I’m standing toe-to-toe with the Mandalorian and trying not to blink. It’s not that he’s pointed a blaster at my person — in fact, the shimmering suit of beskar before me lies empty and dormant, posed on a pliant mannequin and not on either of the performers who bring Din Djarin to life at any given time. (And that’s just fine by me: the presence of Lateef Crowder, Brendan Wayne, or Pedro Pascal would probably send my little Star Wars-loving heart — the heart that I was sure had gone cold and shrunk two sizes like the Grinch’s — into full-on fandom-induced arrest.) Instead, it’s that Din’s armor is placed just so in a room filled with enough Star Wars paraphernalia to smother a bantha. I recognize creatures from the films, like the nexu that sliced Padmé Amidala’s back to ribbons in Attack of the Clones, or the head of a tauntaun that could very well date back to the original trilogy. The rest hail from the shows. If it appeared for even a second in The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, or Skeleton Crew, it’s in this room: the floating heads of aliens and droids, blasters and blades, and models of ships. The creme de la creme (for this Naboo-obsessed writer, at least) is the N-1 starfighter that Din first pilots in Book of Boba Fett, built completely to scale in (almost) its full glory. |
