‘The Mandalorian’ Season 3: Episode 1’s Pirate Ship Is a Major Legends Callback

Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for Season 3, Episode 1 of The Mandalorian.

It took a while, but The Mandalorian is finally back, complete with Mando (Pedro Pascal), our boy Grogu and, of course, Easter eggs! “The Apostate” set the tone of what Season 3 will be about, and made it clear that pirates will play a big part in it, and even made some callbacks to the Star Wars lore in general, but especially the old Legends continuity. By now, these callbacks are expected of any new project by any big IPs, and Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau make a point of indulging our need for fan service in The Mandalorian all the time. This time, they brought back one of Legends’ biggest ships, the Eclipse.

Towards the end of the episode, Din Djarin engages in a dogfight with a gang of pirates that taunted “High” Magistrate Greef Karga (Carl Weathers) in the Nevarro asteroid belt. Those are operating under command of Gorian Shard (Nonso Anozie), the Pirate King, who used to work with Karga back in his Guild master days. The pirate — who bears a striking resemblance to the Swamp Thing — operates from his yet unnamed flagship, which, in turn, bears a striking resemblance to the Eclipse. If it turns out to indeed be a similar type of starship, Mando could be in serious trouble…

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The Eclipse in Star Wars Legends

Cool starship designs are a Star Wars staple since A New Hope, all the way back in 1977. Back then, the Star Destroyer and the Death Star left their marks on fans with their contrasting, but equally impressive designs. In 1980, The Empire Strikes Back came to theaters, and it was the Executor’s turn, a Star Dreadnought that served as Darth Vader’s (James Earl Jones) own flagship and dwarfed regular Star Destroyers. Return of the Jedi brought the Death Star back with a second, much larger version in 1983.

So when the Expanded Universe (now labeled Legends) began with books and comics, they needed to bring some equally impressive stuff to keep fans entertained in the 1990s, now that there were no more Star Wars movies to be released (or so we thought). Timothy Zahn‘s Thrawn Trilogy created the Katana Fleet, a fleet of old Star Dreadnoughts sitting idly by, waiting for whomever claimed it first, even inspiring the Sith Fleet in The Rise of Skywalker, to a certain degree. In the comics, Tom Veitch‘s Dark Empire saga brought many new vessels, the most impressive one being the Eclipse.

The Eclipse is the first of a new class of Super Star Destroyers, creatively named Eclipse-class. It was designed to be Emperor Palpatine’s (Ian McDiarmid) own flagship outside the Death Star and the Imperial capital in Coruscant. It spent most of its existence in construction, but it made the Rebels’ life a lot more difficult once it was completed — and even after the Battle of Endor. In Legends, the Emperor was also reborn as a clone, but with a young body perhaps even more powerful than his original one. That storyline saw Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) himself turn to the Dark Side of the Force, redeemed with the help of his sister, Leia Organa Solo (Carrie Fisher) as the Eclipse mounted its final attack on the Rebel headquarters. Enraged, Palpatine summoned a Force Storm (which, in more practical terms, is like a wormhole) that consumed the starship and everyone in it, including the Emperor himself.

But, as in Star Wars there always seems to be a pair of everything, of course there had to be a second Eclipse, which served as the flagship for yet another clone of Palpatine. Yes, the franchise’s issues with letting go of its past are not at all new. In this storyline, the Eclipse II was destroyed by none other than our favorite droid, R2-D2, who set it in collision course with another super weapon, the Galaxy Gun. Hopefully, though, we’ll never see anything like that in the current Disney canon… Until we do.

Is Gorian Shard’s Starship a Version Of The Eclipse?

There is very little footage of Gorian Shard’s starship so far. We’ve only seen it briefly in “The Apostate” and in the trailers for Season 3, but that short time was enough to show us that it’s probably much smaller compared to the original Eclipse, and it also has extended wings on the sides. It does look extremely fortified, with turbolasers and ventral turrets, and it needs to have a very large hangar to accommodate that many starfighters.

Seeing as Season 3 of The Mandalorian takes place around 8 years after Return of the Jedi, it’s not impossible at all that Gorian Shard’s starship could very well be an old Imperial model, maybe a precursor to what could eventually be an Eclipse-class Super Star Destroyer. The design sure looks similar, and even the bridge has the blocky and dark looks of the bridge of an Imperial ship. With the fall of the Empire, a lot of the regime’s old weaponry and ships are surely lying around and up for grabs — that has not yet been addressed in Star Wars. We know part of the Imperial Fleet is in the hands of Moff Gideon’s (Giancarlo Esposito) Imperial Remnant, and another part flew into the Unknown Regions and vanished during the Battle of Jakku, one year after Return of the Jedi. In Legends, the New Republic incorporated much of what used to be Imperial starships, but the current Disney canon proposed a demilitarization of the galaxy, so there’s no way of knowing what became of the Imperial starships that remained in the galaxy.

Either way, a ship as big as the Eclipse would certainly call the attention of anyone who wants to stake a claim to any part of the galaxy, especially Gorian Shard, self-titled Pirate King. The Eclipse of more than appropriate for a king – it served an Emperor. So we’ll see what The Mandalorian will make of this new addition to the Star Wars fleet, but, if it lives up to what its older and bigger sister was, it should do a lot of damage to anyone who stands in its way.

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