The Book Of Boba Fett improves somewhat by choosing a path to follow
“The Gathering Storm” brings some focus to the last half of the series.
TV Reviews Boba Fett
While watching this week’s episode, my brain kept on returning to the existential question of what is it people want from Star Wars? It certainly can’t be tense, well-scripted crime dramas, unless The Book Of Boba Fett looks to deconstruct the genre by exploring one man’s attempts to become boss in the sloppiest, most roundabout way possible.
The first two trilogies told, to varying degrees of success, a tidy little fairy tale. And it was the fable-like quality of the movies that was first to be lost in the massive, outward expansion of material; flattening the mystery of this weird, unique space opera into just another technical-heavy sci-fi universe. Or at least almost lost, since Star Wars is one of the few ongoing properties that can sustain itself on being a feeling. It’s a feeling that relies too heavily on nostalgia, and yet there’s something about infiltrating a kingpin’s castle through the cavernous, boiling kitchen and facing off against a janky old droid with six meat cleavers for arms and a tiny net-wielding rat catching companion that you just don’t see anywhere else.
It’s a very specific mood. Fantastical, absurd, cute, and dangerous—all mixed together. And while there are plenty of examples (including last week’s episode) that put a great strain on this theory, as long as it’s delivered competently, whatever story you want to tell to allow more time in the Star Wars universe is sufficient. This isn’t to say I wouldn’t like to see greater aspirations from the franchise, but it is impressive how reliable a return you can get on deliberately un-aerodynamic spaceships and aggressive Muppets.
In a more grounded examination of this week’s episode, there are entire sections of “The Gathering Storm” that would have made a whole lot of sense to occur during the first or second episodes. It seems impossible that weeks into his aggressive move to become the head of a massive and dangerous power structure that it would occur to Boba Fett, à la Homer Simpson, that he needs a crew and money can be used to secure him a crew. It’s the kind of epiphany you would expect him to have before trotting all around town declaring himself the new boss, but I guess better late than never.
Even the banquet scene where Fett meets with the three factions who oversee Mos Espa feels like it would have been a first order of business. Though at least waiting this long facilitated the power move of placing the table right above his new Rancor. And sure, we all make rookie mistakes our first time trying to upend a crime family, but I truly don’t understand how a man who, until this point made an entire career being hired to bolster the legitimacy of criminals through the threat of violence, wouldn’t think to bolster his legitimacy by hiring people trained in violence. Or where to find them for that matter; Fennec’s final line of the episode, “Credits can buy muscle, if you know where to look.” That has to be the most superfluous statement an assassin-for-hire has ever made.
This episode also lays out the explicit reason Fett wants to become Daimyo. There’s no hidden agenda, he’s just another long line of subordinates who has decided it’s probably better being the boss instead. Fett claims that most employers are idiots who cause the needless death of their employees. Earlier in the episode, he even vows vengeance against Bib Fortuna for double-crossing him. I don’t know if this alludes to some yet-unknown event that led to the death of the Tusken tribe, because it surely can’t be in reference to the events of Return Of The Jedi, where it was explicitly shown Fett’s greatest enemy is his lack of peripheral vision.
As far as motivations go, raw ambition is a perfectly acceptable one, though again, it’s strange to wait until halfway through the series to make such a straight-forward decision clear. It now seems clear that the whole point of Fett’s time with the Sand People (a few years, apparently!) was solely to function as his character development. He was a lone wolf, cold-blooded killer until these humble desert nomads taught him the meaning of family. It’s a true testament to how insufficient the show has been at telegraphing any of these character aspects that they’re completely unclear until delivered in one of the episodes many explicit fireside monologues.
And yet, despite all these issues, “The Gathering Storm” still fares better than last week. Maybe it’s because it seems like the show is focusing in on a climax instead of feinting among a bunch of disposable power players. Maybe it’s because Boba Fett got his ship back. It was a very fun sequence to have the pair infiltrate Jabba’s palace. The aforementioned kitchen fight was a highlight, but so was Fett trying to maneuver his Firespray through a docking bay that was barely large enough to accommodate the ship. There’s still a very strange cadence to the melee action sequences that I can’t quite put my finger on. They all feel like a video game that has suddenly dipped frame rate. They look choppy and inelegantly edited. Using his newly recovered ship first thing as a flashlight to stare down Tatooine’s largest throat was an odd choice, though it’s reasonable that a delirious, semi-digested Fett wouldn’t recall being stripped by Jawas when he first emerged from the Sarlacc. The creature tried to eat the ship, as giant mouths do, forcing Fennec to set off a bomb to free the pair. The Sarlacc is officially dead.
There’s not much to say about the other major development of the episode; the events leading up to Boba Fett and Fennec Shand working together. He found her dying of the gut shot she received in The Mandalorian, she repaid him by helping him recover his ship, and became intrigued enough by his proposal for a crime co-operative that she decided to stick around. It was all fine. Their relationship certainly doesn’t require anything more complicated than that. I think she also enjoyed how willing he was to gun down an entire biker gang without hesitation. We are now past the halfway point in the series with only three episodes remaining. That’s a just a few too many to present a straight-up battle against the Pyke Syndicate, so I assume there will be at least one more twist before the climax. My new guess is Stephen Root’s water monger is the secret puppet master guiding the strings.
Stray Observations
- We get another in-depth look at Tatooine’s fresh-faced counterculture underground, with their well-scrubbed bio-hackers still with baby fat on their cheeks. I’m glad Luke didn’t fall in with that crowd. Instead of learning the ways of the Jedi, he’d still be on Tatooine, lighting death sticks with the lighter he installed in his hand.
- Sure enough, Black Krrsantan joins Fett’s posse this week. The show felt the need to stall his recruitment long enough so we’d have the chance to see him get drunk and surly and tear the arm of off a Trandoshan. See? He’s nobody’s chump.
- The low thrum of the detonator Fennec set off in the Sarlacc was the same as from Attack of the Clones, when Jango was trying to shake Obi-Wan in the asteroid belt. It’s a reminder that among other things, sound design is one of Star Wars greatest assets.
- The standoff with the kitchen bot had shades of Indy’s duel with the Cairo Swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
- I feel as though Fett should have taken at least one of the bikers hostage to get some information. As was pointed out, it seems unlikely that a gang would be able to take down a tribe of trained warriors. Once again, the need for vengeance has clouded judgement.
- Not surprisingly, the name Slave 1 seems to be phased out of Star Wars lexicon. Fett refers to his vehicle solely as a Firespray Gunship, and I expect it will never be further elaborated upon.
- So I guess bacta tanks can cure scar tissue? The whole point of the apparatus was to provide us a more conventionally handsome protagonist. Good thing his final healing regiment happened to coincide so nicely with the closure on his flashbacks.
285 Comments
Loved the musical cue at the end, obviously setting up Mando popping in next week. Should be fun.
Was shocked that neither of the recaps I’ve read mentioned this!
Literally the first thing my friend and I texted about when we both finished watching. It was not subtle.
Yeah, at the very least that has to mean that a character from the Mandalorian will appear (or possibly just other Mandalorians in general). But that is the bare minimum level of payoff to that, and the more logical choice would just have it ben Din.
Would love it if we find out that Cara Dune died on her way back to her home planet. #eatdirtcarano
Gotta jump back in, my problem with the first two episodes was the characters feel kind of wooden. But whatevz, maybe I should just enjoy the visuals!
i think if i recommend this show to people i’m gonna tell them to start with this one and if they need anything more explained watch the first 3. really felt like a first episode. i kind of want topher grace to re-edit this shit chronologically.
Chrono-edit seems like it would really help. All the Tusken flashbacks have a kind of mood that would be stronger if sustained and then (hopefully) the present-day action could clip along more quickly (probably would still require a lot of trimming and, likely, a decent chunk of B-roll for transitions).
With streaming services full of movies I have already saw in the theaters from the 1980’s to 2010’s and often do not like enough to watch over again. At least this is new content, even if not a great as I was hoping.
Yeah, it’s really difficult to find new content nowadays. That’s what everyone’s saying.
Idiot.
“what is it people want from Star Wars?”- Cool guns/walkers/pew pew pew droids
– Beloved British comedians voicing said violent droids (NZ comedians also acceptable)
– Planets besides Tatooine (and NO Jakku doesn’t count)
– More Bill Burr, less Gina Carano
– Maybe something set in a time period outside of +/- 30 years from the original trilogy. Old Republic stuff? Distant future stuff?
it really baffles me that they spent like 5 years getting us all charged up about this new trilogy timeline and then went ‘don’t worry about it, here’s more stuff that took place 40 years ago’i was thinking about how much i’d like to see bb-8 in something the other day.
Because the new trilogy sucked Bantha balls?
no such thing as a good star wars trilogy 😉 best they’ve done so far is a good 2 movies out of 3. i will not be elaborating on which.
Well, it actually didn’t, it’s just your perception of it..maybe lay off those Bantha bath salt balls yourself..
Probably because the new trilogy was terrible. The Force Awakens was nothing new and just a rehash of the original Star Wars. The Last Jedi, to its credit, tried something different but most people hated it. Rise of Skywalker was just a complete embarrassment all around.You can’t build a story around characters that no one likes or cares about. Rey wasn’t a hero that anyone wanted to see anything further about and Fin and Po were just wasted characters that we never got to know in the first place.
noone seems to like this either haha.i’m not necessarily saying i wanted to follow rey, finn and poe but it just seems crazy to me that the end of episode 9 is, basically, the end of star wars. which makes me care even less about shit like this that takes place 40 years ago and doesn’t matter.
