The Littlest Galaxy Far, Far Away

This article contains spoilers for The Book of Boba Fett and the first two seasons of The Mandalorian.

Last week, the latest Star Wars TV series, The Book of Boba Fett, wrapped up its seven-episode run on Disney+. Responses to the series seemed mixed to non-existent. Whereas The Mandalorian looked like a meme-making factory with fans squealing over the story of the eponymous Mandalorian, Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his little buddy Grogu (aka Baby Yoda), The Book of Boba Fett never seemed to catch on despite featuring a fan-favorite character from the original trilogy.

Fans seemed confused at why the first four episodes appeared to be a protracted prologue with Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) looking to become a crime lord ruling the city of Mos Espa on the planet Tatooine. Fans (at least those on my Twitter feed, so your mileage may vary) only seemed to perk up when the show radically changed direction in episodes five and six, which shifted perspective to Din Djarin and Grogu. And when Din and Grogu came to Mos Espa to help Boba Fett win his war against a rival crime syndicate, it was all…underwhelming.

To explain why this didn’t work and why it bodes ill for the future of Star Wars, we have to back up a bit.

Who Is Boba Fett?

Boba Fett is a bounty hunter featured in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. He’s the guy who helps capture Han Solo in Cloud City and then takes him to Jabba the Hutt. In Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Boba Fett fights for Hutt only to be knocked by a blind Han Solo into the Sarlacc pit and eaten. The Sarlacc pit then burps. Boba’s total time in the original trilogy was about six-and-a-half minutes, and he had four lines of dialogue.

So why did this character catch on with fans? Some would argue that it’s because he’s cool and mysterious, but I would counter that the text doesn’t support that. I mean, if you think he’s a neat guy, that’s fine, but to say he’s “mysterious” makes it sound like it was a conscious choice and not some background character with less than seven minutes of screen time. He’s mysterious by necessity because he’s not a major character, and while it’s neat that he has a jetpack and other gadgets, that makes him more of a nifty toy than a character.

I believe Boba Fett caught on with fans as a kind of shibboleth. You have to understand that while the original trilogy was a popular series of movies that helped to usher in the modern blockbuster, it was not “cool” to be a Star Wars fan for quite a while. Throughout the 80s and a large part of the 90s, Star Wars was a geek property at a time when mainstream culture didn’t realize that geeks were a valuable market. Star Wars always had its fans, and certain elements lingered in pop culture (e.g. “Use the Force”), but the die-hard fans knew every element. They knew every background character. They could tell a Jawa from a Tusken Raider at a time when many people did not care about either of those things. And they could tell you who Boba Fett was.

Boba Fett was able to further establish himself not only because unlike the other bounty hunters in Empire he actually does something, but also because he had been first introduced in The Star Wars Holiday Special. Also, his prototype action figure was never mass released because the jetpack missile presented a choking hazard, which made these prototypes massively valuable (in 2020 one went on eBay with an asking price of $225,000).

In this way, Boba Fett as an idea became “cool” even though textually his character didn’t really exist. He was a badass by virtue of his job, his gadgets, and because sometimes minor things catch on in fandom. He was popular enough that George Lucas decided to expand Boba’s role a bit in the prequel trilogy, showing in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones that he was the clone/son of Jango Fett, who in turn was the basis for the Clone Army. Jango Fett gets decapitated by Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson), and little Boba picks up his dad’s severed head and feels sad. From there, you get a bit more Boba Fett in the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but he didn’t return to live action until Season 2 of The Mandalorian, where he assists Din Djarin in his mission to retrieve Grogu. Then, in a post-credits scene, he kills Jabba’s assistant, Bib Fortuna, and takes the throne.

A point of consternation among detractors was, “Why would Boba Fett do this? Why would he want to be a crime boss?” And to that, I can only reply “Why would he want to do anything? He has no character.” You can’t betray the character of Boba Fett because none ever existed except in the minds of fans, and while it’s nice that they had their vision of him, that wasn’t text. It’s one thing to say, “I wish Boba Fett’s story had unfolded in a certain way,” but it’s another to say, “Boba Fett’s story wouldn’t unfold this way,” when textually Boba Fett had nothing but options.

The Ups and Downs of The Book of Boba Fett

That’s why I enjoyed the first four episodes of Book of Boba Fett. It wasn’t great television, but it was doing the work that had never been done in Star Wars before with regards to the character. They had to tell us why Boba Fett wanted something and what he valued. So they told us that Boba Fett no longer wanted to work for employers he thought were dumb and that the sand people taught him the value of community. Cutting back and forth between Boba Fett’s flashbacks and his alliance-building in the present may not have been the most elegant storytelling, but it felt like necessary groundwork. While one could argue that Boba Fett should have stayed a mysterious, loner bounty hunter, Star Wars had already played that card by creating Din Djarin. In their reluctance to make The Mandalorian about Boba Fett, they had to go in a different direction with this character.

