Review: ‘The Book of Boba Fett - Chapter 2: The Tribes of Tattooine'
The social media hate of The Book of Boba Fett rocks on. Let's examine something;
Boba has a total of about six minutes of screen time in the original trilogy. In The Empire Strikes Back, we know he’s badass because when Darth Vader’s debriefing the bounty hunters about capturing Han Solo and Leia, he says specifically to Boba, “No disintegrations.” Boba’s smart enough to track Han Solo’s ruse of attaching the Millennium Falcon to an Imperial Destroyer, then floating away with the rest of the garbage. On Cloud City, Boba complains that carbonite freezing might kill Han Solo. Darth Vader assures him he’ll be compensated.
In Return of the Jedi, we see Boba chilling at Jabba’s palace. When Leia, disguised as a bounty hunter, threatens Jabba with a thermal detonator, Boba prepares to counter. After Leia negotiates with Jabba, Boba shares a nod of mutual respect with her. Later, during the battle on Jabba’s barge, Luke slashes Boba’s blaster in half. Boba entangles Luke in some rope. Luke cuts himself free easily enough, and then ignores Boba as a threat entirely, which should tell you something. Chewbacca warns a blind Han Solo about Boba Fett. Han, holding a lance, spins in confusion, and unwittingly strikes Boba’s jetpack, activating it. Boba flies into Jabba’s barge, splats, then tumbles into the Sarlacc Pitt; a slapstick demise.
That’s it.
That's the on-screen sum of Boba Fett.
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Yet we have complaints that, in Book of Boba Fett, the titular character takes his helmet off, he emotes, he’s chatty, etc., because those previous brief uses of Boba apparently speak entirely to who he is. I appreciate the enigmatic Boba won legions of fans, but maintaining this static portrayal through a series would not only be boring, but unrealistic. If we’re seeing him behave differently, perhaps it’s because we’re seeing him in different environments. He’s not bounty hunting here. In the past story, he’s trying to survive. In the present-day story, he’s trying to consolidate his standing in the underworld.
The complaints are mind-bogglingly unjustified. We’re not talking about Luke, or Leia, or Han Solo, who we got to know intimately, and thus we have an encyclopedic frame of reference for how we believe they should behave in any other property (and why they might've been vandalized in the sequels), we’re talking about a guy who was used briefly, was one-dimensional, and whose past, characteristics, and aspirations are now being explored.
In the Present
Fennec brings the man who tried to kill Boba back to Jabba’s palace. They identify he’s an assassin of the Night Wind and trick him into disclosing that the Mayor hired him. However, when they go to see the Mayor, he refers them to Garsa Fwip at the casino. She tells him the Twins are responsible. Outside, they encounter two Hutts who are born forth on a litter. They have come to claim Jabba’s criminal empire. Boba rebukes them (this scene should please anybody who wanted to see Boba badass his way through a confrontation). The Hutts leave with the hint of threat from a furry black Wookie, Black Krrsantan, who’s drawn into live-action from the comic books, he glares at Boba. Uh oh. Trouble’s afoot.
In the Past
On the Dune Sea, Boba’s learning to use the Tusken staff known as a gaderffii. There’s a disturbance in the sand in the distance, and a train zooms past, firing at the Tuskens, killing several raiders.
Boba concocts a plan: he goes to Tosche Station (where Luke wanted to pick up some power converters). Some bikers are about to beat up Laze "Fixer" Loneozner and Camie Marstrap, Luke’s friends (along with Biggs Darklighter) from A New Hope’s deleted scenes. Boba beats up the bikers, steals their speeder bikes, and brings them back to the Tusken camp. He teaches the Tuskens to ride, and they then launch an assault on the train during its next run.
Following a fast-paced action sequence, Boba and the Tuskens stop the train. The train belongs to the Pyke Syndicate and is carrying spice. Bobba tells the train’s crew that if they’re to pass through the Dune Sea, they must pay a toll. He tells them to take that deal back to their Syndicate.
Later, the Tuskens give Boba a gift – a lizard. It goes up Boba’s nose and takes him on a vision quest to find a branch from which he can carve his own staff. He returns to the Tusken (the lizard leaving his head) with a branch, carves his staff, and is garbed in some menacing black robes.
What follows is one of the coolest scenes in Disney Star Wars: a ritualistic dance the Tuskens and Boba perform as he’s accepted into the tribe.
Structure
In the distant past, episodic television was self-contained. The characters embarked on an adventure, it wrapped up at the end, then everything reset to begin the next episode. Writers such as Joss Whedon with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and J. Michael Straczynski with Babylon 5 would write episodes that were self-contained, but which also contributed to a greater arc that built the season’s goal. Straczynski viewed each episode of Babylon 5 like the chapter of a book.
As I wrote about last week's episode, episodes in limited series are structured weirdly, because we’re just seeing a single block in a much longer story, in this case, one block in a feature film that will take seven episodes to tell.
The Tribes of Tatooine is split down the middle – the first half is in the present, and the second is in the past. While the latter story has a genuine arc (introduces problem, addresses the obstacles of solving problem, and then solves the problem, with some nifty character development along the way), the present-day story is just a tidbit in Mos Espa’s political underworld intrigue, a handful of scenes in a greater story.
Conclusion
I accepted that the pilot was a pilot that introduces the characters and the circumstances, and sets up the universe for us. That’s what it needed to do. It did it. Yet the complaints that abounded seemingly expected an entire feature trilogy composited into 38 minutes.
If you feel betrayed every time Boba’s not the monotonal original trilogy Boba, then Chapter 2 will continue to disappoint you. I would suggest throwing on The Empire Strikes Back, pausing on Boba for 51 minutes, and extracting your Boba-verisimilitude from that experience.
What Chapter 2 did give us was badass Boba, one who threatened to execute an assassin, usurp a mayor, and rebuked the Hutts. Here’s a man who’s been a bounty hunter, yet finds circumstances have afforded him a grab at real power. Is he going to give it up? Well, no. He will be king.
The past shows us how Boba is reinventing himself following his rebirth in Chapter 1. He and the Tuskens now have mutual respect. But he also offers them something else: knowledge. They are nomadic, and all they know about technology is what they can scavenge. But that’s Boba’s world. He is teaching them.
It’s also gratifying to see the Tuskens fleshed out. In the prequels and the original trilogy, they are this one-dimensional race who are antagonistic simply because that’s what the story requires of them. But these two chapters show us that they’re a rich culture trying to survive in a world that’s foreign to them.
I’m still unsure what the story will be, ultimately. I do wonder if something will happen to the Tusken tribe in the past, which is why Boba needs Jabba’s throne in the present. The story’s moving forward with genuine intrigue while also taking what we know of the Star Wars universe and exploring it further.
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