Book of Boba Fett is so much better when you realize Boba Fett is the villain

The pilot through season 1, The Book of Boba Fett had a major hero problem — a protagonist (Temuera Morrison) who’s largely opaque, and so detached from his own story that he’s readily and repeatedly upstaged by visitors from several other Star Wars series. It’s often unclear why Boba does anything he does, and the show doesn’t give viewers much reason to engage with his primary goal of becoming the crime boss in Mos Espa, a city on the little-loved planet of Tatooine. Even his big turning-point conversation with his right-hand assassin Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen) doesn’t cast much light on what he wants out of life, besides a cushier retirement plan than the original Star Wars trilogy gave him. This was not difficult considering the thousand-years of pain in a Sarlacc Pit. When Fennec asks why he wants to head up a crime family, he says “Why not?”

He doesn’t have any real skin in this game. He doesn’t have a dream, and he doesn’t have a plan. He’s a sullen loner who shows up in Mos Espa without a purpose, then stands in the way of the most ruthless and entrenched people he can find. He can’t articulate why he’s doing it, and doesn’t have any thought-through scheme to make it work. And yet somehow he seems astounded when that doesn’t work out.

A big villain problem plagues the series. His main enemy in season 1 is the Pyke Syndicate. It’s a group of anonymous, fish-faced aliens. The Pykes’ key goal is to profit immensely from a drug called spice, apparently imported at great expense from the Dune books and movies. Boba eventually decides to object to spice, again for reasons he doesn’t articulate, and that clearly aren’t personal or passionate. The show doesn’t put any kind of meaningful face on the spice trade, or its possible human (or alien) costs — it’s an absolute abstract. Other season 1 villains such as the Hutt twins and Wookiee Krrsantan are temporary speed bumps and get no development. They are also disposed off with utmost care. Plenty of heroes are bland archetypes who define themselves by what they’re fighting against, or who they’re fighting for. Boba Fett, however, is fighting an unknown school of fish-people half-heartedly for money because there’s nothing else to do. It’s a baffling setup from the start.

Fortunately, there’s an easy solution to both problems. It all comes down to acknowledging that Boba Fett is the main villain in the series. Boba Fett: The Book of Boba FettThe entire story is hilarious and funny, telling the tale of how he fails to climb the ranks of better-known, more competent and stronger villains. People watching the show have been complaining all along that he’s too undefined. But looked at in terms of his choices, he’s actually extremely clearly defined — as a selfish crook who’s oblivious to the harm he causes and how unsuited he is for the role he’s claiming.

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for the finale of The Book of Boba Fett, season 1.]

Photo: Disney Plus

It isn’t a stretch. Boba Fett is a villain from Star Wars’ original Star Wars trilogy. A cool, mysterious, and secretive character, his exit from Star Wars was somewhat disappointing. Boba Fett got sucked into a monster’s stomach while waiting to see it devour a hero. Boba Fett is discovered in Mandalorian, he’s just after his father’s hand-me-down armor. While he shows off some strong fighting skills and a willingness to stand by his word, there’s no reason for The Book of Boba Fett Expect nobility and heroism from him. He’s still the same self-serving, amoral merc who handed Han Solo over to Jabba the Hutt to use as a wall decoration.

And in his own series, he’s laughably incompetent. He tries to take over a crime empire while backed by one minion and a couple of Gamorrean bodyguards who’ve already failed to save two bosses before him. He boasts that he’s rich, but doesn’t use his copious credits to hire guards or enforcers until late in the series, as an afterthought. It’s incredibly unclear what kind of crime he’s planning on doing as a crime boss, given that he disapproves of the drug trade, and he doesn’t have the infrastructure or employees even for something as minimal as a protection racket over the existing vice dens of Mos Espa. He boasts about ruling with respect instead of fear, but he doesn’t give anyone reason to respect him — he shrugs off all the local expectations for a crime boss, and strolls around hostile territory with his guard down and his helmet off, walking right into an ambush that he nearly doesn’t survive because he’s somehow lost all his hand-to-hand skills since Mandalorian.

He then begins to try and establish the law for the Pyke Syndicate. This is a powerful, well-established, wealthy organization that makes it impossible for the Hutts in the area to flee. From the perspective of the Mos Espa natives, he’s a woefully unprepared carpetbagger who walks into a crime world he doesn’t understand and doesn’t bother learning anything about. The status quo is then upset so much that giant droids are able to smash their buildings. And as far as we can tell, he does it all because he’s mildly irked that other people weren’t running their crime rings competently by his standards, and he felt he could do it better. The irony is honestly more comedic than dramatic, at least until he starts getting innocent people killed — the few locals who do acknowledge his claim to Mos Espa get bombed into oblivion, because he’s made no effort to defend them.

