What a way to finish out the season.
If you haven't yet already watched the finale of the second season of 'The Mandalorian', odds are you were never going to watch it.
For everyone else, it was exactly the right way to close out the season by bringing in none other than Luke Skywalker - played by a mixture of CGI de-aging Mark Hamill and a body double in Max Lloyd-Jones. Skywalker, looking like his youthful self in 'Return of the Jedi', appears out of nowhere to save the day and take Grogu / Baby Yoda away with him for training.
Borrowing heavily from the famous corridor scene from 'Rogue One', we see Luke Skywalker slicing and dicing his way through Dark Troopers to reach Mando and Grogu who barricaded themselves into the bridge to survive.
It's a pretty great scene, but for Mark Hamill, it appears it was a lot more. "Sometimes the greatest gifts are the most unexpected and something you never realized you wanted until it was given," Hamill said in a tweet last night.
Sometimes the greatest gifts are the most unexpected and something you never realized you wanted until it was given.#ThankYouJonAndDave π pic.twitter.com/4nNjSvbvIN
β Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) December 30, 2020
Jon Favreau, the series showrunner, spoke to GMA just after the episode aired how scared he was that the casting and the scene would leak beforehand. "It was very tricky, because itβs very hard to keep a secret nowadays," Favreau explained.
"There are so many people involved with the process. Every piece of casting leaked, so we were so scared, right up until it aired, that our surprise cameo was going to leak, too." Not only that, Hamill was actually on-set during the scene, with Lloyd-Jones presumably being the double during the action sequences.
Seeing as how it's probably the most talked-about season finale of the year, that's no small feat.