Star Wars Just Rebooted Its Weirdest Monster Ever
Is this the origin of Bor Gullet?
Star Wars loves monsters with tentacles. From the Dianoga trash monster in A New Hope, to the Sarlaacc pit in Return of the Jedi, some kind of tentacled creature has always been slithering around in the shadows of various Star Wars locales. Back in 2016, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story gave us what is possibly the best of all the tentacled Star Wars creatures in the form of Bor Gullet. This was a tentacle monster so scary and hardcore that it made you tell the truth no matter what. As Saw Gerrera said, “Bor Gullet can feel your thoughts! No lie is safe!”
And now, in The Bad Batch Season 3 in the episode “A Different Approach,” this very specific creature seems to be glimpsed, chronologically, for the first time. Spoilers ahead.
If you like Star Wars monsters and you’re sleeping on The Bad Batch, now is the time to correct that. In its previous seasons, The Bad Batch has given us a kind of Star Wars version of the A-Team, going on specific missions every week, often involving monsters. Now, in Season 3, the writing is much more tightly serialized, but there’s still a monster in pretty much every, single episode. Hunter, Wrecker, and some clone cadets had to avoid the “slither vines” in Episode 2 this season, while in Episode 3, Crosshair and Omega had to contend with the creatures living on Tantiss, as well as the adorable Lurca hound, nicknamed “Batcher.”
But in Episode 4, there’s a surplus of various imprisoned creatures who are all liberated by Omega at the end of the episode. Interestingly, inside one of these cages, we see a very familiar tentacle: that of an organic mind-flayer, just like in Rogue One.
Bor Gullet returns?
Bor Gullet in the Rogue One comic book adaptation.
Prior to this episode of The Bad Batch, the only canon appearance of Bor Gullet comes from Rogue One. There, Saw Gerrera used this creature to interrogate Bodhi Rook, and through its telepathic abilities, determine that he was legitimately anti-Empire. Retroactively, Bor Gullet was identified as belonging to the species of the mairans. In Doctor Aphra #21, a different Mairan was working for Harra the Hutt, and was also used to scan the minds of prisoners. Interestingly, this comic actually retconned Bor Gullet’s species, because previously, the species known as “Mairan,” were considered non-canon. The first appearance of a Mairan comes from the Young Jedi Knights YA books, specifically in the 1996 novel Lightsabers. (And in old Legends canon, Mairans could be Jedi Masters!)
In The Bad Batch it’s unclear if the Mairan that attacks the Imperial Governor at the end is actually Bor Gullet. But, the timeline would make sense. The Bad Batch is hovering around 18 BBY, while Rouge One takes place close to 0 BBY, right before A New Hope. So, the question is, how did Saw Gerrera get ahold of this particular Mairan?
Saw doesn’t appear in this episode of The Bad Batch, but we know, at this time, he’s starting to form the beginnings of his faction of the Rebellion, the Partisans. At this point, in the early days of the Empire, the Rebellion isn’t in existence at all, particularly not in the way we think about it in Andor, Rebels, and Rogue One. But, because The Bad Batch is the bridge between the prequel era and the sequel era, it’s creating all sorts of origin stories we never knew we needed.
And, because The Bad Batch has given us a glimpse of Bor Gullet in one of its early Season 3 episodes, does that mean we’ll see him again before the end? You know what they say: If you put a tentacle on screen in the first act, then maybe it will mess with someone’s mind in the final act.
