Over the past few weeks, some of The Mandalorian's most delightful Easter eggs have included a hilarious deep cut to a nearly 40-year-old inside joke, a live-action rendition of a classic animated creature, and even the return of a beloved prequel meme. Let's break down some of the best Easter eggs and tie-ins from the Disney+ show's last three episodes: "The Sin," "Sanctuary," and this week's jam-packed "The Gunslinger."
1. The not-an-ice-cream-maker — "The Sin" features an incredible Star Wars in-joke early on when Werner Herzog's The Client uses a safe to retrieve the Mandalorian's Beskar. This safe is a reference to a blink-and-you-miss-him character from The Empire Strikes Back, who can briefly be seen fleeing Cloud City.
Fans for years have joked about the strange item he's holding that looks a whole lot like an ice cream maker, and the character, later given the name Willrow Hood, is even frequent inspiration for cosplay at Star Wars conventions. The Mandalorian reveals the item he was holding was no ice cream maker, but rather a safe of some sort, which pops up in the episode and is referred to as a camtono.
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2. Paz Vizla — Also in "The Sin" is a Mandalorian in heavy armor who our hero clashes with early on. He's identified in the credits as Paz Vizla, a name that carries great significance for Star Wars fans.
In the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Pre Vizsla was a Mandalorian who led a group called Death Watch, extremists who were dedicated to preserving Mandalore's warrior culture as a new group of pacifist Mandalorians sought to leave these violent ways in the past. It just so happens that Vizsla was voiced in the series by The Mandalorian showrunner Jon Favreau, and Favreau also voices Paz Vizla in "The Sin."
3. The Twi'lek healing baths — While recommending the Mandalorian take some much-needed time off in "The Sin," Greef Karga offers to take him to the "Twi'lek healing baths." That's the same kind of species as Jabba the Hutt's employee Bib Fortuna from Return of the Jedi, as well as one of the main heroes of Star Wars Rebels, Hera Syndulla.
4. The battle droid — We see more of a flashback of the Mandalorian's tragic backstory in "The Sin," which this time ends with a look at a B2 super battle droid. The Confederacy of Independent Systems, the separatist movement against the Republic, used this type of droid during the Clone Wars. The flashback during this prequel-era conflict has fueled fan theories that a recognizable hero who would have been fighting with the Republic at that time could come to the Mandalorian's rescue — perhaps even the real Yoda himself.
5. "You little womp rat" — The Mandalorian in the fourth episode, "Sanctuary," refers to Baby Yoda as a "little womp rat," recalling the Tatooine creatures mentioned by Luke Skywalker in A New Hope. "I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home," Luke says during the briefing scene. This phrase emerges again in "The Gunslinger," when Peli Motto refers to the Mandalorian as a womp rat.
6. The Loth-cat — In "Sanctuary," we see a cat-like creature scare Baby Yoda on Sorgan. This creature is a Loth-cat, which appeared throughout Star Wars Rebels, in which the main character grew up on the planet to which Loth-cats are native. After years of animated appearances, the Loth-cats get a live-action interpretation.
7. The Klatooinians — The raiders the Mandalorian and Cara Dune help fight off in "Sanctuary" are Klatooinians, the same species as Barada, who served Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi. In The Clone Wars, the bounty hunter Castas was also a Klatooinian.
8. A wretched hive — In "The Gunslinger," The Mandalorian heads to Anakin and Luke Skywalker's home planet of Tatooine and specifically Mos Eisley, the famous "wretched hive of scum and villainy" from A New Hope, even winding up back in the same iconic cantina from that film. While the Mos Eisley cantina famously didn't even serve droids in A New Hope, here, the Mandalorian chats with a droid behind the bar, not a human.
9. Tusken Raiders, banthas, and dewbacks— While on his mission in "The Gunslinger," the Mandalorian encounters several Tusken Raiders, who attacked Luke early on in A New Hope, and we see two banthas, also from A New Hope. The Mandalorian also comes across a dewback, the type of creature we see stormtroopers riding while searching the desert in the original film.
9. The pit droids — In "The Gunslinger," the droids owned by Peli Motto, the woman who repairs the Mandalorian's ship, are pit droids, which we previously saw during the podrace sequence in The Phantom Menace.
10. Sabacc and Corellia — We also see the droids and Peli in "The Gunslinger" playing sabacc, the card game Han Solo was playing when he won the Millennium Falcon from Lando Calrissian, as seen in Solo: A Star Wars Story. And speaking of Han, Toro tells the Mandalorian at one point that "this ain't Corellia." That's the shipbuilding planet Han Solo is from, where the opening of Solo was set.
11. The Dune Sea and Beggar's Canyon — Toro Calican mentions that Fennec Shand is "headed out beyond the Dune Sea," the area of the desert where we saw the Sarlacc pit in Return of the Jedi and which C-3PO mentions by name, saying, "You will, therefore, be taken to the Dune Sea and cast into the Pit of Carkoon, the nesting place of the all powerful Sarlacc."
Similarly, Peli gives a shout-out to Beggar's Canyon, which was mentioned by Luke in A New Hope — "It'll be just like Beggar's Canyon back home" — and was seen during the podrace in The Phantom Menace.
12. "She's got the high ground" and "he's no good to me dead" —The Mandalorian in "The Gunslinger" warns that Fennec has "got the high ground," which is almost certainly an intentional reference to Obi-Wan Kenobi telling Anakin Skywalker in Revenge of the Sith, in a line that has spawned thousands of memes, "It's over, Anakin. I have the high ground!"
Later, the Mandalorian mentions that Fennec is "no good to us dead," likely an intentional callback to Boba Fett's famous line in The Empire Strikes Back: "He's no good to me dead." The Mandalorian continues to bring tie-ins both to the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy, helping to bring some balance to the franchise.
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