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The announcement of The Mandalorian & Grogu this week raises a bunch of interesting questions about just why this is the next chapter of the titular heroes’ tale. But one of the most interesting is when it’s coming. The end of season three saw Din undo the machinations of his greatest foil on The Mandalorian, and the biggest threat to his point in the Star Wars timeline is being saved for another. So... who’s the bad guy in his movie?
The death of Moff Gideon, and Grand Admiral Thrawn’s impending arrival after Ahsoka’s first season—to be dealt with, presumably, in Dave Filoni’s still-incoming Imperial Remnant vs. New Republic film—leave Din without a clear antagonist for his sudden feature film. That doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to set that particular story up in The Mandalorian & Grogu, but that also doesn’t mean there aren’t other opportunities to explore different foils for the clan of two.
We’ve gathered a few potential ideas, some silly, some serious, some out-there, some less so—but all ones that could make for an interesting antagonist as The Mandalorian heads to the silver screen. Well, at least we like to think so.
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Din and his friends already dealt with Gorian Shard in season three, but Vane and some of his crew survived Nevarro—and we actually know Vane is getting some set-up even further in the upcoming Skeleton Crew series, which takes place around the same timeframe as The Mandalorian. What if it’s that show that leads into The Mandalorian & Grogu?
Giving Din a foil that reflects the growling lawlessness of the Outer Rim—one that ties him further into projects aside from the more traditional heroes—could help bring back a bit of the bounty hunting, western vibe that the series has moved away from as Din’s place in the galaxy got a bit bigger.
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If we do have to give Din a more traditionally aligned villain, then season three definitely gave us a suitable one: Gideon’s shadow council. Sure, their leader is gone, but it was clear even when he was around that multiple factions were at play in this intermingling circle of Imperial agents, former Moffs, and officers. Din is technically still on contract with New Republic forces—ones that are going to be very distracted dealing with the return of Thrawn. That fight doesn’t have to be Din’s, but the idea of dismantling Gideon’s whole legacy by taking on the council he forged would be a good conclusion to their arc over the course of the show.
Image: Chris Trevas/Del Rey
But maybe we need a specific face for that council. Most of them were unnamed—we have Brendol Hux, the father of Armitage Hux and the eventual architect of the First Order Stormtroopers, and we have Captain Gilad Pellaeon, who’s likely going to be saved for Thrawn business given his expansive EU history with the Grand Admiral. But what if we turned to the Expanded Universe to give one other major faction on the council a face: the Warlords, the collective of former Imperial officers and Moffs that ruled their own splintered factions of loyalists vying for their own fiefdoms?
And what if we turned to what is, frankly, the current canon’s favorite EU novel to give them that face: Warlord Zsinj?
Introduced in The Courtship of Princess Leia, Zsinj was a former Admiral in the Imperial Navy who, in the wake of Palpatine’s death and the Empire’s fragmentation, built himself a massive base of power to rival both the nascent New Republic and the Imperial remnant. A shadowy threat throughout the first few X-Wing novels in the wake of Ysanne Isard’s downfall (keep that name in mind), Zsinj was also a personal foil to Han Solo in the EU, narrowly escaping defeat at Han’s hands multiple times until... well long story in Courtship made short, Han won the planet Dathomir in a gambling match, a world over which Zsinj had established a secret base. Han took Zsinj down in the ensuing battle over Dathomir, leading to his Empire falling apart.
Given Dathomir’s vital importance to current canon, making a play for EU nods by throwing in Zsinj as the major Warlord on Gideon’s Shadow Council could make for a very fun villain—especially giving Din the Han stand-in role.
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Maybe if Star Wars wants to keep Vane as a specific threat for Skeleton Crew to deal with, we could still get a story about navigating piracy and growing lawlessness as the New Republic and Imperial Remnant go at it, and tie Mandalorian and Grogu into another unresolved story: what became of the Pykes after Fennec Shand assassinated their leadership at the climax of The Book of Boba Fett?
The Pykes might have lost the battle for Mos Espa, but it was clear they hadn’t lost the war—so maybe Din needs to return to an old friend and fellow Mandalorian for another team-up. Plus, it would just be very funny to me if a Mandalorian movie inadvertently takes a swerve into being a Boba Fett movie halfway through. It’s like poetry, it rhymes.
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Okay sure, Din is contracted to the New Republic right now, but consider this: the New Republic sucks, even beyond the “well at least we’re not literally the Galactic Empire!” kind of way. Remember the early days of The Mandalorian, when a Republic presence was just as much a cause for concern to Din as an Imperial one was? Where an X-Wing carried almost as much implied opposition as a TIE Fighter? Maybe it’s time to bring back a bit of that independent vibe.
The New Republic don’t have to be explicitly evil to be antagonists of The Mandalorian & Grogu, although they’re already at the “so we renamed the torture device something nicer” stages of neoliberal evils. But there are plenty of ways they could be in opposition to Din’s goals that make them reluctantly at odds with each other—especially at a time when the New Republic is going to be in crisis trying to deal with Thrawn’s return.
