Why The Mandalorian's Katee Sackhoff Thought The Luke Skywalker Cameo Was A Completely Different Star Wars Character (2024)

The second season of The Mandalorian featured the live-action debut of Bo-Katan Kryze, with Katee Sackhoff donning the Mandalorian helmet to play the character she had already voiced for animation on Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels. Bo-Katan was present for The Mandalorian's unforgettable Season 2 finale sequence that saw Luke Skywalker save the day and then leave with Baby Yoda for training, but Sackhoff actually thought that a Star Wars character other than Luke would be the one showing up in the nick of time, and it was a character that Clone Wars fans would have known well: Plo Koon.

Katee Sackhoff participated in a charity stream for Star Wars Explained, and Plo Koon came up in a discussion of favorite minor Star Wars characters. The Bo-Katan actress had an interesting and unexpected piece of trivia to drop about Plo-Koon and The Mandalorian Season 2:

According to Katee Sackhoff, she and others were told that the person showing up with the epic save at the end of Season 2 was actually Jedi Master Plo Koon. The character was one of the Jedi who died on screen as part of Order 66 in Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, but when has death ever stopped a Jedi character from turning back up again in the Star Wars saga?

Of course, it's hard to blame Katee Sackhoff for believing the story that it was Plo Koon showing up to save the day. She previously revealed that the sequence was shot with an actor with dots on his face, so that his face could be digitally replaced by whoever the character was meant to be. It could have been Plo Koon!

In hindsight, clues do point toward Luke Skywalker showing up in the X-Wing, but surely a Star Wars project might also produce a scene involving a non-human by using the same kind of digital effects with dots on an actor's face, right? The Luke who showed up was voiced by Mark Hamill, and Star Wars had come a long way from the digital recreations of Tarkin and Leia for Rogue One.

Without knowing what the finished product of the sequence would be, it's easy to see how Plo Koon seemed like a perfectly reasonable possibility. It certainly wouldn't be the craziest thing ever to happen in the Star Wars saga! Gina Carano, who played Cara Dune on The Mandalorian before being fired by Lucasfilm, also commented on the secret of the savior in the Mandalorian Season 2 by saying that everybody started to do some whispering about who it could be on set.

The end of Season 2 did deliver more than just Luke Skywalker turning up, including setting the stage for potential conflict between Katee Sackhoff's Bo-Katan and Pedro Pascal's Mando over the Darksaber, since Bo-Katan feels that she needs to win the saber rather than have it yielded to her if she's going to have a real claim as leader of Mandalore.

As for what comes next for Katee Sackhoff's Bo-Katan, only time will tell. The next Star Wars project that will release is Star Wars: The Bad Batch, an animated series set at a time in the Star Wars saga when Bo-Katan is definitely alive and potentially active, but little about the plot of the series is confirmed just yet. A different Mandalorian character will definitely appear, however! The Bad Batch premieres on May 4 on Disney+, and the Disney streamer is the place to be for plenty more Star Wars content, including The Mandalorian.