The Book of Boba Fett episode 6 recap: the one with all the guest stars

Spoilers for The Book of Boba Fett follow.

Boba Fett famously spoke just four lines in the original Star Wars trilogy, yet he still managed to become an icon.

Now, the son of Jango has made it through two whole episodes of the show that bears his name without uttering a single word. And the fact that they’ve also been the two best episodes so far isn't a coincidence.

Look past the notion that The Book of Boba Fett is rapidly becoming the most misleading title on television, and it’s clear that the former bounty hunter works best in his original role – as a memorable supporting player with a killer suit of armor.

Now that the show has detailed the long and winding road that took him from Sarlacc dinner to mob boss, it’s free to tell a multi-character, thematically varied story in the tradition of classic Star Wars. 

And, even if the much-vaunted Tatooine-meets-The Godfather plot is still struggling to deliver – despite early promise, there’s still little evidence there’s a concrete story to tell – there’s now no question that The Book of Boba Fett will leave its mark on the galaxy’s wider mythology. It’s just a shame that Boba himself may be the collateral damage in a Disney Plus series that’s much better at telling other people’s stories than his own.

That said, this episode is so packed that writers Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni (who also directs) would struggle to find space for Mr Fett, even if they wanted to. To borrow from that classic Friends title treatment, ‘From the Desert Comes a Stranger’ is ‘The One with all the Characters’. It's an instalment that devotes screen time to so many major characters from The Mandalorian that Carl Weathers (Greef Karga) and Katee Sackhoff (Bo-Katan Kryze) must be disappointed they didn’t get a phone call.

After working with George Lucas on The Clone Wars for years, Star Wars lore runs through Filoni’s blood like Midi-chlorians, and his influence is unmistakeable here. From a pair of characters he originated in animation (Ahsoka Tano and Cad Bane), to a trio of bona fide superstars (R2-D2, Baby Yoda and Luke Skywalker), this is an unashamed opportunity to revel in the vastness of Star Wars lore.

But it’s Luke and Grogu’s Dagobah-inspired training sequence that will undoubtedly grab the headlines, as The Empire Strikes Back’s pupil/teacher dynamic shifts to make Luke the master.

Beyond the educational opportunities, most of Grogu’s exercises (whether levitating a frog or hopping between rocks) are precision engineered to become internet memes – frankly, everything that kid does is cute. 

And yet he’s still prone to the impulsiveness of a toddler, something Luke may not have entirely grasped. In fact, learning about Grogu’s past – and by extension, that of his old master, Yoda – seems as important to Skywalker Jr. as training his new Padawan. A flashback to the Jedi slaughter during Order 66 – nearly three decades earlier – is a harrowing glimpse of the intense trauma in the Child’s past, and is sure to tug on the heartstrings.

While wheeling out an iconic character in Luke, for a supporting role no less, undeniably cheapens his surprise cameo in The Mandalorian season 2 finale, it’s integral to the continuation of Mando and Grogu’s story. As a heartbroken Din Djarin looks on from a distance, this is far from the joyous reunion many were hoping for – even though the Child’s come on leaps and (Force-powered) bounds since they parted ways.

But Skywalker Jr. isn’t the only practitioner of Jedi ways in the episode. “Old friend of the family” Ahsoka Tano pops in for a visit, although she’s slightly surplus to requirements. Her main functions are seemingly keeping Mando away from Grogu, and reminding everyone she exists before her own spin-off series gets underway – for a character who’s such a favorite with fans, it feels like a slightly unnecessary cameo.

Back on Tatooine, the episode is effectively a recruitment drive for the inevitable season finale shoot-out – already something of a cliché in Star Wars TV shows.

Even by the standards of that galaxy far, far away, a militia boasting Boba Fett, Fennec Shand, 'Mando', Black Krrsantan, a pair of Gamorreans, and a bunch of Vespa-riding mods feels like an implausibly ragtag assortment of warriors. But that mercenary weirdness is perfect counterpoint to all that earnest Jedi philosophising with Luke and Ahsoka. Recapturing the original trilogy’s blend of Western-style lawlessness and Force-powered mythology, then, is the episode’s biggest strength.

