Hunter, Wrecker, Tech, and Echo’s young companion, female clone Omega, as it turns out, has very valuable DNA. Per Tech’s analysis, Omega is a first-generation clone of Jango Fett.
This means her DNA has presumably not been genetically altered from Fett’s in any way — so it is curious that she’s a female — and, perhaps more importantly to the overall Star Wars story, it means that she is Boba Fett’s “sister”.
Episode 9 picks up where Episode 8 (“Reunion”) left off, with our elite squad of clone troopers trying to evade Imperial Commander Crosshair (Dee Bradley Baker) and find Omega, who was taken by bounty hunter Cad Bane (Corey Burton) when he tracked the clone trooper remnant to junkyard planet Bracca.
The episode focuses heavily on Omega’s escape from Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels character Bane — and his droid Todo. It also features the reappearance of another familiar bounty hunter, Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen).
Shand first appeared on Pantora in Episode 4 (“Cornered”), where she failed to secure the asset she was after — Omega, in this case. Shand’s return at the abandoned cloning facility on Boro Vio sees her tell the young clone that the reason Bane wants her is far worse than the reason Shand herself is trying to secure her.
Although we do not learn precisely what these reasons are, it is clear that they have something to do with the Kaminoans cloning experiments, and, quite possibly, with the existence of Supreme Leader Snoke in the Star Wars sequel trilogy.
At the end of the episode, viewers learned that Bane and Shand were both hired by different Kaminoans to secure Omega. As one recent article noted:
In Bane’s case, he planned to deliver Omega to Lama Su (Bob Bergen), who wants to use her genetic material for various experiments. On the other hand, Shand is working with Nala Se (Gwendoline Yeo), seemingly the only Kaminoan who wants to keep Omega safe from harm.Â
Despite Nala Se’s instructions to Shand to leave Omega alone so long as she’s with the Bad Batch, it’s doubtful that Bane will so easily give up on his bounty. Surely, their paths will cross again.
And, if Bane and Shand cross paths again, it seems almost inevitable that Shand and Boba Fett will also meet in The Bad Batch, as we seem to be hurtling toward an inevitable showdown between Bane and the iconic clone.
This could very well change everything we know about Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) and Fennec Shand’s relationship in showrunner Jon Favreau and executive producer Dave Filoni’s The Mandalorian.
When the two show up together in The Mandalorian Season 2, Episode 6 (“Chapter 14: The Tragedy”), it is explained that:
…[after The Mandalorian Season 1, Episode 5 (“Chapter 5: The The Gunslinger”)] Shand was eventually discovered by the bounty hunter Boba Fett, who saved her life with the use of cybernetics. In return, Shand worked as his partner. Following a skirmish against Moff Gideon’s Imperial remnant on Tython, Fett and Shand agreed to aid Djarin in rescuing his foundling, Grogu, from the Moff. This led her to be involved in future missions with Djarin, which included the infiltration and attack on an Imperial Remnant on Morak.
To date, Star Wars fans have been left to assume that Fett found Shand in the desert because he was already tracking Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu (AKA “Baby Yoda”). Now, however, it is certainly possible that we’ll discover the two had a long relationship, going back nearly 30 years to the first days of the Galactic Empire.
This could alter the Star Wars universe in a big way moving forward, particularly with the Mandalorian spinoff series, The Book of Boba Fett, airing in December 2021.
While fans expected to see new Fett and Shand go on new adventures after they took over Jabba the Hutt’s palace in The Mandalorian Season 2 post credits scene, we could also see old stories that alter the Star Wars franchise in major ways.
We know, for example, that we will go back to the original trilogy era in The Book of Boba Fett — what if we discover that Shand herself saved Fett from the Sarlaac pit, and it wasn’t just the toughness of his beskar armor, after all?
Do you think Boba Fett and Fennec Shand knew one another long before The Mandalorian?
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Credit: Lucasfilm
