Every Star Wars Easter Egg You May Have Missed In The Book Of Boba Fett Chapter 2
Episode 2 of "The Book of Boba Fett" is an interesting one. I'm still not sure how this guy is a crime lord but also a really awesome guy, or that we needed this show after "The Mandalorian," but here we are. At least in the second episode, the fighting has gone from "Xena: Warrior Princess" to something resembling real action. (I love "Xena." I'm just clear on what it is.) Let's dive into some Easter eggs, shall we?
Needless to say, there are major spoilers here for "The Tribes of Tatooine." You've been warned.
Most of this episode was a flashback (and frankly, I like that show better than the one happening in present day), but let's start with the modern part. Someone has sent an assassin to take down Boba. This assassin is part of the Order of the Night Wind, and while that sounds so familiar to me, it's a new thing in the "Star Wars" universe (as far as I can tell). We learn that they're expensive and that you can't get them to talk. Apparently that only holds true if you're not thrown in a Rancor pit. There is no Rancor there (and I do hope we get one and that Boba treats it well), but there is a rat. It looked like a rat, anyway. I didn't recognize it as a specific species, but if you do, please let me know. Before we move on from here, we learn that the mayor hired this babbling assassin, who earlier spits out the curse, "E chu ta." This is the same curse that a protocol droid E-3PO says to C-3PO in Cloud City in "The Empire Strikes Back." So rude!
Don't Mess with the Mayor
Much like the Mayor in season 3 of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the mayor of Mos Espa isn't someone to trifle with. Mayor Mok Shaiz is an Ithorian (a rather fuzzy one). He's got the same layers of bureaucracy outside his door, but once inside, it's all no nonsense. You may know the Ithorians as "Hammerheads," and we've seen them all over the "Star Wars" universe, including in one of the pods in the Senate in the prequels. Mok Shaiz's people quickly kill the Night Wind bounty hunter when Boba brings him in with Fennec Shand, and when he speaks, the voice you're hearing is through the translator he's wearing. By the way, "The Book of Boba Fett" director Robert Rodriguez is voicing him. He sends Boba and Fennec to Garsa's place. (Side note: Jennifer Beals must sleep in a bacta tank, because she hasn't aged since "Flashdance.")
One fun thing here is R-3X on the table in the cantina. He's the droid from the "Star Tours" ride at Disney parks. We also have Max Rebo performing his fantastic music again. Oh, and that reference to a gumpta sweating on Mustafar? You might remember the planet Mustafar as the hot one where the big battle between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker takes place. Anakin loses a lot there, including limbs. It's also a big part of the "Vader Immortal" game on Oculus and the walk-through virtual reality "Star Wars" experience you can check out in places like Downtown Disney and Las Vegas.
Black Krrsantan
Garsa is pretty jumpy and Boba finds out from her that "The Twins" are coming to claim Jabba the Hutt's throne. These Hutt twins are related to Jabba, and you can tell from the gender markers that one of these Hutts is coded as female. Pinkish with a fan. Odd choice, but okay. They're new characters as far as I know, and they're pretty powerful. Even Fennec knows (and tells Boba) that you can't kill these two without permission. Permission from whom? That we don't know yet. Huttese is spoken, and that's a useful language to know if you're someone in the crime world. Are these cousins of Jabba related to his uncle Ziro the Hutt from "The Clone Wars?" Probably, though at least we're spared that voice. We also see the greenish Hutt wiping himself down with a bunny-like creature called a hoojib (something our own Bryan Young points out in his review), which came from one of the "Star Wars" comics.
Disney+
The twins have hired someone that fans of the Doctor Aphra comic series will know. That Wookiee you saw threatening Boba Fett? That was Black Krrsantan, or Black K from Kashyyyk. He's a Wookiee bounty hunter who has worked for Jabba and is feared across the galaxy. The look he gives Boba is frightening and it's very likely that we'll see him again. Boba Fett might say he's no longer a bounty hunter, but everyone still refers to him in that way, and Black K clearly recognizes a colleague. In fact, Black K has worked for Darth Vader before, just like Boba Fett. It's something to keep in mind.
Characters from a Deleted Scene from A New Hope
Now this is what you call an Easter egg! We'll get to Boba's Tusken Raider experience in a bit, but he does make a flashback appearance in what appears to be Tosche Station. Remember Luke Skywalker whining about being able to go there in the original movie? In a deleted scene from "A New Hope," he gets teased by two friends named Camie Marstrap and Laze "Fixer" Loneozner. (Mandy Kowalski and Skyler Bible in the show, Koo Stark and Anthony Forrest in the film's deleted scene). Though we don't hear Laze's name spoken, Camie's is.
