Let’s ring in the new year with bounties aplenty! The Book of Boba Fett has begun….
Recap
Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) is sleeping submerged in a healing chamber in Jabba’s Palace on Tatooine. In it, he dreams of Kamino, his father’s death on Geonosis, and how he escaped the Sarlacc Pit following the death of Jabba and his entourage. He remembers being stripped of his armor by Jawas, then found by a group of Sand People, tied to the back of their bantha, and taken to their encampment. He is tied up next to a Rodian prisoner, and guarded by a massiff. When he tries to escape, the Rodian sounds the alarm.
Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen) comes to wake Fett so they can begin receiving tribute now that they’re newly installed in Jabba’s Palace. They received many gifts, and pull a droid up from the basement to translate for them. They are expecting a visit from the Mayor of Mos Espa, but only his Twi’lek majordomo (David Pasquesi) arrives. He tells them that the Mayor extends well-wishes but offers no tribute—instead, they expect the tribute. Fennec tells the majordomo that their tribute is allowing him to leave with his life. The majordomo assures them that they will receive other envoys from the Mayor in the future. They take on two Gamorean guards who worked for Jabba and then Bib Fortuna after they swear their loyalty in exchange for their lives.
Boba and Fennec walk into Mos Espa; Fennec tells Boba that he should be carried through the streets to show people he is the new man in charge, but Fett isn’t interested—he plans to rule via respect instead of fear. They arrive at The Sanctuary, a large cantina and gambling establishment run by Garsa Fwip (Jennifer Beals). Boba introduces himself and explains the new state of business. Her staff clean Boba and Fennec’s helmets and return Boba’s full of money. As they make to leave the city, they are stopped and surrounded by shielded and armed assassins. A fight breaks out, made easier once the Gamoreans find them and enter the fray. Two escape, and Boba tells Fennec that he wants them alive. Fennec chases the men down and captures one for questioning. After the fight, Fett heads back into his tank to rejuvenate.
More flashback resumes: Eventually, Fett and the Rodian are taken by one of the Sand People youths to the edge of a moisture farm that is in the process of being raided by a gang. The boy instructs them to dig for pods containing water beneath the sand. Eventually, the Rodian hits a multi-armed-legged creature (it’s a giant bug centaur) and is killed. Fett strangles the thing with their chain after a long fight. The boy takes the head of the creature back to his people, and one of the adults finally gives Fett some water in respect for what he did.
Commentary
If we’re only here to clock vibes, this show has truly got it all.
Mafioso offering sequence? Check. Hardcore parkour over the rooftops of Mos Espa? Check. Helmets full of money? Cha-ching-check. Half-naked Gamorean bodyguards? Check. Burrowing your way out through the side of a giant dessert acid stomach monster? Mega-effing-check.
That said, if we’re here to appreciate some semblance of plot and storytelling, I’m… underwhelmed? Hopefully, we’ll gain some momentum as the show continues, but if The Mandalorian has taught us anything, it’s that Jon Favreau doesn’t really write scripts, he writes mood boards that he then asks directors to fill in. Robert Rodriguez has already proven that he does it better than most with his work on “The Tragedy” last year, but there’s only so much empty space you can hide with good direction and a killer design team.
We start straight out the gate with one of the goofiest fiction conceits of film, the old “we’re having a lengthy and extremely involved flashback and calling it dreams.” Because that’s how dreams work, right? You remember your past, exactly as it happened to you. Dreams are just memories we don’t wanna look too closely at because that’s how trauma works, I guess. Not with you going to a therapist that specializes in hypnotism to tap away at your subconscious, but with naps.
We’re gonna do this every week, aren’t we? *sigh*
On the other hand, I do love Boba going “Aw man, I’m having those shitty dreams again,” and Fennec being like “Cool story, put some clothes on.” As a friendship dynamic, that is truly god-tier in its familiarity and exhaustion. I also love her constant check-ins of I kills this one? as he shakes his head in the negative and tries to get her on board with his way of doing things. They’re a great team, and I hope this show gives them more by way of dialogue and interaction so that we can understand their bond a bit better. We still don’t know why Fennec feels loyalty to him, aside from the vague suggestion that he saved her life following her seeming murder in Mando season one.
