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the events of the flashback seem insufficient to cover the 10-15 years between RotJ and Mandalorian)

Its actually 5 years, but yeah. Nothing shows it, and its quite a surprise when the characters simply tell the audience how long it has been. I had figured a month, at the absolute outside. Enough to kinda-sorta recover, fetch a stick and train his train raiders.

There's nothing in between the train and him demanding tolls for crossing the Dune Sea, but somehow there are years in there. You'd think the local fish-crime rep wouldn't even know who he was at that point- just vaguely remember hearing about an incident that never repeated.

5 yeas. Think I was thinking of the sequels for a second?

Episode 5 is good but it's weird how much better it is and makes me wonder if anyone really wanted to do this whole Boba Fett season thing. It all feels so 'we need a show so here's some stuff' and none of it is really well thought out. You're really telling me this outlaw criminal palace has a hangar containing valuable spacecraft, and the door is opened and closed by a deadweight. I know the Star Wars universe is very analog but that feels so contrived, like it was thought up in five minutes in the boardroom because they wanted Boba and Fen to get out and no one bothered to think of anything better.

Djinn showing up and being fun to watch is so a radical contrast to how uninterested Boba's entire deal is.

It's not like the show runners don't know how to establish stakes either. Mandalorian Season 2 resolved the shows original plot but this one episode immediately gives Mando compelling problems anew in about 20 minutes.

In more ways than one I'm still not really sure what Boba is about or trying to do. His reason is given. It's just kind of hard to take seriously.

I had assumed that Boba had been in the Sarlacc for several years before escaping.

I know that sounds daft, but the Sarlacc extends the torment of those it eats by keeping them alive while it digests them? That's why it's meant to be such a horrible death.

It even absorbs their consciousness, and after death still continues to torment them.

To quote myself from earlier in the thread:

 Geifer wrote:
He was in it for days at most. The marshal from the Mandalorian got his armor days after the mercs crashed his End of Empire party, and the Battle of Endor was only a short time after Jabba's death.

He's lived most of those five years with the Tusken.

Also, who knows how long he had the Delirium Lizard in his head. He certainly didn't go to the nearest DIY store for his piece of wood.

There's a lot of room in the timeline between Return of the Jedi and Mandalorian/Book of Boba that Lucasfilm could fill in the future if they so chose, but Boba's stay in the Sarlacc isn't one of them. That is very explicitly answered already.

 LordofHats wrote:
5 yeas. Think I was thinking of the sequels for a second?

Episode 5 is good but it's weird how much better it is and makes me wonder if anyone really wanted to do this whole Boba Fett season thing. It all feels so 'we need a show so here's some stuff' and none of it is really well thought out. You're really telling me this outlaw criminal palace has a hangar containing valuable spacecraft, and the door is opened and closed by a deadweight. I know the Star Wars universe is very analog but that feels so contrived, like it was thought up in five minutes in the boardroom because they wanted Boba and Fen to get out and no one bothered to think of anything better.

Djinn showing up and being fun to watch is so a radical contrast to how uninterested Boba's entire deal is.

It's not like the show runners don't know how to establish stakes either. Mandalorian Season 2 resolved the shows original plot but this one episode immediately gives Mando compelling problems anew in about 20 minutes.

In more ways than one I'm still not really sure what Boba is about or trying to do. His reason is given. It's just kind of hard to take seriously.

I kind of wonder, had the whole Cara Dune fiasco not happened and they'd gone with Bo Katan from the start if we would have been better off just renaming the story "The Mandalorians" and followed Boba and Bo as parallel threads rather than try to set up entire new shows.

LordofHats wrote: In more ways than one I'm still not really sure what Boba is about or trying to do. His reason is given. It's just kind of hard to take seriously.

Metaphorical 'vegan' crime lording is inherently hard to take seriously.

Especially when we the audience and multiple galaxy spanning criminal cartels know he's just a guy with no infrastructure, organization or backing. They even know he sleeps in a bacta tank in front of exterior windows. Which makes for a real easy murder, providing you don't send in an idiot with stun knuckles.

