Great Scott! After a long and varied career, Christopher Lloyd is headed to a galaxy far, far away. The veteran actor was announced as part of the Mandalorian Season 3 cast late Friday night, and fans immediately got to speculating. There’s no shortage of elderly mentors in Star Wars, but Lloyd’s haunting demeanor may instead make him perfect for an insane clone scientist with a lust for power. Here’s everything you need to know.
Christopher Lloyd seems like he would be a perfect fit to somehow play Palpatine’s former master, Darth Plagueis. After all, he’s the one who started Palpatine’s obsession with cloning, which carries into The Mandalorian.
But sadly, that wouldn’t make much sense, because Darth Plagueis famously fell at the hand of Palpatine. There is, however, another possibility, one that not only fits in the timeline but in Lloyd’s wheelhouse — the Thrawn trilogy’s resident mad scientist and Dark Jedi, Joruus C’Baoth.
Joruus C’Baoth is a clone of a long-gone Jedi, and the mentally unstable genius assisted Grand Admiral Thrawn as a scientific advisor. Thrawn was a strategic mastermind, but he wasn’t intimately familiar with the ins and outs of the Force, so he cloned someone who was.
As Doc Brown in the Back to the Future series, Christopher Lloyd basically created the modern archetype of the Mad Scientist, so he’d be the perfect person to embody the closest Star Wars ever got to basically having a wizard. And, because of Joruus’ clone status, we could even get flashbacks to the original Jorus before his demise. Where was he during Order 66? Could he be the one who rescued Grogu from certain doom?
And what does Joruus C’Baoth change about The Mandalorian? Well, the merge between current Star Wars live-action canon and the famous Thrawn books was confirmed when Ahsoka demanded to know where Thrawn was, setting up her own spinoff and, in a roundabout way, a Rebels sequel. Why not just lean into this shift and add one of the fan-favorite elements from the Thrawn trilogy?
Joruus is not only an iconic part of the non-canonical Star Wars Legends, but he could serve an important purpose in the The Mandalorian’s plot. As a less than ideal product of cloning, he could be the motivation for the Empire’s search for Grogu to improve their cloning technique. Or, at the very least, he’ll be a hilarious wild card to add to the mix.
The Mandalorian is now streaming on Disney+.