The ‘whys’ of this story are largely missing so far, namely, why does Boba Fett want to take up Jabba’s seat anyhow? Being a bounty hunter is a very different game from taking over an entire sector of organized crime. And what’s more, he claims he wants to run the joint through respect, but doesn’t seem to have any plans on how to earn said respect. It’s not like anyone is impressed by his dispatch of Bib Fortuna, after all. That guy was a lightweight pretending toward heavyweight status.
For the flashback sections, I feel as though The Mandalorian was putting in some work toward portraying the Sand People as actual people rather than monsters, which was important given the native-ized background the group has always had. This depiction doesn’t do them any favors, though; they have Fett and a Rodian kidnapped and tied to posts… for giggles? The Sand People have no reason to keep them around unless they want them for food—digging for those water pods is something that is undoubtedly built into their societal structure, not something they need exhausted and dehydrated slaves to do for them. Maybe that kid is just making them do his chores, but that still doesn’t explain why they were kept in the first place. (Also wtf are those water pods plant things and where do they come from because that’s waaaaay too convenient for you to throw out there. They’re just there, buried under a thin layer of sand? The whole planet has them? Sure. And I’ve got a Sandcrawler full of beskar to sell you.)
Even if we get more information explaining their capture of Fett, this set up made no sense. And if it turns out that they only put Boba in this position so that we know how he learned to fight with a gaderffii, then that’s a real bad look on the production team’s part. The Sand People don’t need to be anyone’s noble savage combat trainers: Again, this is where the reliance on Western tropes really fall flat.
Which brings me to the title of the episode, because that was an unnecessarily weird flex? Stranger in a Strange Land is the title Robert Heinlein’s seminal SF work, but it’s also a quote taken directly from the King James Bible in the book of Exodus. I get that its use by Heinlein means that it’s a quote that genre fans are well acquainted with, but what could possibly be the purpose in referencing it here? Because nothing about Heinlein’s story really aligns with this narrative, which means you’re more likely to look for the biblical connection and… what, is Boba Fett supposed to be Moses in this analogy? Is Tatooine supposed to be Egypt? Is he going to go track down the remaining clone troopers and, um, free them? I know I’m belaboring the point here, but if you’re gonna try to be clever with your references, they need to actually be clever.
I’m assuming that the tank Fett’s sleeping in is a bacta tank, which is an interesting place to start from, and probably what I have the most questions about regarding his health. We’re not exactly sure when Mando and this show are set, but current wisdom puts it somewhere in the five-to-ten years post-Return-of-the-Jedi range. We can be sure that Boba didn’t have access to that tank the whole time, and at the moment it looks like he needs to use it pretty constantly to keep him alive. This tracks somewhat with what the Legends canon did, acknowledging that time in the Sarlacc’s stomach pretty irrevocably fucked up Boba’s body, to the point where he eventually needed cloned organs to stay alive. This could be part of the reason he wants to be a crime boss—bacta isn’t cheap, and if he needs tons of it, bounty hunting might not be enough to keep him going.
There’s obviously something going on with the group who looted the moisture farm and left their mark on the house. I’m guessing those are the people who sent the assassins with shields to kill Boba and Fennec, but they’re not showing their faces yet. Also, who’s gonna be the mayor of Mos Espa?
Hopefully we’ll find out next week.
Bits and Beskar:
- There was a long-standing joke in the fandom about how Jango Fett’s head should have fallen out of that helmet when Boba picked it up after his murder, to the point where I’m pretty sure someone on the film had to insist that you could see a shadow of his head bouncing away after Mace Windu sliced it off. As a result, I’m always expecting to see that head drop out when little Boba takes up the helmet.
- While I like the escape that they give Fett from the Sarlacc, I’ll always be emotionally attached to the Legends canon story that portrayed it, in which he insulted the being symbiotically attached to the Sarlacc badly enough that the whole place went haywire and he was able to explode his way to freedom.
