The Book of Boba Fett finale review

Full spoilers ahead for this one

There's something missing with this show and I'm not quite sure what. If I had to guess I would say Boba Fett, he has been missing for a whole lot of this series. Boba is back though, in full capacity but it just feels like too little too late.

I loved the last two episodes and in a longer series they would have been perfect but in this case they took a third of what was already a very short series and it left the final episode with a lot to do. That's the problem this episode has, it has to wrap up a season that kind of felt like it never got going and that just makes it feel a bit rushed. To me the Pike syndicate never felt like that much of a threat right through to the end when they were all just killed and that leaves this series feeling like it might as well have just not existed. None of this felt earned at all and I just wish it did, I honestly wish that the show were just a couple episodes longer so that everything could be properly established. It all just felt rushed, the tusken raider plot was great, the Hutt stuff was interesting, the moped gang episode was just the worst, the Mandalorian diversion was very well done (although could have done with being its own thing), but the Pike syndicate just felt tacked on. To wrap all of this up can't have been an easy task, it's the exact same problem that The Rise of Skywalker faced and that too just felt rushed and messy.

I really wanted to talk about specific moments and there are some absolutely great ones but I just feel like they were all just a bit of a distraction from a bit of a messy episode and series. I'll go into some of them though (not in any particular order). Boba Fett riding a rancor is awesome, it's so so stupid but so so awesome, imagine Ratatouille but badass and that's what we got. Fennec Shand was yet again underused but the way she killed the other crimebosses was great (although I feel it may have been a symptom of the writers forgetting about them and having to kill them all off quickly at the end). The Boba Fett and Cad Bane duel was great, a very fitting end to Cad Bane's character even if it did leave me wanting a bit more live action Cad Bane. Grogu was great and his reunion with Din Djarin was great too (Pedro Pascal is going to be excellent in The Last Of Us). Maybe best of all was the team up between Boba Fett and the Mandalorian, it was great. There were other cool moments but they were the standouts, I really really just wish that they were part of a better plot though.

There were quite a few little issues too, some are nitpicky some aren't but all of them were slightly too annoying to be ignored. The space moped gang, they really just ruin every scene they're in, at first I thought maybe I was just overly critical about them but this episode has made me double down on this opinion. It felt completely obvious from the start that the other crime families wouldn't play fair, that whole treaty was built on nothing anyway so no shock at all.

Why are Din and Boba so convinced they're going to die? They're literally blaster and lightsaber proof and they have a ridiculous arsenal of weapons, who's going to kill them?

How did it take everyone so long to run away from those droids? If they had just ran (at any pace) and ducked down any alleyway they would have been absolutely fine, it all just felt like major runtime padding at its finest.

These are all sort of nitpicky but they properly took me out of it while watching it, the whole episode is so frustratingly mixed as it moves from great moment to terrible moment throughout.

This episode isn't a bad episode by any means, it's just a bad finale. Maybe this will get a second season that will flesh it out a bit or maybe it will run into the Mandalorian (most likely the case) but it really did just feel like such a nothing series. A Boba Fett movie would have been a better call, there would have been no room for runtime padding and the plot would have benefitted (plus the Mandalorian on the big screen would be great).

I don't really have much more to say about this one, although that could be more down to my general disappointment than anything else.

This episode and the series as a whole just left me feeling a bit empty. I just wanted more, more substance, more plot, more Boba Fett. Luckily there's not too long to wait for the Mandalorian (although it was delayed from dropping at christmas to a now unknown date).

The rating for this one is for both episode and series which both conveniently get the same score. The Book of Boba Fett limps away with a 6, sadly they weren't all up to the standard of episode 5.