“Not everything or everyone should be from Tatooine.” When this nugget of wisdom, from a 1994Â Star Wars writing guide, made its way online a few years ago, we all shared a resigned laugh about where the prequel movie trilogy went wrong, and hoped for a better future.
After all, while Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which hit theaters a few months earlier, gave us another hero from another desolate desert planet, at least it wasn’t Tatooine. Instead, J.J. Abrams gave us familiar visuals, while leaving things less narratively grating, by introducing the desert world of Jakku, and Rogue One went a similar route with the desert moon Jedha—and now we’re left wondering if the Star Wars TV show is going the same route.
The first set pics hit the internet over the weekend, thanks to Making Star Wars (head over to that link to see for yourself), and it looks like they’ve got yet another location that’s light on precipitation to bring to the screen. We can’t yet say exactly where that location is, since images are all we have to go on so far, but it’s definitely got a Tatooine vibe to it, right down to what appear to be moisture vaporators. Making Star Wars notes that they’re different in design from ones previously seen on Tatooine, but that doesn’t necessarily rule out the possibility that they’re on the same planet, either.
On the other hand, there’s also some kind of black, volcanic-looking rock adorning parts of the set, and while there’s certainly room for something like that somewhere on Tatooine (planets are big places with varied geography, after all), Star Wars tends to stick to one geographic setting per planet/moon, so we could be somewhere else entirely.
Where might that be? Well, there’s another desert world that just so happens to fit in with one of the recent rumors about the show’s focus, even if it’s also a location the franchise has already visited in the past: Mandalore. It’s hard to tell just from set pictures whether what we’re seeing lines up with what we know of that planet’s enclosed cities, especially when the series’ astronomical budget likely means that the physical sets we’re seeing will be backed by plenty of special effects, but that seems like the most likely choice at the moment.
The series is expected to take up the story shortly after the end of Return of the Jedi, filling in some of the gap between the original movie trilogy and the beginning of The Force Awakens. Mandalore has already featured prominently in pre-original trilogy series Star Wars Rebels, so there’s plenty of groundwork already laid down for the new series to work with. We’ve still got a while to wait for the show, with filming just getting underway in the near future, but more details should continue to trickle out as we approach the 2019 launch of the Disney Play streaming service that will be its home.
(via io9, image: Lucasfilm)
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