- I do love to see Fett taking a page out of Leia’s book and strangling big threats with his own chain.
- My meager kingdom for people to stop pretending that you can go even two days in a desert without water. I can buy Boba taking on all sorts of physical abuse in combat, but you cannot stay out tied to a post in the blazing heat for over a day. Let alone dig a hole in the ground later.
- The Trandoshan who comes to pay tribute gives them a Wookiee pelt, which is part of a long-standing background dating all the way back to the Legends canon stating that those species are enemies, with the Trandoshans hunting Wookiees for sport. We see evidence of this in The Clone Wars episodes “Padawan Lost” and “Wookiee Hunt.”
- MAX REBO LIVED
- (No but for serious, that’s kind of a big deal that he’s sitting there after the sail barge done blew up, good for you Max Rebo, four for you, but also I wish that they gave you and presumably that’s Figrin D’an a new number to play, come on, making the space music is half the fun of even having space bands.)
- So we’ve got Matt Berry of What We Do in the Shadows (and AD/BC) fame as their extremely tired torture-turned-translator droid 8D8. (He’s likely the one we see burning the Gonk droid in ROTJ.) We’ve also got Jennifer Beals as Garsa Fwip, who you might know from The L Word, and most famously, as the eponymous dancer (who does not do the dance) of Flashdance. She looks very cool in the Twi’lek ensemble.
- I mean, Fwip’s people put something in the helmets when they cleaned them, right? Aside from money? Surveillance or detonators or something?
See you next Wednesday, everyone!
[Please note that comments will be temporarily closed over the holiday break, but will be open for discussion on Monday, January 3rd.]
Emmet Asher-Perrin would like them to explain what that bug centaur was and why Tatooine would ever have a lifeform like that. You can bug them on Twitter, and read more of their work here and elsewhere.
Maybe I don’t get the timeline so well.
But I’m having a hard time buying that the most feared, and assumingly fit, bounty hunter in the galaxy went into the Sarlacc Pit and came out a shlubby guy a few days later.
I’m still waiting for Temeura Morrison to show up either here or on The Mandalorian (or in the upcoming Ahsoka) as Rex………….
This did not grip me as much as I’d hoped it would, mainly because it’s a lot of set pieces with no real plot. “Mood boards,” indeed.
The real problem, of course, is that Boba Fett hasn’t actually been a character, he’s a guy who looks cool. That is the sum total of who he was in the animated short and in his two appearances in the live-action films. I really hope this series tells us who the hell he is, but nothing in this first episode did that, it just filled in part of how he got from inside a Sarlaac’s stomach to where he was in Mando season two.
I’m also amused that Jennifer Beals is too famous to get bodypaint…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@2, I’m guessing the years spent with the Sandpeople will play an important role in explaining Fett’s motives. As you note, we don’t know anything about what motivates him, and even in Legends, he was always portrayed as more of a “Judge Dredd” type figure, where even the stories supposedly “about” him were mainly about the characters and events around him.
Between the multiple characters wearing masks, speaking untranslated languages, or just naturally terse, this is a show that’s going to require close attention to body language, shot framing, and subtext.
I think my favourite scene was that last scene in the Tusken camp, as the Kid was taking credit for killing the monster (and thus, earning his adulthood –note that he wasn’t carrying a Gaderffii, which was mark of adulthood in the Legends continuity), the Chief seemed to be the only one who figured out that Fett was the one who actually did it –and didn’t say anything, just quietly acknowledged him, one Elder to another. It raises some interesting details about Sandperson culture, or maybe about the Chief specifically (that he doesn’t care whether or not this Rite of Passage was “legitimate”).
I also love the subtle bit of worldbuilding; those water-gourds can’t be too common; they probably only appear in specific places, which leads to a chicken-and-egg question; do the settlers scan for gourds and then build their moisture farms nearby (knowing that there’s water around), or are the gourds encouraged by the byproducts of moisture-farming? Either way, this recasts conflict between the settlers and the native peoples. Historically, it’s always been portrayed as simple territorialism on the Sandpeoples’ part, but those gourds make clear that they can’t just go off into the wilderness to survive traditionally; they need those foraging-grounds that the settlers are occupying.