It is his incompetence and greed that define his backstory. Although flashbacks of him finding friendship and respect in a Tusken group of warriors are entertaining, his incompetence is what ends the idyll. He uses the Tuskens to conduct a shakedown that hurts and embarrasses the Pykes. They respond by erasing the Tuskens from the world. The show plays this as a tragedy for Boba, but it’s far more of a tragedy for the sandpeople who took him in, listened to his overreaching and short-sighted advice, and made enemies out of people with the reach and power to destroy them.

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To see it takes very little effort Boba Fett: The Book of Boba FettAs a long version of the criminal-empire rise and fall story, Goodfellas / Casino / Wolf of Wall Street / Scarface The story is about a self-deprecating striver, who channeled his arrogance and hunger into pushing him to the top only to find those same qualities dragging them down. The difference is that Boba Fett doesn’t get anywhere near the top until the final moments of the show, and he never demonstrates that he deservesTo be there. He doesn’t even demonstrate that he wants to be there. As soon as he has the power he was chasing, he wearily tells Fennec, “We are not suited for this.” He’s right, he isn’t.

He is clearly suited for ruining a lot of people’s lives. All because he enters a situation that he doesn’t know and then murders everyone in his path, while pursuing power and profits. His failures and inability to adjust to his circumstances are not lessons he can learn. Heroes tend to do this. You can see how important the protagonist is in Mandalorian The character has changed and grown over the course of two seasons. In most stories, Boba’s monomaniacal focus on muscling into other people’s territory, his drastic mismanagement of that territory, and his raw fury at being balked would make him the villain. This story is also a good example of this.

Cad Bane is his arch enemy. Boba claims he’s somehow started the gang war on behalf of the people of Mos Espa, who he’s barely spoken to, and who in no way stand to benefit from his bloody rise to power. Cad Bane laughs at these pretensions and points to the fact that Boba has always been a thug. “I knew you were a killer,” Cad chuckles, just before Boba lives up to the jibe by killing him. He clearly sees that Boba isn’t clever enough to be a schemer or foresightful enough to be a leader, and that his only real skills are violence and ruthlessness. He isn’t just amoral, an anti-hero, or a gray character. He’s a full-on villain who doesn’t care if he gets his subordinates bombed, his allies shot, or his town smashed, as long as he gets his way and comes out on top.

It is important to remember that Boba, the bad-guy protagonist, brings many of the vaguer aspects of The Book of Boba Fett into focus, including the reason he’s so easily sidelined in his own story. The hero of a story needs to take center stage, but it’s fine for a villain to stand down while other, actually heroic figures like Marshal Cobb Vanth, Mandalorian Din Djarin, and even Luke Skywalker all step up to serve nobler causes.

And the “Boba Fett is the villain” reading clears up the confusing tone of the series, which draws heavily from classic Westerns and pulp crime stories, while throwing in melodrama, fantasy, and comedy borrowed from Mandalorian. In the end, season 1 of the show isn’t any of these things — it’s a farce, and a pretty subversive one. The villain wins, even though he isn’t prepared for the wars he starts, and he’s fighting them for the wrong reasons. He gets his revenge on the drug-pushing criminal bureaucrats who killed his Tusken family, even though it’s an afterthought and he doesn’t do it himself. He takes the throne he was after, even though he doesn’t know why he wanted it in the first place, and doesn’t enjoy it once he has it.

Of course, the one person who can’t acknowledge that he’s the villain is Boba Fett himself. He clearly thinks he’s some kind of hero, given his out-of-nowhere claims that he’s fighting on behalf of Mos Espa’s people — people who didn’t invite him to their town, don’t want him there, and are suffering because of him. But maybe that’s the most villainous thing he does in the whole season: He justifies all his failures, and all the havoc he causes with his own weakness and belligerence, by pretending he’s serving a greater good. Perhaps Boba Fett: The Book of Boba FettThis is a good cautionary tale on self-justification, selfishness, and how to be kinder. Or maybe it’s just funny to see how, in the chaotic criminal underworld of Star Wars, where everyone’s chasing some kind of profit, sometimes pure stubborn villainous tenacity wins out over everything else.

Season 1Boba Fett’s BookDisney Plus now streams the video.