I think it’s fair to say that my reaction to The Book of Boba Fett was never going to be unbiased. Like many Star Wars fans I was immediately snared by his cool armor in the films and stuck around for the “Legends” content that came after before Disney swept every non-film/TV show off the table for the sake of building their own universe. There we saw Fett surviving his unglamorous end in the Sarlacc Pit and continuing his bounty hunting adventures for many more years, as well as some looks into his time before the fall of the Empire and everything in between. So yes, I’m a fan of the character; and as a fan I was as excited as anyone else to see Fett’s return in The Mandalorian and him picking up his own spin-off, even more so when it was such uncharted territory as Fett taking over a criminal empire. After all, the titular Mandalorian is essentially filling the role of the T-visored, man-of-few-words bounty hunter, so it was a good idea to send Fett in a different direction.
Unfortunately that’s the only good decision the show made, and it’s such a misfire in every conceivable direction that I’m writing this almost as a form of self-care to properly organize everything that I hated about The Book of Boba Fett (which will hereafter just be “Book” unless I feel like being even more wordy). For the sake of said organization I’ll be breaking complaints into categories, which I hope will also highlight that Book has more problems than just not being about the Fett that people have seen in Legends for the last thirty years. There will be spoilers of various severity, though I will try to be as vague as possible when referencing specific characters isn’t necessary to make my point. Let’s strap in.
Disconnects from reality
There’s a strange clash in Book between what we have come to understand about the Star Wars universe and the characters within it and what Book tries to present within its own story. There’s a lot of examples that I can slot in this section but let’s start with one that is present throughout the show: Jabba’s criminal empire. Jabba the Hutt essentially ran Tatooine, with enough resources to field an army of mercenaries and enough credits to put one of the biggest bounties of all time out on Han Solo’s head. Bib Fortuna then, as far as we can tell, ran the entire planet without much trouble for the next five years, ostensibly using the same resources and manpower that Jabba had for however many decades he controlled the planet. But suddenly Fett shows up in a hostile takeover and Jabba’s empire for some reason is completely out of men who are willing to work for the top organization around and we’re just supposed to buy that this lack of manpower is a normal thing for a criminal empire that runs AN ENTIRE PLANET.
This lack of resources or infrastructure is further established in the final episode where Fett’s “forces” are keeping watch across the city and it’s literally just a dozen people, two of which are bounty hunters that Fett paid for with his self-described “lot of credits.” Fett should have all of his considerable resources from decades of bounty hunting PLUS any leftover wealth that Fortuna and Jabba had in their criminal enterprise, and yet he can only hire a pair of people as outside muscle? And yet he has NO ONE ELSE IN HIS EMPLOY when he enters the final stage of a gang war? Maybe we’re supposed to believe that everyone working under Jabba in the past was a member of those other criminal organizations that Fett tried to convince to stay neutral, but that doesn’t hold much water since no one stays at the top of the criminal food chain by having the least amount of guns compared to his rivals/”business partners.” Fennec mentions to Fett once that a good part of their revenue comes from spice trading, but who’s trading the spice for Fett’s new empire? Where are the guards making sure the spice isn’t stolen? Where are the “dealers” who are standing on street corners selling spice? Where are the spice dens? Where is EVERYTHING that would show we actually have our main character running a criminal organization rather than just him walking down the streets telling everyone his name? The final shot of Book before the obligatory post-credits teaser is on a group of about eight people standing around as the camera pulls away, basking in their hard fought victory and new status as the sole power on Tatooine, but how in the hell are we supposed to believe that three reasonable fighters and half a bike gang can run an entire planet, much less the city they’re standing in?
Oh god, the Mods bike gang. There’s a lot of weird, out of place, unnecessary stuff in the Star Wars universe but the Mods gang has to be on or near the top of the list, especially in this post-Legends Disney universe that has retconned things like that time Star Wars was Warhammer 40k for a few hundred years. So the writers/director/whoever wanted to put a little cyberpunk into their Star Wars, and there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just that the Mods are so visually out of place that it looks like they fell in from another universe. Nothing on Tatooine is so clean, colorful, and well maintained as the Mods and their bikes, and it leads one to ask how much money they have to constantly polish and buff all the sand and grime from the planet that covers literally everything else out of those shiny bikes. They would have been perfectly at home in a slightly more well-to-do area of Nar Shaddaa or a middling level of Coruscant, but Tatooine is the worst place for colorful fancy dressers and they remind you of that every time they’re on screen. Not to mention that they were part of the worst “car” chases in modern history in the third episode.
