With The Mandalorian it seemed that Disney had done the impossible and restored to Star Wars an aura of intergalactic invincibility – while creating the cult of Baby Yoda for good measure. Perhaps, however, this was wishful thinking on the part of a fanbase desperate for the franchise to shake off the hangover inflicted by the dreadful JJ Abrams/Rian Johnson “sequel” trilogy.

Now, having suffered through the underwhelming finale of The Book of Boba Fett (Disney+) – a Mandalorian spin-off so ghastly it has retroactively spoiled memories of the original series – this will certainly have been the conclusion of many fans.

Disney had displayed an appalling lack of ambition in green-lighting Abrams’ The Force Awakens (having acquired the franchise from George Lucas for $4 billion in 2012). All it wanted to do, it appeared, was repackage the original Lucas films and sell them back to die-hard fans. Alas, The Book of Boba Fett suffers from precisely the opposite problem – it is trying to be half a dozen things at once and, in the finale, that refusal to commit to a specific vision came back to bite it like an angry Rancor running amok.

Was this series a Boba Fett story? A Mandalorian sequel? Another Baby Yoda marketing opportunity? Yes, no, maybe… The sense throughout was of a spin-off with no pressing reason to exist beyond the need to expand Disney+’s roster of original content.

What was telling across the seven episodes was that The Book of Boba Fett was at its most intriguing when the eponymous anti-hero was shuffled off to the margins. He barely had a line in episodes five and six – which were armour-plated head-and-shoulders over the rest of the season. There, we reconnected with the Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal), the masked and monosyllabic bounty hunter sold to Star Wars fans as a new and improved Boba Fett. Raising the question: why bring Boba Fett back at all?

Baby Yoda had seemingly departed at the end of series two, when a CGI Mark Hamill (as Luke Skywalker) picked him up in his X-wing Starfighter. All that merchandise isn’t going to sell itself, however, and here we were reunited with the pint-sized green machine, who was training with Luke on a distant jungle planet. In the final scene Luke offered the alien, known as Grogu, a choice. Stay and learn the ways of the Jedi or sacrifice that future for friendship and rejoin the Mandalorian.