Mark Turetsky: Hey Austin, thanks for inviting me to review this, the third episode of The Book of Boba Fett!
Austin Gorton: Thank you for joining me! Three episodes in, we’re starting to get a feel for the arc of the season, yet at the same time, the show still seems to be figuring out how to balance its flashbacks and present day material. What are your general thoughts on where things are at right now?
Mark: Overall, I’m not having as much fun in this one than I did with The Mandalorian. I think part of it is that Mando works on a level of pastiche: what if Boba Fett and Yoda teamed up, but Yoda was a baby. And their enemy is Darth Gus from Breaking Bad. Here we have actual Boba Fett, and it’s maybe just not as much fun. I dunno. It’s kind of amazing that the show that focuses on a puppet and someone who’s always behind a mask seems much more lively than this one.
That’s not to say I’m not enjoying parts of Boba Fett, but it’s a bit of a step down.
Austin: Part of the issue, I think, has been that the show has thus far spent a lot more time showing us how Boba Fett became the person he is in the present day, without also showing us who he is in the present day. But that changes a little bit here, with this episode spending vastly more time in the present day than in flashbacks. Should we get to it?
Mark: This is the way.
Space Vespas
Austin: The episode opens with Boba and Fennec conducting what I assume is “everyday business” for them, discussing the recent assassination attempt and taking meetings. One of those is with local businessman Lortha Peel (played by Milton from Office Space/voice of Bill Dauterive himself, Stephen Root, continuing the Favreu-verse’s propensity for casting comedians as random Star Wars denizens). Peel has problems with some local hooligans, and is seeking the help of his local crime boss to deal with them. When Boba goes to confront the hooligans, he decides to hire them on himself, and tells Peel to cut it off with the price gouging. Mark, what did you make of this window into Boba’s managerial style, and the overall impression of his newfound teen gang associates?
Mark: First off, the place of appointments as status markers in this episode cannot be overstated. The question of who has appointments, who gets appointments, it’s all about the power dynamics. Nobody who shows up at Boba Fett’s palace in this episode actually has an appointment (be it Peel or the Hutt twins, who we’ll meet later on), but he sees them anyway. Not very high status for a Daimyo.
I can understand him seeing Stephen Root because he’s a national treasure. Also, I’m loving the designs of this gang of mods. The Streets of Mos Espa? More like The Streets With Most Vespas. Am I right?
Austin: I feel like we can stop right here because this piece has peaked.
I too dig the overall look of this gang. They remind me a bit of the Neutrinos from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but that’s really just because both are doing what Star Wars, at least in its origins, has always done: sci-fi up 50s car culture. But you make a good point about the meetings. It’s clearly meant to be viewed as a badass move when Boba refuses to take no for an answer when trying to see the mayor, for example, yet everyone barging in on him doesn’t even need to bother picking a lock first.
That said, I liked the way he handled the street gang. Obviously, Stephen Root was expecting him to just disintegrate the lot of them, but he smartly decided to solve two problems at once: address Stephen Root’s concern while also adding some additional muscle to his own retinue. Of course, in the process, Boba shows that, once again, he’s more inclined to side with the little guy, behavior that seems more and more to be a direct result of his experiences in the flashbacks, which gets heavily underscored in this episode.
That Escalated Quickly
Mark: Right. At a certain point in the ComicsXF Slack last week, I said that the flashback stories were done, now all that had to happen was that the Native Tatooiner tribe would just need to be killed off. It’s really bugging me how rote the flashback plot has been.
Now, we can talk about how these flashbacks are intercut with his memories of his father leaving while he was a boy, and how this is a man who keeps losing his family and is trying to make a new one in the present day. They even refer to his criminal empire as a family. And that’s all well and good, but this is a straight up fridging. Every member of this tribe gets killed off for the sake of Boba Fett’s character growth. Heck, the Pykes probably planned their meeting to coincide with the Kintan Striders’ attack just so that he wouldn’t be there.
Austin: Agreed, this is absolutely fridging that entire tribe. It was pretty clear last episode that this is where the whole flashback plot was heading, and the only thing surprising about the actual execution of the plotline was how quickly it occurred – I figured we’d get another episode or two of Boba hanging with the Native Tatooiners just to twist the knife when they were inevitably killed off. The end result is doubly disappointing: both for the way it reduces what had been a relatively intricate depiction of a culture to nothing more than motivation for another character, and for the way it was completely predictable.
I guess, if I’m being charitable, the one minor twist here is how it’s the Kintan Striders and not the Pykes who eliminate the tribe: it seemed like we were heading towards a “present day Boba becomes a crime lord in order to take out the Pyke’s for revenge” scenario, but maybe the intent here is to create a more general sense of lawlessness and chaos that Present Day Boba is trying to stem.
Mark: I suppose we still need to see him get his ship back and see the end of that scene from The Mandalorian where he picks up Fennec Shand. And I’m betting somehow Bib Fortuna sanctioned the slaughter of his tribe, because the Boba Fett we see in the present day doesn’t seem like he’d come in guns blazing without some personal reason.
One minor thing in this flashback: I know we all noticed Peli Motto (Amy Sedaris) and her pit droids in the flashback, but is that the only way that it establishes that we’re seeing Mos Eisley? Or does it get mentioned directly on screen?
Austin: It’s established after the flashback that the Pykes control Mos Eisely (with designs on Mos Espa). Which then begs the question of whether that was true in Jabba’s time as well, or if they’ve taken advantage of the relative power vacuum left in the wake of Jabba’s death.
