Mando Meets up With a Few Anzellans in a Recent Episode of 'The Mandalorian'

Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for Season 3 of The Mandalorian.

It's fair to say that the general reaction to The Rise of Skywalker was decidedly mixed. One thing almost everyone agreed on, though, was that the adorable and crotchety Babu Frik was an exciting new addition to the roster of Star Wars characters. In the first episode of The Mandalorian Season 3, we see a few creatures that resemble Babu Frik quite closely, which has led some fans to wonder whether the character has reappeared.

In 'Chapter 17,' Mando comes across an entire group of Anzellan beings, which are the same species as Babu Frik. They're working in a garage on Navarro, and one of them even gets into a wrestling match with baby Grogu.

While these Anzellans were cute regardless of who exactly they were, plenty of people immediately wanted to know whether any of the Anzellans we see in this episode were actually Babu Frik at an earlier point in the timeline.

In the credits for the episode, the three Anzellans we meet are unnamed, and all of them are voiced by Shirley Henderson, who also provided the voice for Babu Frik. Mando and Grogu head their way to fix up IG-11, and like Babu Frik, these three Anzellans are exceptionally good at working with droids.

Although all three Anzellans get some screen time, the main Anzellan in the scene bears a notable resemblance to Babu Frik, sharing the same facial hear and general coloring.

What's more, the character also talks quite a bit like Babu, combining broken English with his native tongue, while the other two Anzellans largely speak in their native tongue. All of this seems to suggest that that main Anzellan may actually be Babu Frik, although there's plenty we still don't know. The main issue is that The Mandalorian takes place 25 years before Rise of Skywalker, and we have no sense of how long Anzellans live.

Babu also has a different visor in The Rise of Skywalker than the one he uses here, although that change is certainly explainable. It's also possible that there are just a lot of Anzellans that look and sound exactly like Babu, and we just haven't had a chance to interact much with this particular species yet. While this definitely could be everyone's favorite Anzellan, at this point we can't say for sure.

Most of what we know about Babu comes from Rise of Skywalker, and there's not much in the extended Star Wars universe that might shed a light on exactly what Babu was doing before he came across Rey and company in that film. We do know that he's Anzellan and good with droids, however.

It's possible that someone involved in The Mandalorian will clarify whether one of those Anzellans was in fact Babu or not. Either way, though, it was an enormous delight to see the species pop up again inside of Star Wars canon.