The Mandalorian Season 2 Finale Includes Hilarious “Maclunkey” Reference

There were a lot of surprises in this week’s Season 2 finale of Disney+‘s The Mandalorian. Between the surprising return of a beloved Star Wars character and stunning return to a key Return of the Jedi setting, Chapter 16, “The Rescue” gave fans a lot to process. But there was one detail in the episode that some fans may have missed — a hilarious “macklunkey” reference that creates an interesting tie to not just Star Wars: A New Hope, but Star Wars: The Fandom Menace as well.

Spoilers below for the finale of The Mandalorian Season Two. Proceed with caution if you’ve yet to watch through “The Rescue.”

With Grogu off with Luke Skywalker to be properly trained as a Jedi — a heartbreaking scene that saw Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) bid farewell to his adopted son — a post-credits scene took fans back to Jabba’s Palace on Tatooine. The scene saw Bib Fortuna having taken over Jabba’s role, though in short order Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen) and Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) show up and end Fortuna, taking over once and for all.

But if you’re listening carefully in the scene, right as Fett and Shand show up and start taking people out, Forutna turns to one of his guards and speaks, the word “maclunkey” clearly identifiable. For Star Wars fans, this is probably not a reference on the scale of Boba Fett’s surprise return earlier in the season, but it’s still a pretty clever one. Last year, when Disney+ launched with the entire original Star Wars trilogy as part of the catalog, fans watching A New Hope discovered that the “Han Shoots Greedo” Cantina scene had been edited yet again, this time with Greedo saying something that sounded like “macklunkey”.

At the time, much was made of the utterance, to the point that sleuths soon pointed out that “maclunkey” has appeared in the Star Wars universe before, specifically uttered by pod racer pilot Sebulba in The Phantom Menace with writer Bryan Young at the time noting that the word roughly translated to “this’ll be the end of you.”

In the context of the Cantina scene, “this will be the end of you” actually makes sense, but it also makes sense in the scene in The Mandalorian as well. Fortuna turning to his guard to tell him “this’ll be the end of you” when someone is breaking into the facility and taking people out certainly seems like a solid threat, especially if it’s the guard’s job to protect Fortuna from exactly this sort of situation. But, even if there is no actual meaning to the word, it’s still a hilarious nod not only to earlier in the Star Wars universe, but to Disney+ as well.

Both seasons of The Mandalorian are now streaming on Disney+.

Did you catch the “maclunkey” reference? Let us know in the comments!