“If we’re only here to clock vibes, this show has truly got it all.”
But I mean, aren’t we? That’s sort of the only reason I was interested in this show in the first place, and it delivered and then some. While it’s true that not much happened in the present, the real story for right now was how he got out of the sarlaac, which was something it was almost expected to cover. And the flashbacks go beyond that…I love how they expanded the design of the Tuskens beyond what we’ve seen so far. Also, I think there’s room for a lot of interesting stories here in how Boba is running things, his conflicts of conscience, Fennec’s role in his leadership, and Tatooine culture in general.
And hasn’t visual media always mostly been about mood anyway? Intellectual books are ones you reread, but Intellectual movies are ones that grip you while watching but leave you without much inclination to rewatch too often. The ones we watch over and over are the fun ones. This is a broad brush; of course there are exceptions, and I think TV series can escape this to more of an extent. But for example, the first Avenger’s movie was well-received, even though it has hardly any plot and what little there was came out of a trope catalogue. I have my own guilty pleasures in this regard as well; I really enjoyed No Way Home for nostalgia’s sake and fun bits despite the story being terrible and not making much sense.
Part of what made BoB great was the expanse on the world building. There may not have been a ton of plot here, but they made a real and interesting world around it. I think what I really loved andwhat surprised me was the two Gammoreans. Suddenly we have Gammoreans that seem like they are actual characters and not just a thoughtless laugh piece. I also like that they weren’t body-shamed. The Twi’lek Madame has a line about hosing them down and feeding them, showing that they are treated like pigs in universe, whereas the show (and Boba) treats them like loyal guards. I found myself really liking these two and their portrayal despite them not actually doing all that much (and saying nothing).
A little too much backstory for a first episode, at least for my taste. I prefer the old Stan Lee “give us a big battle, and explain how we got there later” approach to storytelling. And the plot just kind of meandered around. But other than that, it was a solid and entertaining episode. The acting, direction, makeup, effects, sets, editing, lighting and all that was great.
Off to a good start!
I’m assuming Boba Fett had some really cool genetic modifications, including the ones that let him survive as long as he did with only minimal water. And I’m going to assume that the pigment that blocks out ultra-violet radiation, in his case, has been altered as well. He looks pale to us but, if we could see into the ultra-violet range of the spectrum, we’d see he’s heavily shielded against the sun.
It may just be me, but I’m reminded a bit of the Liaden books. One of the characters becomes a crime boss on a desolate world, helped by a dark haired, female assassin. One of the first businesses that accepts his being the new boss is a brothel run by the madam-with-a-heart-of-gold character. The new crime boss means to create a new system not run on fear.
RE: The title of the episode
Warrior is stranded alone in the deep desert, only to be rescued by a tribe of wandering nomads, who eventually take him as one of their own.
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
@6: Good point! I had not made that connection. Let’s see how far it continues!
Premiere was okay, not mindblowing. The main appeal is watching Morrison and Wen perform, though there wasn’t enough of the latter.
The “revelation” of how he got out of the Sarlacc was underwhelming; okay, so he was in it and he used his gear to get out. Anyone could’ve guessed that, really. Although it amusingly bears some resemblances to Boba’s escape in the original Marvel SW comics, which also involved him being scavenged by Jawas after he got himself out (though in a different way).
Also, they should’ve included a brief clip from Return of the Jedi to establish how he got in the pit in the first place — maybe a quick montage of clips from Empire and Jedi showing how his work for Vader and Jabba led to that fate. I mean, yeah, of course this is made mostly for the fans who already know his backstory, but it’s just basic good storytelling practice to approach every story as if it’s somebody’s first, and to give everyone enough information to catch up even if they don’t know the backstory — or to refresh their memories if they do. Heck, even though I have known the backstory for 38 years, the flashbacks still felt incomplete to me without showing what led Boba to end up in the Sarlacc, because that’s a key part of the narrative being revisited. They did include a clip from Episode II, so they could’ve included clips from the other movies too. If actor clearances were an issue, they could’ve edited around shots of Luke, Leia, and Han.
