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5 Ways to Revise The Book of Boba Fett

At this point, I think it’s pretty clear that The Book of Boba Fett was not a resounding success. You may have liked it, you may have hated it, you may have already forgotten it, but I haven’t encountered anyone who loved it. It’s a messy, very confusing series that from its first episode made a number of questionable structural and storytelling decisions that would never really cohere across the series’ seven episode run.

The difficulty with this show isn’t really that Boba Fett isn’t blood thirsty or even the over abundance of cameos. It’s ultimately that whatever story Jon Favreau was trying to tell about Boba Fett was never clearly established. This is his book after all. So anyways, here are five changes I would’ve made to The Book of Boba Fett.

But first, some ground rules. I’m not going to change any of the major plot events for the series. Let’s keep the struggle on Tatooine, the Pykes, Black Krrsantan, the Mods, the Tuskens etc. Let’s just do some tweaking. Some messing around with the formula of it all.

1.  Clarify Boba’s Past

Let’s be clear here. For the vast, vast majority of Star Wars viewers and fans, Boba Fett is an enigma. He’s a cool costume rather than a character, which honestly is part of his appeal. He’s a mystery character that you can project a lot of your own thoughts and opinions upon. There is a version of this show that keeps that mystique and shows us a Boba of few words that rarely, if ever shows his face.

That’s clearly not the show, Jon Favreau wanted to make. Which is fine, you already have a show about a mostly faceless taciturn buckethead. We want Boba to feel different. Sure. But the issue here is that we as viewers then need a better idea of who this Boba character is. It’s clear by the end of the series that The Book of Boba Fett wanted to tell a story of a violent, loner of a man who learns compassion and trust in others through help from the Tusken Raiders and then carries those lessons into being a crime lord. The issue is that at the start of this show we don’t really have a baseline of who Boba Fett is. We can’t chart character growth if we don’t know what we are growing from.

Sure, fans of the expanded universe of Star Wars comics, games, and animated shows may have a bit better of an idea of who exactly Boba Fett is, but even then his portrayal has been relatively inconsistent and varied depending on the medium and writer. In The Clone Wars we have a Boba Fett who is vengeful but still compassionate. In the Bounty Hunters comics we have a Boba Fett that is comfortable shooting women in the back. And again, the vast majority of fans don’t have this context. All they know of Boba Fett is his iconography and his brief roles in several of the films. We need an idea of who Boba is. If this is a story of a violent loner turning over a new leaf. We need to understand and see that man as a violent loner.

So how do we fix this? Well, The Book of Boba Fett already has a foot in the right direction. We keep the flashback structure but we retool it a bit. The Tusken stories stay, but we push them towards the end of the show. Instead we spend the first three to four episodes of the series flashing back to Boba’s earlier days. We can even bring back Daniel Logan for a few years of young adult Boba. We see Boba at various periods over his life and get an idea of the various choices that have shaped him into the man he was. By the time we get to the Tusken stories, we can really see the effect that companionship and community have on this man. We have context now.

It also adds some texture to the present-day stories as well. If we see Boba Fett’s past, his decisions in present day become more unpredictable. Sure, we may see a Boba that wants to rule with respect, but he sure as hell has been killing a lot of people in the past. He is after all, to quote another bounty hunter, “A cold blooded killer who worked for the Empire.” This also adds a sense of mystery to the present as well. Why is Boba Fett back? Why does he want to take care of Tatooine? What motivates this change of character? It becomes not just how Boba Fett got his gaffi stick and teamed up with Fennec Shand, but why.

2.  Show Boba’s Struggle

If part of Jon Favreau’s apparent story idea was to chart Boba’s evolution into a more communal and respecting person, we also need to see more of that struggle. Some of the most dramatically intriguing moments of the show come in the finale when Cad Bane taunts Boba and we see for the first time that he maybe doesn’t have the demeanor to do this job. There’s still a hint of a more violent impulsive man underneath that helmet.

