Empty Empire

The Book of Boba Fett, Season 1, Episode 1 - Stranger in a Strange Land

First of all: Happy Life Day! (It’s apparently today! I thought it was in January? I can’t keep track of Life Day!)

I started writing this Substack in 2022, just before the release of Obi-Wan Kenobi, so there’s a fair amount of Star Wars storytelling I haven’t directly responded to or covered, including the first two seasons of The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett.

I’ve always been drawn to the parts of Star Wars that were too-quickly dismissed. We often have surface-level, first pass reads on what we watch, give it a quick ‘good or bad’ assessment, wind up in the conversation windmill, and move on. I think it’s valuable to linger and reconsider; time makes us only wiser and adds data points and perspective.

So, as we’re awaiting The Mandalorian and Grogu and discussing Star Wars that never was, I’ve decided to dip back to 2021 and write about each episode of the Boba Fett series. I mean, who’s going to step in and tell me to stop? No one, that’s who. (Well, you might, but I’ll just let that go.)

The Book of Boba Fett was made during the height of the pandemic, lodged into between The Mandalorian Seasons 2 and 3. The quick and easy line about The Book of Boba Fett is that it’s ‘The Mandalorian Season 2.5,’ because it provides essential, unmissable parts of The Mandalorian story tucked inside its pages.

It’s only confusing if you overvalue all these numbers and titles. If you focus on the story, and only the story, it’s not complicated at all. Din Djarin, in his travels, crosses paths with Boba Fett and Fennec Shand, who initially seem like his foes, but eventually agree to help him recover his lost ward. When he successfully recovers The Child, he delivers Grogu into the arms of a Jedi named Luke Skywalker, fulfilling his quest to bring Grogu to safety.

After their tearful goodbye, we leave Din Djarin for a time and move onto the next part of the story, which is Boba Fett’s return to Tatooine, now with his armor and a companion. We learn how Fett returned from the brink of death and explain how he came to meet Din Djarin in the first place; and eventually these two Mandalorians come back together, reuniting against a common enemy and reconnecting Grogu and his adopted father. Din and Grogu leave Boba Fett on Tatooine, a leader with a tribe, and return to their adventures. It’s one big story with four seasons. Ignore the titles and watch it all in order, and it’s easy to follow.

Of course, when we all watched the first chapter of The Book of Boba Fett, Stranger in a Strange Land, we didn’t know what was to come, we could only respond to these introductory choices. We didn’t know what it would be, or where it would live in the timeline. (Apparently, most of the cast and crew thought they were filming The Mandalorian Season 3, too!)

There were seemingly three choices available for a Boba Fett standalone story. One could explain how Boba Fett, who died in Return of the Jedi, came to survive that experience and appear in The Mandalorian. Or, one could take the story forward, showing us how Boba Fett carries on from where we leave him at the end of The Mandalorian Season 2. Or, one could toss out the continuity with The Mandalorian altogether, and give us Boba Fett, the badass Bounty Hunter, on a mission for a big score.

We got two out of three. Here, we find Boba Fett flashing back and forth between his post-digestive adventures and his real-time adventures. (Real-time in Star Wars is always relative.) The signaling device for Boba Fett’s flashbacks, which include some for-the-fans recollections of Kamino and The Battle of Geonosis, is his personal bacta tank, which he returns to repeatedly. Being submerged in famously slow stomach acid will addict a man pretty quickly to floating in painkillers. (Should a future Star Wars film deal with bacta addiction? That’s one very topical premise free of charge!) The effect of this is to put us in two very different storytelling modes.

One is a rebirth, of sorts, as we see Temuera Morrison reenact Dances With Wolves among a tribe of Sand People. In this first episode, he’s stripped of his armor by Jawas, dragged into the desert, chained up and forced to dig for black melons, which are basically Tatooine’s natural water bottle. He attempts escape, but doesn’t earn the Tusken’s respect until he kills … I mean…this thing.

Which even the official Star Wars databank punted on naming: they just call it a Tatooine sand beast.

This is basically a Ray Harryhausen tribute band. It’s cool as well, but it’s hunting methods and it’s evolutionary imperatives are pretty mystifying. It just kind of waits in the sand until someone trips over it and then it goes Lizard Centaur on their ass. Which: okay! If there’s sound in space, there’s this thing. I’m on board.

In the other story, real-time, Boba Fett has taken over Jabba’s Palace and declared himself the new “Daimyo," a term lifted from shogun era Japan that appears for the very first time in a television show that debuted 40 years after we first meet the Hutts. (Insert joke here about Jabba’s death being an exquisite corpse.) He and Fennec Shand have this title because 1) they killed Bib Fortuna and 2) have taken up residence in Jabba’s Palace.

