One way I am definitely still stuck in last century with is my series watching habits. It takes me a while to get through a show, though usually not as long as in the olden days when we got one episode per week. Other times, it takes me even longer than in the good old days ™ because the luxury of getting to watch at my own pace might mean that I wait quite a while between episodes or seasons. I have no ability to plop on the couch and watch hours and hours of something at one time.
But I’ve now watched Boba Fett Episode 1: Let’s Retcon!, Episode 2: Dance with Sand People, Episode 3: Scooter Gang! and Episode 4: Shall we Form an Alliance? And I have thoughts. Lots of thoughts. I’ll try to keep them as spoiler free as possible, but if you’re super allergic to spoilers, maybe stop reading here. 3/5– Might recommend.
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Book of Boba Fett uses and overuses that trope that every beginning writer gets chastised about– dream sequences. At episode 4, things have progressed to a point where maybe we won’t be getting any more heaping servings of backstory via Bacta Tank-induced hallucination. It feels like the main point of all this backstory is less to enrich the story and more to prove to us that Boba, despite being a terrifying mercenary for hire, is a really nice guy who is good to children, animals, and comrades.
I’m not immune to the temptation of shoving a little backstory into a dream sequence or flashback– I did it in briefly Ran Shaipur and more extensively in Blood Gambit. It can be a fast way to shorthand information that’s important but doesn’t fit easily into the timeline of the current narrative.
With Boba Fett, though, this makes no sense. The time jumps in Blood Gambit bounce you back centuries. In Ran Shaipur, it’s only a decade, but it’s stuff that lies well outside of any timeline that could be folded into the narrative efficiently. Boba Fett, it’s like being bounced to last Tuesday. They might as well have started with the Sarlaac pit and worked forward instead of presenting time-traveling in dreamscapes.
So on one hand, I’m enjoying this expansion of Tatooine and the use of peripheral characters like Krrsantan while feeling perplexed about some of the retconning and the frantic, amusing attempts to make us understand that Boba Fett has been upgraded from minor villain to Charming Rogue. I thought I would have given up by now, but I’m in it for the long haul. It’s given me a lot to dissect and contemplate about the way I present my own stories!
