Since The Book of Boba Fett is technically a spin-off from The Mandalorian, an appearance by the Mandalorian himself was inevitable. But the latest episode of Boba’s series, “Chapter 5: Return of the Mandalorian,” took the flagship star’s obligatory cameo to the nth degree and didn’t feature Boba at all. The episode offered a fun Star Wars adventure, but it ultimately felt like an episode of a different show. Helmed by regular Mandalorian director Bryce Dallas Howard, “The Return of the Mandalorian” is essentially a Mandalorian episode crammed into the middle of The Book of Boba Fett’s run.
“The Return of the Mandalorian” might as well be the season 3 premiere of The Mandalorian. Boba is nowhere to be seen and it catches up with Mando following the explosive events of his show’s season 2 finale. While Grogu is off training as a Jedi under Luke Skywalker’s tutelage, Mando is back to his old bounty-hunting ways. He’s now armed with the Darksaber and, since the Razor Crest was destroyed, he has to take taxis from bounty to bounty like Tom Cruise in Collateral. Throughout the episode, he gets kicked out of the Mandalorian religion for removing his helmet and fixes up a new ship on Tatooine with Peli Motto.
In the final scene, the episode finally connects to the show it actually belongs to as Mando promises to help Boba and Fennec combat their gangland rivals, but only after he pays his little green friend a visit. This is either a setup for the actual third-season premiere of The Mandalorian or The Book of Boba Fett’s next episode will double down on leaving Boba behind with Mando traveling to Luke’s fledgling Jedi academy to reconvene with “Baby Yoda.”
The Opposite Of A Backdoor Pilot
“The Return of the Mandalorian” is an oddity within the traditions of episodic television. With Mando in the spotlight and Boba in the green room, it’s the opposite of a backdoor pilot. It’s not an episode of a flagship series setting up a potential spin-off; it’s an episode of a spin-off continuing the storylines of the flagship series (without a second of screen time for the spin-off’s title character). The ongoing storylines of The Book of Boba Fett are barely progressing as it is, with a lot of filler padding out each episode, but the glacially paced narrative didn’t progress at all this week.
Pedro Pascal’s reprisal of the role of Mando is more than welcome, but “The Return of the Mandalorian” really just served as a reminder that The Mandalorian is a far superior show. In the lead-up to The Book of Boba Fett’s release, Star Wars fans were worried that another show about a bounty hunter in Mandalorian armor would skew too close to its predecessor, The Mandalorian. But after The Book of Boba Fett has replaced familiar elements from The Mandalorian with slow-paced gangland negotiations and goofy Power Rangers speeders, an action-packed Mandalorian clone sounds like a much better alternative. “The Return of the Mandalorian” ditches The Book of Boba Fett’s clunky, disjointed parallel-timelines structure in favor of The Mandalorian’s much more successful episodic adventure-of-the-week format.
Much like The Mandalorian itself, this episode felt more like traditional Star Wars than the weird, dystopian version of The Godfather that The Book of Boba Fett has been so far. It had a lot more action scenes than The Book of Boba Fett’s previous episodes, like the opening Darksaber slash-‘em-up in an alien slaughterhouse and Mando and a fellow Mandalorian’s ritualistic combat for ownership of the iconic weapon. It also explored more intergalactic locations. The Book of Boba Fett was set entirely on Tatooine (save for brief flashbacks set on Kamino and Geonosis) until this week. Howard introduced audiences to a sprawling city on a floating belt in the depths of space, filled with shady characters. At the episode’s climax, Mando fixes up a Naboo royal starfighter and goes for a joyride.
The Book Of Din Djarin
This week’s Mando-centric episode didn’t make The Book of Boba Fett any better. It had nothing to do with the ongoing narrative threads in the series (which are already moving along at a snail’s pace) and focused entirely on providing a stepping stone between the second and third seasons of The Mandalorian. The presence of this episode will hurt the series in the long run, because it sticks out like a sore thumb in The Book of Boba Fett’s line-up of episodes. It’s a detour through an entirely different story that will inevitably hurt any potential rewatches of the show.
The ironic thing is that if “The Return of the Mandalorian” had been an episode of The Mandalorian, it would’ve been considered one of the weakest and least eventful chapters. Fixing up a starfighter takes up a big chunk of the runtime and Mando’s discussions with the Armorer about the Mandalorian religion are too technical to have any thematic substance. But as an episode of The Book of Boba Fett, it comes off as thrilling, fast-paced, and one of the strongest installments. The fact that “The Return of the Mandalorian” is by far the most exciting episode of The Book of Boba Fett to date just serves to highlight that The Mandalorian is a much better series than its new offshoot.