The ridiculous energy of ‘The Book of Boba Fett’
I don’t remember asking anyone for a Boba Fett TV series. In fact, for 39 years I’ve been fine with the idea that the infamous bounty hunter was looking at another 961 years of digestion in the belly of that sarlacc a half blind Han Solo clumsily bumped him into so long ago. Even in a galaxy far, far away, shit happens.
Of course Boba Fett has made numerous appearances in plenty of Star Wars books and comics — most of which I’ve never read — and as far as Disney is concerned, none of that stuff counted to them either. But here we are at the end of a seven episode season of the first ever Boba Fett TV show that brought the character back from the dead and answered the siren call of a frothing fanbase desperate for more Boba Fett.
According to the series, Fett never actually died inside that sarlacc, and instead used tools that he’d normally use for bounty hunting — you know, the usual, like a flamethrower — to bust out of the thing. Because Boba Fett is a badass.
I was fine with a missing or dead Boba Fett. The less I knew about him, the better and more dangerous he was. He never spoke much, had the swagger of a spaghetti western protagonist, and he did crazy stuff like make big contract deals with guys in scarier masks than his. I can’t imagine too many bounty hunters worth their salt cared to go up against an institution that choked out its own commanding officers by the power of an ancient religion.
That’s all we knew about Boba Fett for a long time until George Lucas decided to give him a backstory that amounts to a cringeworthy reach where he’s a clone of a bounty hunter. And that bounty hunter was cloned into an army and part of his deal was to get his own clone. What the hell kind of bounty hunter 1) needs another mouth to feed and 2) wants to raise a child in that lifestyle? The retroactive exposition of Boba Fett was pretty stupid from the get-go.
Fast forward 20 years, and Disney+ is not only cranking out a series but now we’ve got a whole mythology for a culture that essentially emerged from a neat-looking costume design, and another “Boba Fett” who Boba Fetts better than Boba Fett. You know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about The Mandalorian, who brought good ol’ fashioned Star Wars back to life in the midst of an exhaustive sequel narrative that climbs the single branch of the Skywalker family tree and is never going to end.
The Mandalorian’s creators were chomping at the bit to get to that Boba Fett gold, and before the end of the show’s second season, yay, verily, at long last, Boba Fett made his appearance, yanking the Mandalorian’s show out from under him. Let’s not forget that the Mandalorian was competing for his own show that second season after already being upstaged by the appearance of Ahsoka Tano from The Clone Wars, and then ultimately the poor guy had to take up the table scraps left when Luke Skywalker and R2-D2 showed up at the very end of the season.
Then, at the very, very end of season two of The Mandalorian, Disney loaded up with a great big ol’ fistful of Boba Fett, ready to ram it down our throats by teasing its new series The Book of Boba Fett, which brings us to my problem.
All this build up and fan service to tease up a series that is surely a winning bet for slobbery fans, and when it finally arrives it could not be more boring. The promise of Boba Fett doing the coolest Boba Fett things in a serialized format, on a platform that turns on the money faucets for whatever they want to make, and we get a tired old man who wants to settle down on conceivably the boringest place in the galaxy: a desert planet, that for some reason people believe has enormous story potential — that appears in nearly every Star Wars movie, and when it doesn’t, there’s another couple of desert planets just in case we were afraid one wasn’t enough. And he wants to be the next Jabba the Hutt. What a snoozefest!
Most of the time when Boba Fett isn’t holed up in some empty room with his pal, the criminally underdeveloped and underused Fennec Shand, he’s walking around town expecting people to piss him off, or catching Zs in his bacta tank dreaming about all the cool stuff that happened to him after he beat up that sarlacc. The most interesting stuff in this series is shared through these dreamy flashbacks, revealing his time with the planet’s native Tusken Raiders, developing their culture. This is all terribly disappointing because it does so little to advance the story to be as compelling as it is.
