The Pyke posse are now gunning for Boba, but this week’s episode heads back to the origin story and finally gives Fennec (Ming-Na Wen) the screen-time she deserves. Now hell-bent on avenging the massacre of his whole tribe, Boba (Temera Morrison) starts scouting out Jabba’s palace before stumbling across Fennec’s body in the middle of the desert.
Picking up the strand left hanging at the end of The Mandalorian episode five, we now see how Boba fixes up Fennec and starts the partnership that eventually ends up saving Baby Yoda. Loading her up on the back of his Bantha, Boba drags her to a body mod chop shop on the edge of town and pays to have most of her organs replaced with droid gears. After last week’s intro to the tech’d-up punk kids, it looks like Star Wars is really starting to lean into the body-mod idea for the first time (a staple of cyberpunk sci-fi for years). They neatly rewrite a large chunk of The Mandalorian’s logic with a character who’s now at least half a terminator.
Waking up to her new metal body, Fennec agrees to help Boba get his ship back – the first step in his plan of taking the throne. The pair sneak up on the palace and send in a little flying drone scout to see what’s going on inside and find it crawling with guards. Taking the silent approach, they creep through the sewers and pop up in the palace kitchens.
There’s a great little moment here with a sushi chef droid who starts twirling his knife arms around like General Grievous, only for Fennec to casually chop his head off (a nice nod to Revenge Of The Sith and Raiders Of The Lost Ark at the same time), right before Boba goes full Looney Tunes as he chases a rascally rabbit droid around the pots and pans.
Making it to the garage, Fennec fends off the Gamorrean guards while Boba starts the engine of Slave I, giving her the hero shot as she shoots the weights holding the door closed just in time.
“Next time, we stick to the plan” says Fennec, now part of the team. Her motives for settling down seem even murkier than Boba’s, but Star Wars has always been about rogue agents realising what’s worth fighting for. In Boba’s case, it’s still all about revenge.
Swooping down on a gang of bikers, he kills more than 30 of them at once in one of the show’s most cold-blooded scenes of violence – even giving Boba and Fennec a little squinting nod at the end to show how much they enjoyed it. Next stop, Boba’s armour.
We know that the Jawas stole it off Boba after he crawled out of the sticky belly of the Sarlacc, but he thinks it’s still somewhere inside the monster’s gut – so he flies his ship into it. Unsurprisingly (but also still pretty shockingly) the Sarlacc wakes up and starts eating the ship, forcing Fennec to drop a seismic charge in its mouth and kill off another original Star Wars legend (the fan base won’t be happy…)
Back in the present, Chris the evil Wookiee is sulking at the bar, picking a fight with a group of lizard men just for the fun of it. Garsa Fwip (Jennifer Beals) steps in just before he starts ripping off arms, talking him down to only a light bit of dismemberment. We learn here that Chris used to be an arena thug, and it seems that he’s lost without a tribe to belong to. He agrees to join the gang as an enforcer.
The show goes full Sopranos in the last scene, as Fennec and Boba invite Jabba’s former capos in for a sit down. Boba asks them help him beat the Pykes, but they’re not convinced – even when they realise they’re all sitting over the rancor pit. Eventually they agree to remain neutral, which means Boba won’t have to worry about getting stabbed in the back by the other families (although he probably definitely will).
“What I’m short on is muscle,” he says to Fennec, looking out over his new empire. “Credits can buy muscle,” she says, “if you know where to look…” Cue the theme from The Mandalorian…
Under the helmet
- EV-9D9 is the mean droid who sends R2-D2 into the galley of Jabba’s slave barge in Return Of The Jedi (“you’re a feisty little one…!”) – but we see here that he’s ended up working in the kitchen himself. Justice, at last.
- Speaking of barges, the scene in the garage where Boba and Fennec carjack Slave I sees them smash up one of Jabba’s iconic smaller desert yachts that played such a big part in Boba’s first downfall.
- The seismic charge that kills the Sarlacc triggers the same awesome bit of noise-sucking sound design that editor Ben Burtt first used in Attack Of The Clones, something he described then as an “audio black hole”.
‘The Book Of Boba Fett’ releases new episodes every Wednesday on Disney+