WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Book of Boba Fett, streaming on Disney+.
The crop of Star Wars live action series that are currently airing on Disney+ all take place roughly five years after the events of Return of the Jedi and new shows like Ahsoka will also run concurrent to this region of time in the galaxy far, far away. The first four chapters of the The Book of Boba Fett’s first season have provided a timeline for how Fett has spent the last half decade since being swallowed by the Sarlacc and even hinted at how far along he was in his thousand year digestion cycle before his escape.
What it does not provide however is the dynamic process by which a bounty hunter renowned for his brutality and ruthlessness transforms into a docile lackluster crime boss. This drastic shift in his personality is not chronicled in any way which leads to two potential rationales with one unsatisfactory outcome. Either the one time bounty hunter’s behavioral migration was ignored or the collective sense of who Boba Fett is has been misunderstood for decades, but in either case it represents a missed exploratory opportunity for the show.
When the Tuskens found Boba Fett he was essentially comatose from a combination of hunger, thirst and the bodily damage he sustained by being partially consumed by the Sarlacc. It seems clear that he escapes a relatively short time after falling in since the wreckage of Jabba’s yacht is still smoldering in the distance. The five years in question seem to have been spent almost entirely among the Tuskens since the fourth episode of The Book of Boba Fett and his rescue of Fennec Shand syncs up with the events of The Mandalorian‘s fifth episode of its first season where she was left for dead. The show does an excellent job of memorializing the rapport he built with the Tuskens, his adopted family, before they were slaughtered and illuminating a paternal protector role that seemed to come naturally to Boba but it doesn’t explain the glaring differences between this version of Fett and the one familiar to audiences since The Empire Strikes Back.
In the New Hope sequel, Vader collects a coterie of bounty hunters to track down the Millennium Falcon and as he inspects them he confronts Boba Fett specifically, making it clear that its crew is to be captured alive, driving home the point by saying “No disintegrations.” Fett replies with a non expressive “As you wish,” but the fact that Vader felt it necessary among the convened “scum” to isolate Boba for this admonishment has always implied that he was the most likely among them to resort to such methods. This seems a far cry from the man depicted in The Book of Boba Fett and the show does not offer any explanation as to how to reconcile these two distinct impressions and forces the audience to supply its own theories.
Fett is only responsible for 27 words of dialogue in the original trilogy and it may turn out that the world at large never truly knew who he was at its heart, but given the clear perception of who and what he is an established reason for this deviation seems sound. Almost all of Boba’s continuity, which came primarily from the comics, has been relegated to Legends lore and so is no longer canonical. This may mean that hindsight is necessary to accurately describe his actions from The Empire Strikes Back. The entirety of his dialogue is centered around capturing Han for the bounty on his head and returning him to Jabba alive. Of his four lines, half of them are specific to keeping Solo breathing. He reminds Vader that “…he is worth a lot to me,” and later “He’s no good to me dead.” This seems entirely based on the fact that Jabba wants Solo alive to humiliate him but it isn’t as if a carbonite wall hanging was part of the original plan. Vader wanted to test the process on Solo so that he could deliver Luke to the Emperor unharmed and promised to supply recompense to Fett if the process wound up killing the smuggler. Jabba’s adornment of Solo’s frozen body was improvisational, not mandated.
At this point, given what The Book of Boba Fett has revealed, it is not so far fetched to believe that Boba’s desire to keep him alive also came from a code of honor that required him to follow his directives to the letter. He often bemoans the role of being a servant to those that don’t deserve it and even offers this advice to his would be assassin, Black Krrsantan. This implies that instead of a morally vacant hired gun satisfied with collecting pucks, Fett has always been someone seeking to remove the yoke from his neck and was eager to live more authentically when he was finally given the opportunity. However in Episode 4 “The Gathering Storm” a droid kills itself at the mere mention of Fett’s name, further articulating in dramatic fashion the grim reputation he has earned throughout the galaxy.
Boba Fett is the heir to Jango Fett, himself a bounty hunter of galactic renown who won the right to have his DNA cloned to produce the army designed to secretly serve the Sith Lord Darth Sidious. Raised as his son, Boba is an exact duplicate of Jango sans any growth enhancements or pruning of his genetic code to make him more submissive. In addition to a fortune of credits it was the one stipulation Jango demanded as payment for his role as breeding stock. He lovingly nurtured Boba, raised him as his son and died publicly in an arena on Geonosis at the hands of a Jedi. Memories of his father and their time together on Kamino are among the sacred moments that Boba relives over and over again during his bacta tank treatments within Jabba’s palace.
As Jango’s perfect clone it is safe to assume that he may carry much of his father’s inherent personality and it is clear that the elder Fett desired a child even more than money. The paternalistic aspects of Boba’s nature that are on display during his time living on the Dune Sea may actually be more apropos to his character than audiences had always been led to believe. Jango, for all his fierceness, referred to Boba as “son” and smiled easily in his presence. Their screen time together during Attack of the Clones is brief but it communicated trust and devotion. The Children of the Watch, cultish extremists of Mandalorian culture which include the Armorer and Din Djarin, emphasize the part of their creed that promotes bonding with others and is specifically referenced as counter to the prohibitions the Jedi place on attachments.
Another potential avenue for speculation is that Fett’s time in the Sarlacc’s throat provided a moment of transfiguration similar to Paul’s journey on the road to Damascus. Caught in its gullet, coming face to face with his mortality, hanging beside a storm trooper that may or may not have shared his face, the path of his current steps may have caught up with him and shaped his mindset. In that moment of rebirth on the surface of Tattooine, still slick with decomposition juices and bile, perhaps Boba was spiritually reborn with his shell removed and left only in the stained white coveralls that potentially signified renewal. This would also serve a genuine narrative purpose and offer a spiritual aspect to the character, something that would resonate with some of the zealotry practiced by The Mandalorian, but thus far there is only an absence and the audience is left wondering how to make the puzzle fit while certain that there are pieces missing.
To see a paternal Boba Fett, The Book of Boba Fett is streaming now on Disney+.
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