The action scenes in the show in general follow this theme of just not following any established in-universe logic, or really logic of any kind. From the very first action scene where Fett is surrounded and just gets poked awkwardly for a few minutes to the final scene where one character “draws the fire” of an enemy from another character while standing right next to them, it feels like the action is written for different characters or just vaguely described on the page and then the director (Robert Rodriguez in all of the above instances and more to follow) hacks it together rather than thinking about the scene for more than two minutes. Fett and Din just standing in the middle of street getting shot from all directions in the final episode is another such scene, where both fighters are wearing some amount of nigh-invulnerable armor but they also have been shown to utilize cover when they aren’t acting as some sort of distraction or have some other objective in mind, yet they don’t for whatever reason in this particular instance. There’s a few other examples I have on my list, like weapons not being able to destroy a wall when they can blow up an armored car, a crowd of people running away from someone shooting at them them in a straight line and never being shot, etc. but then I’d just be writing out every moment of the final episode and we’ve got to move on.
Much like the Mod’s bikes there was another vehicle that was added to the show mostly just to sell toys without any actual logical sense: Din’s new ship, a Naboo B-wing. Don’t get me wrong, I also liked seeing it again, with its classic noises and nice visual design that essentially just disappeared after Phantom Menace, but it’s completely useless for Din’s needs. We saw in the very first episode of The Mandalorian that Din hunts in bulk, with at least a half dozen bounties that he froze and delivered at a time, but the B-wing can only fit at most two people including Din himself. Never mind supplies or bathrooms, since most trips through hyperspace can take hours if not longer so a lack of cargo space, transport ability, and basic utilities means the ship is completely impractical for Din unless all he’s going to do is short planet hops for straight mercenary work in season three. But hey, who cares about logic and practicality when we can sell toys?! None of these problems seem to occur to Din however, so maybe he’s got some stock investments in Disney’s toy market.
Fett is completely removed from the character he’s been set up to be
Characterizing Boba Fett without referencing his appearances in the Legends canon was pretty difficult until recently, considering he was basically a non-entity for twenty years, but there has been a big push of Fett content in the comics recently and of course George Lucas himself expanded on Fett in the prequels. Thanks to Attack of the Clones and the Clone Wars CGI show we know that he’s a suspicious child that’s hung up on the death of his father and must have some sort of leadership or strategic abilities since he was able to organize several groups of bounty hunters and also plan an assassination attempt on Mace Windu despite being less than fifteen years old. In the comics post-Disney we’ve seen that he’s a man of self-image that will hunt down people that slighted him to keep his reputation intact, torture people in public to intimidate a crowd, kick people to death, set wookiees on fire, tie people up in harsh environments and leave them to die, etc etc etc. Basically exactly what a brutal bounty hunter that has to be told “no disintegrations” by Darth Vader would be expected to do, not to mention that the lead into Book was him shooting Bib Fortuna without any warnings or threats before casting his body aside to assume his throne. So this is who we have as a baseline for Fett going into his show, and this is not who Fett was at all during The Book of Boba Fett.
Let’s start with Fett’s naivete when it comes to being a crime boss. Admittedly this is Fett’s first attempt at running an organization rather than being an independent contractor, but Fett has also been involved in this business for twenty years so he should have some idea about how to get things done or at the very least have any measure of common sense. Sadly common sense goes right out the window in the third episode where he has no one guarding him while he sleeps in his bacta tank despite it being completely obvious the Hutts are going to try to have him killed. This not only highlights my earlier point about Fett having absolutely no manpower at his command but also should have ended the show immediately if the wookiee being sent to kill him actually started with the arm ripping like any good wookiee should. Then later Fett completely ignores the first rule of dealing with criminals (have leverage over them) and just takes the other gang leaders at their word that they won’t side against him despite them saying they were seeing a benefit in doing it just one minute earlier. These are not the actions of a man who knows how the galaxy’s hives of scum and villainy work, this is a guy who started working at Amazon two days ago and then was told he had to run an entire warehouse by himself.
Though to be fair to Fett it doesn’t seem like the rest of the galaxy knows who he is either. Boba Fett is supposed to be the Darth Vader of the underworld, the man that everyone sees when he walks into a room and everyone hopes he isn’t going to walk over to your table. He’s the archetype gunslinger that walks into an office and is told that the boss can’t see him by a busy flunky behind a desk, only for the person to look up and see who’s standing in front of him and immediately letting him in. I’m dipping a little into Legends here but there’s enough in post-Disney comics to paint him like this as well, and instead absolutely no one is impressed or intimidated by him in Book, with anyone who does seem to respect him paying more heed to the throne he’s sitting on (a throne which seems to have no real power behind it given Fett’s lack of resources) than the man who’s on it. All of this can be handwaved away with any number of excuses, most notably that it’s been five years since Return of the Jedi and people may have “forgotten” about Fett in that time, but there’s one line in particular that makes me think we’re walking back on everything Fett is supposed to be, both in Legends and new canon: “I knew you were a killer.”
