The Mandalorian season 3 premiere makes sure there’s plenty of Babu Frik to go around

polygon.com:

Sometimes, The Mandalorian isn’t really a TV show. It’s a tour bus. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — one of the pleasures of watching the show is seeing how it drives by deeply esoteric aspects of Star Wars lore (see: the Darksaber) or repurposed bits of less popular stories (hot-rodding a Naboo starfighter). In the season 3 premiere of The Mandalorian, this theme continues, folding in perhaps the only universally beloved aspect of 2019’s divisive The Rise of Skywalker:my man Babu Frik.

For those who need a refresher, Babu Frik was the tiny droid specialist that the heroes of The Rise of Skywalker turn to in order to extract Sith secrets from C-3PO’s memory. He’s the sort of one-off character that Star Wars excels at — 8 inches tall with 20 feet of personality, he explodes onto the screen as a wildly expressive puppet with an unforgettable voice as performed by Shirley Henderson. He even, like Yoda, has a distinctive speech pattern that’s just fun to listen to, a bit of cartoony exuberance in an otherwise serious scene.

Technically, Babu Frik is not in the season 3 premiere of The Mandalorian. What we get is better: a whole gang of droid specialists just like him (all also voiced by Shirley Henderson). They’re called Anzellans, a species of tiny upright aliens that look like a cross between a gremlin (dry) and primate. Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) goes to them in order to see if they can rebuild the bounty hunter droid IG-11 (voiced by Taika Waititi) that self-destructed in the show’s first season.

As a recent addition to Star Wars canon, Anzellans don’t have a lot of backstory to them. There’s a perhaps apocryphal account of an early draft of The Rise of Skywalker script that had Babu Frik, or a version of him, give