The Book of Boba Fett

Across its first four episodes, The Book of Boba Fett tells a pulpy, fanservice-y, and for the most part completely unnecessary story. Devoid of the walking, cooing hook that was The Child/Grogu from The Mandalorian and seemingly opting to rest its weight solely on Temuera Morrison’s (admittedly game) shoulders, the show is light, breezy, very enjoyable and supremely disposable, but for a few striking and grating details.

First of all, that fanservice. There is a powerful sense of ‘didn’t I read this fanfic however many years ago’ throughout, starting literally from the cold open in which Boba escapes the grisly state in which Return of the Jedi stuck him. But the form of that fanservice very quickly takes a bizarre turn. Star Wars has always been an appropriator (consciously or not) of cultural signifiers from across the real world, but I’d be surprised if anything else in this franchise has fragrantly pinched quite so much as Book of Boba Fett. The Tusken raiders who initially imprison and ultimately ‘adopt’ Boba perform a haka — not an alien performance but a Maori haka, seemingly unchanged. Boba’s staff is a traditional Maori weapon, also completely unchanged. The crashed train in episode two is straight from Lawrence of Arabia. The Mods are, well, mods, in space. Boba takes the title ‘daimyo’ (which Jabba the Hutt apparently held, an unintentionally hilarious detail). The appearance of Cad Bane, carried over from producer Dave Filoni’s animated Clone Wars series, is shot like a spaghetti western, if Lee Van Cleef had been painted blue and given absolutely massive chompers to work around. Whenever this show is obliged to worldbuild, it choses instead to lift wholesale from elsewhere, and while Star Wars has always done this, it has never felt so quite so blatant, and I’m not sure if I scorn the laziness as much as I admire the chutzpah.

The bigger problems lie with how the show frames its central character. It’s worth remembering that Boba Fett was never exactly the affable and charming man that Morrison presents here; he was a hired killer who sided with gangsters and space fascists, and this not insubstantial issue the writers choose to deal with by… ignoring it entirely. By the time Boba has clawed his way up to power (swiftly, with surprisingly little direct opposition), the show has pulled all manner of interesting tricks to position him as a ‘good’ gangster. It gives him that lordly title, daimyo, and a goofy Scooby Gang for his henchmen (whom I confess, I loved, more for their capacity to infuriate Star Wars diehards than for any sterling performances). It reassures us that Boba is a kindly man, beloved by the people, beyond reasonable with the other crime lords, who are of course just waiting for their own moment to backstab him. He is a man who is definitely not making his money by exploiting other people, oh dear me no, though where he is getting his money and power from, the show has no interest in saying (this hedging reaches parodic levels by the finale, when Ming Na Wen’s returning fan fave Fennec Shand debates Boba on the positives of dealing drugs as the two are knee-deep in a siege with drug runners they’ve already decided to push out of town). Book of Boba Fett seems determined to massage away all of its leads’ worst qualities, afraid that any genuine nastiness would make him a less appealing — or less marketable — protagonist, which is now a 2/2 problem for the Star Wars shows produced under the Disney brand. Like Din Djarin before him, Boba Fett can be ‘edgy’ in affect, but he can never tip over that edge into outright ugliness, into doing something for which he might be feared and hated, and the result is that he becomes entirely flat. His story is so slight, so guided by lore over motivation, and so much more concerned with how he got here than what he wants to do, that it cannot help but seem rather weightless.

I found myself simply going along with it regardless, mostly because the actors were game, the design and production teams are plainly still bringing their best as with Mandalorian, and a weightless puff of air once a week is not exactly demanding on the schedule. There is a great deal of novelty in the show and Book of Boba Fett, for those four episodes, is mostly fun. These slim and slight pleasures go out the door, however, when the series decides it hasn’t the slightest interest in Boba once he’s positioned neatly atop the food chain, and gets on with another story entirely.

The next two episodes are, effectively, Mandalorian episodes, with Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal, given so much presence he feels like a co-lead of the show) wrapping up such Mando-specific issues as ownership of the darksaber, his standing within his cultish band of Mandalorians, and his inability to cope with parting from Grogu. There is a great deal of hay to be made out of a great deal of lore, and it must be said that there are elements to like; I’ve never yet seen a ringworld in Star Wars, and the version rendered here is spectacularly done. But these episodes are simply drowning in their fanservice, to the point of suffocating the most interesting idea they raise. When Din is confronted by the Armourer (Emily Swallow) and ejected from his nearly extinct covert for the crime of removing his helmet, the set-up is strong, but the pay-off is baffling. One cannot help but think his experiences across two seasons of television might give him some pause about this judgement.

I am not suggesting, heaven forfend, that Din does not take the made-up religion of the Mandalorians very seriously; my contention is that by having him meekly accept that he has committed a great and terrible sin, failing to put any justifiable argument against this into his mouth, the writers of Boba Fett are throwing away the thing that matters far more than the lore; the drama. Off Din goes, tail between his legs, to spend twenty minutes of the run time ‘fixing’ a new ride*, leaving the audience to reflect on how much interesting this might have been had he pushed back and challenged anyone on this point — if the show cared as much for drama as it did for iconography.

The same point will be hammered home in the second of the two bogus choices presented to returning Mandalorian characters; Grogu, in training to become the first in the next generation of Jedi under Luke Skywalker, hightails it out from under his tutor at the first opportunity to reunite with Din. One can scarcely blame him — Luke’s CG visage having become even more chillingly unreal thanks to the stiffness of both his physical performer and Mark Hamill’s voicework — but one also can’t help but be exhausted by the short-sighted, abusive stupidity of Luke’s method. The show, bound by lore and a fanbase that sees nothing wrong with anything the Jedi have done, seems to have no notion that Luke replicating their broken methods is in and of itself doomed to failure, and so it simply lets him carry on. For the sake of making Luke Skywalker ‘badass’ again, we get the saddest indictment possible of his character, purely by accident on the part of the show.

Through all this, Boba and his concerns make the absolute briefest of cameos, but otherwise remain in absentia. The show, almost shame-facedly, brings him back for the finale, and all this concludes in a blow-out finale virtually every minor character across both series’ gathers to fight off the drug-running Pike Syndicate (a villainous group so undercooked I forgot everything about them almost immediately) and preserve Boba on his throne in Mos Espa. There’s a rancor. There’s several gigantic and extremely ineffectual tank droids. If you’ve never seen Clone Wars, you may be a touch perplexed when a long-term rivalry seems to begin and end in the space of a single confrontation. People are shot, things explode, the day, from a certain point of view, is saved. But as Boba smiled benevolently at the market stall owners whose homes his gang war had blown apart, I couldn’t get away from the indifference with which Book of Boba Fett treats everyone outside of its central conflict. For all that the show seemed determined to position Boba as a ‘good’ criminal, no-one from Mos Espa turns out in support of him or in defence of their own city; the finale hinges on whether or not a group of people Boba has never met, from a town far, far away he has never been to, from a different show, will show up to be his cannon fodder. No-one, at the bottom of it all, seems to care who comes out on top. No-one cares about the change Boba offers, because his is no actual change. No-one actually cares, at all, about Boba Fett. And now, a month later, with Obi-Wan Kenobi already replacing it, no-one in the real world seems to give a damn about him either.

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*(This was too petty a gripe to leave in the review proper, but I remain unable to forgive whomever on the production crew took a design as elegant as the Naboo starfighter and made it so very, very ugly)