The Book of Not Boba Fett (Patreon)

It’s easy to learn the wrong lessons about storytelling.

There’s this old SNL sketch that highlights this really well and it focuses on the 1992 movie version of Of Mice and Men (and warning, the sketch is fairly offensive in its portrait of disability, but in a way where it’s really just highlighting how offensive Malkovich’s portrayal of Lenny probably was, but that’s a whole other conversation about adapting that particular work). Anyway, the whole point of the sketch is that it is a reasonably dark story for a Disney movie and Phil Hartman (doing a dead-on Eisner impersonation) realized that audiences liked sweet old Lenny and hated that mean old George! So to fix it, they put in, you guessed it: another Lenny! Now everyone can just be nice and have fun as the two Lennys accidentally murder things! And even though the sketch is basically an excuse for Chris Farley to do his thing (though the ending feels mega dark on a meta level), it completely highlights the storytelling misunderstanding of just about everything aimed to be corporate and safe. Like how you need character dynamics between different types of people and that their personalities should create drama. You can’t just take out all the conflict, then throw in more and more and MORE of the things people like and act like that’s that. You can’t just add another Lenny. Because that misunderstands why we like Lenny in the first place. But it’s so easy to learn the wrong lessons.

And it’s weird how much this has to do with The Book of Boba Fett.

Perhaps the funniest thing to me is that the whole point of The Mandalorian in the first place was to escape the trappings of Boba Fett. Disney had long been trying to make various movie projects work with the character (and got close), but then they realized they needed to get out of the existing lore maze and start fresh with a new character. And more importantly, they needed to give the new character a new meaningful relationship a la Silas Marner, which meant pairing the new stoic armor boy with a cute as fuck baby yoda. The success of the show speaks for itself. And has given rise to basically everything Star Wars that’s followed. But it also worked them into a hole. Because there was only so much Mando could do with Grogu when it came to the relationship as is, but that’s the whole thing about writing. You gotta figure the hard part out. You have to find a way to really make the relationship and conflict evolve and grow into something equally meaningful. But instead of growing and building it out? It feels like the second season of the show desperately retreated into old lore. Whether it was mining the prequels or bringing in characters from Rebels (which is a show I know nothing about and thus those inclusions feel super forced and weird, ya’ll). But of all the things that felt the most odd, they soon brought in the other Lenny.

Meaning they brought in Boba Fett. Again, the whole point of the show was to get away from the looming specter of that character, but now it must have seemed like a safe way for them to do it. The Mandalorian first season was a huge success. Fans seemed hungry to build out his world and there was perhaps a chance to dive into the larger world of Mandalorian culture and make the conflict between them into something meaningful… But instead, it just went for so much of the lowest common denominator. First I felt bad because it felt like Temuera Morrison got the call three days before filming. But it was all about showing the two of them there doing all their Mandalorian type things. And there was such a sudden, sloppy, weird, and loose approach to their team-up that it felt more like they were putting jigsaw pieces together, but for a puzzle you couldn’t see it. It turns out there was a reason for that feeling. Because instead of the character being a guest star with a story and arc that actually impacts Mando, it was all just a backdoor pilot type move that was teasing for Boba’s own spin-off…

Which is now all here. I’ll be honest in that I didn’t really want to cover it. And I’m so happy I’ve been able to use that time to write a lot of essays about stuff I really cared about. But I knew I’d go back and catch up with all of it by the end and… well…

As always, we have a lot to talk about.

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I just realized I don’t think I’ve written much about Robert Rodriguez.

But it’s worth noting that as a young, enthusiastic little film nerd who loved action movies, I was the perfect age for El Mariachi. Because it proved you could do it. That you could run around with your friends and make indie action movies that were kinetic and compelling. His whole DIY modus operandi became the ethos of his book, “rebel without a crew,” which went into him eventually making his own studio (Honestly I now mostly see a lot of it as union-busting crap, but that’s a whole other conversation). But when I was young, the spirit of his work was perhaps what was most addictive, often more than the work itself. Though the work really does reflect his ethos. He knows how to work quickly and cut things together, but the storytelling is largely attitudinal. He clearly wants to have fun, but isn’t going to get too caught up on whether he’s being sloppy or arrhythmic. He’s just trying to pump it as fast as he can. Everything feels like trying to be 10! 10! 10! And I dunno, in retrospect I think the first Spy Kids is his best and most disciplined work? For all the energy and spirit, I’ve always wanted 8% more polish. Especially when it came to story construction.