I haven’t watched the newest one, but I really liked the first couple of episodes. Didn’t care for the third one much People also embraced the Mandalorian pretty hard so I think with good writing the fans are open to new stories and new characters.
uh yeah, that’s what i’m saying i want. some new locations would be good, too! and yeah, let’s do it in the brand new timeline, too!
“it really baffles me that they spent like 5 years getting us all charged up about this new trilogy timeline and then went ‘don’t worry about it, here’s more stuff that took place 40 years ago’”
It baffles you that the pivoted after MASSIVE backlash?
What doesn’t baffle you?
Good list, good list. I’ll add in: glow sticks, lasers and tech with janky 1980s CRT screens; space magic!; puppets.
I want more space dog fights. More X-Wings.
So many X-Wing stories: A lighthearted “Top Gun” style series about new recruit Rebels learning how to fly X-Wings and general barracks shenanigansA “Ford vs Ferrari” style series about the respective inventors of TIE Fighters and X-Wings constantly trying to outsmart each-other with vastly different budgets and intense time pressure. A series set in the distant future where X-Wings are like vintage collectible cars now, extremely expensive museum pieces. Maybe some story of a heist of Luke’s original X-Wing from a rich private collector?
Break me off a piece of that X-Wing action!
I’m sure somewhere in the Star Wars universe they have space dog fights. Probably illegal ones run by Hutts where people gamble on which space dog will kill the rest.
There’s got to be some other planet with interesting stuff going on.
Nope! Only Tatooine. Always Tatooine. Forever.
They apparently wanna get the same feeling Empire gave them, but it’s never going to happen. They need to stop chasing nostalgia.
I want pew pew pew.Giant space battles.Jedis.Old Republic stuff
Agree with all points except the last one. That’d be like asking for a Western or a WW2 film to be set in the 1970’s.
“A western to be set in the 1970s” – you’re missing out on a whole genre of wonderful films called Neo-Westerns: No Country for Old Men! El Mariachi! The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada!
I liked El Mariachi. Desperado and Once Upon A Time In Mexico too but sadly those films led us to where we are today: Spy Kids in Star Wars!
I’d settle for simply a compelling story with characters you care about.
At its best, Star Wars delivers this.
X-Wings. And Disney can’t even give us THAT properly.
More Garsa Fwip in Mos Espa’s best available and seductively fashionable decolletage.
Fwipfwipfwip…
Alright, Disney. Robert done spelled it out for ya. Ball is in your court.
I want to know more about the New Republic food riots.
I happened to wait long enough to watch last weeks episode that I ended up watching it before today’s, which was apparently the right move because that one felt incomplete on its own but tied in just fine with this one. Streaming still isn’t really that mature of a medium, and I think that creators are sometimes stuck in either “this will be binged” or “this will be consumed weekly,” and that doesn’t always match up with however the streamer decides to release it. This series seems like it was designed to be binged, and never mind that everyone involved should have known it would be released weekly and should have paced the show accordingly.
My overall taste for Star Wars is incredibly simple. I wouldn’t necessarily settle for thirty minutes of a kid banging his figurines together while making lightsaber noises, but I’m comfortable with that more or less happening on screen with paid actors. I’m not in love with the franchise to such an extent that I care so much about the minutiae or logic of anything, but I like it just enough that it takes little more than a wookie considering if he should rip some dude’s arm off, and then deciding to rip some dude’s arm off to get me clapping and laughing. I don’t mean to be so reductive of it in the “It’s just space wizards” sense, but I’m not sure how people are still being disappointed by Star Wars in this day and age like they never learned to temper their expectations after ~14 previous disappointments.
I think the pacing issue is similar to the one comics have had for a while. They release monthly, but now days the real money is in the collected trade once the story arc is done. Same thing here. The early watchers get the odd pacing, but once the initial airing is done, the whole season is there for the new subscribers. Writing for the trade/binge.
When Boba Fett made his underlings move to Mos Espa did he give them cost of living raises?
I was expecting Fett to re-christen the Slave 1, given his experiences as a Tuskin slave
Sub 1. That’s his FettLife account name already, anyway.
That the ship now apparently has no name is super-irritating to me. Yeah, I get it, a massive company like Disney wants to avoid amplifying the previous fairly mild social media shitstorm that happened when somebody in… was it 2019? Earlier?… realised “Slave I” has the word “Slave” in it and that’s offensive……but to have him just call it “my Firespray gunship” just seems like a cowardly choice.
Yeah that’s what I mean. Even in a post BLM world, I don’t think anyone would be too offended by the name “Slave 1″I still think it will be a plot point for the show but maybe we might get it in the next two episodes.
Given Boba’s change in life view it would make sense for him to rename it to something else. OOO What if he named it after his dad or the Tuskin tribe?!
What’s funny is Robot Chicken made a passing joke almost 15 years ago and now has become a real issue.
“…but to have him just call it “my Firespray gunship” just seems like a cowardly choice.”
Yeah, at least make it realistic. Like how everyone I know who has a car also names it.
I assume a bunch of fans know it as Slave 1, but was it ever referred to as Slave 1 in any of the movies?
Because if not, then it’s an EU/Legends name and no one but those fans that know about it care. And I’m one of those fans and I can live without it.
The movies, no
but it is mentioned by Aurra Sing in the animated series The Clone Wars.
Fair enough. Then yeah, it’s canon, though its absence is hardly my main problem with this show. 🙂
Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t really bother me either way what his ship is called, although Corsair sounds way better than just the Firespray. They should’ve went with that.
Well, it’s not simply an “EU” name, since it was always called that on the toys and in all the supplemental material, before the “EU” even existed.Heck, Boba Fett’s name is only uttered once on camera in ROTJ, but everyone knew that was his name when ESB came out and before that one passing utterance.
It wasn’t ever said in the movies, but the toy of the ship “which I had as a kid” was market as “The Slave 1″ so it’s a Kenner name as well. I’m probably older than your dad
Fett’s Vette!
Didn’t MC Chris solve this for us?
When the first episode came out I thought the central question of the show was going to be whether Boba wanted to be Stringer Bell or Marlo Stanfield. Now here we are at the co-op pitch. Hopefully Boba doesn’t overstep his play with Brother Krrsantan.
BROTHER KRRSANTAN LMFAO
He’s clearly always wanted to be Stringer Bell. Fennec is more of an Avon Barksdale (much more comfortable with violence as a first response). I guess that makes Black Krrsantan the Wee-Bey of the operation.
I like this take. Thank goodness Bill Simmons isn’t writing about this show and ruining the bit.
*Weequay
Maybe you do!
This continues to be such a weird show to me as I do like it, yet every episode I’m kind of taken back by the incredible dumb narrative choices it makes.Like that final discussion was the comedic highlight for me despite being played completely straight. I mean, even though I think I know what they were going for there, it pretty much went as follows:Fett: I need muscle.
Shand: Do you have money?Fett: Loads of it due to reasons left completely unclear to the viewer.
Shand: Well, then you can hire muscle?Fett: Really? You can do that?Also I could not figure out what the hell was Boba plan to go get his armor. Like was he trying to sneak his ship down a giant desert monster’s gullet?
A sidenote related to my ponderings about how dumb the show is.During this episode there was a moment where I compared to the Witcher’s second season in that both were incredibly stupid, but I like them anyway. Then after that I realized it wasn’t true as I can very easily understand what worked for me so well in the Witcher that I was able to deal with the constant stupid choices it made, but I can’t really do that with this show.
The Witcher knows it’s junk food. The Book of Boba Fett wants to be prestige genre fare.
Book of Boba Fett isn’t trying to be prestige TV, though for some reason lots of people seem to think this. It’s very clearly meant to be an homage to 60s/70s/80s TV, mostly Westerns, same as the Mandalorian before it. The difference is that show was good and this one is bad
I would love if the show just committed to the semi-comedic theme that “Boba Fett is a great fighter, but an incredibly incompetent manager and maybe not super bright. Like Michael Scott with a jetpack”
So you’re saying Fennec is Dwight?
She’s the Assistant (To The) Regional Crimelord.“Fennec, what does our criminal organization need?”“Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica.”
“Bantha’s , Black Melons , and er… Battledroid Gambling”
Ah but that’s a level of self-awareness that just wouldn’t be star wars. Or would it?
I would love if the show just committed to the semi-comedic theme that “Boba Fett is a great fighter, but an incredibly incompetent manager and maybe not super bright.To mention another show that’s airing at the moment , swap out ‘Manager ‘with ‘Assassin’ and Boba Fett with “Peacemaker’ and it still holds true.
buddy, that exchange where she explained that money can be exchanged for goods and services really had me laughing.
Yeah, how did Boba get paid when he was bounty-hunting?
Was he like genuinely thrilled and surprised every time completed a job and someone gave him money?
Hmm, credits… what a delightful coincidence.
Boba is now officially the Homer Simpson of the Star Wars universe.