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What better way to test the renewed unity of Mandalore than to present the challenge of division? Din might have walked away from the home he so desperately sought to live with Grogu, but potential schisms could lead the man who helped Mandalorians reunite back to help his people again. Maybe it’s another covert returning from elsewhere in the galaxy, maybe it’s ex-Deathwatch who see the Tribe and Bo-Katan’s groups as pale imitations of Mandalore’s warrior-driven cultures of days gone by. Maybe this time for real the Armorer is actually up to no good!
Just as it would be interesting to try and pull Din away from the more traditional battles of good and evil in Star Wars again, bringing him back into the world and factions of the Mandalorians as they slowly come back together would be a good opportunity to do so.
Image: Steve Crespo, John Nadeau, Chip Wallace, Jordi Ensign, and Perry McNamee/Dark Horse Comics
Remember when we mentioned Isard a few entries ago? She’d be another fascinating, Gideon-esque foil to Din, too. The head of Imperial Intelligence at the time of Palpatine’s death, Ysanne Isard established a coup against Grand Vizier Sate Pestage and the Imperial Ruling Council to pretty much lord over Coruscant herself, the face of the Imperial Remnant. A major enemy of Rogue Squadron in the EU, she’d be a great character to bring back as a rival to Din that leans on Gideon’s own status as an Intelligence agent—perhaps he was one of her closest commanders or something, to give her that personal connection worth seeking a lone Mandalorian out for?
Image: Lucasfilm
It would honestly be a bit of a wild move to make the villain of your big movie a supporting character from a couple of episodes of the streaming show it’s based on, but hey: if Ysanne Isard is a way to deal with the shadow of Moff Gideon’s death by re-introducing a classic legacy character from the EU, Katy O’Brien’s Elia Kane would be a way to do that with an already established face—and one with personal interest in wanting to go up against Din and Grogu. Plus, it’d help pare back the stakes of Din’s world a bit again to make his “big bad” a former minor character. Maybe not what you want to hear for what is now going to be the first Star Wars theatrical release in seven years, but it’d be nice to sort of tone down Din and Grogu’s importance to the galaxy and tell smaller stories again.
Image: Karl Kesel/Penguin Random House
The Mandalorian spent a very long time setting up connections to mysterious cloning experiments and dark magics over its three seasons, only to seemingly snuff out the root of all those connections almost as soon as they were revealed: Moff Gideon’s would-be army of cloned Force sensitive versions of himself, the next generation of Dark Troopers. But Star Wars loves a mysterious cloning experiments and dark magics moment! Why not more?
Another Warlord introduced in The Glove of Darth Vader, Trioculus was the secret product of genetic experimentation and manipulation by scientists working for Palpatine while he was still Supreme Chancellor. An attempt to create spontaneously generated life, Trioculus was the sole “success” of the experiments, a mutate with a third eye in the center of his forehead. Raised by the Prophets of the Dark Side as the heralded son of Palpatine, Trioculus was presented as an alternate successor to the Emperor against Ysanne Isard, seeking the glove of Vader to prove his prowess.
Trioculus would be a wild pull, but a very cool way to tie back around into all those cloning experiments and supernatural magicks that saw people connecting what The Mandalorian put down to the eventual return of Palpatine himself.
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Look. Hear me out.
It would be insane for Lucasfilm to make Luke Skywalker the antagonist of a film. Let alone, once again, the first Star Wars theatrical release since 2019. Insane! Ballsy, which would be a nice change of pace for the risk-averse studio, but still, insane! And yet, dear reader. And yet.
Luke Skywalker is the perfect balance of everything we’ve talked about in an antagonist so far. He’d be a big, shocking name, hugely important to Star Wars and worthy of the scale of a movie, but also one with a deeply personal relationship to Din and Grogu already: Luke tried to make Grogu the first student of his new Jedi Academy, and he failed. Now, the New Republic he and his friends helped forge faces a crisis that could undo it. What if Luke gets desperate to recruit allies to his cause? What if he just needs Grogu to understand training with him is necessary, that attachment to his father figure is holding him back, blind in his desperation to how attachment made Luke the incredible Jedi he is in the first place?
What if we did his atrocious Book of Boba Fett appearance over and actually spent the time and understanding necessary to do the idea justice, not just as an exploration of Luke’s own inner conflicts and turmoils that would go on to define the rest of his life after Return of the Jedi, but as an actual exploration and test of the bond between Din and Grogu, the battle for the fate of a child’s livelihood? Like I said, an antagonist doesn’t have to be evil to be in opposition to our heroes. They just have to want something different to them.
Or fuck it, make him actually Luuke, the mad clone from The Last Command made by the dark Jedi Joruus C’Baoth and that’s a plot twist. Play with the uncanny valleyness of it all with the the inevitably CG-de-aged and re-voiced Mark Hamill and make that offness intentional! We wanna bring Star Wars back to the big screen? Let’s get nuts.
