With Pedro Pascal set to be busy with HBO’s The Last of Us for the foreseeable future, and production on Obi-Wan Kenobi occupying the sets used for The Mandalorian, it could be a while before we get season 3 of Disney Plus’ marquee Star Wars show.
However, despite the presumed and very likely absence of Din Djarin, a new rumor claims that Timothy Olyphant’s Cobb Vanth may fill the vacancy marked “ruggedly handsome space cowboy with excellent hair” left by Pascal’s outside commitments and drop by The Book of Boba Fett. The former Justified star only appeared in one episode of The Mandalorian‘s second season, but that was more than enough to have fans clamoring for him to get his own spinoff, and to be honest, it’s not the worst idea we’ve ever head.
Throughout his six runs as Raylan Givens, Olyphant more than proved he’s got the dry wit and innate charisma to play a lawman in a revisionist Western, so all you’d have to do is transplant the formula to a galaxy far, far away and we’re good to go, with the entire Star Wars mythos heavily indebted to the tropes of the genre as it is.
It also makes a lot of storytelling sense in regards to The Book of Boba Fett, with Temuera Morrison’s antihero and Ming-Na Wen’s Fennec Shand assuming control of Tatooine’s criminal underworld, and Vanth is the wry sheriff for the planet’s backwater town of Mos Pelgo. Not only that, but Boba and Cobb have plenty of experience wielding the exact same set of Mandalore armor, so there’s already an unspoken history between the two that the series could lean on, whether they end up positioned as enemies or allies.