So The Book of Boba Fett closes—as do our strained comparisons to Seinfeld. Yet Boba’s finale is indeed akin to Seinfeld’s “The Finale,” trotting out some familiar characters with a belabored conflict that will leave absolutely no one satisfied. It’s a remarkably poor closer for something that was already pretty bad. And, like The Mandalorian’s season two finale, it goes ensemble action-heavy to anemic effect.
It opens on Boba and Fennec checking out this bar that got blown out in a terrorist attack last episode. To be clear, the two aren’t searching for clues as to the responsible party or anything. They’re just sort of standing around like, “Man, this is pretty fucked up, right?”
Mando shows up, and Fennec says, “That was fast.”
We just spent two episodes with the guy, but sure. Taking up almost a third of the series with a side quest is indeed pretty fast in terms of this crawling narrative.
So Mando says how he thinks he has Handsome Cowboy’s folks wrangled up to help out, and he drops how the condition is that the “orange powder” of spice must no longer be trafficked through the Freetown area.
Fennec is rightfully like, “Suuure, but drug hustling is sort of the main thing a crime lord does,” and Boba again confuses this narrative by re-stating that he is in no way a crime lord at all.
He’s like, “No, we will stop the evil Tang. Mos Espa will be a city completely on the up and up.”
Dude, just run for mayor or something. How and why is your reign being presented as a criminal enterprise? What is even happening?
Meanwhile, there’s a meeting of the freaks. Since we’ve only seen the Mayor, the Fish-Faced Fuck, and Chakan: The Forever Man for a combined total of a minute or two, we have to be reminded that they’re ostensibly the villains. They’re pointless antagonists no one could care less about, but let’s be real: they are great freaks. Love these dead-eyed idiots. Chakan is voiced by proper voice actor Corey Burton, and he is one of the few redeeming parts of this show. He began the role in the animated Clone Wars, and continues to go big in acknowledging that this too is a cartoon. Chef’s kiss to him.
The meeting of the freaks is nearly pointless, but Fish-Faced Fuck does acknowledge that he framed the biker gang in slaughtering the Tusken camp. This information will also prove nearly pointless, but there it is.
Meanwhile, over at Amy Sedaris’s garage, an X-wing lands. Is it Mark Hamill’s grotesque CGI simulacrum? No. It’s the baby that can fly, Grogu.
“That’s a terrible name. No way am I callin’ ya that,” Sedaris says, presumably outside of character. And she’s right. We’re going back to just saying “Baby Yoda.” Fuck “Grogu.”
Back to Boba and Fennec, she’s going over this non-plan that’s basically “we have the most conspicuous-looking motherfuckers on the planet Tatooine spying on things.” We already know their bench isn’t deep, and here they have these two pig-men morons lurking around one area, the giant black-and-white Chewbacca stationed at another place, and the Mods zooming around in their candy-colored mopeds to fill in the gaps.
Good luck avoiding that discreet crew!
So now Chakan shows up, and he wants to duel Boba, because if it wasn’t clear from his black hat and duster, he is A Cowboy Villain. Literally all he does in this entire series is show up to present a duel.
For now, though, they do not duel. That would be too exciting. Instead, we have to slowly lower ourselves into the most prolonged, lifeless action sequence ever committed to television.
So, first it’s meant to be like this Godfather moment where we find out the “deal” Boba barely even negotiated back in episode four is not holding up. Oh, no kidding, huh? Pleading with some gangsters to just sort of sit back and do nothing didn’t work as a strategy? They betrayed you? Who’d have thought?
And so they have.
Their crews are attacking. The pig-men are hilariously poked off a cliff. Skunkor Chewbacca is mobbed. And the Mods are under siege from people they call “the locals,” which honestly raises some questions about who is even the villain at this point.
Fennec shows up to save the mods with some sniper kills, and after the sequence of her strained and awkward to hop down on some crates in episode five, now she’s given a poorly cut-together redemption of spryly jumping down some other crates thanks to a rapid series of close-ups. It’s just another case of The Book of Boba Fett being mostly about having 60-ish people strain to move youthfully for the benefit of old dorks to watch a character they loved as a child. It’s a fascinating, failed experiment in aging.
In case anyone forgot, David Pasquesi’s Twi’lek guy is still around, and he suggests that Boba and his crew could just offer a humble apology and fuck off out of the situation.
“I can’t abandon Mos Espa. These people are counting on me,” Boba says.
ARE THEY, THOUGH!?
No one at all is counting on you. Mos Espa seemed totally fine before, and now there are bombings and shoot-outs on the street. It’s the most delusional thing with this guy. What is your role, man?
