It’s been less than 24 hours since Jon Favreau revealed the title and synopsis of his hotly anticipated live-action Star Wars TV series for Disney’s upcoming streaming service, but we may already know exactly who the titular character of The Mandalorian is, according to a new theory. No Bothan spies had to perish to bring us this latest bit of information about The Mandalorian because it’s more speculation than hard fact, but the evidence is hard to ignore. According to Screen Rant, the eponymous Mandalorian will be a character we’ve already met before, one with a connection to everyone’s favorite bounty hunter who is legitimately terrible at what he does—Boba Fett!
Looking to the expanded Star Wars canon and combing through Favreau’s Instagram for clues has narrowed down the list of suspects to exactly one character: the man who stole Boba Fett’s armor, Cobb Vanth. Who is Cobb Vanth? How could he fit into the story that Favreau is looking to tell? Join host Dan Casey (that’s me) on today’s episode of Nerdist News as we dive into this theory like Boba into the Great Pit of Carkoon.
In order to understand why Vanth is the prime suspect to star in the live-action TV series, which Favreau will write and executive produce, one must carefully parse Favreau’s text. On Wednesday, he wrote, “After the stories of Jango and Boba Fett, another warrior emerges in the Star Wars universe. The Mandalorian is set after the fall of the Empire and before the emergence of the First Order. We follow the travails of a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy, far from the authority of the New Republic.”
As the theory points out, we have already met a “long gunfighter”-style character in the pages of Chuck Wendig’s Star Wars: Aftermath novels, Cobb Vanth. A former slave of Jabba the Hutt, Vanth managed to free himself after the corpulent crime lord choked to death in Return of the Jedi and became the self-appointed sheriff of Freetown, a previously lawless town on Tatooine. Shortly after becoming the resident lawman of Freetown, Vanth acquired a suit of Mandalorian armor, which had been recovered by a group of Jawa scavengers.
Given what we know about the Jawas and the relative rarity of Mandalorian armor on Tatooine, it stands to reason that this particular suit of armor belonged to a recently digested mercenary with a penchant for disintegrations. Whether or not Boba Fett survived the encounter and will come looking for his missing suit of armor remains to be seen, but it could make for one hell of a reveal at the end of The Mandalorian season one. We’ll have to wait and see until the Disney streaming service premieres in 2019, though, to find out.
What do you think of the Cobb Vanth theory? Who do you thing should star as The Mandalorian? Let us know in the comments below.
Images: Lucasfilm/Disney
