The Mandalorian saved Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker’s best part: Babu Frik

Sometimes, The Mandalorian isn’t really a TV show. It’s a tour bus. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — one of the pleasures of watching the show is seeing how it drives by deeply esoteric aspects of Star Wars lore (see: the Darksaber) or repurposed bits of less popular stories (hot-rodding a Naboo starfighter). The season 3 premiere is here. Mandalorian, this theme continues, folding in perhaps the only universally beloved aspect of 2019’s divisive Skywalkers are on the Rise: My man Babu Frik.

Babu Frik is the tiny droid specialist who the heroes of the film adored. Skywalkers are on the Rise turn to in order to extract Sith secrets from C-3PO’s memory. He’s the sort of one-off character that Star Wars excels at — 8 inches tall with 20 feet of personality, he explodes onto the screen as a wildly expressive puppet with an unforgettable voice as performed by Shirley Henderson. He even, like Yoda, has a distinctive speech pattern that’s just fun to listen to, a bit of cartoony exuberance in an otherwise serious scene.

Technically Babu Frik was not present in the premiere episode of season 3. Mandalorian. We get even better results: A whole bunch of droid experts just like him, all also voiced and recorded by Shirley Henderson. They’re called Anzellans, a species of tiny upright aliens that look like a cross between a gremlin (dry) and primate. Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) goes to them in order to see if they can rebuild the bounty hunter droid IG-11 (voiced by Taika Waititi) that self-destructed in the show’s first season.

Photo by Jonathan Olley/Lucasfilm

As a recent addition to Star Wars canon, Anzellans don’t have a lot of backstory to them. There’s a perhaps apocryphal account of an early draft of Skywalkers are on the Rise script that had Babu Frik, or a version of him, give the heroes a weapon that could wipe out a Star Destroyer fleet — because Anzellans’ diminutive size and sharp sight made them uniquely desirable ship mechanics with unique insight into Star Destroyer plans. This eventually led to the film’s droidsmiths.

Mandalorian would only be the Anzellans’ second on-screen appearance, and Star Wars literature has only mentioned them in a handful of books. There’s nothing to suggest that they’re going to be a huge part of this season of TV, but they could be! They’re a hilarious blue-collar caricature, like a kooky Star Wars version of a mechanic with a thick Brooklyn accent telling you no matter how much you argue with him, your R2 unit is never gonna play a violin. Having an archetype that’s so hilariously broad playing against Din Djarin’s steely resolve is just inherently funny, and a reminder that these fantastic Star Wars heroes You can also see it hereShare a space alongside a larger number of characters. Even if the puppets are adorable,

In fact, Din Djarin’s quest leads MandalorianThere are many interesting people, both familiar and unknown. The premiere also features the Anzellans and a group of pirates headed by Vane (Marti Martulis), an alien with a great rubber face, as well as his boss, Gorian Shard, a kelp-y captain. Mandalorian also has enough history behind it to delve into its own roster of characters — Greef Karga (Carl Weathers) is back to help his friend Mando out, and Bo-Katan (Katee Sackhoff), the former Mandalorian royal who does not follow Din’s creed, has a pointed argument with the hero.

Photo: Francois Duhamel/Lucasfilm

There are three seasons. MandalorianThe final texture feels almost like an EU story. There’s just enough detail to feel as though it can go anywhere, but it still feels familiar. It doesn’t always Follow this — arguably the weakest part of the premiere is how concerned it is with Mandalorian lore, which is underexplained and overemphasized — but it understands on some level that an essential part of Star Wars is delightIt could be from meeting new people or getting back together with the ones we have known.

Fans of the animated side of Star Wars are familiar with this — The Clone Wars was particularly interested in plumbing the franchise’s adventure-serial heritage in order to build out a rewarding patchwork of characters and locales that seemed haphazard at first but eventually cohered into something meaningful. It’s newer in the live-action realm of Star Wars, but no less satisfying. Star Wars can be a good choice for political thrillers. There are other times. It’s a chill party bus, and Babu Frik is driving.