The return of Mos Pelgo’s Marshal Cobb Vanth is particularly welcome. He’s the quintessential honorable lawman on a lawless frontier, one of the few to face up to the danger of the oncoming Pyke storm – even in his “more careful”, armor-less state, he’d be a worthy addition to Fett’s army.

Timothy Olyphant injects a healthy dose of charisma and quotable humor to the episode. As a character who survives by his wits and skills with a blaster alone, he may be the closest thing we’ve had to Han Solo since Return of the Jedi.

If only he’d watched The Clone Wars, however, he’d have recognized the silhouette emerging from the desert a little sooner. Then he’d have realized that Cad Bane (a character who presumably had an alien Clint Eastwood on his bedroom wall as a kid) is not a bounty hunter to be messed with, and that he should have taken cover with the rest of Freetown's residents.

But then we’d have been denied a wonderfully tense face-off lifted straight out of a classic Western, that ends with Vanth fighting for his life after Bane proves he’s the superior marksman. Bane’s reminder that that Tatooine belongs to his employers – the Pyke Syndicate – is wonderfully chilling, and makes the Spice runners significantly scarier than they have been to date.

But even the unresolved fates of Vanth – or the patrons of Madam Garsa's Sanctuary after that bomb blast – come to feel close to inconsequential.

Indeed, Grogu’s choice becomes a cliffhanger that could shape the destiny of The Mandalorian's next season. Will the kid opt to get his hands on the ultimate Star Wars souvenir, in the form of Yoda’s old lightsaber? Or will he go with that beautifully crafted beskar chain mail? We can’t help hoping he chooses the latter – after all, it would be a shame to see the little glass dome on Mando’s new Naboo starfighter going to waste.

Our verdict

When The Book of Boba Fett was first announced, many fans speculated that it was a rebranded third season. It now seems they weren’t too far off the mark, as the last two episodes have been as much continuation of Din Djarin’s story as a new chapter in Boba Fett’s. Whatever the title in the credits, it’s clear that Lucasfilm and Disney see both shows in this post-Return of the Jedi era as part of the same story.

That Marvel Cinematic Universe-style interconnectivity is great news for Star Wars as a whole, but may come at the expense of The Book of Boba Fett having its own beginning, middle and end. If there's a bigger bad than the Pykes waiting in the wings, the show is running out of time for a big reveal, and if there isn’t… well, it’s disappointing that Favreau, Filoni and Robert Rodriguez couldn’t come up with a better adversary for a superstar like Fett.

Still, even if The Book of Boba Fett turns out to be a bridge to other corners of the galaxy rather than a show in its own right, this episode’s mix of Jedi lore, emotional beats and Star Wars underworld weirdness suggests that those overlong flashbacks earlier in the season were outliers rather than the norm. And the Star Wars galaxy is an essential pop culture destination once again.

