The Broken Content Machine of Boba Fett

Why banging together action figures from the Star Wars toy box doesn't make good drama

Boba Fest riding a rancor into battle. Because why not?

‘Spoilers’ for the Book of Boba Fett follow, to the extent that knowing what’s in it ‘spoils’ something that’s already fundamentally broken…

Star Wars has always been the franchisiest of franchises, the template for blockbuster movie-making and merchandising. It has walked a tightrope between the Light side of satisfyingly mythic popular storytelling, and the Dark side of money-spinning and fan-pandering.

After The Rise of Skywalker took the movie saga decisively down the Dark Side, a new hope arose in the form of The Mandalorian. The show worked in large part because it doubled down on the influence of Westerns, with Din Djarin as the lone gunslinger who walks into town, humanised by his relationship with the almost unbearably cute “Baby Yoda” (his name by now revealed to be Grogu). The first season was refreshingly unencumbered by the weight of Star Wars lore - it had its references and ‘Easter eggs’ but had its own story to tell.

So it’s been disappointing to see The Book of Boba Fett take Star Wars back down the Dark Side, letting loose the worst impulses of fannish indulgence and streaming-era universe building in a tale that is narratively dysfunctional and broken.

Why I tried and failed to skip The Book of Boba Fett

First of all a confession: I’ve not actually watched all of it.

I bailed after the first episode, after it utterly failed to convince me that they had any idea how to turn Boba Fett into an interesting enough character to build an episode around. I would count myself as a fan of Star Wars but not the kind who has a nostalgic attachment to Boba Fett, or any automatic interest in seeing a bit part character get more screen time just because he had cool armour. The Mandalorian scratched the itch without any of the lore-baggage that Boba himself carries. I was sceptical going in, and found episode 1 to be rather dull. I didn’t understand why Boba Fett wanted to take Jabba’s place as crime-lord of Tatooine (though with less ruthlessness and more of a sense of honour). Why did it matter to Boba, and why should I care?

Life was too short, so I decided to give it a miss.

That’s fine, I don’t have to watch everything Star Wars. I’m a forager in the wider Star Wars universe for the stories that interest me rather than an avid fan. I really got into Star Wars: Rebels but lost interest in The Bad Batch, and have only dipped into the Clone Wars. I’ve read some of the Darth Vader and Doctor Aphra comics on Marvel Unlimited, and enjoyed playing Jedi: Fallen Order. There’s plenty under the Star Wars banner, some of which interests me and other parts less so much.

However, I got pulled back in on The Book of Boba Fett once I heard that episode 5 was picking up the storylines of The Mandalorian in an essential way. Indeed, this episode didn’t feature Boba Fett himself at all, making it essentially a Mando episode dropped in mid-season, which seems to show an astonishing lack of confidence on the part of the writers in the story they were telling about Boba. Episode 6 continued in a similar vein, with more returning faces - Grogu, Luke Skywalker (in an impressive but still slightly soulless CGI recreation of young Mark Hamill), R2-D2 and Ahsoka Tano (Anakin’s padawan turned maverick Jedi from Clone Wars, Rebels and The Mandalorian season 2).

It’s a frustrating thing where stories become interconnected to the extent that your favourite shows have ‘required reading’ from other sources, whether that’s another show or particular movies or comics or whatever.

The limits of the toy box

I read an observation (I can’t quite recall or track down where) that The Book of Boba Fett is basically watching the writers and directors get a load of action figures out of the Star Wars toy box and smash them together. The fun lies in mixing and matching figures from different sets.

Now I’m enough of a Star Wars nerd to get at least some thrill of excitement at having Ahsoka meet Luke on screen for the first time, and to see Luke’s Jedi academy being built. But the entire appeal of The Book of Boba Fett seems to be predicated on these moments of recognition or crossover or joining the dots of continuity. And it just doesn’t add up to a satisfying story.

So take episode 6, for example. You have the Mandalorian getting a new spaceship as a Naboo starfighter, with the little robot from the Fallen Order video game running around, which he then flies around the canyons from the podracing in the prequels, and dodges some X-Wings!

The battle in the final episode is another offender. There’s no real sense of emotional stakes, of why the battle matters either to the people of Tatooine or to Boba Fett personally. But never mind that - here’s Boba riding into battle on a Rancor! Yay!

These aren’t really stories, so much as televised Wookieepedia entries.

This interconnectivity has also undermined the Marvel Disney+ shows, where landing their own storylines has often been undercut by the need to set up the next thing and the next thing. Loki was the worst offender to my mind, where his own dramatic arc got sidelined in the final episode for an info dump setting up Kang the Conqueror and the opening up of the multiverse.