Reasonably he'd be dead multiple times over (not even including the Sarlaac, being dragged across the desert, beaten, exhausted, beaten again and tied out for the sun, and then sand monsters); but the plot armor is still at 100% and not even pretending to take any threat seriously. No stakes and no risk (and no crime) makes for a bad crime lord show.

That he makes Luke at the beginning of New Hope look worldly and experienced is just a baffling choice.

I agree with Voss. One of the many things I don't understand about Fett is why nobody has successfully taken him out yet, other than the aforementioned plot armour. Unlike the other crime lords he has no network, no deep ties to other organisations, no alliances to speak of. Anyone offing Fett would literally incur the wrath of a single assassin who spends most of her time walking along beside him and would therefore be caught in the blast of whatever mini rocket launcher any competent assassin would use to defeat his beskar armour.

He seems to have no plan, is outwitted by demonstrably incompetent characters like the mayor's lackey, and hasn't actually done anything important in the present-day timeline in the entirety of the season. So far Fett's achievements in the whole of the season amount to crawling out of the Sarlaac and one completely pointless train heist. Neither of those things are happening in the present-day timeline of the series so it all just feels kind of...pointless and empty.

like i said, they managed to move Djinn's story futher forward in 1 episode, than they managed with Fett in 4 episodes.


now, in absolute fairness, I will cut them some slack for the first and second episodes, because they needed to answer to obvious questions and set up the new series and enemies, and that sort of exposition, while necessary, is slow and tedious. I think the intercutting between present and past might have been a mistake, and made it feel like nothing was happening as both story threads seemed to move slow. Maybe a more "active" recounting would have worked better, with fett acting as a narrator, telling his story to his guests at the feast in episode 4?


either way, the show seems very slow, with no great direction. its not clear what Fetts problem is with the spice runners of the Pyke Syndicate, beyond a vague feeling they double crossed him in the past*, or a generic "drugs are bad, m'kay?".



*which they didn't. they objected to paying protection money to two organisations for the same area, and told fett he needed to deal with the rival bike gang before they paid him...and the bike gang wiped out the tuskens, and he gunned down the bikers in return, so im not sure what his beef is with the pykes.

*which they didn't. they objected to paying protection money to two organisations for the same area, and told fett he needed to deal with the rival bike gang before they paid him...and the bike gang wiped out the tuskens, and he gunned down the bikers in return, so im not sure what his beef is with the pykes.

Well, Boba is happily not quite so naive that he didn't manage to read between the lines on this- the Pykes very obviously paid the biker gang to kill the Tuskens. That was the 'protection' they paid for, since the Tuskens had taken a train and the bikers never had. (because they weren't stupid enough to take on one of the major players of galactic crime. Seriously, the Hutts backed down from a major war with the Pykes over Tattooine. Maybe it wasn't worth it to them, but they just noped out of there without a fight, more concerned with not getting involved than the loss of face or reputation for backing down).

Slipspace wrote:
I agree with Voss. One of the many things I don't understand about Fett is why nobody has successfully taken him out yet, other than the aforementioned plot armour. Unlike the other crime lords he has no network, no deep ties to other organisations, no alliances to speak of. Anyone offing Fett would literally incur the wrath of a single assassin who spends most of her time walking along beside him and would therefore be caught in the blast of whatever mini rocket launcher any competent assassin would use to defeat his beskar armour.

He seems to have no plan, is outwitted by demonstrably incompetent characters like the mayor's lackey, and hasn't actually done anything important in the present-day timeline in the entirety of the season. So far Fett's achievements in the whole of the season amount to crawling out of the Sarlaac and one completely pointless train heist. Neither of those things are happening in the present-day timeline of the series so it all just feels kind of...pointless and empty.

This is why I say the Mos Espa storyline feels really underdeveloped. So much time is spent on the Dances with Tuskans flashbacks that the only thing about it that stands out to me are the painfully out of place Cyberpunk 2077 ads playing the role of henchmen who are entirely too colorful and put together for how grungy the rest of the show is. That I'm half convinced they'll star in their own spinoff show at some point just makes their presence nausious.