Mark: Makes sense, since the opening of the episode establishes that Bib was much more of a hands-off delegator with his crime syndicate than either Jabba or Boba is trying to be.
Star Wars Monsters
Austin: The flashback ends as Boba’s reverie is rudely interrupted in the present day by an angry Wookiee ripping him out of his bacta tank. After making his live action debut last episode but not really doing much, Black Krrsantan makes a triumphant and violent return here.
Mark: The Hutt twins told him to “sleep lightly,” practically telling him they’d try to kill him in his sleep, and he didn’t post guards near his room! Sloppy work, Boba Fett. It was good seeing Krrsantan being an absolute force of nature, though. It required Boba, Shand, the two Gamorreans, and the Vespa kids to ultimately fight him off. And the way they deal with him, dropping him into the rancor pit. It has echoes of Chewbacca being “the beast” down in the pit in Solo.
Austin: More Solo callbacks! Love it. I also loved seeing Black Krrsantan as an absolute force of nature in that fight. The whole thing was intense, and carried over nicely from the train attack in the previous episode: both were action sequences with clear stakes and clear storytelling.
It’s conclusion tees up the next sequence and another fun bit, with the Twins returning to essentially concede to Boba and deliver him the gift of a new rancor, to replace the angry Wookiee he only recently installed there. More on the rancor in a bit, but do you think this truly marks the end of the Twins’ involvement in the plot, or is there more to come?
Mark: Again, we get these levels of disrespect from them. They show up without an appointment. Their apology is cursory at best. “We have come to apologize. We sent Krrsantan to kill you… We are sorry.” It’s the outward show of respect, the words and motions of respect, without any actual respect. I get the feeling they’re cutting their losses. If they’re going back to Hutta, maybe they just don’t want to haul a rancor? Maybe Krrsantan isn’t worth the trouble for them to get back.
Austin: I love the idea that they turned an awkward-to-move bit of luggage in the rancor into a gift for Boba Fett! The rancor comes with a keeper, the form of all around tough guy actor Danny Trejo. Clearly, Favreau and Robert Rodriguez are putting their contacts list to good use in this show, but rather than portraying one of his usual bad-asses, Trejo instead continues the (apparent) Star Wars tradition of rancor keepers being big ol’ softies when it comes to their charges.
Mark: He’s the new Malakili! And this scene really builds off the short Malakili sequence from Return of the Jedi, where he’s crying over the death of the rancor. You know, Star Wars as a franchise, including the Disney+ series, is just full of monsters. And rarely are they treated like mistreated animals. There are a few exceptions, (“The Baptist,” Nnedia Okorafor’s short story focusing on the dianoga in From A Certain Point Of View comes to mind) but by and large the monsters of Star Wars tend to be obstacles for our heroes to kill. Here the Rancor gets some depth and pathos. It was taken from his parents as a child, just like Boba. It was trained to fight, just like Boba. So of course he’ll treat it with love and respect, unlike Jabba. Heck, its predecessor was even killed by a Jedi.
Austin: Boba declaring he wants to ride it immediately makes this Chekhov’s Rancor. If this series doesn’t feature Boba Fett riding a rancor at some point, what are we even doing here?
The exchange with the Twins leads Boba and company back to the mayor of Mos Espa, which sets up the second big action sequence of the episode, in which Boba’s gang of vespa riders gets into a good old fashioned car chase with the mayor’s oily majordomo. How did this sequence hold up compared to the earlier Black Krrsantan melee?
Mark: I thought it was good, in that it played to the strengths of his new scooter enforcers. They got to show off some of their transhuman body mods. There were some issues with the effects, where I’d say it didn’t look quite as good as, say, a billion-dollar Star Wars movie, but that’s a pretty high standard to hold these things to. It looks a lot better than any other TV series could have pulled off. Did you notice the McQuarrie painting?
Austin: The Jabba portrait one of the vespas flew through?
Mark: Yeah! It’s a McQuarrie painting of Luke meeting with Jabba. It’s even got Boba Fett by Jabba’s side, though it seems like Luke is either cropped or airbrushed out of this version. It’s a fun little easter egg.
Austin: And, of course, the fact that it’s being carried across the street by two laborers only to get split in half by the car chase is a pretty old school car chase cliche, which makes it doubly fun.
You’re not wrong though, that some of the effects in this sequence were wobbly/ All in all, this action scene seemed less propulsive than the earlier fight, despite it being literally a chase involving high speed vehicles. Ultimately, it concludes with the news that the mayor is in league with the Pykes, who are arriving in force on the planet at the same time, something Fennec suggests means war. Presumably, this will lead to the further melding of the two timelines, as Boba is now facing off against the same foes in both plotlines and, more importantly, to a greater narrative urgency in the present day events.
Mark: How many fruit stands did the mayor’s majordomo end up hitting? It must’ve been the fruit stand district.
Force Facts
- Episode title: “The Streets of Mos Espa”
- The very beginning of the episode opens with a B’omarr Monk (the spider robots with brains in jars) skitting across the front yard of
Jabba’sBoba’s palace, a scene that was featured in some of the trailers for the season. - Black Krrsantan used “vibro knuckles” in his fight with Boba. We also heard his name spoken, putting to rest some minor internet speculation from earlier in the week.
- The rancor-riding Witches of Dathomir got name-dropped by Danny Trejo; while they were made canonical in The Clone Wars animated series, I will always think of them first and foremost as the antagonists of the old Courtship of Princess Leia novel (one of the less great Expanded Universe novels).
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
