Who Is Elia Kane on ‘The Mandalorian,’ and What Is She Really Up To?

This Is the Way

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[WARNING: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for The Mandalorian Season 3 Episode 3, “The Convert.”]

First, The Mandalorian swiped a couple of episodes from The Book of Boba Fett—and now, Andor seems to have pilfered an episode from The Mandalorian. (Not really. But kind of.)

You’d be forgiven for watching Season 3’s third episode and thinking it a different show entirely; aside from the opening and closing minutes, Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sackhoff) are absent. We cross the galaxy to land on cotton-candy-colored, skyscraper-littered Coruscant, where the lead roles for the following 40-ish minutes go to Dr. Penn Pershing (Omid Abtahi) and Elia Kane (Katy O’Brian).

This duo of ex-Imperials has enlisted in the New Republic’s “Amnesty Program,” and while it seems Pershing truly wants to leave the Empire behind, Elia’s motives are murkier. By the episode’s end, she turns on Pershing and uses a torture device to scramble his mind. (How very ISB Supervisor Dedra Meero [Denise Gough] of her.)

What does Elia want? Why does Pershing matter to her? We’re breaking down a couple theories below.

Theory #1: Elia Is Still Working for Moff Gideon

If we had to bet a few credits, we’d put ‘em on this one. It wasn’t too hard to piece together that Elia was going to betray her new pal—she had a real case of “conniving face” throughout their whole excursion to retrieve Pershing’s lab equipment. But who did she turn on him for? At this point, it’s worth remembering this isn’t the first time we’ve met Elia. She appeared briefly on Moff Gideon’s (Giancarlo Esposito) Star Cruiser in The Mandalorian’s Season 2 finale on the ship’s bridge. The Moff was her boss there… and yeah, we’re pretty darn sure he still is.

Supposedly, Gideon is securely entombed in a New Republic prison. That said, there’s nothing preventing him from pulling a few sinister strings from the shadows. One of those strings just might be Elia Kane, and for all we know, she was tasked specifically with retrieving Pershing and convincing him to continue his research. As the beginning of the episode reminded us, Pershing’s job within the Empire was to research cloning. Gideon might have wanted to use Grogu’s blood not to make himself Force-sensitive or to create a Force-sensitive Imperial army, but to clone him. Which leads us to our next, perhaps a bit more “out there” theory…

Lucasfilm/Disney+

Theory #2: Why Elia Wanted Pershing to Continue His Work

Granted, if Theory #1 is true, Elia’s interest here probably would begin and end with “because Moff Gideon told her to.” But pulling the shroud of mystery back a bit farther, it’s possible—if not probable—that Pershing’s research ties into one of the most reviled lines in Star Wars history: “Somehow, Palpatine returned.” (Nooooooooo.) The vagueness of it all raised eyebrows and clenched teeth, but with The Mandalorian’s ties to the sequel era, viewers could soon get a better explanation for Palpatine’s appearance than “somehow.”

With Palpatine’s resurrection tied to cloning and Pershing’s research tied to cloning, connecting the dots just means drawing a straight line. Granted, Gideon’s experiments used Grogu as a cornerstone, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t eventually graduate to human tests on a certain Emperor or shimmery-robed Sith named Snoke (Andy Serkis). It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that Pershing gave his speech in the very same opera house where Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) asked Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) if he’d ever heard the Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise. The whole deal is wound into the concept of life everlasting, and if we had to guess, Pershing’s research is going to pay off in a big way—and one with huge impacts on the galaxy at large.

The Mandalorian Season 3, Wednesdays, Disney+