It’s weird to see Boba portrayed as this honorable criminal type, when he’s been treated in the past as a sinister figure of pure malevolence. I guess he has so little canonical backstory — aside from his childhood vendetta against Mace Windu — that there’s room for such a characterization, but it’s still a change from expectations. Of course, it’s obvious why they did it; even in a show centered on a crime lord, they want the audience to sympathize with him, so they make him a nobler, humbler crime lord than his predecessors. Though I hope the series fleshes out more of his backstory to explore how he formed his values and outlook. He’s still kind of a blank slate at this point.
I was surprised when Boba offered to help the Rodian escape. I was expecting the Rodian to beg for rescue and Boba to ignore him and only help himself. So they established that he had a decent streak to start with.
@1/Fehler: “But I’m having a hard time buying that the most feared, and assumingly fit, bounty hunter in the galaxy went into the Sarlacc Pit and came out a shlubby guy a few days later.”
His head and face looked pretty scarred after the Sarlacc and however long he was lying unconscious in the desert. I think the idea is that the injuries and scarring aged his appearance.
@9 – actually, in the Legends EU (and speaking of that, I once wrote into Star Wars Insider for a favorite character poll claiming that the Sarlaac counted as a character because of that story, and my letter got referenced lol) hew as portrayed as a kind of ‘man with a code’ type of character.
Anyway, I’m with crzydroid on this – the show was basically what I wanted it to be. I don’t actually particularly care about Boba Fett – back when they were going to make a Boba Fett Movie I was like, “Really? Do we need that?”. Even the crime lord stuff isn’t totally what draws me – I can see the potential for some good intrigue, but overall it’s not my thing (and I do agree that so far I have no idea WHY Boba Fett wants to be a crime lord, becuase it looks annoying and stressful to me!).
But what I am TOTALLY hear for is just soaking up the Star Wars worldbuilding and seeing what the non-Skywalkers do with their time. I actually like what they are doing with the Tuskens here – they have a culture and are not mindless, and the Tatooine colonists have probably also wronged them in their own way, but that culture isn’t beyond reproach, either. I think it is still canon that part of their rituals (at least, some of the tribes) involve ritual torture/sacrifice, and they are ultimately an honor/warrior based culture for all that entails. Survival of the fittest and all that. They are going to have some brutal aspects that probably ascribe more value to physical might and prowess. But in some ways, I think Boba and his Mandalorian heritage (which is also not above criticism in my mind) will fit in well there.
At any rate, it’s great that we get to see more of the Tuskens, and not just the men, but the women, and the children too.
I liked the music and visuals a lot…it just felt like home. I did also really like the nods to Kamino/Geonosis (I agree some other flashbacks could have been useful), as well as the cantina band remix :) I think this also hit home more for me because I was really disappointed in the Wheel of Time show which, for all its positives, still didn’t FEEL like the world I knew or match up with how it felt in my head. This to me still basically feels like Star Wars, and I like just hanging around in that world.
I think this will be a fairly enjoyable series, but it’s basically the appetizer for what I really want (Kenobi, and Andor and Ahsoka).
@10/Lisamarie: “actually, in the Legends EU… hew as portrayed as a kind of ‘man with a code’ type of character.”
Yes, no doubt, but I’m speaking from my perspective as someone whose experience of Boba Fett comes pretty much only from the films, the early Marvel comics, and the Nelvana cartoons (the Holiday Special short where he debuted and the episode of Droids he appeared in with the same character design and voice actor). I never got into the EU; I got bored with the Thrawn trilogy 2/3 of the way through and never finished it, and in the ensuing years I only ever read a handful of SW novels or comics. I’ve never been a hardcore SW fan. Frankly, I’m a bigger fan of the modern stuff than I ever was of anything prior to The Clone Wars.
“I actually like what they are doing with the Tuskens here – they have a culture and are not mindless, and the Tatooine colonists have probably also wronged them in their own way, but that culture isn’t beyond reproach, either.”