This episode with just 15 minutes left did more interesting fun stuff in the present storyline to move the story forward than the entire 3rd episode.The present Boba Fett is now making more sense with that excellent flashback and the present story is being moved forward by Boba making big moves. We have Black Krrsantan joining Boba Fett’s gang like a general bodyguard or something. That last conversation about hiring more muscle. Oh heck yeah! Boba is looking stronger and a lot more badass! A force to wreckin with!
This really comes across as sarcasm given how unbearably dumb the show is.
Star Wars was never that sophisticated. The dialogue is pretty simple and dumb in the first Star Wars films.
No, it’s not. Yes, there is a lot of bland, functional or just plain awkward dialogue. There is also a ton of dialogue that isn’t. The first two movies in particular are full of verbal wit and cracking dialogue. There’s a reason it’s been so quotable for over forty years now.Favreau’s dialogue is almost consistently first-draft level flat. Utterly without wit or joy.
So maybe all the bitching and moaning (not accusing you, speaking in general) about the unexplained character changes was a little premature?I’ll never understand why people seem to want an entire season fully explained by the first episode.
“It’s the Mandolorian but dumb!”
“DumbER.”
Shand: Yes. In fact, you may recall that you yourself used to act as hired muscle in exchange for money.
Have you seen the movies?
Apparently you can’t win a sword fight if you don’t have the high ground, except when you’re dangling from the inside of a pit and can launch yourself up and over your opponent to cut them in half.
And that’s just one example. Saying and doing nonsensical things is Star Wars. But you ignore that and enjoy the, thankfully, majority of it which is good.
“Have you seen the movies?”
Yes. Maybe you’ve heard of Jedi? They’re wizards who can do magic stuff.
Maybe you’ve also heard that most people aren’t magic.
Also I could not figure out what the hell was Boba plan to go get his armor. Like was he trying to sneak his ship down a giant desert monster’s gullet?
I think he thought the gaping hole he burned into it when he escaped killed it because it was lying there lifeless (which makes it kind of creepier because that means the Sarlaac is intelligent enough to lure prey by playing dead).
Liking it despite how dumb and ambling it is is where I’m at as well. I think I was arguing with someone in the comments of the first episode about the potential for the show to go somewhere and that it’s ridiculous to critique the direction of the show based only on its first episode, but mea culpa to that other commenter, this show is UTTERLY unconcerned with getting to any damned point with any sense of speed, and the only reason we’re being so damned slow is because apparently Robert Rodriguez wants Boba Fett to “learn” about what it takes to be a mob boss, as if our whole fascination with the character wasn’t that he was a just a glowering badass that was cool instead of someone that needed to learn shit.
Like, that’s what I don’t get. This guy fucking directed Desperado, Sin City, and Machete. Why are we so reticent to get to the lurid criminal murder fantasies, and instead languidly get to scenes that where we meet with cool mob bosses… and the result of the scene is that the mob bosses are promising to stay out of it and not do anything? There’s just been no pay-off to the people we’ve been meeting or the things we’ve been learning about this world. It’s like, in an effort to reign in his rated-R sensibilities for Star Wars, we’re getting neither a good Star War nor a good Rodriguez film, and mostly just a thing that’s just… sitting there, with the constant POTENTIAL to enthrall, but never getting to it.
It’s like the whole show is set in a firework factory, but the plot of the show has been about showing how the protagonist must learn the ancient ways of how to put fire to fuse. JUST SHOOT OFF THE DAMNED FIREWORKS, BOB(A).
And yet I still watch. There’s just enough cool moments among the doofy decisions and slow pace that I’m hoping the damned thing amounts to something. And I’m unsure if that’s Star Wars Stockholm Syndrome at this point or not. I didn’t THINK I was a blinkered superfan that just swallows crap, but this is beginning to test even my patience.
“Like, that’s what I don’t get. This guy fucking directed Desperado, Sin City, and Machete.”
He’s also NOT the writer. He’s a director-for-hire, he doesn’t control the story.
Why do you think a contributor to the show with no writing credits is responsible for the writing of the show?
Because he’s the showrunner, and the writing credits have more to do with WGA guidelines than his lack of influence on the goddamned show he runs. What, you think Vince Gilligan had nothing to do with Breaking Bad because he only “wrote” a few episodes, and that the “created by” or “executive produced by” credit means he has little to do with the direction of the show?
Why do you think a showrunner doesn’t run the show? Like… really, bro? Really?
I didn’t know Rodriguez was the showrunner. Googled and apparently he’s a ‘co-showrunner.’ Presumably with Favreau, but not sure about that.Anyway – a simple ‘Rodriguez is the showrunner’ would have answered my question, and you would have seemed like a stable person instead of Sheldon from that stupid sitcom.
…Ok. It’s the first credit after every episode, and you at least knew he was associated with the show, and you’re on a website centered on discussion of the direction of the show. Me assuming that you knew HOW he was associated based on that is not a stretch, or at least that you reasonably could or would have Googled before making your first response. That assumption led me to think you weren’t arguing in good faith or reasonable logic, not that it was a question based on you actually asking me (instead of Google) what Rodriguez’s connection to the show is. So… my B. But otherwise, what you’re saying is that you made your first response assuming that I was talking about Robert Rodriguez for little to no reason, and that this is his show is somehow arcane backlot knowledge only pedants would know. Again, in a place devoted to talking about the show.
Thus my wholly “unstable” response of “Like… really, bro?”. Which led to your reasonable response of comparing me to a character who is intended to be seen as laughably autistic.
…Not sure how you would expect anyone to respond to that.
Didn’t expect anyone to respond to that. But well done.
I’m finishing up Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn TV series on Netflix. And while it’s not great, he is all-in on what’s great about the movie: Sexy people, ridiculous supporting characters, arterial sprays of blood and lots of sexy not-quite vampires. (They spend a lot of time creating an Aztec snake vampire mythos, along with various Aztec demons and other monsters.)
If that Robert Rodriguez had shown up for this show, there’d be Bothans getting disintegrated left, right and center, not touching scenes of Boba hanging out with his bantha.
I’m actually fine with those scenes. They just aren’t adding up to much.
They’re taking away key Bothan-disintegrating time.
Or, more realistically, more time away from Boba losing to Muppets.
Hehe. Agreed.
In fairness to the showrunners, the difficulty in making a fun Boba Fett series is that there’s no character to work with. His suit of armor *was* the character in the original trilogy, and he captured imaginations because we learn almost nothing about him onscreen.This series is demonstrating the wisdom of starting with The Mandalorian, and fleshing out an original character with his own motivations and internal logic, unencumbered by earlier appearances in the movies.They’re actually attempting to do something much more difficult here, which is to figure out who Boba Fett really is and what he wants and what makes him tick. Except the guy who originally created the character never gave any thought to these things. All of the slow-moving stuff has been an attempt to construct an arc and an inner life for a familiar character who was really always a blank slate. It’s not really working, but there’s no substance without that. If the whole show was just Boba doing gangster shit, like Darth Vader in Rogue One, it would get boring quick.
I’d argue the opposite: The Mandalorian took everything that was cool about Boba Fett and did it first, so this show ends up feeling superfluous and plodding by comparison. Din Djarin feels more like what folks expected from Boba Fett and, for the most part, we got it. Boba Fett feels more like an original character that has little to do with how he’s portrayed in the films, and what we’re getting is leaking out so slowly, and when we do get it, many of the “mysteries” about the character revealed to us are kind of obvious, or seem delayed for no reason. And it’s precisely BECAUSE there’s not a lot to work with from Empire and RotJ that there’s not a lot of tension in Fett’s shift to being a different person, because we never really knew the old one. Introducing oneself with “I used to be a famous asshole” engenders boredom and bemusement, not intrigue.
And to be clear, there is some good stuff here, it’s not total dreck. It’s just dragging and wheelspinning in a similar way that, say, some of the seasons of Netflix’s Marvel shows tended to. I mean, I wholly agree with “It’s not really working, but there’s no substance without that”. But the problem is the “It’s not really working” part, not that the substance can’t be got without it feeling plodding or aimless. Again, the unfortunate comparison with The Mandalorian is that that show was still enjoyable and exciting episode to episode for the most part WHILE giving the main character (and side characters too) an interesting season and series long arc that was established almost immediately. Probably the coolest things that’s happened so far in this show have to do with Krrsantan, or Fett mercilessly killing that biker gang. That’s… three scenes? And the arc as we’ve come to see it now is “Fett wants to put the “family” back in “crime family”, which has potential, but it’s taken 5 episodes for that to really become clear.
I think it’s just that the show seems to be explicitly preventing Fett from being the quiet methodical badass that Djarin was portrayed as, but it’s ALSO failing in making the new character development we get exciting or interesting. So as I say, it’s like we got to the fireworks factory at the beginning of the show based on the premise alone… but they want to give us a season long safety walkthrough first and expect us to be just as excited about that.
Yeah, great points there. The Mandalorian seems to have been conceived as “How do we make a Boba Fett show without making a Boba Fett show?” and then they executed it so well that by the time the actual Boba Fett showed up, secondary characters are mocking him as Mando’s sidekick (something that would have been unthinkable in 1985) and it feels totally correct.Ironically, I think one reason they initially made a show about Din Djarin and not Boba Fett is that they didn’t want to bog down the series with a tedious retcon around the Sarlaac monster and an escape from Tatooine right off the bat. So all that tedium has been transferred over here. Except, as you mention, they also felt they had to differentiate Boba and Din as characters — so this Boba is constantly yakking and taking off his helmet, which is the opposite of Mando, but also the opposite of how we imagined Boba might act in his spare time.