Their declaration of dominion feels, and looks, a little empty.

First of all, no one voted on this, and if you’re going to be a crime boss other people have to kind of buy in. Second, the Palace isn’t filled to the brim with sycophants. Jim Henson’s creature shop has cleared out in the post-Empire era. It’s essentially filled with crickets. There are two Gamorrean Guards and a droid voiced by Matt Berry and…that’s it. The whole thing feels a little haunted or posthumous. (Hard to say if this emptiness is thematic or Covid-19 driven or a little bit of both.)

There’s more to being in charge than sitting in a chair and saying so. So the duo take to the streets of beautifully rendered Mos Espa, and tell a few folks to pay them tribute. They go to see Garsa Fwip, played by everyone’s dream boat from the 80s Jennifer Beals, and get treated to some Twi’lek hospitality. (It’s a lot livelier there than Jabba’s Palace of echoes.) After getting their helmets filled with coins, they walk out into an plain-view ambush that includes some laser shields, a little parkour, and a lot of zapping. These ninjas are not good at the shadow-part of their job.

The fun part here is that Boba Fett gets a big “BOOM” sound every time he lays down the law on someone and beats them with a stick. It’s very satisfying and very Robert Rodriquez. And, what can I say, I love seeing things happen on the streets of Tatooine. There’s very little that feels more Star Wars than Tatooine itself, and it’s a well-choreographed scuffle. It doesn’t match watching Boba Fett slaughter a battalion of stormtroopers in “The Tragedy,” from Mando Season 2, but it’s got its charms.

There is, though, a kind of leisurely pace to all this. There’s stuff here that many fans have clamored for for decades (including, hilariously, the heeded superfan Patton Oswalt) and it doesn’t disappoint on those fronts. Boba Fett’s escape from the Sarlacc is gooey and visceral and campy in the very best way. And it’s wonderful to see Temuera Morrison, who is such an important part of Star Wars lore, really get to sink his teeth into the character.

But he’s not quite fearsome in this incarnation, not yet. We’re seeing a man of honor, who doesn’t want to rule with fear, politely take advice and pointedly not be terrifying. Plus, when he’s confronted with physical danger, gets knocked around, he gets taken right to floating healing bed, which is also not very imposing. He’s like “ouch take me to my room!” It’s like we’re meeting Boba Fett who is trying to play the video game with half his heart meter filled up.

There’s also an archness to the proceedings. For a criminal network, the Mos Espa intramural crime organizations feels like it cannot use contractions. It’s very courtly. Maybe that’s what makes it all work? But there’s quite a lot of “I didn’t see your liter!” and “My apologies!” The underworld could feel grimy and filled with dangerous people, but mostly, Boba Fett’s dealings are quite formal.

It was, as a first episode, a weird and wild first step into the first (and so far only) standalone Boba Fett story, and entirely unexpected. I think most of us, over the years, expected a Boba Fett series to be a look at scum and villainy of the galaxy far, far away; filled with action and brutality and shadows.

That’s not what the first episode offered, really. This is well-lit, above board, and a whole lot of walking and talking. Plus, the parallel stories aren’t intercut with each other, they more or less interrupt one another. Which makes it feel like we’re watching two shows fight for time on screen.

This all reminds me of the first time I saw The Phantom Menace. Most people had anticipated the first Star Wars film in many years to feel like another quickly paced, quippy chase scene and got something else entirely. It took time for people to appreciate the movie on its own terms, because it dashed expectations.

The Book of Boba Fett’s first episode isn’t the Boba Fett we were waiting for, but it was the Boba Fett story that made sense given what had come before. We’re told how Boba Fett survived and came to be the man we meet at the end of the second season of The Mandalorian; and who he is becoming now.

Explanation is often (but not always) less thrilling than mystery. It’s the double-edged sword of wish-fulfillment. So, yes, this was not the Boba Fett I imagined when I first met him in Star Wars Episode V, way back in 1980. This wasthe Boba Fett who resulted in decades of storytelling choices, all of which made him more sympathetic, more real, less defined by a look, and more defined by a man and a performance.

Maybe Stranger in a Strange Land is most apt for this reason: this Boba Fett feels like someone who is a stranger to our expectations. We’re meeting him, really, for the first time. We’ve gotten windows into him as a mask, as a part of other people’s stories. But who is he really? This is where we found out.

There’s so much more to come, and I can’t wait to dive into the epic second episode: The Tribes of Tatooine!

Thanks for reading, as always!