The series goes on to deliver the masturbatory fan love with a useless appearance by Jabba the Hutt’s twin cousins (everyone in Star Wars is related, you know), a big ol’ Wookiee from the comics, and since he lives in Jabba’s old house, naturally, a rancor (delivered by a Danny Trejo in a very ill-fitting costume). Zzzzzzz.
But wait, there’s more. Just when you were feeling real sorry for the Mandalorian for having to give up a third of his series to set up this bore-o-rama, here he comes out of nowhere to drag The Book of Boba Fett out of the proverbial sarlacc pit!
In a jarring and distracting left turn, the show switches gears to catch us up on what the Mandalorian is up to after turning over little Grogu, a.k.a. Baby Yoda, to Luke Skywalker. I was hoping his story would be saved for the next season of his show instead of dragging him through this sand pile of a series. But here we are.
The Mandalorian’s appearance basically amounts to being filler for a team of creators that seemed to have realized that they’d written themselves into pretty listless territory and they needed not one, but two episodes of Mandalorian exposition to eek them into at least seven episodes. The Mandalorian’s first season was eight episodes, by the way, and they were starting from scratch with him. Lest we forget about the returning appearance of Luke Skywalker, R2-D2, and Baby Yoda, and Ahsoka Tano which comes across like foreplay at the end of a first date — they’re careful to do too much with deep fake Luke Skywalker but they want to make sure everyone gets a little more of it with the promise that even more Luke Skywalker could be on the way. It’s all very wantonly gratuitous.
After we’re forced to wade through a bunch of tedious rules about Mandalorian mythology — all droned off in self-important monotone by the mysterious Armorer who talks like the dullest parts of The Lord of the Rings and seems to be living in a boiler room — and setting up the reunion of the Mandalorian and Baby Yoda, the Mandalorian finally arrives to help out the Jimmy Carter of Tatooine, a.k.a. Boba Fett on his crusade to save a city? Run a city? I don’t know!
We may not be sure what Boba Fett is supposed to be doing, and for that matter, I’m not sure even Boba Fett knows what he’s supposed to be doing. But what I can tell you is instead of fleshing it out into a few more episodes absolutely cannot be an option when there is potential for this much Big Dick Energy in one place at the same time. The season finale of The Book of Boba Fett culminates in a confounding gunfight that includes our regulars but then drags in the Mandalorian’s obnoxious mechanic and a gang of half-cyborg misfits who were apparently set up just to beef up reinforcements for this finale. These weirdos were crying about not having money for water but ride around on tricked-out speeder bikes that look like they were designed by an eight-year-old with a short attention span.
Anyway, all of these characters are gathered in a gunfight against — *sigh* oh, for goodness sakes — the Lee Van Cleef of Star Wars, Cad Bane and his “syndicate,” and a couple of giant robots that can only be stopped one way. And if your guess isn’t Boba Fett riding a rancor in the Biggest Dick Energy, most ridiculous action sequence this side of Endor, then you’ve not been paying attention. After moping around for six and a half episodes, everyone in this show is suddenly the very best at all of it, and it’s one of the most obnoxious, juvenile, fan-fictiony spectacles you could imagine. You probably did imagine it, and that’s why we’re seeing it!
The execution of The Book of Boba Fett is the result of a lot of things, least of all being money and adding Disney+ subscribers — Star Wars people showed up for The Mandalorian and aren’t going anywhere. Instead, it’s a bet that its audience is willing to go wherever they’re taken, even if that journey is only an outlet for its creators who are also too zealous to know better, too zealous to leave well-enough alone, and driven only by moments instead of narratives that pay off in moments.
We all wanted this to be a cool show. And for some it’s the best. I’m not even insulted by its lack of narrative effort for the sake of extravagance. I’m not even disappointed in its contrived attempt to make Boba Fett interesting. What’s worse is, The Book of Boba Fett one more tooth-rotting indulgence in an entertainment landscape that is pure candy all the time. No one breathes. No one stops moving. No one sucks at anything. When they do, it’s not for pacing as much as it’s merely patchwork filler for getting to the next 20 straight minutes of eye candy.
What’s worse is, I’m indifferent to it.