Having sat on it for a night the cardinal sin of the show really is that it's 5 episodes in and it feels like everything of relevance or interest could have been condensed down to two episodes and episode 5 is one of them.

In this case brevity isn't just the soul of wit, its absence is the death of interest. They really didn't need to give us a full remake of Dances with Wolves that is both worse than the original and stands out like a painfully sore thumb while watching this show (they even copied the dancing scene XD come on) and so much time was spent on that the actual meat of the show rotted about 40 minutes into the first episode and began stinking up the place 5 minutes into the second. Maybe things will get spicer and more fun now that it seems to be over and we're looking at a Djinn/Boba team up but that won't really change that the first 4 episodes of this show could probably be skipped without missing a thing worth watching. Just start the show at episode 5 and go.

What I find curious is that they dedicated an entire episode to Din, but didn't figure leading with a present day episode or two to establish the plot, stakes and possibly a plan, and then having a dedicated Tusken episode to explain that part of Boba's story. Say, Boba does his thing as crime boss, sets up his operation, gets injured at the end of the second episode and put in a bacta tank. Episode 3 starts with him in the tank, narrator's voice saying something about the dreams being back, and then showing the Tusken stuff.

Clearly they are not opposed to throwing in a whole episode that has no immediate impact on the present day crime story, but they went for the... exotically paced structure of the first few episode instead.

Interweaving the past and present storylines was definitely a big pacing problem in the early episodes. Not enough happened in either timeline to grab my interest and there wasn't enough connection between the two either. If events in the Tusken plot were directly affecting multiple things in the present-day plot that would have been fine, but instead it was all just set-up for the Pyke hatred.

One minor nitpick from the previous non-Mando episode that annoyed me was Boba going looking for his armour in the Sarlaac pit. Like, I get that he was completely out of it when he crawled out and the Jawas stole his armour but I'm legitimately confused as to why he thinks it's still in the pit. What does he think the chain of events were for getting out? Get eaten > armour protects from Sarlaac digestion > take off armour > get out of Sarlaac? Like, how does that even work? Or does he think he escaped and then the Sarlaac selectively removed only his armour and ate it again? Even if he thinks it's still down there, how does hovering a few feet from the entrance to the mouth help his cause? It's yet another example of Boba seeming like a complete idiot and this time the only purpose seemed to be to give us the spectacle of dropping a seismic charge into the mouth.

Slipspace wrote:
Interweaving the past and present storylines was definitely a big pacing problem in the early episodes. Not enough happened in either timeline to grab my interest and there wasn't enough connection between the two either. If events in the Tusken plot were directly affecting multiple things in the present-day plot that would have been fine, but instead it was all just set-up for the Pyke hatred.

One minor nitpick from the previous non-Mando episode that annoyed me was Boba going looking for his armour in the Sarlaac pit. Like, I get that he was completely out of it when he crawled out and the Jawas stole his armour but I'm legitimately confused as to why he thinks it's still in the pit. What does he think the chain of events were for getting out? Get eaten > armour protects from Sarlaac digestion > take off armour > get out of Sarlaac? Like, how does that even work? Or does he think he escaped and then the Sarlaac selectively removed only his armour and ate it again? Even if he thinks it's still down there, how does hovering a few feet from the entrance to the mouth help his cause? It's yet another example of Boba seeming like a complete idiot and this time the only purpose seemed to be to give us the spectacle of dropping a seismic charge into the mouth.

my guess is he knew he went [i]into the sarlacc with the armour, but doesnt remember his escape at all (he was in pretty bad shape by the end of it, not impossible he was cant remember what he did during it), and form his point of view he "woke up" as a captive of the tuskans with no armour. He also presumably found out they found him like that, once he mastered their language, so his logic must have been it was still in the sarlacc.

How did he find out Din had it and know where to go looking for him on an obscure planet?

 AduroT wrote:
How did he find out Din had it and know where to go looking for him on an obscure planet?