Every time I think of that line, a line delivered as Fett stands over a fallen enemy that just tried to kill him, I feel my brain do a cartwheel. What is that even supposed to mean? You think a guy that needs to be told “no disintegrations” doesn’t kill people? A guy who murdered his predecessor in cold blood to claim his empire? A guy who just killed an entire legion of goons not twenty minutes ago? To further force my brain into going for a spin there’s a line the same character says a moment earlier to Fett: “You tried to go straight.” Excuse me? How is taking over a criminal empire “going straight?” Even if we just take the actions of Fett’s new “job” based on only what we see in the show he’s still accepted dozens of bribes, threatened people who refused to bribe him, threatened people who refused to listen to him, ran an organization that sells spice and probably other drugs, and had the mayor of a nearby town assassinated. What are they talking about and why is THIS the direction they decided to take to redeem/whitewash Boba Fett? No character in-universe would have any reason to say these things and I can’t believe any writer thought these lines made any sense.
The failures of flashbacks
There are a lot of people that say they like this show, of course, and for many of them it’s the same reason that people have warmed up to the Star Wars prequels in the last decade: they appreciate “the intent” of the product rather than the final result. So let’s look at “the intent” of the show, specifically that it’s supposedly a story about how Boba Fett becomes disillusioned about his past deeds and being a bounty hunter in general after almost dying, so he decides to “be his own boss” at the top of the food chain and “rule through respect rather than fear” as he keeps telling everyone that will listen. Fair enough, there have been plenty of stories about “bad man suffers traumatic event and decides to reform himself” and there’s certainly room for that in the Star Wars universe. Unfortunately there is never any lead up or development to this, it’s just “what he decides to do” one day off camera and then mentions it to Fennec after they hung out for a week.
The problem here is that you can’t just spontaneously have a character move from one point to another at the drop of a hat, the character and the audience needs to travel to this point together to both save the audience from getting lost and having the character feel like they have actually transitioned into their new morals/personality/viewpoint. Boba Fett never goes through that, and I think that the showrunners thought he did in his flashbacks but there just aren’t enough of them and they aren’t delivered in the right way to weave together this new character for Fett. He goes from being someone who disintegrates people and breaks their arms to get his way to “let’s sit at a table and pinkie promise not to backstab me” after living with the Tuskens for four years, but never has an onscreen moment of self reflection or anything that shows why he’s decided that verbal agreements are better than his previous methods.
I hate to sink to this point but I think I have to start comparing Book to Arrow, a CW show about the DC super hero Green Arrow. Much like Book, Arrow is a show about a guy that goes through a traumatic event and spends the next four to five years going through a transformation to someone different than he was before, which is shown to us through (lengthy) flashbacks. However Arrow has a slightly easier job of it because they were transforming a weak guy who never had to work a day in his life to a hardened killer, along with a very clear mission statement of “this is how I became a monster,” plus they had twenty-four episodes a season to work with. Book has five episodes (technically seven but we’ll get to that) and while it does commit most of those episodes to these trips to the past the flashbacks themselves are more about action events than moments where Fett actually comes to terms with his past and future. Fett almost dies, Fett fights a monster, Fett fights a train, Fett gets a stick, Fett gets his ship, the flashbacks transition from moment to moment with hard transitions, completely blowing through four years of Fett’s character development without taking the time to actually show it because they only have five episodes to work with.
This highlights multiple problems with using flashbacks as exposition devices. Flashbacks are, by definition, not the main force of the story and are instead establishing vehicles to inform the audience about things in the present, generally as a framing device to show how we got where we are or why a character is the way they are. Ozark does some great stuff with their flashbacks where we sometimes open with a scene that is actually the end of the episode and then lead back into it throughout the rest of the run time, but it’s always informative as to why we are where we are. Book never has this informative moment outside of Fett’s fireside comment to Fennec, and even then that’s just “I want to run this planet because working for Jabba almost killed me” and no other clarification of Fett’s change of heart. Depending how many shows with less than ten episodes you watch you may have noticed that many of them feel like they rush their conclusion, with a strong build up that suddenly needs to check fifteen boxes in the last episode before running out the door, but Book is one of the few bad shows that I didn’t have that feeling about because rather than rushing out the ending they rushed through everything that explains why our main character is the way he is before having a very drawn out ending.
