I just finished watching the final episode of Book of Boba Fett. Unfortunately, like the series as a whole, it was uneven and all too often frustrating. Showrunner Robert Rodriquez directed this episode, with the cringe-worthy cheese of his Shark Boy and Lava Girl movies. I’m wondering if this should have been aired on the Disney Channel instead of Disney+
Let’s begin with our hero and the series namesake, Boba Fett. The episode begins where the previous episode ends, with Boba finding his only powerful ally Garsa Fwip vaporized and her nightclub destroyed by a bomb planted by the Syndicate. Boba postures and grunts like a wylie-old-warrior but end up more like Wile E. Coyote. For most of the episode and series, Boba Fett is a bumbling leader who makes poor decisions.
Boba refuses the obvious choice to retreat to Jabba’s Palace and fight the Syndicate from the nightclub ruins; his Alamo. Boba explains, he will not abandon ‘the people’ of Mos Espa and leave them undefended. Yet by drawing his enemy’s forces to him at the center of the town, he guarantees the inhabitants and their homes to be collateral damage in the expected battle. Another glaring example of poor plot writing or a concerted effort to make Boba the worst leader in Star Wars.
Boba refuses the obvious choice to retreat to Jabba’s Palace and insists on making ‘his stand’ aginst the Syndicate from the nightclub ruins (was the club named Alamo, because I feel like it should have been named ‘The Alamo’?) His loyal-to-a-fault lieutenant, Fennec Shand spreads out their meager ‘forces’ as scouts around Mos Espa to spot the direction of Syndicate forces. But this proves to be their downfall as Boba’s forces and ambushed and taken out separately.
The episode draws beats from “The Godfather”; the coordinated ambush and takedown of Don Corleone’s forces and the gunning down of Sonny and the Don himself. It makes sense that these scouts failed to see the enemy until too late because they were made up of Mos Espa’s local crime gangs. But how did these “scouts” fail to spot the off-world Syndicate’s forces massing to simultaneously attack Boba at the nightclub ruins led by Cad Bane?
The final battle itself looked cheap and poorly choreographed, feeling more like the Stunt Show at Universal Studios. It was chock-full of cliche Western/War-Movie tropes and dialogue. The ‘Bad Guys’ are correctly tactically spread out and seek better firing positions, yet the ‘Good Guys’ bunch together and always seem to turn and hit them at just the right moment (provided their character actually had a name in the credits). I found myself screaming at the screen at many of the character’s actions and dialogue.
All the defenders cram together making themselves an easy target for any thermite bomb or fleeing in straight lines down a road, making them easy targets for the Scorpenek heavy combat droids. If there was any time to use the old “split up” trope, would be then.
In possibly the most perplexing and wasteful moment in this episode, the victorious ‘good guys’ start shooting at Boba Fett’s terrified Baby Rancor. This leads to a gratuitous King Kong climbing up the Empire State homage and then to yet another call-back, but this time The Mandalorian series. Din is knocked unconscious by the Rancor and Grogu again uses the Force to calm the rampaging beast for the battle’s “cute” end.
Grogu and the Mandalorian played an overly heavy presence in these last three episodes of this series. John Favreau and Filoni, the Mandalorian series creators and this series’ primary writers, would have been better served to have had the previous two episodes of Book of Boba Fett occur in The Mandalorian season 2. It would have been more impactful to make a true series cross-over with the same events occurring in both series but told from different points of view. I suspect this wasn’t possible from a production standpoint because both shows utilize the same advanced LED Soundstage at ILM.
Fennec Shand is the only reliably capable character in the show. At times you wonder why she isn’t the leader but her strategic competence prooves lacking as she is outsmarted by the Syndicate and Tatooine’s crime bosses. In a Deus-ex-machina, she manages to take them all out single-handedly in the episode’s denouement; which made me cry out, “why the hell didn’t she just go ninja and kill them at the beginning of the episode!”
Ultimately I was left with the same feeling of disappointment with the ending of Book of Bobb Fett as I was with Boba’s ‘original end’ in Return of the Jedi.