Review: ‘The Book of Boba Fett’ - Chapter 1: Stranger in a Strange Land

By the time I’d gotten around to watching the pilot of The Book of Boba Fett, social media had already told me it was terrible. It was a filler. It looked like a bad fan-made film, and that writer/director Jon Favreau had no idea what he was doing.

I like having my expectations not only grounded, but buried, because it means I am not holding a property to some lofty standard that it is unlikely to meet. But I have to not only admit, but profess, that I liked the pilot. A lot.

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A Basic Summary

We learn how Boba escaped the Sarlacc pit, watch Jawas strip him of his armor, and see him captured by Tusken Raiders, aka. the Sand People. An ill-fated escape attempt sees him recaptured. He wakes, and we see he is recuperating in a bacta tank in the present day. He mentions to Fennec Shand that the dreams are back.

They host a succession of guests who pay tribute to Boba now that he is the new crime daimyo. We learn there is a bit of political maneuvering going on. There are some nifty callbacks to Return of the Jedi. It is all place-setting.

After one meeting at the local casino, Boba and Fennec are returning to Jabba’s palace when they are ambushed. With the help of Jabba's former guards, they fight the attackers off. Fennec, upon Boba’s instruction, captures one of the assailants alive. Boba, injured, is deposited back in the bacta tank. He then dreams of what happened with the Tusken Raiders. This has a satisfying pay-off, which signals the end of the episode.

Thirty-eight minutes. That is all it took to do all that.

Boba Fett

Boba exists in this nexus. What made him special in The Empire Strikes Back is that he is a masked badass. He has stature. He has mystique. He is the bounty hunter who caught Han Solo. When you first see him, he is like a souped-up stormtrooper. If we do look under the mask, we see that he is just some guy.

The prequels offer us something surprising. Boba is a clone of Jango Fett, ostensibly, his son. Boba watches Mace Windu decapitate Jango, and later grieves while holding the iconic helmet close to his face. This is a gruesome thing for a kid to go through, so you could accept Boba becoming who he is– a cold-hearted, single-minded bounty hunter who honors his father by wearing his armor. He is the exception to the clones. He is the one clone who took his own path, and forged a reputation.

Ideologically, he is what the stormtroopers should have been.

Disney’s Strategy

Most of the Disney Star Wars series are based on ancillary characters, people who have been bit players. (The exception, so far, is Obi-Wan Kenobi.) How much do we want to know their stories?

Somebody like Ahsoka Tano is a live-action blank slate, so it is easier to build her as a character without undermining anybody’s expectations. For the most part, we do not have any. Her appearance in The Mandalorian is a good example. We watch her with no preconceptions.

Boba, though? We carry a lot of baggage. Some of it is canonical, some of it is an interpretation, and some of it is a projection. The projection is the danger.

The Pilot

The pilot, “Stranger in a Strange Land,” has to begin at Boba’s original trilogy ending: falling into the Sarlacc pit in Return of the Jedi, where (according to C-3PO’s translation), it will take over “a thousand years” to be digested.

The story begins with Boba’s escape. The thread continues to unravel in the past, and involve him losing his armor (we know this would happen thanks to The Mandalorian), and dealing with the Sand People.

This is an interesting choice. The pilot, and presumably, the season, tracks two narrative arcs. One is in the past and follows Return of the Jedi. The other is in the present, and follows the conclusion of The Mandalorian Season 2 when Boba has deposed Bib Fortuna and taken Jabba’s position as a crime lord. I imagine the writers have decided that Boba needs some past arc to keep him occupied while the events of Return of the Jedi are unfolding, otherwise you would expect him to go straight back after Han Solo and the others.

In the present, we see him healing in a bacta tank, and beginning his criminal reign in Mos Espa. Boba then remarks that Jabba ruled with fear, while he intends to rule with respect, an attempt to humanize him and make him relatable to the audience, rather than leave him an uncaring mercenary.

Limited Series Format

The problem with many limited series nowadays is they play like an extended movie, i.e. a ten hour movie broken down into ten one-hour episodes. That means it is also paced like a movie. The first 15- 20% (roughly the first episode-and-a-half, depending on length) is the first act, introducing us to the characters, the universe, and the circumstances, and then disrupting them with whatever sets the character on their journey. The Book of Boba Fett is supposed to have only seven episodes. I would assume the episodes are of grossly varying lengths, as in The Mandalorian. There, Chapter 14 is just 32 minutes, and Chapter 9 is 52 minutes, while the other chapters range somewhere in between. The varying lengths brings unpredictability to episodic storytelling (as long as you are not checking how much time is left) because you cannot rely on your internal gauge to measure the pace. It is not like you can look at the clock and think, "Oh, it's 8.30! This has to finish in five minutes!"

I mention this because critics need to keep in mind that “Stranger in a Strange Land” is just the opening act, introducing us to the universe (as it functions here in Tatooine), the characters, and the circumstances.

It is not meant to do much more than that.