Every culture has good and bad aspects. Even individuals can be both good and evil — Thomas Jefferson wrote the most powerful statement of individual liberty ever conceived while owning slaves. Respect for other cultures isn’t about denying their darker sides, it’s about admitting that our own cultures have equal darkness, so we’re no better than they are.
“I think this also hit home more for me because I was really disappointed in the Wheel of Time show which, for all its positives, still didn’t FEEL like the world I knew or match up with how it felt in my head. This to me still basically feels like Star Wars, and I like just hanging around in that world.”
It seems to me that it’s far easier to replicate the feel of a long-running film franchise, where everyone is shown the same version of it, than to replicate someone’s perception of a prose novel series, where everyone builds their own version of it in their heads.
@11- yup , definitely (regarding the prose vs books). Especially because Star Wars, for its flaws in some of the storytelling has a really distinct visual and aural language, and I think is meant to be more ‘broad strokes’ in terms of calling on myths/tropes, etc. Not to mention that Star Wars (even if I do enjoy the books) is primarily a visual media anyway. As to your first point, I do think that a lot of the newer content IS still drawing on the books or other media when they find something they like, especially as many of the people involved are themselves fans and so have some of the same common associations. Some of the EU got kind of crazy so I actually wasn’t that upset when Disney bought it and said they were going to start fresh (and I really don’t blame them) but I do enjoy when they pull from it as there was also some cool stuff. To me, anyway :D
Regarding point 2, yes I agree. Which is why I am enjoying getting to see this more nuanced view of them! If anything, this kinda makes Anakin’s slaughter even more impactful.
@12/Lisamarie: “As to your first point, I do think that a lot of the newer content IS still drawing on the books or other media when they find something they like, especially as many of the people involved are themselves fans and so have some of the same common associations.”
Yes, obviously, but again, I’m only talking about my own reaction as a viewer who knows the character primarily from screen canon. And that’s likely to be the case for most of the audience, because the readership for tie-in materials is rarely more than about 1 to 2% of the total viewing audience of a TV or movie franchise. Maybe a larger percentage for a niche show like this on a subscription viewing service, but still probably not a majority of the people watching.
Besides, even if you do know about the apocryphal tie-in materials, there’s no guarantee that canon will take characters in the same direction. New canon may borrow a lot from the apocrypha yet also contradict a lot of it. So just saying “It happened such-and-such a way in the apocrypha” is not very relevant when talking about what new canon chooses to do. (As those of us who write Star Trek novels have experienced over the past few years of new shows contradicting most of what we did, while cherrypicking a few odd details from it here and there.)
@13
I think that some folks are still getting used to the idea that, post-Lucas, the Star Wars franchise now has a single continuity, where the books, comics, cartoons et al are all equally as valid as the movies, as opposed to the old “levels of canon” days, where it looked something like this:
The movies.
Adaptations of the movies (radio, prose)
Clone Wars content
Post-Zahn EU
Older stuff, like the Marvel comics.
Fanfic
A fan talking online.
A guy talking on the street
Strange mumblings at the edge of your hearing
A dream you once had.
Scrabble™ letters scattered on the ground.
The Holiday Special.
:D
@14/DigiCom: Meh. The old tie-ins were touted for years as being “absolutely canon,” until new movies and shows started to contradict them, at which point they walked it back and invented that “tiers of canon” BS to rationalize it. And the same thing is already happening with the new stuff that’s supposedly “absolutely canon.” The Bad Batch presented a different version of Caleb Dume’s Order 66 experience than the comics did, and I gather that The Mandalorian contradicted the novel Aftermath about how Cobb Vanth got Boba Fett’s armor. Tie-ins can claim all they want to be canon, but they’re read by a tiny fraction of the film/TV audience, so film and TV productions will always feel free to contradict them if it suits their needs, even if they keep the broad strokes or cannibalize certain elements.
Heck, canons contradict and rewrite themselves all the time anyway — you can find numerous continuity discrepancies between the original SW trilogy and the prequels, and that’s not even counting how Lucas re-edited the OT. So nobody should ever expect “canon” to be a guarantee against contradiction.
