As eagle-eared viewers likely deduced last week, part of Fennec Shand’s plan to fight off the Pyke Syndicate involves getting our friend and their’s Din Djarin (aka Mando) to join team Boba Fett. I mean, when The Mandalorian theme music plays immediately following Fennec mentioning buying muscle, it’s kind of a foregone conclusion. The return of Mando was a bit of a mixed bag, however, as it proved our favorite Mandalorian can, in fact, make for compelling television even when separated from adorable Grogu*, but it also confirmed that The Book of Boba Fett hasn’t done nearly enough to make us care about its own characters.
*With Mando making what I’m assuming is tiny Beskar chain mail for Grogu and telling Fennec he needs to visit a little friend prior to joining the gang war on Tatooine, the open question is whether or not Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, and Disney can manage to resist the urge to give us more Grogu. As I’ll get into a bit later in this review, we all love Grogu. But this isn’t The Mandalorian. It isn’t Jedi of the New Republic. It’s The Book of Boba Fett. It should be about our favorite Tatooine-based bounty hunter. Not the various additional Star Wars characters.
Let’s get the good out of the way first. For anyone worried that The Mandalorian would fall apart without its cuddly co-star, I think we can put that fear to rest. Sure, there was an awful lot of emotionless Mandalorian chatter this week (and it remains the most brilliant of decisions on the part of Disney to have a central character who doesn’t need to take his helmet off, allowing for a stunt performer to handle the bulk of the work and let Pedro Pascal simply record his lines and send ‘em in), but once Mando made it to Tatooine and was back with Peli Motto (Amy Sedaris, once again on fire and providing the bulk of the episode’s energy), everything clicked in place and it felt like we were back with our old friends again. It made me excited for season three of The Mandalorian – which appears to be setting up a clash with Bo-Katan (based on the discussion around her and the Darksaber), which should be awesome. But here’s the thing. This isn’t The Mandalorian. It’s The Book of Boba Fett – who, coincidentally, didn’t even appear in this episode – and it should be telling his story, not continuing Mando’s. He’s got his own, very good, show to handle that.
When you have two episodes remaining in a series (or season – there’s no indication at this point if the show is meant to be a standalone series or season one of a longer story at this juncture), bringing in a character from a hit sister series, giving him an entire episode to explain what he’s been up to since his last season finale, and then not even having the titular character from the actual show appear until the final minutes is a heck of gamble. It’s an even bigger gamble when your show hasn’t bothered to take the time to really flesh out anyone other than your two series leads while heading into what is bound to be a massive fire fight. Hell, we still don’t know all that much about the Pyke Syndicate outside of that they run spice, everyone is scared of them, and they are a brutish mob family who just doesn’t care what happens to those around them. Cool, but perhaps take this episode to explore your villain rather than show us what Mando has been up to.
Again, it’s not that I didn’t enjoy seeing Mando again. Or enjoy slipping back into the familiar cadence of a Mandalorian episode. I did. It was great. But with as many open plot threads as The Book of Boba Fett has, taking an episode to devote to another outside character just feels so weird to me. We didn’t need to see that part of Mando’s arc at this time. He could have found his way to Tatooine and we could have spent time with him and the Armorer in The Mandalorian season three premiere. We didn’t get to see Boba Fett escape the Sarlacc Pit in The Mandalorian, we took it as read and moved on. We could have just assumed Mando was on Tatooine – heck, keep the bit with Peli – but we could have also seen our main character, watched him build his ranks and train his fighters. Anything to flesh out Boba Fett’s portion of the story.
And that’s the crux of the problem I’m having with The Book of Boba Fett: The series isn’t concerned nearly enough with actually telling us about who Boba Fett is now (or Fennec Shand, for that matter, who has been criminally underused thus far). The flashbacks to his time with the Tuskens were excellent. But the present-day story arc leaves a lot to be desired. It’s a bad sign if the best scene Fennec has had in the series was a quick moment with Mando – there was more warmth and energy in that short sequence than there has been in the past five episodes. A common pitfall for a spin-off is being afraid to really push the characters outside of their source material. It’s easy to loop back fan favorite characters from the mothership series to remind viewers why they wanted to watch the new show in the first place. But you have to be willing to let the new series stand on its own. I love Mando, but I wish The Book of Boba Fett was willing to fully separate its leads from their past allegiance with Mando and allow them to anchor their own show. There’s plenty of time down the line to reunite the gang. But this should be Boba Fett and Fennec Shand’s story. Mando should sit this one out.
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