Embo? Star Wars Just Brought Back A Clone Wars Villain
He’s back for one last job.
With only a few months left before release, we finally have a detailed trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu, the silver-screen spinoff of the show that launched Disney+. From the looks of it, it was worth the wait. There’s something for every fan here: unmasked Din Djarin, Grogu being a scamp, an Ardennian shopkeeper almost certainly voiced by Martin Scorsese, and a Hutt speaking Basic.
But for the fans of the animated Star Wars spinoff Star Wars: The Clone Wars, there was an especially deep cut: a bounty hunter with an iconic look and a long, checkered past. Check out the full trailer below:
At around the one-minute mark, we see a shadowy figure standing in the dark while one of the Hutts says, “You will suffer, and then it will be his turn.” So whoever this is, it’s implied he’s hunting Din Djarin and Grogu on behalf of the Hutts.
This figure is actually Embo, the bounty hunter who was featured in a handful of episodes of The Clone Wars. A dedicated bounty hunter, he was sent on missions ranging from defending a farm from Hondo Ohnaka to kidnapping Supreme Chancellor Palpatine. He’s not exactly a chatty guy, and when he does speak, it’s exclusively in his native language of Kyuzo. He’s perhaps best known for his wide-brimmed metal hat that acts like Captain America’s shield: it’s a shield, a weapon, and, during an adventure on the wintry planet of Scipio, a sled.
His involvement in The Mandalorian and Grogu has been rumored for more than a year now, but this trailer finally confirms it. However, the timeline is still a little murky.
Embo’s brief appearance in the Mandalorian and Grogu trailer.
During the Clone Wars, Embo served as a bodyguard for the Hutts, and now it seems like he’s back on their payroll, hunting down Mando and Grogu. However, the last we heard of him in Star Wars canon was in a Flight of the Falcon comic, where it was revealed Embo received funding from the New Republic after the events of Return of the Jedi, but after the money ran dry, he returned to the career he had before bounty hunting: farming.
Season 1 of The Mandalorian was set in the same year Embo retired, so a number of years have passed since then. How does he get wrangled out of retirement to hunt down another former bounty hunter, and is he still in the same shape as he was in The Clone Wars? We may not know that, but one thing is very clear: he’s still as ominous in live-action as he was in animation or comics. He might be a deep cut from The Clone Wars, but it’s likely he’ll gain a new love from the fandom after this movie, much like Cad Bane’s appearance in The Book of Boba Fett. It’s worked once before, why not again?
