The Mandalorian has delivered its fair share of jaw-dropping moments over the course of its first sixteen chapters, but the biggest came in the season 2 finale when Mark Hamill returned as Luke Skywalker. The Disney+ series showed us just how powerful he'd become in the wake of Return of the Jedi, while Lucasfilm managing to keep that cameo under wraps was staggering.
How did they do it? Well, in concept art, Luke was portrayed as Plo Koon, a character who fans have been hoping to see return to the Star Wars franchise for some time now.
Talking to StarWars.com, Lucasfilm creative art manager Phil Szostak shared some exciting new details about his upcoming book, The Art of The Mandalorian (Season 2), and explained the challenges of designing a scene for Luke that pretty much no one knew the truth about until the episode dropped.
"As you can see in the book, no art that really clearly depicted Luke was actually created. And honestly, some artists were left completely in the dark up until the episode aired," Szostak explained. "It was really only a small group of us that knew all along. There was no mention of Luke in the script, either. It was all Plo Koon. But there’s that one image in the book where it’s Plo Koon in Luke’s robe and it’s like, “Hmmm.” [Laughs] And Plo Koon surviving makes a lot less sense than Luke, who we know is still around."
"But yeah, for Luke, especially the aesthetic of his look is just about being faithful to what you know. But it’s more what you think you know, versus what it actually is. It’s almost like an elevation or a sketch of your memory versus being exactly, precisely one-to-one with the last time we saw him in the timeline, which would have been, you know, Return of the Jedi, and the supplemental narrative material that he was in for Battlefront II."
"You don’t want to just assume that Luke only has like, one pair of clothes. [Laughs] So, you know, something that would be appropriate to who Luke was, and that’s recognizable and as iconic as his Jedi look in Return of the Jedi," he continued. "But also updating it and bringing it to the modern age, and just making slight tweaks. It’s that balance between remaining faithful yet bringing something new to it, or just translating it into something that will work for the purposes of this particular show."
With these comments comes some new concept art showing Skywalker heading into action against Moff Gideon's Dark Troopers. As Szostak points out, we never see his face, though we are intrigued by the apparent showdown between the Darksaber wielding Din Djarin and Luke as he wields a blue lightsaber (instead of the green we eventually saw in the show).
We can always rely on concept art to offer a tease of what might have been, and what we see here is no exception. As for The Mandalorian, the expectation is that it will return to Disney+ later this year.