to tune in, no matter what. So that being said, we don’t know how much Boba Fett there’ll be in Season 2.

However, it seems pretty obvious that Boba Fett is going to appear again—if not immediately in Chapter 10. For one thing, Boba Fett’s involvement in The Mandalorian is something the show’s been setting up since halfway through Season 1. Remember that cloaked figure at the end of Chapter 5, the one we saw approaching Fennec Shand’s (Ming-Na Wen) body in the desert? That was most likely Boba Fett.

There’s also reason to believe that Boba Fett isn’t going to waste time confronting Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal). After all, we didn’t see Djarin leave Tatooine and, considering how planet-hoppy this show is, it’d be a bit circuitous for him to leave Tatooine only to come back later in the season. It feels like The Mandalorian would want to take care of all the Tatooine business at once—but that’s just a gut feeling. Either way, Temuera Morrison’s arrival at the end of the Season 2 opening just confirms that this is a big deal. He’s this season’s Baby Yoda.

Is this really as big a deal as Baby Yoda?

Yes—although admittedly not as cute of a deal as Baby Yoda. To be blunt, Boba Fett is a character whose prominence in pop culture has always been disproportionate to his onscreen prominence. The guy was just a cool design, standing still behind Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back before suffering a truly humiliating fate in Return of the Jedi.

He didn’t get to do much—and I say this as someone that had a Boba Fett cardboard cutout in his high school bedroom! The Mandalorian has done a lot to retroactively rehabilitate Boba Fett’s image by showing all the badass stuff this suit of armor can do in live action (the cartoons have been showing us for a while now).

Morrison’s debut as Boba Fett in The Mandalorian implies that this show is finally—finally!—going to give Boba Fett the onscreen story arc and character development he has long deserved. And there’s a lot to get into! How did he fight his way out of the sarlacc pit? What’s he been doing in the five years since Return of the Jedi? How did he lose his armor? Does he want the armor back? And if so, why didn’t he take it from Cobb Vanth before now? Was he waiting for an actual Mandalorian to show up and claim it?

It’s also likely that Boba Fett’s involvement in Season 2 is going to play a major part in Din Djarin’s development. We saw from his interaction with Cobb Vanth that he doesn’t like it when a Mandalorian’s sacred armor is worn by someone who doesn’t follow the creed. As far as we know, Jango Fett nor Boba Fett are actual Mandalorians, neither from Mandalore nor followers of the faith (like Djarin). If Boba wants his old armor back, it’s highly likely that Din’s not just gonna hand it over. That’s not the way.

All this could unfold in Chapter 10, or it could happen later in the season. Either way, it seems extremely likely that, after 40 years of waiting, we’re about to get the definitive Boba Fett story.

Stream The Mandalorian on Disney+