And as I said, I think a show like that could work. I think the major issue is that the show thinks we should be interested with how he survived the Sarlacc before we should be interested in who he used to be before that, which would be essential to getting a grasp on the journey he’s taken to who he’s become. Especially because there’s not a lot different between the Fett we see when he wakes up in the Tusken Camp and the one in the current episode.
Now, I actually like the wry, slightly tired, slightly bemused performances from Morrison and Wen, and some of the scenes and sequences work pretty well, especially some of the flashback stuff (even as it distracts from the “main” plot that isn’t happening). But the show around it just has… things that happen and some people he meets? None of it adding up to much yet. And six episodes of a limited series is a long time to wait for things to start adding up.
The Mandalorian could’ve easily been about Boba after Clones, but before Empire. As the show is now, we basically watched Djin become Boba.
The difficulty of a Boba Fett series is that they already created the show (The Mandalorian), but forgot to put him in it. At this point Djin and Fennec are everything we were hoping for in a Boba Fett character.
I think the point of that scene was to have some dialogue to play the Mandalorian theme as a teaser for the next episode.
Yeah, it’s weird. Everyone in Mos Espa constantly reminds Boba Fett that “nobody respects” him yet continues to profess they he’ll earn their respect through fair and benevolent leadership but in the end, it all boils down to paying everybody off.
Boba Fett is a metaphor for Joe Biden?
It leads rise to a question going back to Empire Strikes Back: was Fett not actually paid to bounty hunt?
He was, but we learn in this new episode he got tired of being the gun for hire for dummies. The go fetch if you will. Now he wants to be his own boss.
The point is that Boba Fett, former bounty-hunter-for-pay, seemed unaware in this episode (or the other 3 for that matter), that money could buy services. Specifically: hired muscle, assassins, and maybe just maybe a bounty hunter or two?
Not only was he paid, he double-dipped for the same bounty: He was paid by Vader AND by Jabba. This show is stupid.
The money part doesn’t bother, Fett was Star Wars galaxies best Bounty Hunter for years so I don’t think that having a lot of disposable creds is a plot hole. That final conversation with Fennec was SW writing at it’s pulpiest…and not in a good way.
Shand: Well, then you can hire muscle?
Fett: Really? You can do that?I mean, what does he think a bounty hunter is?
Honestly though I think Shands line was really there just so they could incorporate the musical motif from The Mandalorian into the background music to hint that he’s going to be in the show , mirroring Fett being in his.
That dialogue was hilariously bad as it came out but I think they were trying to imply not that Boba was unfamiliar with the idea of hiring muscle but that he didn’t where the market for hired muscle was on Tatooine, like who to talk to, and she was going to help him with that. But I agree it sounded really stupid
Boba and Fennec using Slave 1 to search the Sarlacc was even more stupid after we just saw Fennec using a space-drone earlier in the same episode to map out Jabba’s palace. Why not use it again? Bad writing…
Just posted the same thing above…haha makes no sense.
“Here’s the perfect tool but we have to write in this really cool scene so let’s throw logic out the window and not go back and rewrite that scene with the space-drone and turn it into something else because laziness and lack of good ideas can be written off as following some sort of pulp roots or something. Huzzah!!”
You always thought Boba Fett was this mysterious, silent badass killer. But this show asks what if he isn’t?
No cringey cyperpunk biker gang this week -> Immediate improvement.
Yeah, but they let us know that the cyberpunk kids on the Quadrophenia-esque scooters into body modification are colloquially known as “Mods”. *sigh*I could take or leave the show in general, but the frequent corny knowing winks to Earth culture really shit me. It breaks suspension of disbelief for absolutely no benefit.
Maybe they’ll be in a band playing The Who songs next week…
What I hate most is that the speeder bike gang wears vest/”battle jackets” with patches on like earthican biker gangs
Well, they kind of were there. The Gen Z tatto-err I mean body mod shop? “You need an appointment, OLD MAN”. Thankfully it wasn’t very long.
yeah but the Thundercat cameo was my main interest in that scene
This episode with just 15 minutes left did more interesting fun stuff in the present storyline to move the story forward than the entire 3rd episode.The present Boba Fett is now making more sense with that excellent flashback and the present story is being moved forward by Boba making big moves. We have Black Krrsantan joining Boba Fett’s gang like a general bodyguard or something. That last conversation about hiring more muscle. Oh heck yeah! Boba is looking stronger and a lot more badass! A force to wreckin with!
Wow, that’s amazing parody!
The timeline here confused me. I’d assumed the flashbacks took place right after RotJ, which is five years before The Mandalorian, but they caught up very quickly.
Where did those five years go? Was Boba supposed to have been with the Tuskans for years? It seemed like a few months at most.
Before this episode I would have thought he spent a week to a month with the Tuskens and even that would’ve been pushing it.
The opening of this episode is years after he found the Tusken village massacred. All other flashbacks in episodes 1-3 took place shortly after ROTJ. He wasn’t with the Tuskens for years. He travelled the desert after their death for years, keeping an eye on Bib Fortuna before finding Fennec…
Eh, felt like maybe 2-3 months. But 5 years is definitely pushing it.
He can’t possibly have been with them more than a year, and that’s straining credulity. He could have been a prisoner for a little while longer than it seemed, and he could have spent longer building up trust and training with them, and longer still training them to attack the train. But all that likely was within 6 months, and then there’s no reason for him to be dallying before going to collect his protection money. Then again, you probably don’t give your psychedelic nose lizard to any layabout who comes tent surfing your way for a few months, so maybe he actually was there for years, and there was just no way to do that “seasons pass rapidly over the course of a few seconds indicating years passing” thing in the desert.
I mean, filmmakers literally solved the problem of time passing with montage A HUNDRED YEARS AGO. I’m sure they could have figured out some way to cleanly indicate how much time had passed.
And the 1980’s gave us the greatest music to montage to!
Boba Gafi training to “Win in the End.”
Honestly, it has to be years with the Tuskens. Or maybe 4 years with the Tuskens and then a year of him wandering around on a Bantha being bummed out until he found Fennic which takes place in Mando S1, five years after the battle of Endor.
I definitely keep getting muddled in the timeline. Apparently his time with the Tuskens took up almost all of the intervening 5 years since ROTJ.
Yes… this was weird. I mean, the Sarlacc does digest you for a thousand years, soooo… was he literally in a food coma for 4 1/2 years?
Every flashback scenes this week were utterly superfluous. Fun in places you can argue, but they told us NOTHING we didn’t already know. We know Fett saved Fennec. We know he got his ship back; we know he got his armor back. We know Fennec stays with him. WE DID NOT NEED TO SEE HOW ANY OF THESE THINGS HAPPENED
I’m enjoying this show in spite of myself. I wasn’t expecting to hear lines like “Find other banthas, make baby banthas” come from Boba Fett, but nor was I expecting a Tusken equivalent of the haka, which I thought was a very powerful onscreen moment. The show is going out of its way to be standalone. You’d think that Fennec might have some thoughts about working with a clone after appearing in Bad Batch, or that Boba Fett might recall his earlier partnership with Krsantan(?) when trying to convince him to join the crew. I’m not entirely convinced this is the best approach, but it seems like there is going to be a lot more connectivity next week, so we’ll see if that works better.
While watching this week’s episode, my brain kept on returning to the existential question of what is it people want from Star Wars?This sentence is an abomination and you should be ashamed of yourself
what i want from star wars is to never read people masquerading as fans of star wars writing ridiculous shit like the aformentioned sentence
Says the person who I’ve noticed never puts a full stop at the end of their sentences. 😉
I’m not being paid to write this properly
Bold of you to assume AV Club writers are being paid, what with the recent news.
What news?
https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-av-club-la-move-chicago-staff-leaving-20220120-dmy64npd5ng63irdzdliifzqha-story.html
It’s not me you’ve got to convince.
He needs to go back to a school were they lern to right good.
Apparently, neither are they.
On the new season of Toast of London, Matt Berry goes on a journey to appear on a new Star Wars show…and here he is!
The first half was unwatchable because it was so damn dark
This show is the worst sort of fan boy pandering mush. Clearly another blind cash grab cynically mining nostalgia. Unoriginal. Baffling ill placed flashbacks. They take some of the most interesting set pieces and world building from the source material and turn it to empty pap. Apparently the sand people, gibbering space apache arabs, just wear those outfits decoratively and moan around the dessert looking for pumpkins? They are supposed to be these incredible warriors but get wiped out instantly. The dialogue, where there is any, devoid of humor or character. Every opportunity squandered.David Pasquesi being the only bright spot in it so far.
