It’s been a few days since season 2 episode 6, “The Tragedy” aired, so you’ve had a chance to watch it, but in case you haven’t seen it, spoiler alert.

I’m one of those people who for a long time hasn’t really understood the hype around Boba Fett. I’m a big fan of the original trilogy, and in it he’s got a cool look, and is a good character as far as plot devices and things go, but there has been something of a cult following around him since his first appearance in 1980.

When the prequels came out, there was backstory explaining Boba, and if I’m being honest, Jango and the clone troopers are much more interesting than Boba. Two trilogies down, and I just didn’t get the appeal.

Surprisingly, J.J. Abrams didn’t bring back Boba for the third trilogy, which was the only piece of nostalgia for the first trilogy that didn’t seem to be dredged back up (unless Phasma is supposed to be the Boba Fett equivalent?)

With it being accepted by almost all fans that Boba survived the Sarlacc pit, it seemed inevitable that most people’s favorite nothing would make it back into the canon Star Wars galaxy, and about a year ago, we started getting casting rumors and speculation about season 2 of The Mandalorian, and the big one was Temuera Morrison, who played Jango Fett (whom Boba is an unaltered clone of) in the prequels.

Temuera Morrison is Back!

It seemed he was going to be Boba, although I was really hoping that we would see him playing Captain Rex from The Clone Wars and Rebels. Captain Rex was a fan favorite, and while he’s been altered, he would also be identical to Temuera Morrison (although likely much older do to age enhancement in the cloning process).

Well, by the end of episode one, that hope had been dashed. Temuera Morrison was going to be Boba Fett, and there was almost no doubt to that.

When we finally got to this past week’s episode, we hadn’t seen Boba since the last shot of the first episode, and I had somewhat forgot that he was going to be coming back, and so when we saw his ship the Slave I following Mando to Tython, I was thinking “oh cool, we’re going to see these two square off,” with a bit of unexpected enthusiasm, but nothing near my Bo Katan energy from the third episode.

Then we saw Boba and Fennec Shand confront Mando about Boba’s armor which Mando is in possession of, and I realize that we’re not going to get the Boba Fett I was expecting. He was much more diplomatic, and while he didn’t seem hesitant to fight, he certainly wasn’t going to pick one unnecessarily.

Boba Fucks Shit Up

When Moff Gideon’s stormtroopers land and come to take Grogu (AKA Baby Yoda), we see Boba Fett sanz armor begin to tear up the stormtroopers. Now, we’ve had more than a season and a half of watching Mando overcome crazy odds, and prove himself as a fighter, we’ve seen Fennec do a bit of sniper work, but what we see of Boba Fett, is nothing short of amazing. Boba fucking up stormtroopers with a stick with a big ball on the end, is probably the best fight we’ve seen in the entirety of The Mandalorian’s run.

Halfway through the fight, we get to see Boba wrestling with the last stormtrooper (from the first batch) and seeing his armor sitting in the doorway of Mando’s ship the Razor Crest. We get a little bit of Mando and Fennec fucking shit up, but being massively overwhelmed by the numbers, and then what I can only describe as the previous fight scene, plus Iron Man coming out of the cave in the first Iron Man, where you’re like “oh, you are all fucking dead.”

Boba lays waste to the remaining stormtroopers before using the jetpack rocket launcher (which personally I kind of think is a lame weapon) to blow up one of the retreating ships.

This is the Boba Fett Everyone’s Been Talking About

In less than ten minutes, forty years after his first introduction, we got the Boba Fett that everyone seemed to think we had from the very beginning. We’ve been building this guy up with head-canon for decades, and I had absolutely no expectation that I was ever going to see the Boba Fett that everyone else was seeing. Then a tv show, not a film, directed by a man who’s been somewhat waning in his career over the last decade or two (Robert Rodriguez), brought it all together.

Boba Fett is fucking awesome. That’s a statement a significant portion of Star Wars fans would have said a year ago, a decade ago, or forty years ago, but it’s a statement that I didn’t believe until last Friday. Boba Fett is fucking awesome, and I hope the last two episodes of the season keep it up.

Article by Michael Cole