That's for season 2 flashbacks, I'm guessing

 AduroT wrote:
How did he find out Din had it and know where to go looking for him on an obscure planet?

Boba was there when Din left Mos Pelgo after the dragon hunt. He may have figured it out from there. Din heading towards Mos Eisley, clearly Mandalorian, possibly bounty hunter. Can't be hard to find information on him there. Mandalorians stand out and tend not to fly coach (which, ironically, he did in the last episode). Mos Eisley has central flight control. Boba could have bribed someone for a list of landings and takeoffs during that time. He could have just sent in Fennec covertly to retrieve that kind of information, what with her being competent and all. He'd find the hangar with the mechanic lady and bribe her for information. He'd have the ship signature, know Din's a bounty hunter, may know he's looking for Mandalorians. That's not a bad start to go looking for Din in the Outer Rim. At least with the level of competence and connections we assumed of Boba prior to shooting Bib.

Appearing on Tython is a leap. I don't think Ahsoka disclosed the location to anyone but Din and she might be disinclined to share it with a) a bounty hunter, b) the guy who almost blew up her master way back when and c) the same guy who might now put Grogu's life in jeopardy in pursuit of his goals.

So you know, it was the will of the force.

 Geifer wrote:

Clearly they are not opposed to throwing in a whole episode that has no immediate impact on the present day crime story, but they went for the... exotically paced structure of the first few episode instead.

A lot of people said the same thing about Season 1 of The Witcher.

Of course, I feel like that was the only thing that elevated The Witcher above mediocre Fantasy and Season 2 was worse off without it. However, I recognize that is a minority opinion.

Book was probably trying to use some sort of gimmick to raise the source material beyond its pedestrian narration, and this one seemed like a "current" idea thanks to The Witcher's "success".

I'm not interested in the Witcher so the comparison escapes me, but I considered the possibility that someone was going for avant-garde artsy bs with the structure of Book of Boba.

It'll be interesting to see how the whole thing looks once I got to see it in full. In fact I think I'll still not have a final opinion until I binged it. I'm getting the impression there's a creative desire to arrange these shows around the modern standard for watching, while the commercial interest is to draw the first showing out in the more traditional way for extra monies*. I've had a much better impression of the Bad Batch as well after the second time. It appeared a lot more cohesive. I'm expecting the same for Book of Boba. Or, I guess, I'm at least hoping for it.


*Eventually that won't matter. It's just the original release and its audience that are affected.

 Geifer wrote:
I'm not interested in the Witcher so the comparison escapes me, but I considered the possibility that someone was going for avant-garde artsy bs with the structure of Book of Boba.
.

the witcher told its story in a very non-chronological order, with past events being shown as they became relevant to the "Present" plot, but this wasn't 100% apparent and never "title carded", but rather inferred form clues in the scenes (for example, one character is interacting with a old man who is king, the other is interacting with father of that old man, who is a child), at least for the first several episodes. it was much more subtle than the "long shot of boda in bacta, fade to the past" transitions of the Book.

xerxeskingofking wrote:

 AduroT wrote:
How did he find out Din had it and know where to go looking for him on an obscure planet?

That's for season 2 flashbacks, I'm guessing

I suspect that he heard of the marshal with Mandalorian armour the same as Din did and was heading to retrieve it just in time to see Din making off with it, and tracked him from there.

Boba made a cameo in this one! The episode did do a better job of advancing this show’s plot than the previous though.

Training montage was a bit slow, that’s just not a dynamic puppet.

The moment we saw that silhouette I knew who it would be.

Din continues to be a more interesting protagonist. He really is carried by that winning smile.

Oooooooh!!!!

Some cool callbacks and that. And some serious screen presence on display.

Quite a lot packed into this episode.

I want it on record that I would take a bullet for Dave or John. I don't care what the show is called, this is what I've been waiting for.

The episode may have very little Boba Fett, but it really was peak Star Wars. Did 5 and 6 have a different writer than the first 4? Are they on the record somewhere saying they just don’t like Boba? Boba’s showing is just so poor in his own series, but these last two episodes display that they can do interesting and compelling stuff. It almost feels like intentional character assassination.

