Mixed, uneven, and weirdly structured, the first season of The Book of Boba Fett is certainly ambitious but fails to deliver on it's promises of a darker, grittier look into the seedy underbelly of the Star Wars universe. Instead, it seems more content on table setting for other, future shows and cameo appearances that don't serve the overall story and seem to only exist to please hardcore fans and fuel reactions online. There is a cynical part of me who truly hates the direction that Star Wars seems to be taking in recent years and this might be the pinnacle of that in it's sheer audacity to sideline two leads of colour in favour of randos from across the franchise.
Still, there is stuff to like here to save it from being completely bad. Temura Morrison is a compelling lead, and Ming-na Wen steals every scene she's in. The decision to frame the early episodes and eventually the finale as a character study on Boba Fett as a criminal, bounty hunter, and eventual redeemed leader is a smart one, and in it's strongest moments it's a moving portrait of redemption in action. A second season could save the show as a whole, but as it stands this is a mess.
Review by BLAQKVIP 7BlockedParentSpoilers2022-02-11T00:57:48Z
Overall The Book of Boba Fett has been a mixed series to me.
I really liked the flashbacks learning how Fett escaped the Sarlaac and how his outlook on life changed from living with the Tuskens and becoming one of them. It was nice to see the man behind the armour.
It’s interesting in that it’s somewhat hard to say what precisely the problem with the show is. The acting is good, the writing’s pretty decent, the effects are fantastic, several of the individual episodes were really good, and the ending ticks off a lot of boxes (big fight, “unexpected reinforcements to the rescue” moment, reunions, impressive visuals), and yet it all feels… sort of empty?
I think the fundamental problem is that there was just no real emotional weight to any of it. I never got any clear impression of why Boba was doing what he did, his whole “I want to be a crimelord but not do any crime” shtick was weird, and he felt more or less isolated and disjoined from the things around him. His big castle was empty, his personal troops were like 7 ppl in total, and I’m just not clear on why exactly he cared about Mos Espa or, by extension, why we should. The whole thing felt rather slow and plodding, not really because the pacing scene-to-scene was awful but mostly because fundamentally, you just didn’t really care what happened next.
The problem could probably be summarised by saying that the show was full of individually good elements, but fundamentally ill-conceived. I’m not really sure why this show had to exist, and it doesn’t quite feel like the show knew either. It honestly felt like filler for The Mandalorian Season 3.