13 Best Easter Eggs In The Mandalorian (All 3 Seasons)

Say what you will about modern Star Wars, but they know how to land an Easter egg. Boba Fett’s escape from the Sarlacc in the opening of The Book of Boba Fett is timed perfectly with Patton Oswalt’s filibuster from Parks and Recreation.

The Mandalorian’s three seasons are jam-packed with Easter eggs and deep cuts. The show used so many references and Easter eggs that the movie had to scrape the bottom of the barrel with Embo and Rotta the Hutt.

13 Life Day

Jon Favreau wasted no time establishing a high Easter egg quotient for The Mandalorian. The series premiere opens with Mando bringing in a Mythrol bounty, played by Horatio Sanz, and as he takes him back to the Razor Crest, this wisecracking fugitive tries bargaining for his freedom.

At one point, he tells Mando, “I was hoping to be free for Life Day, maybe even get home to the family...” This is a throwback to the notorious Star Wars Holiday Special, in which Chewbacca goes home to Kashyyyk to celebrate Life Day — a galaxy-wide celebration of love and peace — with his family.

12 Timothy Olyphant As A Marshal

This one isn’t a Star Wars Easter egg; it’s more like stunt casting. In The Mandalorian’s season 2 premiere, Mando arrives in a dusty town on Tatooine and runs afoul of a local lawman named Cobb Vanth, who’s helped himself to Boba Fett’s discarded armor.

Vanth is played by Timothy Olyphant, who proved to be perfect casting. Not only does Olyphant have the swagger of an old-school TV cowboy; he’s already iconic as a different marshal, Raylan Givens, from his neo-western series Justified.

11 Yousa

Bill Burr was criticized for bringing his native Boston accent to the role of ex-Imperial sharpshooter Migs Mayfeld, but Star Wars has always dealt in familiar archetypes, and Burr’s “Beantown ball-buster” archetype was perfect for Mayfeld.

Mayfeld is constantly making fun of Mando’s ridiculous, arbitrary creeds. In his first appearance, he guesses that Mando is hiding his face because he’s ugly, and suggests he’s a Gungan: “Is that why yousa don’t wanna show your face?” It was refreshing to see modern Star Wars acknowledge the existence of the unfairly maligned Jar Jar Binks.

10 R5-D4

Luke Skywalker ended up with his astromech soulmate, R2-D2, because the first astromech droid that Uncle Owen tried to buy, R5-D4, turned out to have a bad motivator. Owen negotiated with the Jawas to swap out the red astro droid for the blue one.

Apparently, Peli Motto managed to get R5’s motivator up and running again, because he can be seen working in her hangar on Tatooine in The Mandalorian. A bad motivator just needs a good engineer.

9 Matt Lanter As A New Republic Officer

Hayden Christensen’s performance as Anakin Skywalker has been rightly reappraised, but he wasn’t the only actor to bring Anakin to life. Matt Lanter brought a lot of depth and humanity and vulnerability to Anakin in his voice performance in The Clone Wars.

The Mandalorian honored Lanter’s contributions to the Star Wars legacy with a live-action cameo appearance in season 1. He plays a New Republic prison guard in the jailbreak episode, “Chapter 6: The Prisoner.”

8 Purrgil Space Whales

The purrgil are one of the most interesting species in the Star Wars universe. They’re giant, flying whales that feed off of interstellar gasses and propel themselves through hyperspace. When space pilots make the jump to lightspeed, they can often see pods of purrgil traveling alongside them.

These space whales were first introduced in Rebels, and they briefly came back in The Mandalorian. This Easter egg served as a subtle setup for the purrgil’s role in Ahsoka.

7 AT-ST

The Mandalorian remade Seven Samurai in space with its fourth episode, “Chapter 4: Sanctuary.” When an AT-ST walker starts terrorizing a village, Mando and Cara Dune train the villagers to fight back.

This episode takes one of these goofy walkers that got nerfed by Ewoks in Return of the Jedi and makes it genuinely terrifying with nighttime lighting and glowing red eyes. Suddenly, this mechanical laughingstock became a supersized Terminator.

6 Anzellan Droidsmiths

Babu Frik, the teeny-tiny droid engineer who unlocked C-3PO’s dormant Sith coding in The Rise of Skywalker (that movie was so stupid), was one of the only parts of Episode IX that was actually well-received.

Those Anzellan droidsmiths are some of the most impressive (and adorable) puppets in the Star Wars universe. I was thrilled when The Mandalorian season 3 brought them back, and then even more thrilled when the movie gave them their own little side quest.

5 Yes, Disintegrations

When Darth Vader gathered a merry band of bounty hunters to track down the Millennium Falcon in The Empire Strikes Back, he sternly told Boba Fett, “No disintegrations.” This implied that a weapon exists in the Star Wars universe that can disintegrate its target.

In the second episode of The Mandalorian, we were finally introduced to that weapon. As Mando took on a bunch of Jawas, he started disintegrating them left and right.

4 Krayt Dragon

The original Star Wars movie is a masterpiece of environmental storytelling. For the first 20 minutes of the film, we’re just watching R2-D2 and C-3PO trudge through the Tatooine desert, but George Lucas uses props and set design to truly transport us to a galaxy far, far away.

One of the most tantalizing otherworldly hints we see in the background is a massive krayt dragon skeleton. In The Mandalorian’s season 2 premiere, Favreau told a classic slay-the-dragon story with Mando taking on a living, breathing krayt dragon.