A TV series on Disney+

Boba Fett is one of those characters that existed more in fan imaginations than actual time in any of the Star Wars films for a long time. The amount of overwhelming hype surrounding his “death” and escape from the literal jaws of his own demise have been the fertile land as to which many fan-fictions, tie-in books, comics and plenty of other media has been built. In saying that, sometimes one has to step back from fan expectation in order to truly enjoy something, and considering the weird lukewarm reaction that Season one of The Book of Boba Fett received, I can imagine not too many people did that. So what’s the problem? Was it truly a mediocre show or did it do a good job moving the character forward? I am firmly in the camp of the latter, as it met my expectations quite a bit.

“The Book of Boba Fett is a live-action television series that focuses on the character Boba Fett. Its first episode was released on December 29, 2021. It was first teased, with both its title and release window, in a post-credits sequence of the season two finale of The Mandalorian.”

The standout portions of the show, for me at least, were the flashbacks to when Boba was living a nigh-Bedouin lifestyle as a member of a Tusken clan that initially tried to kill him after escaping The Sarlaac Pit. As fans, we have always seen these nomadic people as some sort of anonymous, mindless cannon fodder that gets wiped out for attacking the heroes from time to time. When need arises they become an easy way to make somebody look bad, as when Anakin committed a genocide as revenge for the death of his mother. This time, many of them are given a character and are “humanized” to a degree that we’ve never seen before. We learned aspects of their culture and got to know why they sometimes do what they do as an allusion of the ills of colonialism. Sadly, these so-called Raiders are once again devalued into a way to gain sympathy for the hero at one point which was perhaps the one thing I was not a fan of in the show. I really hope that not all of Boba’s clan perished, and perhaps we learn more about these guys in season two, but time will tell.

The only really gripe, aside from the above, that I has was that the show insisted on having two parallel storylines, much in the same way that CW’s The Arrow had, and that gets tiresome after a while. a scene would show modern day Boba then cut back to the past and show his nomad days. This would happen back and forth until around episode 4 when it largely stopped. this makes the structure of the show seem random since they didn’t keep the device going throughout and somewhat cheapens the impact of what happens.

Despite this and a large portion of the focus being shifted to the cast of The Mandalorian at one point, I enjoyed The Book of Boba Fett and can’t wait to see more. Once it gets rolling it sets up the next wave of the Disney+ Star Wars series and sets some closure of for some lingering plot threads that have been running for a couple of years now. The show is not perfect, but I never found it boring or poorly written, and it adds value to the Mandalorian series in many ways. The show’s characters are fun, and you get a real sense of happiness when everything finally comes together at the end of the season. Don’t listen to the Star Wars fans that seem to hate everything nowadays and give it a watch!