Finally, Pasquesi, in what amounts to a sitcom scenario, offers a backhanded truce to the fish-faced fucks. It understandably doesn’t go well, and everyone starts blastin’.
It’s a sequence where several minutes are spent just kind of shooting but not really acting. The resilience of Mandalorian armor is used to not waste any time blocking the scene; Mando and Boba stand around in the middle of everything not bothering to move at all. They just point their guns around until abruptly-lazy director Robert Rodriguez calls cut. (Judging by the Mods, Disney’s acquisition of Fox included the proprietary use of the Alita: Battle Angel director’s flair for cybernetically-enhanced humans.)
Then we get around to what was fully expected—but not quite as expected.
After a good portion of an episode was dedicated to recruiting the people of Freetown™ to help out, we figured they’d be showing up in the 11th hour. But after their leader, Handsome Cowboy, was shot but once as his deputy was obliterated, we figured we’d see him leading the pack. Not the case! But his cavalry indeed comes through.
A dozen or so people from Freetown arrive (could Boba not even hire that many trained bounty hunter people!?), and they engage in some of the most boring, inexplicable action ever committed to screen. It may as well be Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. The Book of Boba Fett is Star Wars at its most syndicated.
This crew fights off the fish-faces and whatnot, but Mando cautions they have “problems”—and indeed they do: Some real prequel bullshit of crab-skittering robots—which are now huge—with CGI bubble shields. It somehow wasn’t enough of a prequel callback to give Mando a ship from The Phantom Menace; now we have to get back to this, even if nothing like this has appeared in-universe in the last 30 or so years.
Now this is podracing.
What follows is what may as well be a half-hour of people shooting the CGI bubble shields to no effect.
You can palpably feel that the filmmakers are as bored as we are with this crap, so they just rush through the plot points we all saw coming several episodes ago. Like a college student who’s reached their word count, they feed us this as a stilted conclusion so they can go to bed. (And since they already got away with plagiarizing the spice-trade-on-a-desert-planet shit, might as well swipe Dune’s slow-things-beat-shields business.) Can’t entirely fault them, but it’s very bad.
Mando reunites with Baby Yoda—and Baby Yoda chose the shirt over the lightsaber! Great.
Boba rides in on his rancor! Seems like he could have at least had an episode training it, but great.
The one good thing: Strangers with Candy stars Sedaris and Pasquesi finally reunite properly. It would be better if Paul Dinello was also an alien, but it works. We’ll keep that.
Finally, it seems like we’re done with this tedious battle, but remember Chakan? He’s back. We need to have him propose his third duel in two episodes.
At least they actually do it this time.
Before drawing his blaster, Chakan ponders, as have we all, what Boba’s angle is in all of this sudden righteous defense of a city and planet where he once almost died carrying out a job.
“This is my city,” Boba growls. He is that lazy graduate taking up permanent residence in the nothing town his college happened to be in, pridefully claiming that was his plan all along.
Boba and Chakan have their little shoot-out, and it seems Chakan has emerged the victor.
OR HAS HE.
At the last second, Boba saves himself with his Tusken tricks from his Tusken stick! So that whole flashback thing we had to watch over a few hours DID have a point! And now that point is being stabbed into Chakan’s chest.
And yet, with the battle seemingly won, Boba’s literally unleashed pet rancor literally Rampages to the point of clambering up a little building, Kong-style. No matter. Without a spray bottle large enough to quell this excitable monster, the little green idiot who doesn’t talk—suddenly an ace empath—places his little mitt on its head, calming the rancor’s mudbrain to be still. Why not?
But as we were reminded at the beginning of the episode, there are actually two other villains in this universe. Remember the mayor and fish-faced guy whose names we may not have even heard? Well, they’re still alive, and it’s time to end that.
So Fennec pops in and kills the both of them. And it’s like, cool, but why not just do that to begin with? Those are the main bad guys. Just kill them originally. Why have we spent half this series talking about amassing an army for a war when you could cut the head off the snake in thirty seconds? Maybe a bit goofy!
And now it’s just over. That’s actually it. EPILOGUE: Boba Fett runs Mos Espa. There we are, apparently. Everyone is friends. Boba has in no way set up any system of government, and he’s effectively a despot that’s taken over by assassinating an elected mayor, but very cool. These people are counting on this guy they’ve never met and who has no experience and who doesn’t have any sort of clear viewpoint and thinks of himself as the new Jabba the Hutt. That’s the Book of Boba Fett’s final chapter.
Off in space, Mando flies off with Baby Yoda in the droid passenger spot. He’s off to create his own Curb, to give The Book of Boba Fett a proper farewell in another 20 years. Not that it really deserves one.
