with the second chapter of the seven-episode live-action Star Wars show landing on the streaming service. It comes after the first episode flashed back to Boba's escape from the sarlacc.
When it wasn't looking to the past, the episode revealed Boba and master assassin pal Fennec Shand (Temeura Morrison and Ming-Na Wen) taking their messy first steps towards seizing control of Tatooine's criminal underworld. After an attempt on their lives in the streets of Mos Espa, Fennec leaves one of the would-be killers alive for interrogation.
Dragging the goon to town, Boba and Fennec confront the mayor (an Ithorian, aka “a hammerhead”) who denies everything, conveniently killing the assassin and suggesting the pair start asking questions in The Sanctuary club instead. When they get there, Garsa Fwip (Jennifer Beals) pretends she doesn’t know anything either, just in time for the third (and fourth) culprit to turn up.
THE MATRIX RESSURECTION MOVIE REVIEW
Led in by a war drum, and carried by some of the most thankless servants in the galaxy, The Book Of Boba Fett reintroduces the Hutts to the Star Wars universe as “the twins” roll down the street – getting the best entrance of the series so far. As gross as Jabba was in Return Of The Jedi, his cousins are worse. Mopping his sweaty jelly brow with a live rat, twin number one (no names yet…) tells Boba that the throne rightfully belongs to him and his sister, back now to claim the family inheritance of the Hutt crime empire. Threatening him with an evil Wookiee henchman, the pair decide to back down (for now) and slither off back down the street to join the list of enemies now stacked against Boba.
At this point, you have to wonder why Boba even wants to be a gangster. He might have retired from bounty hunting but it seems like there are easier ways of making money than running a crime ring on a planet where everyone hates him. Clearly, something is driving him, and as he settles back down into his water bath/bed for the night, the show picks up his backstory where we left it last week – fresh out of the belly of the Sarlacc, still in his PJs, now running with the Tusken raiders.
This of course led them into town to meet with the mysterious mayor, who while is an Ithorian, the most well known one for us these days is Dok-Ondar over at Black Spire Outpost on Batuu, was not someone I could have seen in the role. But while the character speaks with a soft voice and a calm cadence, you can tell that there is a lot more to him than meets the eye. While Boba Fett is using his history as a bounty hunter, to help shape what people think of him, the mayor was able to seem far more dangerous, just in how he spoke to Boba, which makes him far more likely to be a thorn later on. Of course, a good adversary always seeks to mess with the minds of the hero, or in this case the anti-hero and sent him back to the casino and while Boba notices something is wrong, the host doesn’t fear him, rather the Twins, a pair of Hutts who have decided to lay claim to all that was one Jabbas.
For some reason, their appearance was utterly worthless to me, not because the threat of a Hutt isn’t a good one, but it just seems like a little to many players right now and the board is still being set up, but the worst point is that we don’t even know what game is being played. What I really do appreciate was the appearance of the gladiatorial Wookie, purely because normally whenever we see a Wookie in Star Wars, it is Chewbacca, who is cool and all, or its animated and a slave or being rescued from being a slave. At first, I thought it was Grozz, but then I realised that his colouring is more light brown and this one was far darker and dare I say it, meaner looking. Of course, the show couldn’t keep us there, instead this was where the left the present and went back in time, to learn more about Boba’s time in the sand.
The second half of episode two sees Boba learning the ways of the desert – part Dune, part Lawrence Of Arabia, part Sons Of Anarchy as he robs a biker bar, steals a load of speeders and leads a full on train robbery in what already seems like a classic Star Wars set piece. Director Steph Green (Watchmen) does a great job with the action here, but the training montage works just as well, as Boba teaches the Tuskens how to ride (“this makes it go, this makes it stop”) and gains enough trust to get given the weird lizard nose thing as a gift.
Finding himself a tree branch somewhere in the middle of his acid trip, Boba returns to the tribe to swap his dirty undies for clean desert robes and to carve his own gaderffii stick, ending the show with a nice little dance number around the campfire. Still a long way from Mos Espa, and still without his armour, there’s a lot of backstory left to fill here before we catch up with the turf war playing out in Boba’s main thread. Now faced with fending off the mayor, the local club syndicate and the Hutts all at the same time, it looks like he has his work cut out for him in both halves of the story.
