All that is old is new again on Tatooine: The Book of Boba Fett

Like any franchise reasonably long in the tooth, in the vanishingly brief, blink-and-you’ll miss it timeframe of pop culture anyway, Star Wars always has to approach any new storytelling vehicles with the mindset of whether they intend to stick to a tried-and-true formula or going sprinting boldly forth (yes, that’s eerily close to the language of another franchise but serves the purpose here) into the fresh verdant fields of unexplored narrative.

Obviously, there must be some sort of service paid to established lore since it is what the franchise’s storytelling is based on and also what fans have come to expect and to love, but stick to closely to that and go nowhere else and you risk disappearing down a hole out of which no fresh narrative light will ever escape.

New series like The Mandalorian have done a mostly enjoyable job of blending the old with the new, touching on old plot points and giving loved or known characters some extra moments in the narrative sun while enlarging the Star Wars universe in lyrical and emotionally evocative ways.

It has been the best of both worlds, a neat step away from the Skywalker-centric storytelling on the nine-episode movies – for the record, these were mostly well-told stories, at least in the case of the back six, but it was high time for some fresh blood to enter the frame (and this is said as a long-standing fan of 1977 saw-it-in-the-cinema vintage) – and has resulted in some highly satisfying stories seeing the light of galactic day.

So, when word broke of The Book of Boba Fett, starring everyone’s favourite six-minutes-footage-in-the-original-trilogy (now the middle trilogy) bounty hunter, it was reasonable to expect another fresh tour de force entry in the ever-burgeoning Star Wars canon.

What we get instead is a series that isn’t entirely sure what it wants to be or who it wants to be about, and also one that does a fine job of fleshing out an expositionally poor character such that he becomes so much more fulsome a character than he was before.

In so far as the series dedicates itself to showing us more about Boba Fett the man, it does a great job.

In a series of flashbacks, courtesy of Fett’s extensive sessions in the healing waters of the bacta tank as he recovers from some serious and sustained injuries courtesy of the Tusken raiders and other Dune Sea ne’er-do-wells, we come to see what made Fett the man he is now as we are made privy to his time both before and after that unfortunate Jabba the Hutt-initiated trip into the digestive horrors of the Sarlacc Pit.

Up to this point, Fett’s story was a lightly told one, his character existing largely in service to that of Han Solo, one of the three main people in the original 1977-1983 trilogy, and honestly in terms of that narrative, that was sufficient.

But we are now living in a far more content hungry age where streaming battles abound, and so, we increasingly find that even minor, though much-loved, characters are being given substantially more focus than was previously case.

That in itself in not a bad thing; if you have had four decades of enjoying a particular character’s role in a story, it’s highly exciting to get the chance to know more about them, and in that respect, The Book of Boba Fett excels with Temuera Morrison doing a brilliant job of adding flesh and bones to a character long clouded in mystique and mystique alone.

We come to see how he develops from a callous bounty hunter only out for money to a man who actually has a conscience and who, though he bases his new life on taking over Jabba the Hutt’s role as Daimyo of Mos Espa (essentially the big crime boss of what Obi-wan Kenobi called a “wretched hive of scum and villainy”), tries to be a crimelord, with the help of a savvier Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen) with a heart who rules not out of fear but respect.

As far as humanising Fett goes, The Book of Boba Fett excels, as it does when giving us more of a look at Tatooine which is, thanks to Luke Skywalker, an ageing Jedi Knight and two Laurel and Hardy-esque droids, the Star wars story got its start.

It’s hugely enjoyable being taken back to the Dune sea, to moisture farms, to the canyons where a young Anakin Skywalker raced and to the cantinas of ill-repute for which Mos Espa is infamous, and while it could well be argued that Star Wars has over-Tatooine’d itself, The Book of Boba Fett manages to both celebrate what we know and love about the desert planet while adding to what we know about it (this is especially so with the Tusken Raiders who are given an entire culture and vibrant, if violent, backstory).

Unfortunately where The Book of Boba Fett falls down, but not fatally so, is in its narrative focus and construction.

For a series all about a bounty hunter attempting to forge a new life and make a new home on Tatooine, newly moralistic and ethical but far from perfect, the series spends an inordinate amount of time, one-and-a-half episodes in fact solely centred on the Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal).

On the surface there’s nothing wrong with these stories, which add nicely to what know about Mando and the Force-strong cuteness of Grogu, who’s now on a quiet planet learning the way of the Jedi with a computer-enhanced young Luke Skywalker, and the occasional company of Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson), but you are left feeling as if the already-faltering and tissue-thin story of Fett and his rebirth and fight to protect his new home from off-world criminals, has been weirdly and strangely truncated and interrupted.

While the first four episodes haven’t exactly built a massive head of steam by the time episodes five and six goes almost all Mando, all the time, they are enjoyably immersive enough, giving you pleasing insight into Fett the person and how he wants to shape his life going forward and the sudden halt to Fett’s storyline, and dominance by another titular character seems odd given his name is in the title.

You could quite easily excise all of episode five and the first half of episode six and not affect The Book of Boba Fett one bit; again, they are great The Mandalorian stories but out of place in a story which is really a great big space Western, harkening back to the original Wild West spirit of A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi.

The final episode, all big showdown and intense, sandy battles is epic and exactly what you’d want from the finale of series such as The Book of Boba Fett but it’s eerily emotionally bereft, largely because while we have got to know Fett, he’s not really the central character in his own story and it’s hard to feel much of anything because the narrative was subsumed in the story of another character whose name is not on this series at least.

The Book of Boba Fett is a fine, enjoyable piece of Star Wars storytelling that does a pleasing job of paying tribute to the franchise’s past (Easter eggs abound!) while giving it a push into an imaginatively fecund future, with some sterling character building and slow narrative build to a full-on finale, but it also feels a little too narratively Frankenstein’s monster-ish, unsure whose story it ultimately wants to tell and why, leaving you happy to have spent more time with a franchise you love but with no lingering sense you are any better off for having seen it.