This is more like it. I’ve enjoyed the series so far, despite some of the tonal inconsistencies, but this feels close to what I was expecting and hoping for out of the series. There’s a little more of the ruthlessness Fett is supposed to be known for, and his motivations are finally clear. It did feel like he gave up kind of easily in convincing the various crime bosses to support him against the Pykes, but at least they’ve been consistent from the beginning in his willingness to do things himself as a way of showing how he wants to lead, even if it’s not the best idea. And it was nice to see Fennec get some more action. Ming-Na Wen has been a bit under-utilized, and she’s awesome. (Seriously, how the hell is she 58? She’s incredible.)Really surprised that there’s no mention of how heavily they hinted at Din Djarin being at least some of the muscle that they’re going to hire, going by the Mando theme drop there at the end. Wouldn’t be surprised to see some other classic bounty hunters show up as well; maybe not Bossk, going by how Krrsantan feels about Trandoshans, but Dengar and/or Zuckuss and 4LOM wouldn’t be a shock. Also surprised that there was no mention of Thundercat as the modder that saved Fennec’s life. I’m not familiar with his music, but it’s not an insignificant acting debut.Really looking forward to seeing how the rest of the season goes. It feels like they’re hitting their stride finally.
Either spaceships are crazy solid in Star Wars or palaces are made out of crumbling shit.
I mean, they have to endure SPACE and HYPERSPACE so I imagine they’re relatively sturdy. And Jabba’s Palace doesn’t exactly look like it passed all the building inspections, frankly. I’m mostly fine with it. It looks to be basically a weak concrete.
“And Jabba’s Palace doesn’t exactly look like it passed all the building inspections, frankly.”
Yeah, it REALLY looks unsturdy, with its feet-thick rock walls.
Haven’t you ever seen Futurama?“How much pressure can it handle”“Well it’s a spaceship, so… 1 atmosphere”
Very little of what looks like concrete building is built out of solid concrete. It’s simply more expensive, slower, and more difficult to build that way. Typically, there’s just a concrete frame filled in with terracotta brick (I’m assuming the building trades in Tataouine operate a lot like its inspiration Tunisia). That brick is not as massive as American-style bricks and is surprisingly brittle if you hit it from the side, all of it’s strength is in bearing.In this construction photo you can see the shards that have broken off during the process. Nothing here is cast in-place concrete, even the stairs are built up of bricks and then given a skim coat of concrete and plaster.
I still think Jennifer Beals’ Garsa Fwip has more of a role to play. I think she’s more skilled than the show is showing and could be behind things
Her blouse buttons were skilled at not popping off that’s for sure
Boba Fett does look wherever she points without questioning… she could very well be the mastermind behind the Pyke takeover.
It’s not a horrible show but it still hasn’t really justified its existence yet.
And it hasn’t really justified the decision to resurrect Boba Fett either. We didn’t learn much about the character in the original trilogy except that he was a ruthless bounty hunter that had no issue working with Darth Vador or Jabba. The character Favreau and Rodriguez have created has little to do with that, and the show probably would have gained if they had used a new character instead.
Yeah, The Mandalorian already basically traded in Fett’s cultural cache, leaving Book of Boba Fett without the ability to build a show around an armored, amoral, mostly quiet bounty hunter. So now we’ve got a fairly chatty Fett who’s largely unhelmeted and who decided he wants to be the employer. Which is fine, but totally at odds with what made people like Boba Fett in the first place. But that’s always the risk of filling in the details of a character whose central appeal was mystery.
You nailed it!
They’ve done an awful job clarifying to the audience why Boba wants to be a crime lord, but the biggest problem is that he just comes off as incredibly incompetent.
It’s not a horrible show but it still hasn’t really justified its existence yet.Pretty sure it did that when tons of us did not pause our Disney+ subscription after Hawkeye ended.
Isn’t everybody subscribed to D+ in the hope that LMM will release Hamilton 2 on the platform?
Outside of Marvel & Mando, I’ve been watching archival stuff, both nostalgic (The Muppet Show, So Weird,….) & completely unfamiliar to me (Clone Wars, Soy Luna,….). Sometimes a good new thing will pop up as well (Soul, Stargirl, Mysterious Benedict Society,….).I don’t get this narrative about people turning their subscriptions on & off just based on what 1 or 2 franchises are doing. Are there really that many people who don’t watch anything besides MCU & Star Wars?
Well, really, what character was Boba Fett before? He was a faceless bounty hunter who easily gets killed, never given anything more than he liked disintegrating people. Even when Lucas went to the Prequels, he never made Boba anything. His entire character there, which extended into Clone Wars, was “I’m an angry pre-teen who really wants to kill Mace Windu,” which of course was destined to go nowhere since, you know, he would never get that chance. At this point he’s more or less a blank slate that they can make into any kind of character. All they needed to keep was that he can (sometimes) fight good.
Isnt every stormtrooper a clone of Boba? And Boba is a clone of his Dad or something….
Presumably from his first name he likes bubble tea? And maybe Greek cheese from his last?
It’s pretty close to horrible at this point, though.
I enjoyed the show once I accepted that he’s more Samurai Jack than SW Boba Fett.
“What Star Wars fans don’t want: narratives that stray even a little from the consistently rote story structures that they’ve grown so fond of over the years”Kidding aside, streaming a limited series over 6-8 episodes is very different than a 2+ hour feature film, and benefits from a difference in narrative format. The problem is reactionary fans who DEMAND instant gratification from SW, BECAUSE LASER BLASTS, LIGHTSABER FIGHTS, AND SHIPS FIGHTING IN OUTER SPACE NEED TO HAPPEN EVER 3 MINUTES ON SCREEN AHGGHGGGHGHHHHH!!!
Reading soooo many comments and reviews online for this show are hilarious because they’re incredibly consistent: “Why would Boba do that?? Why on earth is there a reason for that??” (Next episode): “Ohhhh, now I know why.” The internet has really furthered the lemming herd mentality far too well, because a lot of the comments are so similar, I don’t think people use critical thinking skills anymore when watching something. Personally, I like the show because as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been obsessed with the aesthetic of Jabba’s palace and Tatooine in general (even from McQuarrie’s artwork) ever since I watched ROTJ, so for me, I relish the time they’re spending on the planet, and filling in so many details that I always imagined seeing.. but that’s just me.Reviews like this seemingly only care about dissecting every little item that irritates them, without looking at the bigger picture. There’s a reason it’s called “The Book of Boba Fett”, where the individual episodes more clearly represent chapters of a book, more so than the ‘chapters’ of Mando, which feel much more story of the week like a typical show, which is also great in its own way.Perhaps the funniest scene for me in today’s episode is when Garsa just throws here hands up in the air after Black K just rips the Trandoshan’s arm off. “Oh well, I tried.” lol
Something happened in the last decade that really made people unable to understand the concept of serialized storytelling, particularly in the TV format. Not every episode of a thing is going to be full steam ahead on plot and nothing else. There can be episodes where it’s just “let’s just hang out and learn about these characters, maybe they learn one new thing by the end.” But NO! I NEED EVERY ANSWER IN THE FIRST EPISODE, OTHERWISE I’M GOING TO CREATE AN OUTCOME IN MY HEAD BASED ON THINGS I DON’T FULLY UNDERSTAND AND THEN BE MAD WHEN THE SHOW DOESN’T DO THOSE EXACT THINGS! GRAAAHHHH!!!!I guess just another declining part of our culture and the overall failure as a species.
The same thing has been happening for a while now, going back as far as when Lost was on, and probably before. I realized around the third season of that show that a shitload of people simply do not have the patience or the attention span for serializations. It’s either give me everything all at once right now, or I’m spending all night on the internet trashing it, and yet still continuing to watch.I both despise and do not understand the concept of ‘hate watching’ with every fiber of my being. Don’t like something? Cool. Don’t watch it anymore. Continuing to watch something with the sole intention of using it as fuel to shit on strangers online week after week because they do in fact like it must be a symptom of some sort of mental deficiency. We’re living in a golden age of sociogenic illnesses, and this sort of behavior is just one of them.
No, the failure is in the writing. We don’t need “all the answers right now”, but we sure as fuck need a reason to care. Watch any good serialized show. They exist. This isn’t one of them. Good shows manage to craft compelling characters, meaningful relationships and engaging conflicts even in their first episodes, even while a serialized story unfolds over the course of a season (or more.)This show utterly failed at all of that. You can draw out your narrative while still giving us a reason to be invested. This show decided that episode 4 was the best place to even begin to sketch in the title character’s motivation for everything he’s doing. To date, it has yet to craft a single meaningful relationship or flesh out a single supporting character. It hasn’t given us any interesting conflicts, beyond some vague shadowy forces that are, to date, completely impersonal and vague.In short, it sucks and it’s not the fault of “our culture” because we demand more from our shows. We demand quality, not this piss-poor fanfic.
I do think this one was better than 1 or 3, in no small part because Ming-Na Wen wills chemistry into existence with anyone she’s in a scene with; but on your point of not fleshing out the supporting characters?Yeah dude, they have her character wake up to realize her guts are now made of, IDK, used speeder parts and the water-cooling from a gaming PC, and it doesn’t occur to Favreau and Co. to let her have some feelings about that? They introduce things and then ignore them completely as they flop around like a fish on the dune sea. They’ve got Jennifer Beales in here, and she finally gets a big speech! And… it has no effect. Boba is paid for protection! He stands there while one of her customers’ arms is ripped off. She does nothing, he does nothing, then he hires the dude… like, maybe there’s some DRAMA in these situations!? Consequences?Even 2 (the best so far maybe?); the Sand People are just chill after the train battle with the Fish Faces? Why isn’t there a scene of Boba wanting to kill them, and the Tusken Raider has to convince him ‘that’s not our way,’ or something? Or Boba convinces *them* not to slaughter these a-holes? Especially since it’s obviously a take on the train attack from “Lawrence of Arabia,” where the Bedouin *do* slaughter the Turkish soldiers, and Lawrence has to question his admiration for the Bedouins? Why does this show have no nuances at all? It’s like the Little Golden Book adaptation of itself. But goddamit I loved that damn kitchen fight, and every once in a while it does something really fun… why can’t there be more of them? Or better connective tissue in between?
