Spoiler Warning: The Mandalorian Season 3The finale of The Mandalorian Season 3 is out now. Now three years in and boasting 24 episodes, this particular season feels like The Mandalorian at perhaps its most fun. There's confidence in what it's doing now, and assuredness that the sequel trilogy never seemed to quite capture convincingly.

With such a steady hand behind the scenes in Dave Filoni and former Marvel alumnus Jon Favreau, the two men are openly fans themselves and have created and nurtured an exciting off-shoot that feels like its own beast and not mere fan service to the past iterations. And evidently with such a fun and sprawling sense of confidence comes a sense of play.

For the eagle-eyed viewer of the final episode of Season 3, they may have noticed a certain line that links back to another Star Wars superfan.

Clerks and Its Love of Star Wars

Clerks 1994
Miramax Films

In 1994, at just 24 years old, New Jersey local Kevin Smith pulled some of his friends together and shot a super low-budget black-and-white movie that somehow encapsulated a decade and a generation. Clerks, Smith's debut turned magnum opus, is a scrappy indie film focused in and around a local QuickStop store, where its employee — Dante — and his friends work, loiter, and, yes, talk about Star Wars.

Related: The Mandalorian Season 3 Ending, Explained

Creating the film off his own back, then selling it to Miramax and becoming the talk of Cannes at the time, catapulted Smith into a career as a filmmaker, an accolade that he has been dining off of since. In a similar way to Quentin Tarantino's own work at the time, the characters talking about popular movies in their everyday conversation felt effortless and not shoehorned in for easy reference points. In between Smith's smutty script (which resented the general public, swore throughout, sold cigarettes to children, and merrily included a scene with a cadaver's hard-on), Dante and Randal found common ground in talking about Return of the Jedi and a dislike for Ewoks.

Randal goes on to note that Return of the Jedi's ending just never sat right with him. As the Death Star was halfway through construction during the film's finale, it was bound to have independent contractors on board at the time of the super weapon's destruction.

Randal reasons that there's no way a Stormtrooper would know how to install a toilet, and how all the outside help in roofers and plumbers were honest joes that became casualties of war in the crossfire. An actual roofer also in the store during the scene backs up the claim, citing a friend that had worked on a gangster's house and was shot and killed just by doing his job when a hit went awry.

Now so iconic and so lodged in the Star Wars lore itself, George Lucas himself actually said on the Attack of the Clones DVD commentary that the heartless Geonosians built the Death Star, and thus removed the outcome of any dead plumbers.

How The Mandalorian References Clerks

The Mandalorian
Lucasfilm

With an epic conclusion to the series, the Mandalorian clans would unite in a bid to reclaim their home planet. But in current control, and using the planet for its natural resources and gradually rebuilding his nu-Empire, is Mando's big bad Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito) — now with a new suit made of beskar and out for revenge. Taken out, by Mando, Bo-Katan (Katee Sackhoff), and the up-and-coming Jedi in Grogu, Gideon is defeated and killed, and the Mandalorian settles down with his apprentice son.

Related: Best Kevin Smith Films, Ranked

However, following the battle, Din Djarin joins friend-turned-enemy New Republic fighter pilot Carson Teva (Paul Sung-Hyung Lee) with the thought to join the republic as a bounty hunter on the right side of the law for once. And it's in here that Star Wars finally officially repays the favor to fanboy Kevin Smith. In such a simple, yet knowing line, Djarin suggests that he comes on for the New Republic, hunting down any Imperial factions left "on a case-by-case basis — an independent contractor."

With such specific wording, there's just no way that this line isn't a deep-cut nod to Kevin Smith's own Clerks and his characters' particular musings on independent contractors caught in the crossfire on the second death star in Return of the Jedi's battle of Endor.

Having forged a healthy career of his own since his '90s origins, even branching out from merely the world of Clerks, Smith has made no bones about his adoration of the Star Wars world, with his movies frequently returning to pay homage to that universe. Of late, Smith was even included firsthand in the Disney series of films (voicing a role in Force Awakens, and featuring as a background character in The Rise of Skywalker), and to see such a deep cut included in arguably the best Star Wars product to come out of the Disney deal really is a neat touch.