Sackhoff is great, but I want Bo to get her bite back before I get asked to pay attention to her again. The character works better as an anti-hero, and even worked better as a villain, than she does as a purely heroic, bland hero in a story that’s uncritical of her history - and if they don’t want to mine her true past for drama and character work, then she’s as boring as this season’s post-Mines of Mandalore Din, and part of the reason why the seaosn doesn’t have a compelling rewatch factor and littler to no solid character work… except they’ve also subtracted complexity from her character to get her there.
The Mandalorians as a whole are much more interesting the more diverse and flawed their cultures are portrayed as being. And Bo herself has the most compelling selling point when she’s at a fracture point over that - when she’s leveraging the vices and virtues of other Mandos for her cause in Season Two, or acting more as a co-belligerent with a flawed honor code herself who really isn’t a heroic person because nothing in the Mando code requires that, since it’s a warrior ethos high on valor and loyalty but low on altruism, compassion, and humility.
She didn’t benefit from having the script lazily bequeath her the Darksaber *again*, play her as a bland heroine who the script won’t sharpen dramatic by tackling her betrayal of her people and sister as a young woman, or take a leadership role that both Sabine and Din made more interesting candidates for - because honestly, she doesn’t need to be a leader or paragon character to be her best dramatic or heroic character.
She - and the Armorer as well, who she was better than but similarly too favored by the story - are downgrades from Din being a dynamic protagonist because she relies (right now, not forever) on the story being “rigged” in her favor, but at the expense of making her more static, shallow, and simple.
She shouldn’t have replaced Din (or Sabine before him) unless they wanted to actually dive into the tragedy, trauma, and requisite redemption arc her past gives her - and I’m not really interested din seeing her as a protagonist again unless they want to start deconstructing some Mandalorian ethos… which Sabine and Din are *also* better suited for.
Hell, she’d still make a better warning sign for Din about what the Creed can make you do than as his “lady.”
DKDetectiveElementary, Dear Robin (he/him)
Hunter RiderRonin
