Less than two weeks are left before The Mandalorian returns for Season 2, but glimpses of what's in store with the new episodes have been few and far between. The first trailer revealed that Mando and Baby Yoda will be traveling to some new locales, and of course Baby Yoda is as cute as ever. Now, a new trailer released during Monday Night Football on October 19. While it wasn't packed with tons of new content, I find myself asking: does the footage point toward Star Wars Rebels characters appearing?
Check out the newly released look at The Mandalorian Season 2 that may or may not lead to appearances from another Star Wars TV show's cast:
In this new trailer, Pedro Pascal's Mando reveals to Greef Karga and Cara Dune that he's been "quested" to bring Baby Yoda back to its own kind, as viewers saw The Armorer instruct him at the end of Season 1. Mando goes on to say that if he can locate other Mandalorians, they can "guide" him. From everything The Mandalorian has established so far, Mandalorians are few and far between after the events surrounding the original trilogy, and most of those that appeared in Season 1 died in Season 1. So how does this connect to Rebels?
Sabine Wren, for one! The young Mandalorian woman was a major character in all four seasons of Star Wars Rebels, and she was alive and well at the end of the series. In fact, she was poised to join Ahsoka on a mission to find Ezra Bridger again. With Ahsoka heavily rumored to appear in The Mandalorian Season 2, the door would be wide open for Sabine (and perhaps Ezra) to come along with her.
Is it possible that Ahsoka only shows up on The Mandalorian because Mando was trying to find Sabine? It's hard to rule anything out when it comes to the show that somehow managed to keep the Baby Yoda secret from leaking ahead of the series premiere!
The icy terrain seen in several of the trailer scenes also reminds me of Krownest, which first appeared in Star Wars Rebels Season 3 as the ancestral home of Clan Wren. Rebels never established what happened to the Wrens aside from Sabine, other than that her father was rescued and at least temporarily reunited with his family. A couple of Rebels arcs featured Sabine's mother and brother, Ursa and Tristan, and there's always Fenn Rau. There are Rebels Mandalorians who definitely could have survived what happened to Mandalore, even if Sabine herself isn't fated for a Mandalorian appearance... yet.
The Mandalorian thrived in Season 1 without overloading the very first live-action Star Wars series with familiar franchise faces, which I for one thought was a fantastic choice, to the point that I wasn't too happy about the rumors of Boba Fett appearing in Season 2, and even Ahsoka feels to me like The Mandalorian adding a Jedi element to a story that doesn't really need them, since Baby Yoda doesn't quite count.
Bo-Katan was and is a different story, in my book, because her inclusion in The Mandalorian as an actual prominent Mandalorian makes sense, especially with the Darksaber connection. Other Mandalorians from Rebels and even Clone Wars could make sense, and not pull focus from Mando as the star of his own series.
Rebels is the chronologically closest Star Wars entry to The Mandalorian aside from the original trilogy, and Mandalorians were notably absent from those first three films (which Rebels may have explained). Of the canon characters around this timeline, Rebels Mandalorians arguably make the most sense to cross paths with Mando. The galaxy is a big place, right? Everybody shouldn't meet everybody else!
The Mandalorian Season 2 premieres on Friday, October 30 at 3:01 a.m. PT on Disney+. You can rewatch the first season (along with plenty of other content from the galaxy far, far away) on the Disney streamer, and our fall 2020 premiere schedule will reveal your other viewing options now and in the coming weeks.
