Boba Fett's Ship In The Mandalorian Explained
Contains spoilers for The Mandalorian season 2, episode 6 — "Chapter 14: The Tragedy"
In clinics around the world today, nerds are having shards of broken glass tweezed from their skin after their shrieks of excitement exploded all of the windows, bottles, and stemware in their immediate surroundings. Boba Fett has returned, bringing with him a sack of questions and callbacks proportional to his stature in the Star Wars mythos.
As undeniably cool as it was to see Temuera Morrison done up in beskar once again, it was equally rad to witness his slick ride making planetfall on Tython. Longtime fans of the franchise will have recognized his ship from the first moment it broke atmo: Slave I, the souped-up ship that's been trashing protagonists' afternoons since Luke Skywalker was just a twinkle in the Force's eye.
Even after Disney's summary execution of the Star Wars extended universe, Slave I has a long and rapscallious history. It started life as a patrol vehicle on a prison moon called Oovo IV, where it was stolen by Jango Fett sometime before the Clone Wars. Jango, in characteristic cooler-than-everyone fashion, refitted the Firespray-class interceptor with an array of death-dealing contraptions — including its distinctive double cannons and the seismic charges that he'd later employ against Obi-Wan in Attack of the Clones. It was with this ship that Jango would travel the galaxy, hunting bounties, raising a clone son, and bumping his dang old noggin on the door in a moment of winking retroactive stormtrooper exposition.
Boba Fett's Slave I has been scaring kids since the Clone Wars
Like the old saying goes, "Nothing lasts forever, especially if you cut its head off." Eventually, Jango found himself at the business end of Mace Windu's (Samuel L. Jackson) lightsaber during the climax of Attack of the Clones. But Star Wars, more than anything, is all about dads leaving their kids kickass implements of death, so it's no surprise that Boba Fett inherited his pop's old ride.
Young Boba's adventures in Slave I were chronicled in the Clone Wars animated series. He eventually gave it a fresh coat of green and red, similar enough in color to the glow-up he'd given his dad's old armor to make you suspect he had some paint left over. Young Boba lost his old man's spacecraft before the rise of the Empire thanks to his association with the unscrupulous Aurra, and it fell into the hands of Weequay mob boss Hondo Ohnaka.
The hows and whens of Slave I's return to the bounty hunter's possession haven't been explored in the current continuity, but that might be a story for the recently announced Boba Fett spin-off series.
By the end of The Empire Strikes Back, the ship had been through the space ringer: Slave I had lost a wing to a lightsaber, crashed, and been rusted irreparably by the tears of Han Solo fans when it jetted away from Bespin with the carbonite-frozen scoundrel on board. With any luck, we'll have the gaps in its history filled in a little more as The Mandalorian concludes its second season.