But then The Book of Boba Fett made a bizarre choice by dropping Boba for episodes 5 and 6. I wish I had an explanation for why they chose to do this. Typically, in a writer’s room, they break the entire arc of the season, and they would know that it’s structurally weird to spend four episodes with one character only to completely change focus for the next two episodes. Set aside the title of the series; the showrunners knew this series would drop a new episode on a weekly basis and that it would be confusing for people to spend four weeks following Boba Fett only to then shift direction and spend the next two episodes following Din Djarin. Maybe they decided to change course mid-production, or maybe COVID affected scheduling, but whatever transpired behind the scenes, The Book of Boba Fett implicitly told its audience that it had a main character who wasn’t good enough to hold our interest, so the plot had to retreat to picking up the plotline from the end of Mandalorian Season 2.

Not only did that make for some clumsy storytelling, but the retreat also showed that Star Wars is uninterested in taking any risks even insofar as simply focusing on Boba Fett and giving him a character arc. When faced with the option of taking a legacy character like Boba Fett and trying to do something new with him, the people in charge of Star Wars hedged, and ran into the warm embrace of Din Djarin and Grogu along with appearances by Clone Wars characters Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) and Cad Bane (voiced by Corey Burton, body by Dorian Kingi) as well as Luke Skywalker (played by…well, that’s tricky).

The finale was fun for what it was (hard to argue with a rancor smashing droids), but it also showed that the showrunners didn’t seem to have much of an idea of what this show should be about. Why was it important to tell the story of Boba Fett? He was a blank slate upon which they could write anything, and they built it all up to a showdown with Cad Bane, who Clone Wars fans will spot as Boba Fett’s former mentor — but even if you had that investment, The Book of Boba Fett never built on that. The show wasn’t about Boba Fett wrestling with his past beyond the Sarlacc pit or what it meant to be a killer. The show was, at best, a show about a loner who realized the value of community and making friends. But Cad Bane has nothing to do with that as an antagonist. He’s there because fans recognized him from The Clone Wars and the follow-up animated series The Bad Batch. The people behind Book of Boba Fett aren’t telling the best story possible as much as they’re telling one that gives people what they want, and it makes the Star Wars universe feel smaller as a result.

Interconnected Storytelling in an Increasingly Disconnected World

I saw a Twitter thread recently where the author argued that Star Wars is one big story. That it’s good when you’re telling a story called “The Book of Boba Fett” and you drop Boba Fett to see what’s happening with Din Djarin and Grogu and Ahsoka and Luke Skywalker — because it’s all one big story. This approach bummed me out hard, because it seems to contain the Star Wars mythos based on convenience rather than embracing that this setting takes place in a vast galaxy comprised of many small worlds.

I’m not necessarily opposed to interconnected storytelling. That’s been the whole thing with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, after all. But the MCU presents key differences. Even setting aside that Marvel Comics was doing the interconnected thing for decades, they were able to do it because a lot of the characters lived in the New York area. It wasn’t a huge leap that Spider-Man might cross paths with Doctor Strange while swinging through Greenwich Village. Additionally, Marvel’s hook is its collection of superheroes, and it’s fun to mix-and-match them. The stories are based around heroes rather than being set against a fantastical galaxy amid an intergalactic civil war. When you get to the climactic battle in Avengers: Endgame, it’s fun to see Spider-Man say hello to Valkyrie.

And yet Star Wars keeps making its canvas smaller. Back in 1999, we made fun of the fact that Lucas decided a young Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) was the creator of C-3PO (Anthony Daniels). In 2002, we made fun of the fact that the template for all stormtroopers came from Boba Fett’s dad. In telling the story about Darth Vader’s origins, Lucas had made his world smaller, and fans took him to task for it. Who knew that Lucas failed not because he made it interconnected, but it wasn’t interconnected enough! We needed a 7-episode Jango Fett series and maybe a prequel to the prequel about Threepio’s construction.

I don’t know why the popularity of these interconnected stories has taken off, but I have some theories. Part of it, I think, is simply a response to the world around us. When we’re being constantly assaulted by information, the world begins to feel more chaotic. In these times, it’s nice to think that everything is connected (oddly, conspiracy theories work on the same logic); that someone is telling a story where all the pieces fit and, in a media landscape crowded with content, no one is “wasting” their time on a standalone story.