To be fair, they’re struggling against the adage of Never Meet Your Heroes.

See, canonical Boba is…pretty sparse. We know his origins, and some of the more dull Clone Wars episodes. Then we’re onto the original trilogy where he looks at the camera (ANH), growls a bit and nicks off with Han (ESB), then gets knocked into the Sarlacc (ROTJ).

But, [i]Legends-/i] Boba was of course far more than that. And that I think is an issue. The fans more than the universe built up a mythical Boba. So when we see Fresh Page Boba (finding a sense of belonging, finding his place in a changed galaxy) etc, it’s gonna feel a bit disappointing to those steeped in Legends.

Note that I’m not having a pop or criticising those who became invested in Legends Boba. But I think it is something we need to keep in mind.

I’m suspecting this is a hurdle the snow won’t in the end cross.

And in terms of the New Canon, I think Boba is the first to really get this treatment? The others we see are either core characters (Luke) or Filoni’s own creations. Filoni’s creations of course are his. He invented them, he knows them better than anyone. And not really appearing in Legends, they don’t have the Baggage of Expectation Boba is lumbered with.

I never read any of the Legends or old EU stuff. Been reading the current Marvel comics, which I believe are supposed to be canon now. He’s shown up in there, and generally been fairly competent. He did lose carbonite Han on the way to Jaba’s, and that started a whole huge crossover event, but of course he managed to steal him back in the end beating out all the other major players. But yeah, I’m not really invested in Boba with much preconceptions, hes just really dull in the show.

 AduroT wrote:
The episode may have very little Boba Fett, but it really was peak Star Wars. Did 5 and 6 have a different writer than the first 4? Are they on the record somewhere saying they just don’t like Boba? Boba’s showing is just so poor in his own series, but these last two episodes display that they can do interesting and compelling stuff. It almost feels like intentional character assassination.

I think part of the issue here is that people keep looking at this as if this stuff is all separated.

It's not.

I think Dave and Jon are mixing the shows doing what they can do with what Disney is giving them to tell a huge and grand story, which involves all the characters. I do understand that folks want specific things, they want to see the Boba of Empire Strikes Back, but my feeling is that he's dead. They're reinventing the character and it's going to take time. I would be willing to bet we will see a lot of him in Mando-S3, and of course the continuation of his show. Of course only time will tell, but god this has been so much better than that dumpster fire that was the new trilogy from a few years back.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
To be fair, they’re struggling against the adage of Never Meet Your Heroes.

See, canonical Boba is…pretty sparse. We know his origins, and some of the more dull Clone Wars episodes. Then we’re onto the original trilogy where he looks at the camera (ANH), growls a bit and nicks off with Han (ESB), then gets knocked into the Sarlacc (ROTJ).

But, [i]Legends-/i] Boba was of course far more than that. And that I think is an issue. The fans more than the universe built up a mythical Boba. So when we see Fresh Page Boba (finding a sense of belonging, finding his place in a changed galaxy) etc, it’s gonna feel a bit disappointing to those steeped in Legends.

Note that I’m not having a pop or criticising those who became invested in Legends Boba. But I think it is something we need to keep in mind.

I’m suspecting this is a hurdle the snow won’t in the end cross.

And in terms of the New Canon, I think Boba is the first to really get this treatment? The others we see are either core characters (Luke) or Filoni’s own creations. Filoni’s creations of course are his. He invented them, he knows them better than anyone. And not really appearing in Legends, they don’t have the Baggage of Expectation Boba is lumbered with.

Mad Doc said it so much better than I did.

And now for some spoilery speculation.

Yeah, the one vs many and everyone crowding around getting handsy afterward I figure we’ll see more of them. That’s Why we had the red shirt, to be the sacrificial one.

Well... that was something. Turns out that the best episodes of The Book of Boba Fett are the ones where he's either not in it, or just says and does nothing. Who knew?

Ok, spoiler time...

And the music's still good!

Here's hoping it can stick the landing next week.

[EDIT]: Max Rebo! NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!