The Greater Story

I am curious what this will be in The Book of Boba Fett. The Mandalorian began by grounding us in the Mandalorian’s world and introducing a mystery of Baby Yoda (as we knew him originally). Occasionally, it did intentionally feel like a travelogue to familiarize us with how the Star Wars universe looks at this time. Let’s not forget, before The Mandalorian screened, we knew how the story had ended in the original trilogy, and how it looked in the sequel trilogy, but not what occurred between the two.

As The Mandalorian went on, we learned who Grogu was, how he fit into the bigger scheme of galactic conflict, and watched the Mandalorian Din Djarin bond with him. We went from a small story about a mercenary finding his humanity to a bigger story about political machinations within the remnants of the Empire and super weapons.

My initial belief was that The Book of Boba Fett might be like The Sopranos in space, and give us an insight into the Tatooine underworld. However, upon reflection, I realize that is unlikely the story’s primary goal. Boba already sits on the underworld throne. He will undoubtedly meet resistance, and his morals will be tested. There will be some grander arc. This little chunk of Tatooine will likely find relevance in the galactic conflict. What does that mean for Boba and Fennec Shand?

Boba’s Journey

As much as purists want to preserve Boba’s mystique, or hold onto preconceptions, the reality is that they have already been shattered. Boba is the clone who was being brought up individually rather than as part of the collective. He had obviously led a violent life, undergone a horrific rebirth, punching his way out of the Sarlacc pit. It was like he was the author of his own caesarian birth with the Jawas stripping him, and bringing him as naked and defenseless as a baby into this world. He is now Boba in reputation only.

His path now will only take him further and further from everything we have known about him and held dear. This is not necessarily a bad thing as long as it is justified and motivated.

Too often, writers who inherit characters force change to shock audiences like it is a daring portrayal. The journey then becomes about resetting the character to what we expected. It is shlock storytelling. We want organic growth. We want to believe that when we rejoin our characters we can believe who they have become.

Cobra Kai is a good parallel. That story began thirty-five years after we left Daniel (Ralph Macchio) and Johnny (William Zabka) in The Karate Kid. Did we project Daniel would become a smarmy yuppy who owns a car dealership and that Johnny would be a heavy drinking divorcee working as an unreliable handyman? Well, no. The writers did such a good job extrapolating who they became as adults (and why), and we accepted it. We could totally believe the characters we knew all those years ago became the characters portrayed in Cobra Kai. We bought in, and Cobra Kai became a hit.

We can accept that Boba is this aging bounty hunter just plodding through life. You just have to look at his armor in The Empire Strikes Back to understand he has seen a lot of action, and a lot of wear and tear. The reality is if this was the Old West, a younger, faster gunslinger would have probably taken him out as a means of brand-building. Boba cannot be this frozen icon. That time has passed. He has the opportunity to become something more than what we have known about him. None of this betrays anything that has come before. It is about asking ourselves if we can believe this is where he is coming to in his life.

As a starting point, I believe the pilot did its job. It was not some mindless action-packed extravaganza, although the action it did employ was meaningful. Boba's victory in the past earned him the respect of the Sand People. His fight in the present shows us hat he is older, slower, and it looks like he is carrying a chronic injury, which explains the reliance on the bacta tank.

The pilot did not depict Boba as some one-dimensional mercenary, essentially his entire role in The Empire Strikes Back (that is not a criticism: that is what the story required of him), who simply kept his helmet on and out-gunned his enemies. He is not a Mandalorian who lives by the Mandalorian code. He is a product of environment, a clone who grew up father-less, became a bounty hunter, and then had to rebuild his life following an epic failure. The pilot put the pieces in place to tell the story it needs to tell. Now, whether it does that successfully remains to be seen.

In terms of setting up its universe, I believe it succeeded.

Jon Favreau

I am an unashamed fan of writers and directors who understand the universe they are inheriting, and can do something new while remaining true to the spirit and integrity of their property. There is plenty of scope for originality, creativity, and subversion while remaining true to the integrity of existing characters and the universes they occupy.

Jon Favreau has shown his capacity to understand, interpret, and represent various properties – from his work on Elf (2003) to beginning the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Iron Man (2008), and then, of course, his foray into Star Wars with The Mandalorian. The Mandalorian also illustrates that Favreau is content to play a long game, rather than going for quick gratification. Favreau’s arc surrounding Grogu spans two seasons (sixteen episodes). Condemning The Book of Boba Fett on a 38-minute pilot may be a tad premature.

We all appreciate that Disney’s forays on to the big screen have polarized the Star Wars fanbase. I, admittedly, am not a fan of the sequel trilogy.

My attitude with all these properties is I will no longer blindly invest, but neither will I unthinkingly condemn. I will give them a chance. I want them to succeed because I want more of good storytelling in these universes I love. However, they have to win me back and keep winning me back to retain me.

I have to say The Book of Boba Fett satisfied and engaged me enough that I will be back next week.

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Written By LeKoupa

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