The Book Of Boba Fett Breaks Out The Star Wars Easter Eggs And Big Action With 'The Tribes Of Tatooine'
This article contains spoilers for the new episode of "The Book of Boba Fett."
The second episode of "The Book of Boba Fett," directed by Steph Green and titled "The Tribes of Tatooine," reaches a little bit further into the present timeline of Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison), but takes giant leaps in his bacta driven flashbacks.
In the present, Fett and his assassin partner Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen) interrogate the Night Wind stooge that tried killing them in the previous episode. He claims the mayor hired him, so they march this poor fool to the mayor's office, where he is promptly killed. Mayor Mok Shaiz of Mos Espa (Robert Rodriguez) offers Boba Fett a cryptic warning and suggests that he check out the Sanctuary for more answers. There, Garsa Fwip (Jennifer Beals) tells him of the resurgence of Jabba's cousins, the twins, who want to take over Jabba's throne. Boba Fett has a brief stand-off with them before they decide that bloodshed in the moment isn't profitable and leave, opting to work against Fett in other ways.
Then Fett goes back to the bacta and relives his days with the Tusken Raiders again. They train him further, but they're attacked by a Pyke Syndicate spice transport train. Fett takes out the Nikto swoop gang in order to steal their speeders and helps the Tuskens take down the Pyke transport, insisting the Pykes must now pay tribute to the Tuskens if they wish to transport spice across the Dune Sea. In return, the Tuskens initiate Boba Fett, sending him on some sort of vision quest to acquire the wood needed to build his own gaderffii. They celebrate that evening until the conclusion of the episode.
The Direction and Film References
This episode is almost twice as long as last week's and offered so much more that we can sink our teeth into, while at the same time managing to move the story forward very little. Steph Green manages to get better performances from the cast in this episode, and also gets a better action set-piece in the form of the train heist. The train-heist itself is a classic western trope, but it's never been told quite so blatantly from the indigenous perspective.
Watching the Pykes take potshots at the Tuskens from the train was reminiscent of a scene in Jim Jarmusch's "Dead Man," where people just lean outside a train to shoot buffalo. This happened plenty often in the history of the American West, with the same thing happening to indigenous tribes as they passed by.
This episode gives us flashbacks across the timeline of "Star Wars" as well, taking us back to Kamino, as well as places that we'd only heard of or have been in deleted scenes in previous films. Namely, we get to finally see the inside of Tosche Station, a place that was cut from "A New Hope." More on that later. More than anything, this episode brings the narrative forward a little bit. It seems as though the flashbacks will offer us further glimpses of why Boba Fett is fully invested in Tatooine and intends to upset the order of things. It's starting to show us some of Boba Fett's change in character as well, feeling very much like it will lead up to his quest to retrieve his armor and even rescue Fennec Shand, which implies we will cross paths with Cobb Vanth (Timothy Olyphaunt) soon enough.
"The Tribes of Tatooine" has a peculiar structure. In the first episode, we were guided back and forth between time periods and the narrative followed one consistent course. In this episode, the narrative is split down the middle between the present and the past. First, it gives us the most interesting part of the episode, then cuts to the flashbacks for the second two-thirds. There is no back and forth, and after the first episode, the audience is waiting for that — especially after some of the jaw-dropping surprises in the first half. Perhaps cameos of people and places were meant to quell our desire for more of the present, but we thirst for more here.
Maybe it's not a bad thing to simply leave us wanting more.
What to Look Out For
There are so many great ties to "Star Wars" in this episode that it is almost hard to know where to start.
The first thing we can point to is a reference to "The Empire Strikes Back." When Fennec Shand and Boba Fett are interrogating their would-be assassin, he tells them defiantly, "E chu ta." This is the same thing E-3PO rudely tells C-3PO on Cloud City, just before C-3PO is blasted to bits by Stormtroopers. This insolence gets the assassin dropped into the rancor pit below Jabba's throne. The sound and visuals match perfectly what we know of the pit from "Return of the Jedi," but as we all well know (but the assassin doesn't) there is no more rancor at Jabba's palace.
The next major moment of delight for fans of "Star Wars" comes when the twins arrive. The twins are described as cousins of Jabba the Hutt and interested in filling the vacuum his death left and that Bib Fortuna had tried to fill. These are the first Hutts we've seen in live-action since Jabba and Gardulla in "The Phantom Menace." Billed as Jabba's cousins, that means they're also likely related to Ziro the Hutt, who was Jabba's uncle. One of the Hutts has facial tattoos, which was something Ziro had as well, making one wonder if they might not have a more direct connection to everyone's favorite Truman Capote-like Hutt.
The more male-presenting Hutt uses a small creature as a sweat rag. I believe this creature might be our first live-action hoojibs. Hoojibs were small, rabbit-like creatures with antennae (just like this one) who were first introduced in the original run of Marvel "Star Wars" comics written by David Michelinie and drawn by the legendary Walt Simonson. They were brought into the new canon by Cavan Scott, in a fun adventure where Han and Chewie delivered a hoojib to Jabba the Hutt.
In what might be the biggest cameo of the episode, it turns out the twins come with their own muscle. In this case, that muscle appears to be the Wookiee known as Black Krrsantan. Black Krrsantan first appeared in the more recent canon "Star Wars" comics. He's worked for Darth Vader and alongside Boba Fett, but became much more of a fan-favorite character in his associations with Doctor Aphra. Krrsantan was forced to fight as a gladiator to bypass the Xonti brothers (hence Boba's comments about gladiators) and eventually became a bounty hunter. He and Boba Fett both worked for Jabba, who loaned them both to Vader for help in unraveling a plot against the Sith Lord and to discover the identity of Luke Skywalker. His adventures with Doctor Aphra occurred during the time of the classic trilogy, so seeing him move on in this nebulously unspecified period after "Return of the Jedi" makes a lot of sense.
I assumed that would be the biggest cameo of the episode, but that was until Boba Fett crashed the Tosche Station and rescued a couple of moisture farming kids from the Nikto swoop gang before stealing their speeders. This is the infamous Tosche Station where Luke was trying to get power converters, and the two people in there trying to enjoy a drink were none other than Camie and Fixer. For longtime "Star Wars" fans, this is very much a big deal. Camie and Fixer were Luke's childhood friends and were in the deleted scenes of "A New Hope." They've never made it onto the screen before, but have always just been talked about. Jason Fry did bring Camie back for a dream sequence in the novelization of "The Last Jedi," but that is as close as she's come to "Star Wars" since the cutting room floor in the '70s. These are the childhood friends who gave Luke the nickname "Wormie" and made fun of him as a kid. And now they've been saved by Boba Fett.
Aboard the train, fans might recognize the Pyke Syndicate at work. First appearing in "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," the Pykes controlled the flow of spice in the galaxy. They were first seen in live-action in "Solo: A Star Wars Story" on Kessel, but this is the first time we've seen them without their helmets on in live action.
The Verdict
This episode felt a lot more exciting than the first, raising a lot more key questions and bringing in some elements I am dying to know more about and see on screen more. First, I need some Black Krrsantan action in this show. Second, this episode also gave me the hope that we will get to see Boba Fett go after Cobb Vanth and, eventually, the Mandalorian. And we'll see him get his ship back. The structure of the show doesn't seem to promise us anything more than showing Boba Fett get some sort of footing in the present and show us how he gets all of the elements of his personality and new character paradigm in the past. And if that's all the show is, it will be fine. I still just hope it offers us something a little more than that.
"Book of Boba Fett: Chapter 2 – The Tribes of Tatooine" is now playing on Disney+. New episodes of "The Book of Boba Fett" premiere on Wednesdays.