Austin Gorton: Welcome back Adam! As of the completion of this episode, we are more than halfway through the season; how are you feeling about where things stand overall?
Adam: I commented on Twitter that I’m really appreciating just how Star Wars-y this show is. It feels deeply invested in what the franchise is all about, has a sense of humor and doesn’t take itself super seriously, and ends up being fun if you’re open to it. Fans looking for some hyper-violent, gritty take need look elsewhere. This show is goofy, and I am enjoying it. A LOT happened in this episode, so let’s not put our helmets on and get right into it:
Save Fennec
Adam: Boba Fett finds Fennec Shand (who he apparently knows by reputation) lying close to dead in the sand. Is it just me or is Lucasfilm trying to make these night scenes as dark as humanly possible? Who is filming this, Gordon Willis? Even with the brightness turned all the way up on my monitor I could barely make out Boba in his black robes and Fennec in her black uniform.
Austin: Yeah, I’ve complained about this before, but the darkness was especially oppressive in this episode. Even some of the later interior fight sequences were muddied, just in terms of the lighting. I get that shows do this to help obscure the seams of the digital effects work, but, like, the stuff in the desert shouldn’t require THAT much in the way of digital effects. I’m watching this in a dark room with the brightness turned up and it’s still like I’m watching through a gauzy shade; just let us see what is going on!
Adam: To save Fennec, Boba takes her to a very cool “mod shop” where hip kids are getting cybernetic implants. I thought this whole sequence was really fun, with its ravey theme music and tattoo parlor aesthetic. What did you think?
Austin: I definitely liked the aesthetic, and “the Modifier” (played by musician Thundercat) had an intense presence to him that suggested a rich history in the best Star Wars manner. But I did find the whole process a little too…clean. I’m not looking for a gritty medical drama in my Star Wars, but between Boba coming across the dying Fennec, hauling her to the Modifier atop a bantha, the ensuing surgery, and then Fennec being hauled out again to awaken on the sandy desert floor, it feels like she should have been a little more banged up. Or at least, been given some kind of quasi sci-fi anesthetic or something while she’s having her guts replaced with machine parts. I mean, what she went through was at least somewhat close to what Boba did, in terms of intensity, and he’s been needing nightly bacta treatments for the last four episodes.
Adam: I hear ya. A core aesthetic choice of Star Wars is generally to make everything pretty dusty, and the Modifier’s (I didn’t realize that was Thundercat! Now I’m going to go listen to some Thundercat, BRB) shop was pretty spotless. BUT! If you’re gonna replace a person’s guts with fun wires and stuff, it should be relatively anti-septic.
Austin: Clean though it may be, the rescue of Fennec marks the beginning of a beautiful friendship between the two (or, at least, a wary alliance) as Boba recruits her to help him get his ship back from where he left it parked at Jabba the Hutt’s palace so he can properly kick off his revenge tour. Two questions for you, Adam: how much do you think five years of parking fees are, and did you enjoy the subsequent action sequences the ship heist triggered?
Adam: It is weird that Bib held onto the ship, but convenient for our plot. And ship heist aside, this did lead to my favorite scene in the episode: The kitchen droids! They slice! They dice! They’ll change into attack mode and Grievous you to death! And bonus, an adorable LEP droid tries to give Boba the slip! I love these droids!
Austin: Hopefully the LucasFilm marketing and licensing departments are paying attention because I need kitchen droid stuff stat! The actual ship heist was fun too, in its way, and there was definitely a charge in seeing Boba reunited with his (father’s) ship, but again, everything was filmed in the apparently-standard hazy darkness that made it a little less engaging.
Revenge Tour
Adam: Boba quickly embarks on his Revenge Tour in [don’t call it the Slave I] his ship. First stop? The Sarlacc Pit! Which begs the question: Why the Sarlacc Pit?
Austin: I really have no idea.
The stated reason is to get back his armor, but it remains unclear, textually, why he thinks it’s in the Sarlacc’s gullet. We saw him emerge from the Sarlacc wearing it in episode 1 before getting knocked out (and then promptly loses it to Jawas). Given what we went through in the immediate aftermath of that sequence and the intervening five (or is it? See below!) years, I guess the idea is supposed to be he doesn’t remember/know that he emerged wearing it? But then, how does he think he survived/got out without it?
Adam: I get it. You got eaten by a giant sand butthole. You were unconscious after you dug out. But you’d think you’d remember you still had the armor on when you dug out, no?
Austin: Right. Yet even in the context of the series, it’s confusing: we know how he’ll eventually get the armor back for real already and this episode doesn’t even spend the time to show us that again. So why make a point of it at all? Just to get the (admittedly, very cool) sequence of the Sarlaac attacking the Firespray and Boba fighting back? In which case, just have him go back there to blow up the Sarlacc for eating him in the first place.
Adam: It’s all in service of throwing a grenade down there so we know the Sarlacc can Sarlacc no more. I mean, unless some moron trips and slides down there? But one pit just ain’t enough, and Fettec (that’s my tabloid name for Boba and Fennec) also track down the Nitko bike gang who killed the Tuskens, and blow them to smithereens video game style. A little impersonal as revenge goes but we’ve gotta catch up with the present timeline. A lot happens in this episode!
