“I can’t believe this is happening.” I think I said that to my wife at least three times during the sixth episode of Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett, which we watched at 1 AM this morning after getting home from a characteristically exhausting Disneyland After Dark event. “Chapter 6 – From the Desert Comes a Stranger,” as it is entitled, contains so many jaw-dropping moments, edge-of-your-seat sequences, and surprise guest character appearances that I find myself struggling with the task of having an opinion about something that's going to take me at least a week to process.
But it’s now getting to be close to 3 AM, and I want to get my initial thoughts down before I finally crash for the night and forget what they are. My first question at the end was, “How much longer do you think Mark Hamill is going to be willing to play Luke Skywalker?” And then we discussed how much Mark Hamill really had to contribute to a performance (both in physical presence and voice) that was largely computer-generated.
“From the Desert Comes a Stranger” actually opens with another guest appearance that I would have been perfectly satisfied with on its own– yep, Timothy Olyphant (Justified) is back in the Star Wars universe as Cobb Vanth, the marshal character he played for one episode of The Mandalorian season 2. And speaking of The Mandalorian, we quickly leave Vanth and his brief encounter with the Pyke Syndicate behind to check in on Din Djarin’s (Pedro Pascal) trip to the still-unnamed planet where the above-mentioned Luke Skywalker is building his Jedi academy with the help of some very ant-like worker droids. There, Djarin runs into both R2-D2 and– gasp!– former Jedi Padawan Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson of Rent fame, also reprising her role from The Book of Boba Fett’s sister series). Ahsoka shows Din where Luke is training Grogu, but warns him not to interfere, or he might make things more difficult for the Force-sensitive youngling.
Djarin is satisfied with Grogu being in good hands and leaves his gift of Beskar armor for Ahsoka to deliver, and then we actually spend an utterly shocking amount of time watching Master and Apprentice bond and train, in captivating scenes that mirror Luke’s experiences with Yoda on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back. I wouldn’t say the CGI deep-fake effects Industrial Light & Magic is using to recreate young Mark Hamill’s face have been entirely, 100% perfected just yet, but you can tell they’ve already come leaps and bounds from the uncanny valley they fell into in The Mandalorian’s second-season finale. There are a lot of reasons why I can’t wait to rewatch this episode tomorrow, but the topmost one is definitely to better absorb these sequences, now that I’ll know they’re coming. I was just so astounded that Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau (series executive producers and co-writers of this episode) were willing to go there and devote this much time to something that feels so tonally different from the first four installments of The Book of Boba Fett.
And I think that’s where my main (and probably only) criticism lies with “From the Desert Comes a Stranger”– once Djarin does finally return to Tatooine and attend a briefing for Boba Fett’s war against the Pykes, the whiplash between the differences in dramatic weight is beyond jarring. My reaction to that transition was genuinely something like, “Oh right, we have to try and go back to caring about this now?” Which is not to say that I am wholly uninterested in these squabbles between factions of the Star Wars underworld– it’s frequently my favorite aspect of A Galaxy Far, Far Away– but the stuff between Luke, Grogu, and Ahsoka is just made to feel so important that in the moment I did not want to be torn away. Regardless, we do also cut back to Mos Pelgo, where Din shows up to try and enlist Cobb Vanth’s help in the coming battle, getting a hesitant “I’ll see what I can do” in response. But when the titular stranger walks out of that desert, things quickly go from bad to worse in the newly renamed Freetown.
Would anyone in their right mind have guessed that we’d see Cobb Vanth, R2-D2, Ahsoka Tano, Grogu, Luke Skywalker, and Cad Bane (Corey Burton, who voiced the Clint Eastwood-inspired bounty hunter role in Star Wars: The Clone Wars– not to mention last year’s first season of Star Wars: The Bad Batch) all show up in this episode? Not me! Anyway, Bane is working for the Pykes, apparently, and arrives in Freetown to put some fear… plus, unfortunately, a blaster bolt… into Vanth’s heart now that he might be choosing sides. Then we get a catastrophic attack at Garsa Fwip’s (Jennifer Beals) Sanctuary, and a cliffhanger return to Luke’s academy where Grogu is told to choose between the chain-mail armor and Yoda’s lightsaber (uh, how the heck did Luke get that?) to determine his ultimate path in life: Mandalorian or Jedi. And what’s most amazing about those choices is that even as a passive audience member I can’t bring myself to decide which one I want him to make.
And so, yeah, for 90% of its roughly 45-minute running time, “From the Desert Comes a Stranger” does not much feel like an episode of The Book of Boba Fett (in that it only features Temuera Morrison and Ming-Na Wen as Boba Fett and Fennec Shand for one very brief scene). But– like last week’s “Return of the Mandalorian,” it does feel like fantastic Star Wars. And it also feels like I’m starting to grasp the kind of interconnected story-within-a-preexisting-story that Favreau and Filoni are telling here. It’s a wondrous thing to behold, and it’s a truly incredible time to be a Star Wars fan.
The season (series?) finale of Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett will be released next Wednesday, February 9th, exclusively on Disney+.