Despite my long admiration for Ming Na Wen, this is the second time in a row she’s been asked to play a “stoic badass” character with ZERO nuance, depth, shading or layers. She’s so let down by the writing that she’s just twisting here with nothing to do except glower. Again and again. It’s getting pretty damn old.
People are dumb. It’s an easy answer to your statement but it’s the truth.
“Something happened in the last decade that really made people unable to understand the concept of serialized storytelling, particularly in the TV format.”
Yeah, people think this shitty show sucks because EVERYONE has changed. Remember how nobody could follow The Mandalorian?
No? Hmm… Weird. So, this change that happened in the last decade actually happened between the last season of The Mandalorian and this show?
Also, nobody could follow the Marvel shows on Disney+? I’m pretty sure they’re serialized.
I mean Jesus fucking Christ, the narcissism on display here is hilarious. You like the show, therefore the MOUNDS of people who don’t just all forgot how to watch TV.
You are truly hilarious. Thank you for your delusional rantings.
Ish. I was on your side during the reactionary comments on the first episode, but at this point… fucking DO something, TV show. It’s all prologue with things that promise to pay off later, and the pay off is usually “Boba Fett does something that a reasonably intelligent character with his background probably should have done a few weeks ago”.
It’s not that there are questions that people want answered quickly. They want questions worth asking and then answered WELL. And this show dithers aimlessly and pointlessly in a way that other shows like it (say, the Mandalorian) don’t. As episodic as Mandalorian was, it felt like it was leading somewhere new and exciting with each episode in a way that this one seems to almost mock and belabor. And not in a “Oh, I just don’t understand prestige television story telling” or “people aren’t watching this show with critical thinking” sort of way, which is in fact incredibly dismissive of the critiques of the show. It feels like the abject defenders of this show switch between “It’s slow like the Sopranos”, and then the response is “Yeah, but the Sopranos was enthralling episode to episode, and this ain’t”, and so they switch to “Yeah, but it’s Star Wars, what do you expect?”. And when the response is “WE WANT STAR WARS”, the circle starts over again. The whole problem is that it’s mediocre at being either a slow character study of a burgeoning crime family OR a side-chapter of an action-first space opera. It doesn’t make me uncritical to realize that. It is PRECISELY my critical faculties that are in full swing now. I wish the narrative were propulsive or interesting enough that I could turn them off and at least enjoy the ride. But it ain’t. It really ain’t.
I still watch, hoping all this prologue WILL pay off in a way that it hasn’t yet after half a season, buoyed by some of the small scenes here and there that satisfy in themselves (like the Krssantan bar fight you indeed mentioned). I’m just ashamed to admit that the reactionary detractors are becoming more and more right the more we sit in the fireworks factory without any fireworks going off. More and more, this feels like Patton Oswalt’s critique of the prequels, akin to asking for ice cream and then being smugly told I should be satisfied with a bag of rock salt simply because that’s where ice cream comes from. Or that I should be satisfied with a movie starring Jon Voight’s ballsack when I asked for Angelina Jolie. Sure, I’m asking for things I’ve grown fond of… but that’s because I’m fond of GOOD things, ffs. Turning that into a pretense of me being UN-critical? Man, that sounds like projection more than a valid argument.
I love this comment. 1000% correct.
Hehe, I think I was arguing with you on the pilot to wait for the potential of the show. WOOPS, lol. And it is TECHNICALLY well made, it’s just written so, so STRANGELY, at least strangely from a showrunner who made some of the best stupid fun ever.
Like, Predators is so much better than this. And I’m not HATING it. It’s just so bafflingly… meh.
Haha!Indeed it is super “meh.” Which is a shame, because it really shouldn’t be THAT hard. Like, this show doesn’t even rise to the level of passably mediocre, it’s just so fucking bland and weightless and pointless. It still hasn’t made a case for itself or why we should care one bit about its title character.
Fett: “We’re smarter than the people who hire us. We should be doing their job.”Also Fett: “Now that I’m here, I have no idea how to do this job.”Seems like a natural progression to me!I’m happy with a Star Wars show that has subtext and character development with only a few fireworks, because Star Wars should be a big enough place to tell multiple kinds of stories. I’m unsure how this show can be doing something new and yet somehow be massively traditionalist, especially given that it isn’t doing much of anything like trad Star Wars did.Yes, it could absolutely be doing what it’s doing better than it is. But it’s making some very careful points about how Fett is both right and wrong in his approach to his new position, and how he’s bringing something new while also having about as much training in how to handle things as you’d expect he would. He’s like every actor who becomes a director: it all looked so easy until he was having to do it himself, and now he’s floundering and trying to find his way.
Except the show hasn’t really been explicit that he’s floundering. He’s not “failed” anything yet, because other than going around saying “I’m a big shot now” and meeting slightly interesting folk, he hasn’t done anything yet, much less anything that would qualify as a blunder he needs to learn from. And we don’t have evidence that this is out of his wheelhouse, because the absence of character from the films works both ways: we have no idea whether he should be overwhelmed by this position or not from his previous experience, and there’s no evidence from the show that he actually is overwhelmed or should be.
I’m just not seeing evidence of deep, flawed character or world development that you’re arguing exists here. It’s the absence of it, along with having nothing else of substance OR cotton candy fluff to replace it, that creates the issues I’m having. There’s some potential here for the season finale, sure, but we’ve had six episodes of that now, with seemingly not a lot of energy toward resolving any of it, nor a lot of effort in making each episode interesting in itself.
And if the thing that gets folks most excited about what happens next is a music sting teasing the appearance of a character from a show that HAD that slow subtextual character development you’re talking about, then I’m reminded of the episode of MST3K where they watched Overdrawn At The Memory Bank. At the beginning, Raul Julia’s character is watching Casablanca, to which Tom Servo responds:
“Man, never show a good movie in the middle of your crappy movie”.
Sorry, but your take is terrible. Every episode, even in a “book”-style TV show, has to make sense and be entertaining on its own. All this “wait until next week and it’ll make sense!” is utter bullshit. Good shows make every episode count. So far, this show has been horribly structured and paced. Boba’s entire motivations for all of his actions aren’t explained even a little until the fourth episode. That’s bad writing. Sitting around for 3 episodes wondering why the fuck we should care is bad writing. Wasting entire episodes on endless flashbacks or pointless sidequests is bad writing.
See the thing is, you’re part of the problem.Thanks for proving my point.
You’re a moron with no point at all. You said you like this show because you like the setting. Um, okay, fine. But that’s not a reason for anyone else to give one whit about a show with horrible writing.
“Look at the big picture! It’s the fans’ fault for wanting things like narrative, character development and rooting interest!” Um, there is no bigger picture. The show is more than half over. It’s still awful. There are still no meaningful conflicts, remotely developed characters or relationships, nuance, narrative urgency, etc. What the fuck are we waiting for, exactly? How much of a chance does this show deserve? It can be terrible for 6.85 episodes out of seven because, man, those last ten minutes really brought it together??
Has there ever been a show in the history of TV that was terrible right up until the very end, when retroactively everything magically became good because they stuck the landing? No. That’s not how it works.
“Proved your point.” What a joke.
Please seek professional help for your emotional/mental health issues.
While that’s probably solid advice, no amount of pharmaceuticals will magically transform “Book of Boba Fett” into a good show.
Critics want on-rails, plot-driven TV as consumable content. Ironically(?) this show is embracing New Hollywood, which inspired Lucas but was synthesized enough in the OT for audiences never to have seen it as pure as it is here. There’s tons of room to breathe, and Fett makes a lot of mistakes while doing things *just because.* That’s not TV du jour and it’s certainly not how Disney’s been operating. Some people expected Rebels with edge and they’re getting Electra Glide in Blue.
A lot of stuff in this episode should have been in the first episode. Simple things like “what does the main character want, and why should I care? Other than because I owned his action figure as a child.”
Generally I hate when modern Star Wars tries to be like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with constant cameos and shout-outs. With the MCU it makes the world feel lived-in – of course everyone on Earth would know who Tony Stark is, even before he made a miraculous suit of armor and saved the world. When Star Wars does it, the whole galaxy seems so much smaller. But at this point I’m looking forward to Mando showing up, because his show (and character) were far more consistently interesting.
Exactly. The fact that they waited until episode 4 to do the absolute bare minimum of character develop to outline the main character’s friggin’ motivation is inexcusable. I came away from the first episode wondering, “um, why the hell should we care about any of this?”
Black Kerrsantan has dropped the “Black” too, which I’m fine with. It’s kind of redundant. I mean Chewbacca wasn’t “Chestnut Brown Chewbacca.” Plus, you don’t say that to his face anymore or he’ll rip your arms off.
Krrsantan. Of course with the recent style change to capitalise “Black” when talking about people in American English, an American institution like Disney can’t use Black anymore, even though technically IIRC they invented him in a 2015 comic?Still, at least they aren’t calling him “Santy”. Yet.
Krrsantan … KerrsantanI don’t think the big guy cares if I misspell his name.*arm gets ripped off*I stand corrected … barely.
