Seven episodes in, The Book of Boba Fett reveals its true purpose. We watch as the Mandalorian tracks down his old ward, Grogu, who's learning to be a jedi from none other than Luke Skywalker himself, gloriously reconstructed using a voodoo mixture of CGI and flesh and blood. Luke looks great; Mark Hamill's digitally de-aged voice sounds unnatural and a little too robotic. Luke eventually offers Grogu a choice: either take Djarin's shirt of mithril chainmail, or chose Yoda's tiny lightsaber. Finally, in the last five minutes of his own show, Boba shows up in a round table meeting as he prepares his gangsta family to take down the Pike Syndicate. Boba doesn't even show up in the previous episode, which also stars the Mandalorian. Why is Fett a side character in his own show? Well, the answer is that Star Wars shows now function to launch other shows involving Star Wars characters, none of which will ever be free of the burden of epic heroism. Even age and his character's death in The Last Jedi can't keep Mark Hamill's Luke out of Star Wars. Although I doubt that we get a Disney Plus series involving the adventures of Uncanny Luke and Baby Yoda, an Asoka Tano show is apparently in the works (she also shows up in episode seven of The Book of Boba Fett). So the reason Boba has his own show even though he's largely rendered superfluous by the Mandalorian, is that Star Wars characters never die, even when they should. Boba was a guy in cool armor who disintegrated people and was chummy with Darth Vader; the Mandalorian took his concept (cool armor, bounty hunter) and developed a character and culture to fill in the void. I guess that's why Boba is such a softie now. Instead of a ruthless bounty hunter, he spares nearly everyone who tries to kill him in an attempt to be a kinder, gentler crime boss as opposed to Jabba's grotesqueness. It's all vaguely entertaining, but I'm afraid Star Wars shows will never again be as focused as that first season of the Mandalorian, which told a self-contained story without Luke Skywalker or Bo-Katan appearing to excite the fanboys.
I feel as though Star Wars is a fiction weighed down by its backstory and its continuous desire to connect everyone in its universe to its central characters. Maybe that's why Visions, a series of non-canonical animated shorts developed by famous anime studios in Japan, is the freshest Star Wars I've seen in years. Visions takes the lore and has fun with it; we get two rival siblings battling in space atop a monstrous star destroyer; a sith ronin who eliminates other sith; and a robot who dreams of becoming a jedi. I've always thought Star Wars would be served better by taking a Final Fantasy approach to its material. Make everything sort of feel like it's in the same universe (weird droids, Western tropes, lightsabers, empires and rebels), but don't feel compelled to actually connect every single piece of fiction. If Disney had chosen this path, they wouldn't feel compelled to computer animate Mark Hamill's face over a younger actor's, or bring Boba Fett back from the dead, when the poor old guy should've stayed in that sarlacc pit.
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