'The Mandalorian' Revealed Baby Yoda Is Grogu. Star Wars Fans Are Piecing Together What That Means.
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If you were getting tired of Mando blastin’ up slugs, spiders, and Stormtroopers every week, then The Mandalorian dropped the episode for you (and then some) last Friday. The show finally let Star Wars fans peek behind the curtain to see how the adventures of Team Mando-Baby Yoda fit into the stories of the Skywalker Saga and the animated series.
So, if anything else, the opening sequence of “Chapter 13: The Jedi,” probably snapped you out of your Thanksgiving hangover. We finally saw the animated series Jedi Ahsoka Tano in glorious live-action, busting up goons with dual lightsabers. But it’s the mysteries that Tano helped unravel later in the episode that has the Star Wars faithful bugging out. About midway though “The Jedi,” Mando and Baby Yoda find Tano in the forest, tell her that Bo-Katan sent them, and they all sit down to share some secrets.
That’s when we get about seven plot bombs in two minutes of dialogue: Tano starts communicating with Baby Yoda via some Force-telepathy situation, where we learn that Baby Yoda is his own damn baby, and we should be calling him Baby Grogu. And that’s just the first bit of new info. Tano says that Grogu was brought up in the Jedi temple on Coruscant and that multiple masters trained him. Then, when the Clone Wars ended and the Empire rose to power, someone stole him away—and that’s when the kid’s memory goes blank. Anakin destroyed most of the living Jedi in 19 BBY, and The Mandalorian kicks off nine years after the events of The Return of the Jedi, so that's about 28 years of unaccounted Grogu adventures.
Naturally, with nearly three decades to fill in, Star Wars fans have been hard at work trying to figure out what kind of shenanigans Grogu was up to. And if there’s even some truth to them, it looks like we’re in for a hell of a ride going forward not only in The Mandalorian, but in Disney’s Star Wars plans in the foreseeable future.
Remember when Anakin Skywalker busted up the Jedi temple in Revenge of the Sith and everything went to shit? In its breakdown of “The Jedi,” New Rockstars theorized that Grogu was likely there for that mess. But who saved him? Sunny and Pluria from Los Angeles Wave had a pretty exciting theory: Mace Windu was the one who saved Grogu. Reason being, Dave Feloni (the man behind the Rebels and Clone Wars animated series and the director of “The Jedi”) has already introduced time travel to Star Wars lore, so it wouldn’t be out of the question to pull any character, living or dead, back into the fold. (Look no further than Darth Maul’s treatment post-The Phantom Menace if you want further proof.) New Rockstars brought up the more likely possibility that Obi-Wan Kenobi was the one who rescued Grogu, considering that character’s upcoming Disney+ series would make for an easy tie-in storyline.
After that… we’d be nearing fan-fic levels of speculation if we were to try to figure out two decades worth of Grogu-spinoff-level-worthy action, most likely. If he was saved by a Jedi, it’s likely that he fell out of the hands of that Jedi, somehow, and ended up with the bad dudes who were guarding him in The Mandalorian’s pilot. If he was with the bad guys to start with? Anyone’s guess, but considering what Tano said about Grogu’s fear being a gateway feel to evil-doing, maybe he even flirted with the Dark side before crossing paths with Mando.
Here’s our best guess as to how things will play out: Now that The Mandalorian showed a few of its cards, the final few episodes will pull things slightly back into the adventures of Grogu and Mando and save some of the expanded-universe stuff for later. Remember: We’ve hardly seen any Moff Gideon this season! Chekhov’s Darksaber can’t sit around for too long.
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