We should be thankful it wasn’t spelled Krrrsantan. Like Kashyyyk. Which TIL is “also known as Planet Wookiee C”.
The capitalization of Black isn’t new. I think it’s just new to you.
“You mean…there’s a ‘White Krrsantan’?”
Now he’s just a kurr.
I’ve been calling him Chestnut Brown Chewbacca, thought he really is more of an ochre.
The way you two fawn all over each other just makes me so … jealous.
He shoulda been. That would be darling.
He’s the color of a Charleston Chew.
…bacca.
G/O Media chose the wrong path.
the whole bit with beak trying to chop through Boba’s ship made me happy they added it in 1997 SE because you wouldn’t get a moment like that if it was just the original design, it just sort of sat there. I wondered if Fennic meant the Pykes were behind the Tusken slaughter, because the recap made a point to show him talking to the Pyke guy before he found the Tuskens dead. and he took out Bib just because Bib is an idiot and Boba is tired for working for idiots but the Pykes are really the ones who were behind it.
So has Boba gotten his revenge by killing Bib or not? Or is there a still to come “you killed my family, prepare to die” scene he has with the unmasked Pyke guy.
I don’t mind at all that Bib was behind it and it adds a lot of context to Boba blowing him away in the Mandalorian S2 finale though.
Anyway him toasting the biker gang was the absolute best.
Toast of Tinseltown deserves your time more.
“Fennec’s final line of the episode, “Credits can buy muscle, if you know where to look.” That has to be the most superfluous statement an assassin-for-hire has ever made.”
You obviously missed the music cue after she said this. It’s the theme from The Mandalorian. He’ll be turning up soon.
I want less shooting, more making out.What’s that? There’s hasn’t been any making out?See my first request.
Honestly, I am greatly enjoying how this show is not giving the hardcore Star Wars fans what they want, a show where it’s just Fett murdering people for an hour each week, while at the same time making the people who make fun of those Star Wars fans annoyed, because now they can’t make fun of them for liking the show. It’s a very shrewd thing Favreau and Filoni have done. Fennec’s final line of the episode, “Credits can buy muscle, if you know where to look.” That has to be the most superfluous statement an assassin-for-hire has ever made.TBF, that line was more just setup for the Mando theme to kick in, as Din Djarin, and maybe some other Mandalorians, is most likely coming in to help next week.
It’s possible to do a show that isn’t crappy fan service but is simultaneously good on its own terms. This show ain’t that.
“Honestly, I am greatly enjoying how this show is not giving the hardcore Star Wars fans what they want”
Cool?
If everybody’s unhappy you might also just be doing a bad job
I’d like to propose other sets of dialogue that would’ve been better than what was presented in the episode.1.) Boba says we need more muscle and Fennec responds that we need more Mandalorians (cue music).
2.) Boba says we need more muscle and Fennec says that she knows a guy (cue music).3.) Boba says we need more muscle (cue music).
I mean, they both know Din pretty well, so that just adds to the weirdness of the scene for me. Why doesn’t she just say “hey, with our cash reserves, why don’t we call Din or his Mandalorian friends whom we literally just worked with a few weeks ago, and see if they’ll give us a hand?”
> It now seems clear that the whole point of Fett’s time with the Sand People (a few years, apparently!) was solely to function as his character development. He was a lone wolf, cold-blooded killer until these humble desert nomads taught him the meaning of family. It’s a true testament to how insufficient the show has been at telegraphing any of these character aspects that they’re completely unclear until delivered in one of the episodes many explicit fireside monologues.Did…. did you see him do the haka-esque dance at the end of the second episode that served as his initiation into the tribe? Or that he blew the crap out of the Niktos? Or his pain over having to burn the corpses of his slaughtered tribe?
Come on now that has been pretty apparent for a few episodes even without a fireside chat.
Did…. did you see him do the haka-esque dance at the end of the second episodeI am predicting that at some point Temuera Morrison will do an interview where he said he pushed Disney to include a bunch of Maori and Pasifika type references – he’s dropped a few Kiwi-isms (“Crook little bugger…”) and he does talk quite a lot about “my tribe” and “having a tribe” and so forth. Unless he’s already done this?That said, my favourite moment was when he totally went back to channelling Jake the Muss to smash the crap out of that bar.
It was a little weird when he sang I Am Moana….
Temeura actually talked about this before, so it’s not surprising that he’s bringing more Maori customs into the character-
Honestly, why did they bother with this show? There’s no point. No one seems to give a shit. No one I know likes it. RIP.
hot take: maybe they should have hired a younger hunky actor instead of being tied to their perceived casting choice.
The guy who played 10-year-0ld Boba in AOTC is actually fairly hunky these days. He’s also much closer in age to the character of Boba than 60-something Dad-bod Morrison.
This should have been the pilot episode.
“Hey, you guys going to give us an antagonist? No? Next week then?”So much weird, out of place stuff. Random crime boss! Random Wookie fight! All that stuff about the three districts of Mos Espa was for… what, exactly?
This is like every horrible, slow-burn streaming show rolled into one package… with Banthas.
Thank god Peacemaker releases the next day to wash the taste of this show out of everyone’s mouths.
Why did Boba say Bib betrayed him?
No clue. It hasn’t been established. One more inexplicable thing about this mess.
Am I insane or did the big door to Jabba’s palace used to open upwards and not down?
The was the hangar door opening downward. The front door still opens upward.
Which raises the question of why would you design a huge thick door (presumably intended to be secure against intrusion) whose failure state is to fall open instead of stay closed?
It’s a feature to facilitate quick escapes. Who has time to wait for a giant door to open upwards when the sith hits the fan?
Your lithp ith tho cute!
Itth seriouthly one of my betht featureth. Altho, my favorite Thtar Warth ith Thy Thnootleth.
So far this show just makes me wish we had another season of Mando. This is a WEAK replacement. I am enjoying the visuals and sound work though. Outside of that unintentionally hilarious chase scene last episode, anyway.I’ll be interested to see how this ends, because right now I just can’t possibly give two shits about his budding crime business.
I’m just here for the Thundercat cameo.
I’m here for the people who post a dozen comments about how terrible everything is and how much they hate it. After every episode. Right after it’s available.It’s like a study in psychology…. or having too much free time.And the Thundercat was cool too.
HO!
I liked that this episode at least gave us a little insight into why Boba wants to be a crime lord and all that stuff even if its just a basic “I was a hired gun. I’m tired of being the one hired, I want to do the hiring”. But one thing that’s been bothering more as the show goes on is just who exactly Boba Fett is as a person. What we saw from the OT and what see now don’t match up much at all. We don’t get much in the OT, but from the dialogue we do get we figure he’s someone to be feared as a fighter and is likely a give no fucks type of guy. Vader has to warn him “no disintegrations” and such. That sorta implies Boba likes to fuck shit up, right? He’ll do the job he’s hired to do, but if given a choice, he’s tearing shit up. Have you seen any glimpse of that in the show so far?In the show, Boba seems to have honor and a code of conduct. Not what I had in mind based on those OT pieces of dialogue. Now I know Boba has a cult like following who dreamed him up as the ultimate badass, but I’m not talking about those expectations. I’m literally talking about what was given to us in “canon” (what little there is) doesn’t really match the character we see now. So when and why did it change? I figured his time with the Tuskens was gonna be what changed him but now that the timeline is more clear, apparently this all happened rather quickly? And even then, the OT Boba doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would be open to understanding the Tuskens. He seems more like the kind of guy that would have killed that Rodian himself after he sounded the alarm and maaaaaybe would have changed once the Tuskens broke his spirit.There just seems to be a fairly significant disconnect between the Boba we’ve seen in the OT (and even Clone Wars Boba) and the one we have in this series. They haven’t really explained the change. For clarity, I’m cool with Boba actually being this type of guy. I just want to know why he is the way he is.
BTW, why did Boba think his armor was in the Sarlacc? Does he not remember busting out of it and the Jawas taking it? I could see him not remembering the Jawas since he was only semi-conscious but does he think the Sarlacc just burped him up naked and that’s how he got out?
Such a good point. I get he may have been delirious about the Jawa theft, but how did he think everything actually went down? That his armor just stuck to the gooey insides of the sarlaac and he had to wriggle out of it??
That’s what always happens in my bacta dreams.
#humblebrag
I didn’t get it either. I guess the answer is supposed to be that Boba forgot exactly what happened with the Jawas etc. It still seems like a strange choice to have the audience know the armor’s not there while the characters look for it
Having cyberpunk in Star Wars feels like a hat on a hat.Favreau should stop writing these. The dialogue and pacing are terrible. What the fuck was with the end of the Biels scene? That whole scene was stupid as hell.I dunno, man. This whole thing just feels…lazy.
Very lazy, very, very sloppy.
seriously, favreau needs to get away from disney for a few years and make one more r rated movie with vince vaughn.
I think those cyberpunk modders could fit into the Star Wars universe… but it felt very odd to see them on Tattooine, a backwater desert world that’s always been depicted as grimy and run down and not as high tech. They just seemed like an idea that someone insisted had to be in this particular show.
I could agree with this. I find the tech in Star Wars infuriatingly inconsistent.We can: replace a dying person’s guts with cybernetics.We cannot: have a functioning camera system in a criminal headquarters.
