The first season of The Mandalorian is the only live-action Star Wars project in recent years that doesn’t seem to have alienated the fans in some way, with the show so far receiving widespread praise, and many now hoping that Jon Favreau will eventually be handed the keys to the entire kingdom given how well he’s handled the material so far.
Disney and Lucasfilm must be thrilled that not only did the positive reception to the series keep the naysayers off their backs for a little while, but it looks set to rake in a fortune in merchandise sales thanks to the Baby Yoda phenomenon. The next batch of episodes are set to delve even deeper into Star Wars canon, too, and double down on fan service at the same time by giving fan favorite character Ahsoka Tano her long-awaited live-action debut, with Rosario Dawson set to play the role in casting news that rubbed Ashley Eckstein’s supporters the wrong way.
Dave Filoni has been the architect of the Star Wars animated universe for over a decade, and he too has made the jump to live-action by writing and directing several episodes of The Mandalorian, and it seems as though he’s got some big surprises up his sleeve for the second season.
Actor Sam Witwer, who has a long association with the franchise – having voiced Darth Maul in Solo, The Clone Wars and Rebels, played a Stormtrooper in both The Force Awakens and Rogue One and brought Palpatine to life in eight Star Wars video games – recently teased that Filoni is going to blow your mind when The Mandalorian returns to our screens.
There are things that Dave Filoni has coming in The Mandalorian Season 2 that are going to blow people’s minds. Because the thing is that Dave and George Lucas always had the same instinct when it came to this. And what this is is that they would ask them, ‘Okay we need to tell a story about witches’. And then they’d sit there and say, ‘Well do we have something like that in Star Wars? What about the Nightsisters of Dathomir. They’re witches’. Yeah, okay, wait a second now, they go in and look at the designs, and look at how it looks, and go ‘yeah, that fits’. And sometimes they would be like, ‘Oh that doesn’t fit, we actually have to do this instead, right?’.”
While it doesn’t seem likely that we’re going to see witches in Mando and Baby Yoda’s next adventure, expectations are no doubt already high for The Mandalorian to deliver a second season that expands the world and builds on the undoubted potential that live-action Star Wars shows undoubtedly have.