There could also be an element of buy-in. The more fans watch, the more obligated they might feel to keep watching, and to feel rewarded that they’ve watched so much. To put it another way, it’s not enough to simply have watched 11 Star Wars movies; we also have to consider people that watched all 133 episodes of Clone Wars, 75 episodes of Rebels, 40 episodes of Resistance, and 16 episodes of The Bad Batch, not to mention Star Wars’ books, comics, and video games. If you’re like me and had the audacity to watch only live-action Star Wars stuff, then Cad Bane or Ahsoka showing up is meaningless. Perhaps that’s unfair and I need to be a True Fan that watches All The Things, but I’d counter that at some point these stories need to be interesting on their own and that even if you don’t know the backstory of a legacy character, you at least understand the emotional stakes of the story.

The Book of Boba Fett seemed to stumble into those stakes by accident. I don’t know how Boba Fett was challenged or changed beyond his time with the sand people, but it sure was nice to see Din Djarin and Grogu reunite (even though it happened awkwardly during a chase scene). Those characters have a relationship, and it’s nice to see them together. We care what happens to them. But more often than not, Star Wars seems happier to have you recognize things. Hardcore fans seem jazzed when they recognize a toy from their youth or a background droid being given a prominent position, but there’s never anything to re-contextualize or deconstruct their placement. Even when you have a major character like Luke Skywalker, he’s not treated like a character, but as a tech demo/cameo.

If you were serious about telling a story that people cared about, you would have to ask questions like, “Why is Luke Skywalker, who has always derived strength from the people around him, now preaching Republic-era Jedi nonsense about disconnecting from attachments?” People loved seeing Grogu again, but look at the breakdown of that episode, and it’s pretty poor. If this is Grogu’s training, why is Luke the one who’s running around? And the answer is because it’s reminiscent of his training with Yoda in Empire, so they wanted the visual. The episode’s conclusion has no stakes because there’s never a chance Grogu is going to stay with Luke. His choice is obvious and easy, and because Grogu doesn’t talk, you can’t even really see him wrestle with that choice. Instead, it’s an explainer for you, the audience—here’s why Grogu is leaving Luke Skywalker and the path of the Jedi to hang out with The Mandalorian.

None of this is good storytelling, but it keeps Star Wars in a closed system where you don’t have to introduce any major new characters. Instead, you keep reusing characters people know. Part of that may be due to The Last Jedi being a “controversial” film (it made over a billion dollars, so it’s not like people hated it, and I’m inclined to believe that social media amplified negative voices, but that’s another article for another time), and the Powers That Be deciding it was better to play it safe for the future of the franchise so as not to alienate the hardcore fans.

What we’ve seen from two seasons of The Mandalorian and now The Book of Boba Fett is that Star Wars, despite having an entire galaxy to play in, prefers to trail us along after the characters we already know. (Despite the fact that Din Djarin and Grogu were new characters and managed to win over audiences pretty quickly!) Look at what’s coming down the line for Star Wars in the next several years, and it’s all familiar: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ahsoka, Andor, and Lando. The only one that appears to be entirely new is The Acolyte.

The Days of Playing It Safe

It makes sense why Disney/Lucasfilm wants to go in this direction. Star Wars is an incredibly valuable IP for them, and it’s a safer bet to go with established characters. People may not have been enthralled with The Book of Boba Fett, but they’re still going to come back for Obi-Wan Kenobi and the next season of The Mandalorian. And perhaps Disney feels like it’s in their best interest to simply retain the Star Wars fans they have now rather than try to grow that audience with exciting new characters, especially after the mixed response to the sequel trilogy. For the studio, it might make more sense to use these shows to test out new technology like they did with the Volume in season one of The Mandalorian or with deep-faking Mark Hamill on The Book of Boba Fett. And look, Disney is a business, and they’re going to do what’s in the interest of their shareholders.

Where I get hung up is with fans thinking that they’re being treated particularly well by safe, simple storytelling that doesn't trust them with deeper characters. I was kind of shocked when I saw friends raving over episode 5 of The Book of Boba Fett because it brought back The Mandalorian. But what really happened in that episode? He trains with the Darksaber a bit, gets chastised for having removed his helmet in the past, doesn’t challenge this dogmatic nonsense despite his lived experience telling him that removing his helmet is fine, then goes to get a new ship, and the show sells us on how those Naboo starfighters from The Phantom Menace are cool actually and definitely coming to a toy store near you. Is that all we want from Star Wars and its characters? Is this all it can do? Is this all the audience will accept?

I disagree. I do think that to tell better stories, Star Wars is going to have to alienate some people because some of the fandom’s beliefs about what Star Wars is and isn’t has led to a toxic gatekeeping where even the color of speederbikes is cause for consternation. I want to see Star Wars stories where I don’t know how the story is going to end. I want to get excited about new characters rather than still hearing about ones who were birthed during the Carter Administration or were invented as part of the Clone Wars animated series. Maybe that doesn’t make me a True Star Wars Fan (OH NO), but I hope the True Star Wars Fans realize they could have it so much better.