Here are the five WOW moments I got from The Book of Boba Fett.

The Book of Boba Fett was good entertainment. I wasn't bothered by the same things that irritated some die-hard Star Wars fans, namely that Boba Fett wasn't "Boba Fett." To be fair, I think many of these complainers are right. Boba Fett was a badass Mandalorian bounty hunter. He wouldn't have needed to learn martial arts from sand people in the desert. But, I did like that whole "sand people" story arc, mostly because it made me see them as more than just hollering barbarians. It humanized them for me, which made me feel the impact of their slaughter both in the series and in the past (when Anakin Skywalker blazed through them all with an angry lightsaber to avenge his dead mother). And Anakin's crime in contrast to how I feel about the sand people today seems to be a lot more in the vein of "pure evil."

I also kind of thought that the whole "let's look in the Sarlacc for my armor" thing using his ship was just stupid. But, it allowed us all to revisit an iconic location from the movies. Seeing as they ended up killing the Sarlacc, it feels like they should have just started with that and then went in to look around for his armor. And then there's the matter of Boba Fett just being a crime lord or a "daimyo." This seemed like a big departure from his character. But, even bounty hunters (I guess) get old and want to settle down. That he seems to be a benevolent autocrat concerned for his citizens seems to be at complete odds with the guy that sold Han Solo to Jabba the Hutt after he was frozen in carbonite. But...I can let that go. People change. All of that being said, there were parts of The Book of Boba Fett which just really soared. I call these moments "WOW" moments, and it's what sticks in my long-term memory and makes me really fall in love with a series. Here's my list from the first (and probably only) season of this show.

1. Episode Five of the show allowed us to catch up with the adventures of Din Djarin from The Mandalorian. Well, when we caught up to him, he had gone to visit a ring world. Star Wars has always been peppered with massive structures like the Death Star, the Ring of Kafrene in Rogue One, or Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back. A ring world as a structure first appeared in Larry Niven's novel, Ringworld. It's a massive structure that traces a planet's orbital path like a thin ribbon around a light bulb. Because it spins, there is enough gravity all along the ring to hold an atmosphere. It has the surface area of three million Earths. Standing on the surface, you wouldn't actually be able to tell that you were standing on an actual ring--it would appear as though there were a giant arch overhead. Anyway, we see Din Djarin walking along and interacting with people on this unknown ring world, and I loved it.

2. The Book of Boba Fett introduced us to the Hutt twins! This was the first time I remember seeing a hutt outside the movies or the animated shows. I loved that the female hutt used a dainty fan to cool off with. In the show, they are said to be cousins of Jabba the Hutt. I also liked that they were carried on a palanquin by dozens of slaves. It seemed like a very "Hutt" thing to do, and it made for a great entrance.

3. Luke Skywalker's face in the penultimate episode took me by surprise. The whole "uncanny valley" thing of CGI was completely missing for me in this deepfake. This Luke looked like the real Luke Skywalker. What was even more shocking was a reveal by Disney execs and Mark Hamill who said that Hamill wasn't even involved in the voice acting. Instead, Disney just took thousands of hours of his spoken dialog, voice acting, and reading out loud of audio books and fed it all into a computer. The computer examined it all and then just performed the lines when they were fed into it. That way, Luke could sound young because Hamill's voice has aged considerably over the years (along with the rest of him). This is really scary technology folks...what happens to the world if it falls into the wrong hands? But yeah, I guess we've gotten to the point where we don't need actors or even reality anymore. We can just synthesize it whole. I'm simultaneously in awe and frightened of what all this means.

4. Boba Fett Riding a Rancor. Wow! Seeing a rancor again delivered by the Hutt twins earlier in the show had me wholly unprepared to witness how cool it was to see Boba Fett riding this creature as a mount to take down his enemies in the Pyke Syndicate. It was also great to see the droids from the Phantom Menace again that had that shield technology that made them impervious to energy weapons. When that happened in The Book of Boba Fett it helped for a time. However, Rancors apparently can still crush the droids with slow and incredibly tense pressure applied in just the right spot. It was like watching a kaiju fighting a robot, so I had real strong Pacific Rim vibes from this. Now if only we could get Ahsoka Tano riding a rancor then my life would be complete.

5. Cad Bane. I loved this bounty hunter from The Clone Wars, and I was delightfully surprised by his appearance in this show. If you don't know, Cad Bane is a ruthless bounty hunter from the planet Duro, and in the animated show The Clone Wars, no quarry was considered too dangerous for Bane if the price was right. One of the things I loved about him was his appearance, an obvious throwback to a cowboy western which seemed out of place in sci-fi until you realized that it was completely awesome, and it made him look different than anything else. It sucks that he's probably been killed off by Boba Fett.

And that's my list. Considering how short this series was, I'd say The Book of Boba Fett treated us to some very fine entertainment.