By: “The Watchman”
Boba Fett is back, as the Mandalorian’s first official spin-off begins. Expectations are high among Star Wars fans, including myself, as the Mandalorian and its legacy remain the only legitimate remnant of Star Wars to be born in this new age of haphazard sequel trilogies and “High Republic” nonsense. So, how did it do? How is the first series to focus on one of the biggest bad asses in all of science fiction? Well… in a word? Boring.
[MOSTLY SPOILER FREE REVIEW]
Starting out promising as we literally watch Boba Fett tear his way out of the innards of the Sarlacc following the events of “Return of the Jedi”, the story really goes nowhere after that for the entirety of the show’s first episode. Most of the show is just people walking around, standing around, and other time wasters. This walking and standing around is usually accompanied with no dialogue whatsoever, or with small bursts of untranslated alien mumblings. This air of silence works well with the Mandalorian because he’s usually doing something badass and crazy every couple of minutes. Boba Fett, however… is mostly just being silent. At one point, the episode replaces the characters standing and walking around in the sand with them quietly digging in the sand, and I got so bored that I literally took out my cell phone and started texting my friends asking if they had seen the episode yet (and asking them if it gets any better). And this is coming from a guy who made a Star Wars website when he was 12 that is still on the web if you know where to look for it.
What really irritated me the most about the episode, though, was the total lack of blasters. For some reason, no one uses a blaster in this episode. At all. Not one time. Boba Fett uses a missile or two, but the biggest, meanest, toughest bounty hunter in the entire Star Wars galaxy is apparently not allowed to use guns anymore, or, so it seems, as every battle sequence was just people swinging at each other with swords and sticks, or, worse, doing Power Rangers style kung fu kicks and flips. I think I literally said out loud “What is this shit?” when I started watching a trained sniper assassin (Fennec) start flipping and jumping around like a bad 90’s comic book supervillain to deal with people trying to kill her, instead of… I don’t know… just shooting them? It was utterly absurd.
Boba Fett looks really badass in his armor, I’ll give him that. If he’d keep his helmet on and actually use his blaster once in a while, he’d be pretty intimidating. I want this show to be good, and it still has time to improve. Nothing in the episode ruined the character or the story in a way that can’t recover 100% if things are different starting in Episode 2. However, there is one other issue with the show that’s going to need to change for me to really get on board with it, and that’s the fact that, well… Boba Fett is just way too nice. Like super nice. Nicer than the Mandalorian. Yet he’s supposed to be, in his own words, a “crime lord”. He’s supposed to be a fearless antihero that wants to turn a new leaf, but still sits on the throne of the corrupt and vile criminal underground of Hutt-stamped Tatooine. Instead, he spends the entire episode sparing people who blatantly insult him, unconditionally trusting people that he literally just met and hired, being humble, talking endlessly about loyalty and respect, taking off his protective helmet, and avoiding killing people around him at all costs, even assassins. Oh, and being beaten up, tied up, weak, and wounded. That happens to Boba a lot in this episode, too.
Overall, like I said, the show has a LOT of flaws. Nothing in the show was so bad as to ruin the character of Boba Fett, or stop the potential for the show to completely turn things around. That said, I didn’t enjoy Episode 1 AT ALL. I didn’t completely hate it, but I was both bored and irritated from the very start, and, by the end of the episode, I had almost completely tuned out. I hated the final sequence, and the only real enemy of consequence that Boba Fett encounters in the whole thing is a creature that looked, again, like a monster out of Power Rangers conjured up by Rita Repulsa and Lord Zedd. I was almost shocked at the end of the episode to not see Jason David Frank step out from behind a sand dune and shout “It’s Morphin’ Time” as a cliffhanger for Episode 2.
I am still looking forward to the next episode as I honestly and truly hope that The Book of Boba Fett will improve. (I might be a little heartbroken if it doesn’t.) There is absolutely no reason that a show about a badass bounty hunter crime lord who rules over the underworld of a major Star Wars hub of shadiness can’t be anything short of excellent. I am frankly surprised to have had to write such a review, as material like this should be really hard to mess up. Yet, mess it up, they did. A LOT. My final score for Episode 1 is 4/10.
SCORE: 4/10
“Boring and neutered, Boba Fett is not the badass he needs to be for this show to be enjoyable, but there is still plenty of time for that to change completely starting next episode. Here’s hoping.”