After what seems like quite a long wait, The Book of Boba Fett hits Disney Plus with its first episode, ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’. *Warning! Spoilers Ahead!*
In a move that echoes some of the other Disney Plus series of late, particularly the Marvel ones (e.g. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), The Book of Boba Fett opens with a single, short episode. At a spritely 39m there’s not a lot of time to get things moving, and this is then complicated by having the show split into two timelines.
The first of these takes place just after the events of Return of The Jedi where Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) is trapped in the Sarlacc pit and makes his escape. From here it tells the tale of him first losing his armour to the Jawas, and then being captured by Tusken Raiders. The second timeline sees Boba and Fennec (Ming-Na Wen) take over the ruins of Jabba the Hutt’s empire and is the present day alongside The Mandalorian season 2. This means that these two timelines are essentially only a few years apart.
Despite the fact that there is very little separation between the two timelines things are still very obviously different and there is no confusion between the two. For any viewers who have seen the Star Wars films and are familiar with the end of Return of The Jedi they will recognise those scenes and understand the significance of what is happening. Pretty much all of this begins to fill in the broad stroke blanks between what we know about Boba Fett up until the end of Return of The Jedi, and his appearance in The Mandalorian.
While using the two timelines works very well, the choice to have a single episode of a short duration to open the season is a mistake, and they should have had two episodes back-to-back or one long extended episode. There just isn’t enough meat here to really engage you before it suddenly finishes.
More positively, Morrison and Ming-Na Wen are excellent as always and show that the future of this series is in safe hands. The environment created also works very well and resembles the world of Tatooine as you would imagine it, matching the rough feel of the films. There are obviously some clunky elements such as the music in the cantina being a sort of pastiche of the original theme, which grates quite a lot, but I guess that is in keeping with the horrific song at the end of Return of The Jedi.
It will be interesting to see what direction they take this show in, as there’s still a lot of information to be filled in between Return of The Jedi and The Mandalorian season 2. Fennec’s history for instance needs a lot more development and there’s a lot that we don’t know about the character. While Fennec does appear in The Bad Batch, the animated series, that may not be that well known for general viewers. This means that for the average audience member and especially new people to the series there will essentially be no information known about her.
While that could be frustrating for some, this does mean that there is a lot of scope for new stories and for the series to take its own direction. This first episode does at least establish where we are and when we are, but it does fail in significantly making inroads into a new story. Not a lot happens, and we are left feeling a little empty at the end the episode, without that solid foundation. Like other series on Disney Plus, this will probably be a better as a binge watch, rather than in an episode-by-episode manner. Hopefully in the next episode they’ll address some of these issues.