Would Book have been better with more episodes? Maybe. A little more inner reflection, a little more demonstration about why in the universe Fett thinks that mutual respect is the way to make the underworld work wouldn’t have gone amiss. They could have had a scene showing how the Tuskens kept peace with other elements out in the desert that “inspires” Fett in some way, or maybe given us an actual explanation for why he hates spice so much. Can we talk about that for a second? This is a show that specifically ignores every other character trait that Legends Fett had established about himself over the last twenty plus years of written material but the ONE THING it latches onto as a point of characterization is a short story from Tales of the Bounty Hunters where Fett is a Judge Dredd wannabe that hates all crime and Han Solo especially because he was running spice for Jabba. It’s a short story that is never mentioned again, probably due to both the hypocrisy of working for the very crime lords that sell spice and Fett lecturing Leia about the sins of premarital sex, but it’s such a central part of this story that is never explained that I have to imagine that the showrunners just assume we should all know Fett hates spice. Sort of how they just assume we all know that Fett’s jetpack is controlled through his helmet and that’s why he didn’t fly away during the fight in the first episode, even though in the canon comics it’s shown to at least partially work through his gauntlets.
Someone else’s show
There were a lot of articles written about Book taking a two-episode hiatus to bring us Mandalorian season 2.5, with most praising the episodes as a fun diversion but criticizing their impact on the show as a whole. There’s definitely something to be said for narrative consistency, and the show taking two episodes away from the titular character to catch us up on and progress a story from another show bothered a lot of people, especially those Mandalorian fans that were skipping Book and now had to re-up their Disney+ subscription to watch three episodes. Most of this didn’t bother me though, since it’s unfortunately a part of the shared cinematic universes we watch now that sometimes characters will have important, impactful moments in other shows, which every Guardians of the Galaxy fan that skipped the last two Avengers movies will learn soon enough. And while it would have been nice for the show to have at least a few more episodes to fully explore Fett’s development it was also nice to take a break from Fett’s amateur hour Sopranos and go on a few adventures outside of Tatooine.
No, my big problem was how they reset to the status quo for Din and Grogu rather than giving those characters more time apart to develop and actually pay off the ending of Mandalorian season 2. Obviously their reunion was inevitable, after all half the people watching Mandalorian only tune in to see the Grogu puppet do silly things, but their heartfelt separation at the end of season 2 loses all impact when they were apart for less than three episodes. It feels like this was just the duration of a summer break more than a long absence in Din’s life, and it’s especially irritating in that it essentially gave almost no payoff to the journey we went on in Mandalorian, turning a moment that could have helped both characters grow independently to literally a “the real tribe is the tribe we choose” message. Season three could have been about Din and Grogu growing as characters apart from each other (Grogu especially since he’s still just a comical puppet), but instead it seems like it’ll just be Din trying his hardest to get back into his helmet cult while flying the most impractical personal ship of all time.
It’s also rather aggravating to see how Grogu made his choice to return, as it wasn’t a choice that he stood up and made on his own and was instead forced upon him by Luke. As a fan of Last Jedi I sort of appreciate they’re being accurate to Luke trying too hard to follow the worn out pre-Empire Jedi ways that failed his father, though I will admit I miss the Legends Jedi Academy where Luke was a little more loose with the rules. However I don’t care for how this “you have to choose right now if you want your adopted dad or a lightsaber” took away any sort of decision Grogu could have gotten to on his own. Maybe this is a limitation of him being a voiceless puppet and the writers decided they needed to feed him in this direction rather than have it come up organically, but on the other hand it’d be hilarious if this was some sort of canonical thing that Jedi make all children with clingy parents go through during their training. “Okay, Mace. You can either take this box of chocolates your mom sent you and get the hell out of this temple, or you can have this sweet lightsaber.”
I really don’t know what the answer is here. More episodes to explore and payoff Fett’s apparent personality adjustment might have been a good starting point, but maybe the entire premise was flawed from the start. Fett’s actions and approach to trying to run Tatooine come off more as that of a self-appointed sheriff trying to clean up a broken town than any sort of crime boss, particularly if viewed through the lens of the Star Wars universe. Crime bosses in Star Wars have always been shown to be violent, intimidating, and cruel individuals that back stab and betray for their own self interest, while Fett goes around pushing verbal contracts, anti-drug policies, friendship with the natives, and even “deputizes” the youth so that they stop causing trouble in the city. The problem is that you’d never be able to sell the idea of “Boba Fett decides to make Tatooine a nice place because he’s a good person now,” even with a super in-depth change of heart montage, so we instead have this bastardized half measure where Fett seizes control of a criminal empire and then just sort of bumbles his way through everything by saying he’s a Daimyo and grumbling about spice while declaring that the citizens of the planet are “his people.” Obviously if you like The Mandalorian you should watch the last three episodes if only to get caught up on Din and Grogu’s storyline, but there’s no reason to watch the rest as it’s just a confusing mess of a show that doesn’t even know what it wants to be.
