(SPOILER ALERT) The season two finale of Disney+ hit The Mandalorian is now available for streaming, and fans have been champing at the bit to see if Grogu — AKA Baby Yoda — escapes the clutches of Giancarlo Esposito‘s evil Moff Gideon.
Oscar, Emmy, and Tony winner Lin-Manuel Miranda was such a Star Wars fan that he played an uncredited Rebel pilot in The Rise of Skywalker. The Force is strong in his family, he explains to ABC Audio.
“My son just turned six, and so we said when you turn six, you can watch the ‘real’ Star Wars movies as opposed to the LEGO Star Wars that he had already watched so many times, you couldn’t watch them anymore,” Miranda laughs. “So we just finished Last Jedi…We just did [episodes] 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. And then my wife and I are watching Mandalorian after they go to sleep.”
Brian Volk-Weiss is a super-fan, as well as the producer of Netflix’s hit shows The Movies That Made Us and The Toys That Made Us. He explained how The Mandalorian brings to life toys hardcore fans had as a child, and that they clamor to collect as adults. The sight of one obscure toy onscreen, the Imperial Troop Transport, got him emotional.
“Honestly, man, this is insane — and I’m aware of it — I teared up when I saw that,” he confesses. “I teared up when I saw Ahsoka Tano … But when they showed Bo Katan for the first time…literally my first thought when I saw her was and again, this is insane, but I was like, like, ‘Wow, she’s real. They did it.'”
Volk-Weiss adds, “We are living in the greatest time in history to be a geek.”
Speaking of which, an after-credits scene in the final chapter contained one more surprise: the announcement of a previously unknown fifth Star Wars TV series on Disney+.
Without divulging any secrets from the episode, the scene ends with Temuera Morrison‘s recently resurrected Boba Fett returning to a location first seen on the big screen in Return of the Jedi: the Tatooine palace of the deceased Jabba the Hutt. Along with him is his Mandalorian co-star Ming-Na Wen, who plays the assassin Fennec Shand. After the brief action there concludes, a title card reads: “The Book of Boba Fett Coming December 2021.”
The series will join three others announced two weeks ago: a limited Obi-Wan Kenobi series starring Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen, a Rogue One prequel show starring Diego Luna, called Andor, and The Acolyte, a “mystery thriller” set long before the previous events in the Star Wars saga.
In a sadly ironic note, the new announcement comes a day after the death of actor Jeremy Bullock, who played the bounty hunter in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
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