Roughly twenty seconds into this week’s episode of The Book of Boba Fett , a very specific Tom Servo joke from Mystery Science Theater 3000’s riff-fest …
Roughly twenty seconds into this week’s episode of The Book of Boba Fett, a very specific Tom Servo joke from Mystery Science Theater 3000’s riff-fest on “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” rang in my head like an alarm: “Man, never show a good movie in the middle of your crappy movie.” The context: barely three minutes into that low-budget D-movie sci-fi movie from 1983, lead character Fingal (Raul Julia!) “scrolls up a cinema” — Casablanca — to distract from his braindead office job. And by the halfway point, the entire movie turns into a Casablanca pastiche… which just forces the viewer to think about how much this made-for-PBS feature is nowhere close to being Casablanca. Twenty seconds into The Book of Boba Fett Episode 5, a very familiar silhouette John Waynes his way up to the plastic strips leading into an alien butcher shop. It’s Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal, or at least his voice), star of the acclaimed, beloved, Emmy-nominated Star Wars series The Mandalorian. To paraphrase Tom Servo, “Man, never remind us of a good Star Wars show in the middle of your crappy Star Wars show.” That’s exactly what The Book of Boba Fett did this week, even going so far as to title the episode “Return of the Mandalorian.” Why they didn’t just go all the way and throw The Mandalorian logo after the cold open, we’ll never know. But what preceded and followed that misleading Book of Boba Fett title card ended up being the hands down best episode of the show to date — and it was an episode of this show in name only. The Book of Boba Fett has been noticeably off from the jump. Even a Star Wars super-fan like myself — someone who really gives the franchise a lot of leeway, someone whose entire day can be made just by noticing that Matt Berry is voicing a specific torture droid — has found this series wanting. I grew up with a to-scale cardboard cutout of the Fett in my bedroom, and even I agree with my colleague Meghan O’Keefe when she says that Boba Fett sucks. I’m still having fun with the show — anything that puts Stephen Root in Star Wars is, bare minimum, okay by me — but it’s not living up to expectations. And that’s because Boba Fett is not Din Djarin, and The Book of Boba Fett is not The Mandalorian. There’s one very crucial, very telling way that my MST3K metaphor doesn’t track: unlike “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank’s” embarrassing version of Casablanca, The Book of Boba Fett Episode 5 is actually a very, very good episode of The Mandalorian. That wasn’t a given! I was incredibly nervous when Djarin showed up, worried that they’d somehow water down his character like how the series has watered down the already shallow Boba Fett (reminder: Boba Fett was barely a character before his return in 2020!). That didn’t happen. Instead, “Return of the Mandalorian” is such a good episode that it just makes me mad about the rest of The Book of Boba Fett.