On the other hand, I have talked about Jon Favreau a lot in The Mandalorian recaps. To restate, he’s generally regarded as a really nice person who likes getting along with people and being a team player. But again, there’s that discipline thing. While Ironman remains the great miracle of fortune, it is also what perhaps begot all the MCU / Disney IP monopolistic horror. But I think there were some “wrong lessons” taken away from that experience. It doesn’t matter who you are, the “we'll figure it out” mindset and constant working with first drafts (if that) will haunt you. As will being more concerned about whether the TVs have march madness than anything going wrong on set. As will always wanting to do the sexy jobs on set instead of paying attention to the details of the hard jobs. It’s no fun, but discipline is a very necessary part of the job. Because the work itself will feel less fun as a result.

Which is sort of why I was worried about the two of them coming together to work on The Book of Boba Fett (Rodriguez directing most episodes and Favreau writing every episode). At times, you feel the fun of their pairing on display - the train robbery sequence is really strong and I in particular like the fight with the kitchen droids because it had this weird mania. At its best, it feels drunk off possibilities. Especially when it doesn’t quite work. Like how I kept laughing at all the cyberpunk teenz with the power ranger colored bikes. Granted, I like things that feel like they push the limits of the Star Wars universe, but there’s this whole aesthetic consideration of what feels different but still “star warsy” and boy does that not… which I kind of find amusing? Less amusing is how much of the show feels painfully over-lit / under-lit / lacking in contrast. Same goes for why Tatooine is so lacking in yellow hue and instead trapped in airy grays and whites. And then there’s a whole host of small things like turning so squarely into Dune territory with the spice plot. But ultimately, such things are quibbles.

Because the core storytelling is the most annoying and rigorous of duties. The thing that requires that deep sense of patience and willing to go back again and again. And most of all, it needs a good answer to that existential question of WHY… as in, why does this show this exist? Why are we telling this story? What is it actually about?

For The Book of Boba Fett those questions are haunting.

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There’s a moment in the finale where bad guy gunslinger Cad Bane tells Boba Fett that there’s just one thing he can’t figure out and asks: “what your angle?”

I was just giggling to myself as I heard this. Because it’s the whole problem. If you didn’t notice, the show had been mystery boxing Boba’s core motivation in all the timeline stuff. And I think they hid because they never had a good answer. Boba gives this whole speech about this being his city and his people and I’m like… are they? There was always some amount of stickiness in understanding “the why” of it all. Sure, the original Tusken raider arc made a real emotional impact, but after that it all becomes so undramatized. And the more lip-service justifications Boba tried to give for why he was doing the things he was doing, the less I believed him… And you can tell the writing never quite believed in it either. Which is, again, why they hid everything and had what is perhaps the wonkiest overarching structure I’ve ever seen in a season of television?

We’ll get to the big seasonal divide in a second, but even when it comes to the first four episodes, the flashback structure absolutely didn’t work. For five millionth time, the whole point of flashbacks is to inform the ongoing narrative of what’s happening in the conflict at hand. Without that? You’re just cutting off the feelings of story progress and diverting the drama (not to mention taking the air out of the “what happens later”). The show absolutely would have been served better with a chronological narrative with episodic focus. Do all the Tusken stuff at the start. Then his friendship with Fennec and getting the ship back. Grow your story to make it feel like an epic journey instead of a puzzle we have to slowly let get put into place. But as I said, the puzzle helps you hide the lack of real dramatic movement. Which is why there are so many standoffs / impasses that go nowhere and don’t result in any meaningful change. Instead, characters are constantly just slinking away to resolve the conflict later (maybe).

On top of it there is a HUGE narrative problem for the show in that a key part of the story was ALREADY TOLD in the second season of The Mandalorian like a year ago and I vaguely remember the critical details. Everything here feels like it’s just trying to put the stuff in the places it seemingly needs to be. Even when Boba builds this rag-tag team, we just get the opening “welcome aboard” transactions and don’t develop those relationships in any way afterward that feels meaningful. As such, the characters can’t help but feel like they left to languish. Morrison has been a great actor for decades now and you see them trying latch onto so many little variations of personality, but none end up clicking. The take on the “new Boba” never solidifies. And I’m officially tired of how many shows are gonna waste Ming Na Wen being this awesome at age 58. She needs CHARACTER MOMENTS to lift her up to the heavens (instead it feels like she basically disappears from the finale). But all this critical stuff is somehow secondary to the big thing about this story…

I’m talking about how the show suddenly just becomes The Mandalorian.