Austin: It’s one of the most plot-heavy episodes yet, for sure.
Adam: If Boba is done with the Bacta Tank, does that mean no more flashbacks? We’ve spent a lot of time in the past in these first four episodes. Should we assume we won’t see any more? And if we do flashback, will Boba have to be underwater somehow? With only three episodes left, it’s safe to assume we’ll stick to the here and now of 9 ABY.
Austin: I think that’s likely, especially with the “flash” of flashbacks here that catches us up to the present day by showing the execution of Bib Fortuna again, but the end result would be a very oddly-structured season, with all the flashbacks pushed into the front half. It makes me wonder if something changed on the fly, and the flashbacks were meant to be sprinkled, in smaller doses, throughout every episode of the season, before getting clustered into the front half for some reason.
Ultimately, it probably doesn’t matter; the focus now is clearly on the present day events.
Be Your Own Boss
Austin: As I’ve mentioned in past reviews, one of my big questions going into this series was why – why does renowned bounty hunter Boba Fett want to be the new Jabba the Hutt? Previous flashbacks teased at an answer that I didn’t like – to get revenge/impose order in the wake of the fridging of his adoptive Native Tatooiner clan – but this episode offers our first concrete explanation: Boba, like many of us, is sick of working for idiots, and wants to be his own boss. Putting aside for the moment the question of whether or not this makes this the first show to speak directly to the Great Resignation, how does this motivation work for you?
Adam: I love the idea that Boba, who has not proven to be the smartest of Daimyos, thinks he’s a smarter strategist than villains like Darth Vader or Jabba the Hutt. This is almost certainly not true. But it does make for a fascinating turn for this character who we knew for decades as a faceless henchman. His proposal to the other crime families isn’t even that good. He can’t convince them to ally with him against the Pykes, so he basically says he’ll do it himself if they’ll leave him alone. He does make the outstanding decision to hire a certain wookie onto his growing team. Wasn’t Krrsantan a delight here?
Austin: He absolutely was. Loved the bar sequence with the Trandoshans,and I love the way Boba is building out his retinue by promising some level of autonomy and authority to long-time jobbers like himself. But I agree, in order to really sell this idea, the series needs to show us Boba Fett doing something exceptional in the context of his role as a Daimyo. Not necessarily him in a cool fight, but some indication that he *is* smarter than the average goon and is a better boss than anyone else for which he’d be working.
Adam: Well at least it looks like his pet rancor is ready for action. I’m highly anticipating the inevitable Boba Fett Rides a Rancor scene in the final episode.
Austin: Things are definitely starting to come together: we have some sense of Boba’s motivation, the overarching conflict (Boba vs. the Pykes) is coming into view, and the flashbacks appear to be behind us. Seems like these last three episodes are going to tell us a lot about the series.
Force Facts
- Episode Title: “The Rising Storm”
- According to the official Star Wars timeline, Return of the Jedi takes place in 4 ABY (After the Battle of Yavin) and the Mandolorian takes place in 9 ABY. This means that everything we’ve seen in the bacta flashbacks occurred within five years. It’s still unclear just how long he was in the Sarlaac (one assumes that even with the armor protecting him, he couldn’t have lived without food or water) and how long Boba spent with the Tuskens before their tribe was murdered. Given that Boba learns to speak Tusken and adopts their ways, it’s safe to say he lived with them for 4-5 years.
- Alternatively: According to Jabba-via-Threepio, the Sarlaac digests its victims over a thousand years, which implies it possesses the capabilities to keep them alive for those thousands of years. So maybe Boba was hanging out there for a few years before he blasted his way out.
- Banthas were originally played in A New Hope by costumed elephants. The average walking speed of an elephant is 4.5 MPH which is slightly faster than the average walking speed of a human at 3-4 MPH. Which means riding a Bantha might be slow, but still a little faster than walking.
- Banthas have traditionally been portrayed as herbivores, but Boba feeds his bantha meat in the episode. (Austin: Banthas should need to eat more than that! I remain endlessly fascinated by how the Tatooine ecosystem even works!)
- Wookies and Trandoshans have an ancient blood feud that goes back centuries with Trandoshans hunting Wookies for their pelts (something which has managed to stick across multiple canonizations and re-canonizations). Makes sense that Krrsantan went after them. We even got a good old fashioned Wookie arm removal! (Han jokes about Wookies removing arms in A New Hope and a deleted scene from The Force Awakens had Chewie ripping off Unkar Plutt’s.)
- Boba chases an LEP droid through Jabba’s kitchen. This LEP is employed as a rat catcher, and a rat catcher droid is also mentioned in Rae Carson’s Most Wanted, a YA novel set during Solo.
Adam Reck is the cartoonist behind Bish & Jubez as well as the co-host of Battle Of The Atom.
Austin Gorton also reviews older issues of X-Men at the Real Gentlemen of Leisure website, co-hosts the A Very Special episode podcast, and likes Star Wars. He lives outside Minneapolis, where sometimes, it is not cold. Follow him on Twitter @AustinGorton