Force facts

• Having debuted in Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath novels (set just after Return of the Jedi), Marshal Cobb Vanth made his screen debut in The Mandalorian’s season 2 premiere. Vanth used Boba Fett’s famous armor to help bring law and order to the frontier settlement of Mos Pelgo (now known as Freetown), until he handed it to Mando as payment for helping save the locals from a troublesome krayt dragon.
• The stone hut under construction on Luke’s homeworld looks very similar to the ancient Jedi buildings on Ahch-To in The Last Jedi, aka Star Wars Episode VIII.
• The name of the planet where Luke built his Jedi school has never been confirmed in canon. Whether we’ve just visited that world – or Luke subsequently relocated – is unclear.
• Luke’s black outfit harks back to the suit he wore in Return of the Jedi.
• Skywalker’s return is once again a triumph of digital de-ageing CG – you can learn more in the brilliant ‘Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian: The Making of Season 2’ Finale documentary on Disney Plus, which explains how ILM used ground breaking technology to recreate the young Luke.
• While original Luke (Mark Hamill) gets a credit, his body double from The Mandalorian’s season 2 finale – Max Lloyd Jones – isn’t mentioned. We’d be surprised if he didn’t fulfill a similar role here, though – especially as he turned up as an X-wing pilot last week.
• It’s not surprising that Luke wants to know more about Yoda and his race – neither his planet nor his species have ever been revealed in Star Wars canon. Aside from Yoda and Grogu, the only other representative of the species we’ve ever seen is Yaddle, a female who made a brief appearance in The Phantom Menace.
• We’re guessing someone at Disney saw Grogu in a backpack and screamed: “Merchandising opportunity!”. It's that, or a fun callback to how Yoda trained Luke in The Empire Strikes Back.
• The hovering training remote Luke uses to teach Grogu made its first appearance in A New Hope.
• We already knew from The Mandalorian season 2 episode ‘The Jedi’ that Grogu was raised in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, where he was trained by many masters. This may explain why Luke feels like the Child is remembering, rather than being taught.
• The harrowing flashback shows Baby Yoda watching his protectors being wiped out by Clone Troopers, after the newly crowned Emperor initiated “Order 66” (as seen in Revenge of the Sith).
• One of the principal characters in The Clone Wars, Ahsoka Tano was Anakin Skywalker’s apprentice. She left the Jedi Order after being framed for a crime she didn't commit, but went on to play a pivotal role in the formation of the Rebel Alliance as covert operative Fulcrum (see Star Wars Rebels). She made her live-action debut in ‘The Jedi’.
• Rosario Dawson is back as Ahsoka, having inherited the role from Clone Wars/Rebels voice actor Ashley Eckstein.
• Episode 6 clears up the mystery of whether Luke ever met his father’s former apprentice, and why she turned down the chance to train Grogu. Apparently the fact the Child chose to go with Luke was crucial.
• It would also be interesting to learn when Ahsoka first met Luke – was it before or after he made contact with Grogu in ‘The Rescue’.
• Ahsoka’s own spin-off series will reportedly start shooting imminently. Dawson will be joined in the cast by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Natasha Liu Bordizzo (playing Mandalorian Rebel Sabine Wren) and Hayden Christensen (as Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader).
• The Jawa Sandcrawler Mando sees from the air is carrying the skull of a krayt dragon – presumably the one killed by the residents of Mos Pelgo. A krayt dragon skeleton can also be seen half-buried in the sands of Tatooine in the opening act of A New Hope.
• This is Cad Bane’s first appearance in live-action, but the Clint Eastwood-inspired Duros bounty hunter has a long history in Star Wars animation. The ruthless killer was a frequent thorn in Jedi sides in The Clone Wars, and he’s also popped up in The Bad Batch. This is our first confirmation that he survived through the Imperial era – making it even more bizarre that he wasn’t among the mercenaries Darth Vader recruited to hunt down the Millennium Falcon in The Empire Strikes Back.
• The Clone Wars voice actor Corey Burton returns to voice the character – presumably nobody else could come close to replicating that characteristic growl.
• Wherever Cad Bane goes, his droid Todo 360 (voiced by Seth Green) is usually close behind.
• Cad Bane’s long walk into town is almost definitly inspired by Omar Sharif’s famous entrance in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.
• There’s a bat-like Chadra-Fan propping up the bar in Garsa Fwip’s Sanctuary. The species first appeared in the Mos Eisley Cantina in A New Hope.
• The two Pykes leave a “camtono” in the Sanctuary. A camtono is a cylindrical container frequently used in the Star Wars galaxy for carrying valuables. A notable example can be seen in The Empire Strikes Back, held by a background character evacuating Cloud City. Because the camtono resembled an ice cream maker, he became widely known as the “Ice Cream Man”, but was subsequently written into canon as Willrow Hood.
• The episode’s co-writer and director Dave Filoni made his name in Star Wars circles as the showrunner of animated shows The Clone Wars and Rebels. Now Executive Creative Director at Lucasfilm, he’s directed The Mandalorian episodes ‘The Mandalorian’, ‘The Gunslinger’ (which featured Fennec Shand’s first appearance) and ‘The Jedi’. He’ll also call the shots on the Ahsoka TV series.
• The episode’s Jedi stunt double is Scott Lang, who shares his name with the MCU’s Ant-Man. 

New episodes of The Book of Boba Fett debut on Disney Plus every Wednesday.