By Jackson Wedel, Staff Writer
Making a show about Boba Fett would have been a difficult task no matter the circumstances. The Star Wars character became such a fan favorite not because of his deep characterization or interesting connection to the storyline, but because he simply has a cool design. In fact, in the original Star Wars trilogy, Boba has exactly four lines of dialogue: hardly something that could make for an engaging protagonist.
A show like Disney+’s The Book of Boba Fett, centering on the iconic bounty hunter, had to simultaneously live up to the character’s legendary reputation while also inventing a personality that never existed in the first place.
The series picks up where the second season of The Mandalorian left off: Boba Fett (played by Temuera Morrison), along with his fellow bounty hunter Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen), attempts to become the new reigning crime lord on the planet Tatooine. Intermittent flashbacks depict how Boba survived his apparent demise in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, revealing how the hardships he faced forced him to evolve as a human being.
On paper, this sounds like a genuinely compelling concept for a Boba Fett series. Depicting Boba as a burgeoning crime lord allows him to genuinely struggle as a character in a way that portraying him in his element as a talented bounty hunter would never allow for. Moreover, it has the added benefit of distinguishing the show’s premise from that of The Mandalorian, which follows a very similar stoic armored bounty hunter. Meanwhile, the flashbacks not only provide a much-needed follow-up to Boba’s last movie appearance, but also allows him to develop as a character, giving him the necessary emotional range to lead a series.
Moreover, the show does tap into some of this potential. Boba Fett finally feels vaguely like a human being, rather than a glorified action figure, thanks to the powerful character development he undergoes here. Although the present-day storyline is messier, it is still packed with entertaining moments that fully embrace the character’s origins as a “space cowboy” archetype. In particular, I thought it handled fanservice exceptionally well: while characters from other Star Wars shows and even comics appeared, they were usually handled in a manner that contributed to the tone of the series and that could still be appreciated even if you didn’t know their origins.
Unfortunately, the structure of the show leaves something to be desired. While the flashbacks provide a solid narrative connection to Boba’s character development, they are incredibly uneven: some episodes center almost entirely on flashbacks, while others rarely feature them. Meanwhile, the crime lord plotline feels jerky and stilted: there isn’t enough of a central conflict to drive these sequences until the third or fourth episode, and the somewhat disjointed nature of the series leaves every episode feeling disconnected from the others, forcing the series to tie absolutely everything together in its admittedly entertaining finale.
The most egregious instance of the show’s structure actively sabotaging itself comes with its fifth and sixth episodes. These episodes focus on a completely different character, whose journey is not relevant at all to Boba’s storylines. In fact, Boba Fett, the protagonist and titular character of the series, does not appear at all in his show’s fifth episode, and has a very minimal presence in the sixth. To be perfectly fair to these episodes, they are absolutely fantastic pieces of standalone Star Wars media. But as episodes of The Book of Boba Fett, they are frankly incomprehensible. While a “side story” like this might be excusable in a long-running show, Boba Fett only has seven episodes, meaning that almost 30% of the series completely sidelines its protagonist.
Because the show spends so much time on completely unrelated storylines, it feels like the narrative lacks the space it needs to grow and develop. While lots of compelling storylines are introduced and set up, most of them are simply not fleshed-out enough – something that those two “wasted” episodes could have easily been better used for.
For instance, the series flirts with the idea that in order to fully redeem himself, Boba must face and fully reject his unscrupulous past. However, that concept is primarily established through other characters talking about Boba – he is never actually given the time to reflect on those aspects of himself, turning an otherwise-interesting character beat into an afterthought.
Thankfully, and as expected from Star Wars, the technical elements of the show are all top-notch. Even though individual episodes have far lower budgets than a full movie would, the special effects all feel realistic and well-integrated into the world. The set design, too, is a strong point, perfectly replicating the aesthetic of Tatooine from the original Star Wars movies while simultaneously expanding upon it.
Finally, the score, written by Mandalorian composer Ludwig Göransson, is phenomenal, once again abandoning Star Wars’ traditionally orchestral soundtrack in favor of the more modern sound that made The Mandalorian stand out as a “new era”.
Ultimately, while The Book of Boba Fett is certainly not a bad show, it could have been so much stronger than what it ended up as. It seems like all the building blocks necessary to make a strong Boba Fett series were in place, but they simply lacked the necessary narrative and thematic ties to bring them all together into one cohesive whole. The show’s end result is a rather messy, but enjoyable jumble of ideas that never seem to build on each other.
Perhaps it was inevitable that a show centered around such an empty character would likewise be a little messy, but it is nevertheless slightly disappointing that it was so close to being a great series.