And again, none of this has anything to do with my original point, which was just about my subjective reaction as a viewer.
I mean, given that Kenobi throws shade at the Tusken Raiders for not being accurate enough to kill Jawas, and then in Episode I we see them shood podracers (and in episode 2 of this show they make head shots inside A MOVING TRAIN) one has to accept there’s wiggle room and stories will change as they see fit. Or maybe it’s just Kenobi who has a flexible relationship with the truth :D
Anyway, nobody expects the EU to be honored in full (and I agree with you about the comics/books of the new era – I appreciate the general effort, but as soon as story dictates otherwise, they will go in some other direction. I don’t think that’s entirely bad since sometimes it’s just a throwaway phrase or something that hasn’t been totally fleshed out and so it might harm the story in the long run to have to be held hostage to it.) especially because the EU itself was filled with a lot of cruft.
That said there is still a pretty thriving fan community (and this show likely is a bit more niche as you say) and I appreciate that they are still making the broad strokes feel familiar for us, because for me it keeps it from feeling bland and generic, which can sometimes happen when a series tries to get too broad. Not saying I want the opposite, which is some super deep cut thing that alienates new viewers, but I also have faith that new viewers can acclimate themselves and enjoy it if the references are done well and don’t rely too much on insider knowledge to follow the story.
I think Solo is another example of that where they clearly went their own direction with it, but still pulled some elements that would be familiar to people who read various novels/comics/lore, even if just as little Easter eggs or references to legend. Like, one of Lando’s (likely embellished) stories that he narrates is a reference to a fairly obscure set of novels. It gave me a chuckle, but the casual fan doesn’t have to worry about it as it still works to establish Lando’s character as somewhat of a braggart. But the broad strokes of Han as an ex Imperial pilot on Carida, the Maw as a gravitational anamoly, Han rescuing Chewie from Imperials are all things from the books. And even people who aren’t that into the books do pick up some of that by cultural osmosis in the fan culture.
At any rate, I think it is relevant in that it’s clear several of the creators DO seem to see it as a valid ‘well’ to pull from for inspiration, even if they change it and put their own spin on it, and it’s fun to trace those roots. Thrawn in Rebels is another example of that. Personally, I enjoy seeing the new spin being put on some of it, as well as the new stuff! There are still some holdouts bitter about the old EU but they both can live in my brain (along with my own continuity).
@16/Lisamarie: “At any rate, I think it is relevant in that it’s clear several of the creators DO seem to see it as a valid ‘well’ to pull from for inspiration”‘
It’s relevant if you’re talking about the creative process. I was not doing so in my original comment about how Boba Fett came off to me before. I was talking purely about my own subjective experience as a viewer, which I would never mistake for objective reality or expect to be binding on anyone else. It was not a judgment of anything outside myself, merely a description of my own state of mind.
Of course drawing on external influences can be done well. Heck, all of Star Wars is a hodgepodge of references to the genres Lucas liked as a kid — the whole thing is one big homage. But a work that functions as an homage also needs to function just as well for people who have no idea what’s being referenced, who are only experiencing it as its own independent thing, like me when I was an 8- or 9-year-old watching the original movie in the theater (or reading the novelization, which I did before I saw the movie). I’d never seen The Hidden Fortress or The Dam Busters or most of the other stuff being referenced (though I had seen the Flash Gordon serials on TV), but I was still able to enjoy the movie on its own terms, because they managed to make it work both as homage and not homage. The perspective of someone who isn’t in the loop is as much worth acknowledging as that of someone who is.
I doubt that’s Figrin D’an in that scene. In the Special Edition version of Jedi, there was a Bith musician in Max Rebo’s band, so it’s more likely that person. Figrin D’an presumably still has a much better gig with his full band in a different city.
Pet peeve:
Just because he wasn’t given water on screen, does not mean he was not given water. The flashbacks show a span of, as you said, two days, in a 38 minute episode.
The water pods aren’t just lying around everywhere. They travelled quite a ways to find a suitable spot, which the Tusken child identified somehow. And naturally, with a source of water, there was a predator lying in wait.