The Child

A leak predicting Baby Yoda's name reveals a major detail The Mandalorian left out

Is Disney trying to hide its plans for a Mandalorian spinoff?

Baby Yoda finally has a name, but that's not the only thing we learned in The Mandalorian Season 2 Episode 5 (Chapter 13, "The Jedi"). The highly anticipated installment written and directed by co-showrunner Dave Filoni delivered one of the most exciting Star Wars moments in years while also revealing tantalizing new details and paying tribute to the franchise's origins in Japanese cinema.

There's a lot to unpack, but a leak that accurately predicted Baby Yoda's name earlier this week could reveal even more, including one character's true intentions, which were mysteriously left unsaid in The Mandalorian Season 2 Episode 5.

Warning! Huge spoilers for The Mandalorian Chapter 13 ahead.

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Michael Biehn ('The Terminator') guest stars in 'The Mandalorian' Season 2 Episode 5.

Lucasfilm

If you're still here, you hopefully already know that Baby Yoda's real name is "Grogu." That likely came as a surprise to Mandalorian fans, but if you watched a certain spoiler-filled video on YouTube you already knew what was coming. A video from the channel "Heavy Spoilers" published on November 23 recapped the entire episode based on leaks, pretty much summarizing the story beat-for-beat... with one notable exception.

The key difference comes at the very end of the episode. On The Mandalorian, Ahsoka Tano tells Mando that she can't train Grogu because he's at risk of falling to the Dark side. She invokes Anakin Skywalker (without mentioning him by name) and says it'd be safer to simply let Baby Yoda's powers fade away. However, that's not how it was supposed to go, according to Heavy Spoilers.

The video (which, again, nailed almost everything including the specific details of Mando and Ahsoka's first encounter), states that Ahsoka declines to train Grogu because she "reveals she has to go after Thrawn." This happens about six minutes and 30 seconds into the video.

Grand Admiral Thrawn already gets a brief mention in The Mandalorian Season 2 Episode 5 after Ahsoka defeats the evil magistrate in a duel and demands to know Thrawn's location (apparently the magistrate was working for Thrawn, an infamous Imperial leader best known from several Star Wars books, comics, and the animated series Rebels).

The last time we saw Ahsoka was in the Rebels finale where she set off to find another Jedi named Ezra Bridger who had disappeared into hyperspace with Thrawn. Because Rebels ends with an epilogue set an unknown number of years after the rest of the show, it's unclear if that happened before or after The Mandalorian, but the fact that Ahsoka is still looking for Thrawn suggests that she hasn't found him (or Ezra) yet.

More importantly, if Heavy Spoilers is right here and The Mandalorian script originally included Ahsoka confirming that she was too busy tracking down Thrawn to take care of Grogu, that could be the set up for another Mandalorian spinoff focused on Ahsoka (and maybe her old friend Bo-Katan too). The apparent decision to remove that line of dialogue could be an attempt to keep Lucasfilm's spinoff plans a secret until they're ready to be confirmed. Or it might be meant to downplay the importance of Grand Admiral Thrawn if he isn't going to be a major character on this show.

Either way, this small change could be a major hint at Disney's (and Dave Filoni's) bigger plans for Ahsoka Tano beyond The Mandalorian.

The Mandalorian is streaming now on Disney+.

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