A figure strides through a scene of deep-space carnage, bringing calm and order to the chaos. That is how Luke Skywalker made his grand entrance in the final episode of season two of Disney+’s Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian, using his Jedi powers to restore balance to a distraught galaxy. But that figure could also be writer and director Dave Filoni, who is seen as delivering peace and stability to the deeply troubled Disney Star Wars universe. 

A year or so later since Luke’s big comeback, Filoni (47) has come to the rescue once again with the latest outing for the Disney+ show The Book of Boba Fett (a quasi-sequel to The Mandalorian and, thus, a spin-off of a spin-off). He’s brought back Baby Yoda and restored much of Star Wars’s epic scope. His intervention could not have arrived at a better moment. True to its name and to the horror of Star Wars fans, The Book of Boba has been a bit of a tatty paperback of a TV series. 

What a Boba botch job it has been. Fett, the enigmatic masked bounty hunter from Empire Strikes Back, had all his mystique stripped away. And his hopeless attempt to establish a criminal empire on desert planet Tatooine has caused Jedi fans to ask, yet again, why everything in Star Wars now seems to take place on the desert planet of Tatooine.

Enter Filoni, who directs and co-writes the most recent instalment and, in the process, saves The Book of Boba from itself. Leaving unfortunate Fett far far away on Tatooine, Filoni takes up the story of Luke Skywalker – a young Mark Hamill brought uncannily to life with CGI –  and his Jedi initiative, Grogu. Or, as you, I and the entire universe knows him, Baby Yoda. 

For Star Wars aficionados it was nostalgia served by a master. As Luke and Grogu trained on their remote forest hideout, the years fell away. Star Wars seemed to plug into the spirit of The Empire Strikes Back and the sequence in which Luke learns at the gnarled green feet of Yoda.