I’m not against interconnected storylines in principle - I think you can get a lot of fun and drama out of having longer term consequences that ripple out into later stories. But the problem is that each individual story needs to stand on its own first. One of the dangers of the recent commercial success of Spider-man: No Way Home is that Marvel takes this as an indicator that the big cross-over events are the future of the franchise, without building the new, original stories to create the future nostalgia that can make that kind of ‘event’ work.

The online fandom hype cycle

This whole problem is enabled and exacerbated by online fandom, of course. Whereas twenty years ago, films and TV series had to make sure that their storylines remained accessible to ‘casual audiences’, streaming platforms, social media and the ubiquitous online Wikis have made lore, backstory and deep cuts into source material from comics or video games part of the media hype-cycle. Online media outlets desperate for fan-clicks create explainer articles and videos, which help create buzz about the latest or upcoming show or movie. Teasing post-credits appearances set up a cycle of speculation. Lore acts as ‘content marketing’ for the back catalogue of shows and movies available on subscription platforms such as Disney+ or Marvel Unlimited. From the point of view of the media corporations, continuity is a way of monetising this aspect of fandom.

The problem is though is that it’s a cycle of diminishing returns. This kind of approach might appeal to a core of dedicated fans, but becomes progressively more forbidding and uninteresting to anyone not already invested in the franchise.

In a recent interview with Phil Miller and Chris Lord, who were fired from directing the Star Wars prequel spin-off Solo over ‘creative differences’ with Lucasfilm, they spoke about the dangers of being afraid of the fanbase:

Phil Lord: If you’re giving the audience exactly what they expect and a bunch of, ‘just fan service,’ they’re going to end up disappointed, they’re gonna be like, ‘Yeah, this is stuff I already knew. The trick is to figure out what it is they don’t quite yet realize that they want and every idea that you add into the stew is something that you’re like, ‘Oh, that would be a cool thing to see that I haven’t seen before and isn’t the thing that’s expected because I think people are really savvy now and so you have to stay two steps ahead of them and I feel like that’s our job.

Chris Miller: You can’t play scared. So, I don’t really relate to some fear of a fanbase. We don’t think about it that way. There are people out there, I suppose, that are trying to game the marketplace and follow a formula. They’re trying to serve the quarterly earnings of a big company, but a company doesn’t make a movie or write a song, these things are made by human beings and we’re always trying to serve the human beings making the movie and the human beings witnessing the movie, always remembering, what you’re putting out there, that’s only half of it. The other half is, there’s a person in a movie theater and you’re beaming sound and light into their face and they make the movie in their brain. So you have to understand that as a relationship and a conversation, put yourselves into the shoes of that person.

The reason we love the action figures in the toy box in the first place is because they remind us of stories that thrilled us and resonated with us emotionally. No-one would have cared how cool Boba Fett looked, if we hadn’t also been enthralled by Luke’s journey as a hero as the larger story in which Boba first appeared.

As a fan of Star Wars, the parts that intrigue me the most aren’t more stuff I’ve already seen, but new and intriguing flavours in the universe, where the stories are informed by other art, history and influences from outside the show. It needs to be made fresh, and to tell compelling, engaging stories with grand choices and big emotions.

The Dark Side or the Light?

The streaming era presents franchises like Star Wars and Marvel with a choice, a Dark Side and a Light Side.

The Dark Side thinks that the appeal of the franchise lies in the nouns: X-Wings, Death Stars, lightsabers, Skywalkers. It tries to give us more and more of the same stuff, remixed in different ways.

The Light Side realises that it isn’t the nouns that are the important part of the equation, but the adjectives: adventurous, epic, scary, emotional. The continued success of the franchise doesn’t lie in greatest hits remixes, but in stories that have the same skill in making us feel the same way, caring about the characters and rooting for them. There’s nothing wrong with drawing on the past where it serves the story, but it’s not driven by it.

There’s still time for the writers and producers to choose the Light side, to commit to prioritising forward-looking storytelling over inward-looking franchise consolidation. But like the Force, ‘Quicker, easier, more seductive’ is the path to the Dark Side.

Which will it be, Disney – the Dark Side, or the Light?

Further reading: Film Crit Hulk has a good takedown of the storytelling missteps of The Book of Boba Fett.

What else I’ve been enjoying

• I had a great time joining the Cooper and Cary Have Words podcast’s book group on C S Lewis’s That Hideous Strength last week! You can find the show wherever you listen to podcasts, but the book group recording is only available to patrons of the show - you can become a supporter on Patreon.

• The Afterparty on Apple TV+ is a fun whodunnit from Phil Lord and Chris Miller, where each suspect’s version of events is presented through the lens of a different movie genre (rom com, action movie, musical, psychological thriller…) reflecting their personality and outlook. It’s a bit like Community meets Knives Out and I’ve been enjoying watching it with my wife and trying to work out the real killer amidst the red herrings.