What, you thought Star Wars would leave something about a character’s backstory unexplained?
We’re just under a month away from the Disney+ series The Book of Boba Fett, and in true Star Wars style as of late, we know barely anything about the series other than the vague idea that Boba Fett and Fennec Shand will be setting up shop in Jabba’s palace to take the expired Hutt’s criminal enterprise for their own. Will there be adventures beyond Tatooine? Will Boba and Fennec deal with the lingering Imperial remnants they faced in The Mandalorian? What other familiar Star Wars faces will show up (because that’s the other thing Star Wars is into these days)? Will there, for the love of god, be books?
We don’t know. What we do know, however, is that Lucasfilm is not going to miss the opportunity of doing a Boba Fett show after the events of Return of the Jedi and not tell us how the bounty hunter is not currently a giant sentient pit monster’s dinner for the next 1,000 years. “There will definitely be a number of answers,” Temuera Morrison told SFX magazine (via GamesRadar). “Some long-winded answers. Some short and sharp answers. Some colourful answers. We’re filling a lot of gaps.”
Of course with Boba, even with his penchant for showing up everywhere he possibly can, there are still many areas of his life left untouched, especially in the current Star Wars canon, so this makes a lot of sense. We’ve already seen cryptic shots in recent footage of him recovering in Bacta and seeing visions of Tuskens, which could all potentially suggest we’ll be looking back at how he crawled out of the Sarlacc and found himself that nifty gaffi stick he was beating the snot out of stormtroopers with when we met him again in The Mandalorian season two. Plus, it’s Star Wars. For better or worse, the series is fascinated by not just its past, but archiving the details of it as much as it can. At least, it seems, beyond the sake of telling us that Boba got out of Sarlacc saliva, Morrison’s co-star Ming-Na Wen teased that the trauma Boba faced in his seeming slow death will become something of a bonding point for him and Fennec, who was likewise rescued from certain doom after being left in the sands of Tatooine to rot. “And you know, Boba died–or we thought he did–in the Sarlacc pit, so I think that both of them share those near-death experiences in common,” Wen told the magazine. “They both have a vulnerability that they understand.”
“He’s someone she respects and they have definitely bonded with him saving her. It allowed her to realise that she might be better off not being solo anymore,” she continued. “She sees her alliance with Boba Fett as a very smart move, in the sense that she’ll have somebody watching her back. And even though it might be an extra baggage to have to align herself with someone else, the reward for her at the moment is greater.”
Of course, The Book of Boba Fett has a lot more it could dive into beyond the titular bounty hunter’s immediate past, given it’s set in that interesting time frame about five years after the events of Return of the Jedi. It’s time of great upheaval in the wider state of the galaxy far, far away; the Galactic Concordance — the official peace agreement between the Imperial remnant and the New Republic that put an end to the Galactic Civil War — was signed just a year after Return. Much of what we know about the New Republic in this time is about the consolidation of its forces, transferring military and law enforcement primarily over to planetary governments.
Sure, Book of Boba Fett will be focused on the main man himself and the criminal underworld he wants to rule, but that could also mean brushing up with the long arm of the new law in the galaxy, making its exploration of the past a bit more interesting than simply covering Boba’s cheating death. The Book of Boba Fett begins on Disney+ December 29.