As in two totally full-on episodes that make much more sense as the opening of season three in that particular show. It’s not just narrative time either, they literally feature HUGE story moments of reconciliation between the two leads… I cannot get over this decision for several reasons. The first is that I think it’s a borderline criminal to do to your existing audience. To out and out force them to watch another show to know what is going on is… it’s honestly cruel and insipid and we’ll come back to the problems with this dynamic. And the second thing it does is show a complete and utter lack of confidence in the show you are making and the story it is telling. You may like it better, but It utterly undermines The Book of Boba Fett. Imagine trying to build to a meaningful conclusion for better or worse and then suddenly having your narrative hijacked by the other show for the two episodes before the finale… I genuinely can't get over it.

Like, really, we need 25 minutes of Mando building his new ship and doing the beggar’s canyon thing? We need 25 minutes of the pilot of JEDI ACADEMY? I want to watch stuff like that, too, but I want to see it in actual stories being told. WHAT ARE THEY DOING HERE!??! Same goes for much the last few episodes cram in the Rebels stuff. To wit, I can’t tell how excited I was to see this cool new western gunslinger character! This feels inventive! But no, he’s an established character and here’s the 40 page wookiepedia article with all the context you need. And you WILL need it because I watched that final scene between him and Boba and was like “wait, they know each other?” I’m glad you all got to see the series finale of a plot that I had no idea existed, but that was absolutely not part of a story that was told in this particular show (in THIS story, it made more sense for the character that was close to Timmy O’s sheriff to be the one having stand-off, if not Timmy himself). This all felt insane to me. And by the end, it feels like it has no in-narrative reason to exist on its own.

Even at the ending, we see Boba and Fennec nodding to people as leaders and saying: “we’re not suited for this” and the truth is they’re not. This never fit right. But when they ask “who else?” would do it, my answer for them is “I don’t know, ANYONE else?” Their personalities and characterizations felt completely antithetical to this gangster story pursuit. And I’m sitting here wondering how they’ve never done something Midnight Run-ish, but what’s past is prologue. They created a Boba Fett show that was ultimately NOT about Boba Fett. And the only reason it exists is this…

“More star wars”

At the end of season 2 of The Mandalorian I talked about the ouroboros. The snake that eats its own tail and goes on in perpetuity, an endless cycle. Everything I’m feeling now is just double of what I was feeling then. I genuinely enjoyed my break of not covering this show. But if I want to keep up covering The Mandalorian? Then this show was an impossible thing to avoid. And it means these shows aren’t shows. They are viewing requirements. Things seemingly impossible to love for their own sake. Objects that make a mockery of the notion of a story in “a star wars story” and instead favor a series of interconnected references. We’ve been talking about this dynamic for so long now in the MCU, but this is the first thing that feels really, truly, and completely broken. I mean, does the show’s approach absolutely break the drama? Of course! But it also gives it an instant immunity from the responsibility of storytelling from the most hardcore fans. It is a delivery system for the thing you want to see, as if it's just filling in the missing pieces. And whatever story point I’m concerned about now? Don’t worry. That’ll get seen three years from now in the Fennec Shan spinoff. Because all developments are not stories unfurling with drama, but instead sight-seeing moments to be checked off the ever-growing-and-shrinking fan wishlist. Maybe you want that. Maybe you love it. And honestly, I’m glad if you do. There’s nothing that can take your enjoyment of the thing away. But given everything I genuinely care about when it comes to dramatic storytelling, I keep feeling like I’m staring into the void with this stuff.

It’s not a fun feeling. I wish I could sit here and talk about the train robbery scene or what I liked when they did some little thing. But these existential story questions rattle around in my brain. And it evokes a deep feeling with it. To wit, in therapeutic dialogue, there’s a lot of conversation around anger. Namely understanding that it’s an important, healthy emotion and often about “fighting for selfhood.” The problem is there’s so many toxic ways to apply it. To wit, I was toying with ending column not with the standard <3HULK, but instead: “Fuck you. Hulk” But doing so requires both a kind of bravery and willingness to be combative that I don’t really possess (or at least try to deal with more soundly). Moreover, it’s just not how I really feel about this. Because how I feel is the same desperate plea that kind of sits at the center of so many damn essays…

I’m trying to issue a simple reminder that good storytelling is hard. And as such, it’s always easy to go for the lowest common denominator. Especially with established, already loved things. It’s easy to put the thing the audience wants right in there. There’s no need for dramatization. You can have the staged reading of the things you want to see with special effects. CGI mumbly Luke not played by Hamill? It’s so easy. Characters from other shows you never saw? Plop em in! It’s so easy. Just as it is so easy to keep learning the wrong lessons. Keep the ouroboros coiling faster and faster. Do the easy thing. But it means I just have to keep having to remind people of the simple fact: all the storytelling approaches that made you love this world in the first place?

They were hard.

<3HULK