Not only replace their guts but can do it in the equivalent of a tattoo parlor, and it’s compatible with your organic digestive system. Just have a black melon and see!
This. IF they appear in Star Wars, Coruscant would make much more sense. Their scooters belong in some anime somewhere.
“That has to be the most superfluous statement an assassin-for-hire has ever made.”Ha. That dialogue was laughably, painfully bad. They’re both guns for fire, for fuck’s sake! That never occurred to them before?? The sheer brain-boggling stupidity of Fett showing up with literally ONE person working for him to try to take over a criminal empire is staggering and so, so poorly written.Then again, the Mayor’s henchman practically shits his pants after Fennec merely shows off her holstered blaster pistol implies that, well, maybe EVERYONE on Tatooine is a rank amateur, so at least that’s consistent.Their enemies, the Pikes, show up in force for a “war” because literally eight of them get off a public spaceliner. So we’re afraid of the criminal empire that has to resort to Space Greyhound instead of having their own ship?So much of what happens in episode 4 should have been in episode 1, like Fett laying out his motivation and Fett meeting with the other crime bosses to lay out his plan. The structure here is a complete mess. The show should have accomplished in 2 episodes, tops, what it’s take 4 clumsy episodes to accomplish.Other utter wastes of time: Why introduce the scary Hutt twins only to completely back off them of them one episode later? Why spend nearly an entire episode on the pointless quest to get Slave I back? Once again, Fennec and Fett’s “mastery” at their craft amounts to, “Uh, let’s just sneak in and shoot people.”God, this show is so, SO bad.
My theory after episode 2 is starting to look more and more sound.I think they wrote each episode and filmed it before moving onto the next.
There’s no other excuse for this level of shitty!
I had to laugh when someone described the Vespa bikers as “Mods”. A little on the nose, don’t you think?
My new guess is Stephen Root’s water monger is the secret puppet master guiding the strings.His character was in the “Previously On” but wasn’t in the episode at all, so I think that’s a safe bet.
Star Wars has a hero named Skywalker and a loner named Solo. On the nose is where we live!
Either you bring the water to Mos Espa or you bring Mos Espa to the water.
Din djarin’s coming, right? Was that tiny snatch of Mandalorian pan pipes any indication?
the show as a whole mostly sucks…but seeing this truly brightened my day…soon as you saw the convoy from the front, you knew these guys were fucked. More of this….less air Vespas and dialogue
I was expecting 6 episodes of fun news ways for Boba to blast people. Instead we actually get to see what makes him tick. Boba is just not the charge-in-guns-blazing type. He lets everybody else show their hand first. Doesn’t mean he shirks action when the time really comes. The show still has plenty of action payoffs, for me those scenes are more grounded from having a better idea how we got there. It’s different, but this show really works for me. I am thoroughly enjoying it.
i want david pasquesi to be the mayor. he pretends he is delivering messages from the mayor, but is, in fact, the mayor. maybe working in concert with stephen root.
You know that we’ve…seen the mayor, right?
Just me, or was that the droid from Star Tours running the gambling table?
not just you that was definitely a REX droid, the same kind DJ’ing at star wars land
Not just you. That’s who it is.
i was trying to figure out why i dont really feel invested in this series/character, especially after being obsessed with boba fett since receiving him in the mail way back when. at first i thought it was because Mandolarian pretty much scratched that itch. While i wasnt blown away by Grogu, at least there was an adventure-a-week, all while having a season arc. i think what i dont really care for is the storytelling as a whole. i like the flashbacks, but they seem uneven. some episodes have barely any flashback, while others seem to be primarily flashback. and i need to be honest, i would rather see him living with the tribe and learning from them. the “current” storyline seems boring. and he seems dumb. maybe his ruthlessness was shuttered when he was with tribe, but a spark here and there would be good. yeah, he blew away the biker gang with his ship, but that was done from a distance. we havent seen a memorable face-to-face battle, other than the quick diner scene, where he lets loose.then i realized there isnt a mcguffin. not that one is needed, but the power vacuum storyline is just dull and doesnt seem to be all that exciting. why stay on this planet? is he settling down? he doesnt seem to be struggling with figuring out who he is or what he wants. will he join power with another tribe and this becomes a native american allegory? i would like to see that, but it seems they left that storyline…
…in the dust.
“The whole point of the apparatus was to provide us a more conventionally handsome protagonist.”
What does this mean? More conventionally attractive than if they had decided there was no need to give him a bunch of scars and wounds since he was wearing armor that looks newer AFTER coming out of the sarlacc pit than it did when Boba fell in?
I appreciate this review, but I have to comment about his line: …it is impressive how reliable a return you can get on deliberately un-aerodynamic spaceships…You said ‘spaceship’. There is no air in space. Obviously these spaceships fly in atmosphere as well, but their primary purpose is space travel and battle, so aerodynamics is not a design priority.I do have to give it to you for this one though:…in reference to the events of Return Of The Jedi, where it was explicitly shown Fett’s greatest enemy is his lack of peripheral vision.Bravo for that one!
When Fennec talks about hiring muscle, they play a bit of the Mandalorian theme, which I took as a bit of foreshadowing.
Boba’s ship design is weird and completely impractical. It’s like our rockets, where the astronauts have to lie on their backs until they get into space.
Did Boba Fett’s experience with the Saarlaac monster give him brain damage? How did he get so goddamn DUMB????? Its weird that i like everything about the Boba Fett show except for Boba Fett.
So, we have two data points about Boba Fett from the original trilogy:
1) He’s the kind of guy who disintegrates people, and apparently did so at least once.
2) He doesn’t know proper jetpack safety. (Why didn’t you have the jetpack safety switch engaged on Jabba’s skiff, Boba? Why didn’t you hit an emergency cut-off when the jetpack got triggered, Boba?)
So, the show giving the first in-depth look at Boba gives us a guy who’s still not great with the jetpack (seriously, how does a flying guy get ambushed by assassins with space axes?), but the disintegrating presumed badass is replaced with a guy who loves his adopted bantha (although he insists on giving meat to a creature that the teeth say is 100% herbivore) and almost loses a fight to a bunch of Muppets.
I’ve always been a Boba Fett skeptic, but this starting to feel like a Zach-Snyder-doesn’t-get-the-appeal-of-Superman thing is happening here.
Was there anyone out there who had spent years hoping to see Boba Fett having a lot of baths and angrily telling a Muppet that he’s BOBA FETT? (Does the Muppet know or care?)
If they do another season of this — please don’t — they need a completely different take on the character.
I’m trying to remember where I saw “The inbox of the worst engineer in the Empire” and it had messages from Boba Fett asking why the jetpack had an on/off switch in the middle of the back, and from the Emperor asking about the shaft to the reactor in his throne room. It was funnier when he did it.
I’ve been hate watching this show to confirm my suspicion (I know, I’m really sticking it to Disney) that it’s completely pointless.So far, my opinion hasn’t changed.
Interesting seeing EV-9D9, Jabba’s former droid torture room boss, now working the palace kitchen. Especially after we last saw it tending bar in The Mandalorian.
Shit’s gotten so bad on Tattooine a droid needs to work 2 jobs just to make rent
Just for fun, here’s how I’d course-correct this mess: The character
we’re seeing in the show never was Boba Fett. He’s another clone that
Fett hired because he knew bad shit was going to go down on Jabba’s sail
barge, and he’s too smart to put himself at risk. So he hires this guy
who has stormtrooper-level skill and luck to take his place, with predictable results. That’s how RoTJ makes a terrifying celebrity bounty hunter into a total clown-ass. The real Boba Fett returns in the last episode and the season ends in the style of Rocky II, with them about to duel.
My son for some reason had the subtitles on when he watched. The cleaver armed droid was listed as “Chef Droid” and the one who was taken out before the Chef Droid was listed as, yup, “Sous-Chef Droid.” Not sure what the droid who turned himself off was named though.
So Boba was with the Tuskens for 5 years? But there’s nothing to suggest that he was with them more than a few months. Heck, that kid Tusken didn’t grow at all.
Why didn’t they used Fennec Shand’s little floaty red orb guy to look around down the Sarlacc Pit? One would think it was only for heat signatures, but it mapped out the walls of Jabba’s/Fortuna’s palace…
just total prequely thing to be like “hey look a piece of technology that could probably get us out of a jam later”, but only use it for one thing and never heard of again. At least the sonic bomb came into play.
What do people want from Star Wars? Not to be nudged in the ribs with references unless they play into the narrative. That count for something a little??
Presumably the acid would have melted it
I’m glad I’m not the only one who was puzzled by Fett looking for his armor in the sarlaac.Best bounty hunter EVAR struggles with bunny droid.Also, Fett’s literal, verbatim response to the question about why he’s doing all this is literally “why not?”Since the show ends on a musical cue to [SPOILERS, maybe], I went back and restarted The Mandalorian and the first 3 episodes of that show are so much better than what we’ve seen so far with BoBF.
You’re correct in that there’s nothing inherently wrong with a show riding on nostalgia, but sadly this series seems to consist of little else. Each episode I come away with an empty feeling. It feels good to be in the SW universe yet it’s shallow because the story is so lacking. I also wish they’d given Ming-Na Wen a different personality to play, maybe more eccentric or jovial, as it is it’s just like watching Melinda May sat next to Fett and it’s distracting.