Sure, we get a few moments when Boba bumbles his way through being a crime lord, but what if this had to do just as much with temperament as it does with naivete. Everyone expects Boba to be this violent, cruel man and there’s probably a voice in him that wants to do the same and that’s what ends up being the big paradox of his leadership on Tatooine. Defying everyone’s expectations, including his own.

It would also be worthwhile to see Boba Fett do some actual leading. Sure, he assembles some allies, but part of being a crime lord isn’t just getting different players in the room, it’s managing different personalities and motivations. We get some hints of this, again, in the final episode of the series. The citizens of Freetown and Mos Espa’s mods have a rural/urban culture conflict that makes teamwork difficult. Getting to see Boba actually broker agreements between these different groups to ensure loyalty would not only add some dramatic tension to the narrative but would also help us believe in him as a leader. At the conclusion of Favreau’s version of The Book of Boba Fett, we still haven’t really seen many qualities about Boba that would make him a good leader. He’s strong willed and a cool fighter and that’s about it.

3.   Jango’s Legacy

Another aspect of Boba’s character that doesn’t feel touched upon nearly as much as it should is Boba’s relationship to his father Jango Fett and also his status as a clone. Bane makes an offhand reference to Boba living in the shadow of his father, but that’s really about it. How much is Boba, even now, still coping with Jango’s death? How does the reputation of his father and his bounty hunting legacy inform his decision making on Tatooine?

There’s also just the fact that Boba spent years of his life seeing his father’s face on the frontlines of a galactic war. And also! Fennec Shand met them! Several times! Fennec at least mentioning Boba being a clone at least once feels like a missed opportunity for character growth and introspection and maybe could add some wrinkles to her as a character too. If there’s anything that this show really needs to do is to give Ming-na Wen more to play with.

4.  Introduce Cad Bane Earlier

One of the things that The Book of Boba Fett was missing is easily a villain we can root against. The Pykes may be an overwhelming force, but they don’t have much of a personality to them. They’re bad guys to get blasted. When Cad Bane appears at the conclusion of “From the Desert Comes a Stranger” the entire show ups its stakes dramatically. We have a villain now. A scary one.

Again, some of the best scenes of the show concern Cad Bane and Boba Fett facing off. Corey Burton’s voicework and the impressive practical effects bounce off Morrison’s own acting in a really effective manner and we can feel that tense history between Bane and Boba. However, it’s never been a history we’ve seen. The entirety of Cad Bane and Boba’s relationship occurred in unseen episodes for another show that have only ever been glimpsed in unfinished animatics. It’s not exactly narrative context and it’s a missed opportunity for emotional tension and payoff during their standoffs in “In the Name of Honor.”

But, we also don’t want to lose that cool intro for the character in “From the Desert Comes a Stranger,” right? So what do we do? We make Bane a recurring character in the Boba Fett flashbacks. We get a sense of their relationship and also their decades long rivalry. We actually see the influence these two men have on each other. So when Bane swaggers out of the desert to gun down Cobb Vanth, we know that the stakes for the series increased dramatically. Bane is back and we know that shit’s about to get real.

5.     Keep Din, but Don’t Leave Boba

I think everyone can agree that despite how fun Din Djarin’s episodes of The Book of Boba Fett may have been, they undoubtedly feel like installments of a different show. Because they are. They don’t really have a place in this series. Din does. It makes perfect sense that Boba may rely on the other armored badass he knows to help defend his territory, but this isn’t Din’s story.

Just make “Return of the Mandalorian” and the Grogu/Luke portions of “From the Desert Comes a Stranger” parts of The Mandalorian season 3. Din can still show up in his hot rod Naboo Starfighter, but we don’t need the origins for it in this show. Star Wars fans are smart and also more than used to getting wonky, sometimes out of sync, continuity. Nobody would bat an eye at seeing the intro to a ship here and then learning its origin in another show. Acknowledge that these events happen and maybe even hint at them, but don’t show them. It’s not their place.