Book of Boba Fett off to Horribly Disappointing Start

I know Boba Fett from the movies and The Clone Wars animated TV show. I have never read the novels or comics where he is featured and never fully understood his enormous popularity. Sure, he’s a Mandalorian, which meant nothing to me before the Clone Wars animated series. He’s a bounty hunter, which is a popular character in westerns. The armor and helmet are kind of cool too but, to me, that wasn’t really enough to make him such an iconic character. I mean, didn’t he only have three lines?

The Clone Wars added a little more meat to Boba Fett but he still wasn’t really a great character. He swore revenge on the Jedi for killing his father on Geonosis and nearly succeeded in killing Mace Windu and Anakin Skywalker. There was also the great train robbery with Asajj Ventress, which actually made him more of a comical villain.

Based on this, my expectations for Book of Boba Fett were modest at best. There was hope when it was announced Jon Favreau would be writing the series.

That hope was misplaced.

After 4 episodes, The Book of Boba Fett is off too a rough start. Despite strong critic reviews at the front, the audience is disappointed. It isn’t just their lofty expectations. If you were to treat it as just another sci-fi action show, it is a perfect example of mediocrity.

Here are some of the creative choices that stand out as the most problematic so far:

Why is Boba Fett so Passive? Boba Fett was a bounty hunter and a ruthless one at that. Other than desiring revenge against Mace Windu and the Jedi, his only other motivation is money. He worked for Jabba and Darth Vader, two of the major villains of the whole saga. Clearly he has no moral or ethical standards regarding the jobs he takes.

So why is he going out of his way to not kill people? Why does he seem to have no interest in money, yet obviously has interest in power? The show tries to persuade the audience that his time with the Tusken raiders changed him. It is the classic noble savages trope. A soldier or mercenary finds himself in an alien culture that he originally sees as primitive but comes to see them as family. Boba even goes on the Tusken version of a vision quest. It’s Dances With Wolves on Tatooine.

It’s actually not a terrible idea, except the journey is brief and just not well executed. Boba Fett is a shell of his former bad ass self.

Why does everyone use melee weapons? This is a space western. Where are the blasters? Even regular westerns had guns. Yet, The Book of Boba Fett mostly features baffling melee weapons like staffs, machetes, brass knuckles, shields, slingshots, and others that have no place in Star Wars. I thought Boba Fett was a marksman. I thought his suit had a bunch of sweet Mandalorian weapons and accessories. When are we going to see them?

The Action. Again, Boba Fett is a marksman and should have some sick Mandalorian weaponry on that armor. Where is it? Instead, they are asking Temuera Morrison (61) and Ming-Na Wen (58) to do melee and hand-to-hand combat sequences. Ming-Na is actually somewhat convincing but Morrison is not. Who can blame him! Why are you making two older actors do so much martial arts in a Star Wars show? One is a sniper for fuck sake!!!

The Music. The soundtrack for this show feels off. This is an area Disney typically delivers on when it comes to Star Wars. Not here. It is generic, uninspired, and doesn’t really align with the action on screen. There’s a sense of drama of revelation, of seeing a great man go through personal struggles before ascending to power. Only, the story takes place on a desolate desert world and his seat of power is an empty palace in the middle of nowhere.

The soundtrack assumes the audience has already connected with Boba Fett and truly feel for his struggles and ascent to power but they didn’t do enough to set that groundwork. Boba Fett is a character of legend. We haven’t seen him do much in live action. I’m guessing most of the audience has not read his stories from the expanded universe and, therefore, haven’t connected with him yet.

There is a Clint Eastwood western feel to it at times but then it veers toward almost religious chants, possibly inspired by First Nations but it sounds more like Gregorian chants. This really doesn’t fit with a space western that hasn’t ventured much into religion or spiritualism. Throughout the show, the stakes are fairly low and personal, not epic in scale. It just, doesn’t work. They should’ve stuck with the low, bass-heavy melody with what sounds like a didgeridoo from The Mandalorian episode. That worked.

What is his power base? Why does anyone pay tribute to him? Other than sitting on the throne, the show has yet to show any reason why the crime lords of Mos Espa should listen to, let alone pay tribute to a former bounty hunter and his assassin friend. There are only two of them and they don’t appear to be all that heavily armed or fearsome. Is he sitting on a fortune? He’s gaining recruits but it is still unexplained why anyone accepts that he’s the new Daimyo.

Why call him a Daimyo? You couldn’t think of your own title? You had to borrow from Japanese history. That’s just lazy. This is Tatooine, not Tokugawa’s Japan.

Those hover bikes. His new muscle ride around in color-coded hover bikes like their power rangers. The low-speed, boring chase scene only made them look more ridiculous, not to mention their ride up to the mayor’s office in a perfect V formation behind Boba and Fennec.

Why did he save Fennec Shand? She’s a former Imperial assassin, left for dead in the desert. Of all the dead and dying people he’s likely come across, why try so hard to save her? Was it that he was hoping to recruit her to help him? Is he in love with her? Does her know her from before? All they do is talk shop and throw cheesy lines at one another during fights. It hasn’t worked.

The poor deployment of Fennec Shand—an interesting and promising character—is equally baffling. In four episodes we still have little understanding of her motivations or why she tolerates Boba Fett’s questionable tactics. She obviously does not agree with most of them. In terms of her life debt, she has already paid it.

Why is it called Book of Boba Fett? Did they use the “book” part because it sounds cool? I have yet to see any character hold a book, let alone read or write one. There’s no narrator or voice-over to suggest someone is reading about this from a book. So, why? Maybe this becomes clear later.

It is hard to understand how Jon Favreau created this. This feels like something that came from amateurs writing fan fiction.

The fourth episode hinted at the return of the Mandalorian, the character that Boba Fett should have been. Using a relatively new character to save the show of a legacy character really demonstrates how weak it truly is. Perhaps Boba Fett was never going to get his own series. Maybe, this is just a lead in to The Mandalorian season 3. If so, that was a terrible idea.

I hate being so negative lately, but I just don’t know how to say anything positive about this show. It’s substandard in almost every way, and the people behind should have known better. I would hate to think this is being done intentionally. Perhaps the final few episodes will change directions… We can hope, but look where that got us.