They used to call Luke Skywalker "Wormie." Not very nice, although they knew Luke before he was the hero of the galaxy and a Jedi. Back then, he was just that whiny kid who stared at twin suns and hoped for an adventurous life out among the stars. If you want to hear something lovely, check out Jeremy Messersmith's song "Tatooine." It gets stuck in my head (in the best way) every time someone mentions this desert planet.
Learning to Fight with the Tusken Raiders
As I said, I thought the Boba backstory part of the episode was much more interesting than the modern day stuff. The Tosche Station scene was a piece of that, but it was the Tusken Raider part of things that really grabbed me. Before we start, a tweet from Adam Prime (hat tip to /Film's Peter Sciretta) mentions that a stunt person named Joanna Bennett plays the main Tusken warrior. (She's not credited, but Peter also noticed that the audio description refers to this warrior as female.) How interesting — and I'm not judging here, just noticing — that while the pinkish Hutt has gender markers coded as female, the Tusken warrior does not.
Joanna Bennett has been a stunt double for Brie Larson in "Captain Marvel," Larson and Karen Gillan in "Avengers: Endgame," Gal Gadot in "Wonder Woman," and so much more. I've linked to her IMDb page so you can marvel (sorry) at her body of work.
As Boba Fett lives with the Tuskens, he becomes more accepted by the tribe, which puts in mind of any number of Westerns where the cowboy learns and is accepted by an indigenous tribe. Boba is once again being kind. Sure, you could say that he's doing what he must to survive, but you don't win over kids by faking kindness, and the kid and that puppy lizard (they're called massiffs) obviously like him. (He was a jerk with a cool costume before, right? I know I didn't make that up.) He brings back swoop bikes that he captures from the Nikto miners that were attacking Camie and Laze in Tosche Station. You might remember the Nikto miners from their hideout breach in "The Mandalorian." They've long served the Hutts, so it's no surprise to see them again.
The Obligatory Train Heist
The Tuskens are attacked by a train going by, and this train appears to have a podracer engine. Little Anakin Skywalker's prequel podrace win was a big moment for him, and of course, train heists are not new to the "Star Wars" universe. We got a pretty great one in "Solo: A Star Wars Story," and this one is no different. After last week's seemingly slo-mo action, it was wonderful to see some powerful fighting here. Boba teaches the Tuskens to ride and jump between bikes, and together they take out the bandits shooting them from the train. Those bandits are members of the Pyke Syndicate, and I don't believe we've seen their faces before. We know them from "The Clone Wars" as the gang that takes spice from Kessel (we saw that in "Solo," and of course, Han Solo brags about his Kessel run in "A New Hope") and sells it as a drug. Will we see Qi'ra show up at any point in this series? She's involved in this sort of thing, and it wouldn't be that much of a stretch if Emilia Clarke is available.
The Tusken Raiders win, and Boba sends them off in the direction of Anchorhead (a place we know that they can get passage off-world) and asks them to walk single file in the direction of the sun. That's a Tusken custom, as we learned from an older Obi-Wan Kenobi in "A New Hope." He tells Luke they walk single file to hide their numbers. Boba gives the Syndicate members one black melon each for the milk so they don't die, something he got in the last episode from the Tuskens. Oddly enough, the Tuskens themselves are dancing in the water pouring from the train, which seems odd if you're trying to conserve liquid in the desert.
Dream Sequence
Finally, we get Boba Fett's initiation into the Tusken Raiders, something else we see in a lot of those Western films I mentioned. Boba is given a nose lizard — I wasn't able to find out what sort of trippy lizard visits your nasal passages, makes you hallucinate, and then comes back out in "Star Wars," but if you find it, let me know — which lets him go on a vision quest of sorts, showing us a quick glimpse of his childhood on the water planet of Kamino, something we saw in the prequels and "The Bad Batch." We also see a lot of water gushing around a tree, which is clearly part of the trip he's on. Nothing like that happens in the desert unless it's pouring from a train car. Behind the tree, there are glowing red eyes. I thought at first it was Jawas, but the eyes were the wrong color. In the concept art they show at the end of each episode, they are clearly Jawas and their eyes are yellow. I've read in several places that Jawas from other planets outside of Tatooine (called Offworld Jawas) can have red eyes.
Boba brings the branch back to the Tusken tribe and they help him fashion his own staff from it. The Tusken Raiders have to come back at some point, don't they? In present day "Book of Boba Fett?" It's so much more compelling than what's happening there, Hutts aside. He gets new black robes, and you may remember those from what he wore in "The Mandalorian."
These are the Easter eggs I found, but tweet us @slashfilm and cc me @jennabusch if I missed any. What did you like? What didn't you like? I can't wait to hear!