Like My Father Before Me – The Parallel Journeys of Boba Fett and Luke Skywalker
New Essay at StarWarsNewsNet
I think I speak for many Star Wars fans when I say that I was dismissive of The Book of Boba Fett when it aired in early 2022. The show did not ignite the same firestorm of controversy as, say, The Last Jedi or The Acolyte; it simply came and went with next to no fanfare. Of all the Disney+ shows, it seems to be the most forgotten; I seldom hear anyone talk about it, and when they do, the comments are not favorable. I still remember the dismayed exclamation of a student in my American Lit classroom: “They turned Boba Fett into a sympathetic loser!”
Of course, if your only exposure to Star Wars was the films, you might not remark on the character of Boba Fett at all. A secondary or even tertiary character who was introduced in the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special and died an embarrassing death in Return of the Jedi, he became a fan favorite primarily because he looked really, really cool. When he was brought back onscreen in the second season of The Mandalorian, I confess I rolled my eyes a bit; by devoting fifteen minutes of screentime to the spectacle of Boba mowing down hordes of Stormtroopers, the show seemed to be bending over backwards to make him the unstoppable badass fans had always wanted him to be when playing with their Star Wars action figures.
Then The Book of Boba Fett came along and Boba was no longer a ruthless killing machine but a strangely soft, self-reflective figure. My student’s description of him as a “sympathetic loser” wasn’t far off the mark. “What are we even doing with this character at this point?” I wondered.
Last year, as I embarked on the foolhardy project of rewatching all Star Wars screen media in chronological order, The Book of Boba Fett was the thing I most dreaded returning to. I only rewatched it for the sake of completism. As I did, though, I became more and more intrigued. Something interesting was happening with Boba Fett’s character – something that I had not recognized before. As I put the pieces together, I realized that Boba Fett’s arc in the show was patterned after Luke Skywalker’s archetypal development in the original trilogy, and thus consistent with some of the fundamental themes of Star Wars.