ajp4mgs
Super Freak
- Joined
- Jul 10, 2017
- Messages
- 2,305
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You make a good point about the redundancy of piling on, and I've done enough of it here that it's time for me to back away from the thread. This last episode, despite arguably being the best of these first four, pissed me off the most, so I have nothing positive to say. But since you asked the question of what did people want to see from this show, I'd like to answer that question. Then I'll try my best to avoid more piling on.
I wanted to see Boba Fett being Boba Fett. I wanted to see the character I was introduced to (with a good amount of marketing and fanfare) more than 40 years ago but who was given very little time on screen. That character was a villain. A guy who collected bounties; sometimes by ruthless disintegration, and sometimes in whatever manner allowed him to wear the victim's scalp as a braided trophy. He worked alone. He said little. He had a reputation that merited respect from the most feared and evil man in the galaxy (Vader). He was cunning and proficient. I wanted to see *that* guy as a crime boss, to make up for the lack of getting to see that guy as a bounty hunter.
But none of those characteristics are present in the current iteration of the character. He's not a villain; though we'd have every reason to think he was going to be as a *crime boss* on Tatooine. He's a good guy, in every sense of that phrase; he explicitly says he would like to see fewer people die and he only goes after bad guys who threaten him or have done him wrong. I wouldn't be entirely opposed to eventually ending his arc by turning him into the good guy anti-hero, but only *after* OG Fett got plenty of screen time being OG Fett. Instead, they bypassed that guy and went straight to the nicer guy version.
He isn't a man of few words now; he speaks a ton. He isn't proficient; he's clumsy enough to ineptly chase a rabbit droid through a kitchen like a ******* clown. He isn't cunning; he comes up with the stupidest ideas and fails to spot vulnerabilities. He certainly isn't ruthless. He's not a bounty hunter. He doesn't work alone; he believes in being part of a tribe (even though all that got him was a dead tribe). He isn't respected; characters even tell him this to his face.
This is quite literally a completely different character in every way except for name, a helmet, and some armor. There's nothing about this show that makes it more compelling by having the main character be "Boba Fett" rather than be some completely new character who gives up a life of bounty hunting to pursue more autonomy with some benevolent intent. His name and legacy were simply the hook to reel in longtime fans (aka "suckers") like me before unveiling the bait-and-switch.
Robert Rodriguez talked about how this great character was underserved for so many years, and that now they get to give fans actual stories of the Boba Fett they grew up wanting more of. Well, for me this isn't anything remotely similar to the Boba Fett I grew up with, and I already enumerated the reasons why. It's a rebrand into a more soft and cuddly Boba Fett. And for anyone rationalizing it as "character evolution," I hope they at least understand that while that's true, this "evolution" comes without having been given any further glimpse of the original version of the character beyond the few minutes we got in the OT.
It also barely qualifies as an evolution since the end result is a complete departure from virtually everything the character used to be. It also comes at the expense of exchanging one of the few notable and awesome villains in the Star Wars universe for another version of Din Djarin (but nowhere near as cool). A villain with great design and attitude, with plenty of mysterious intrigue, is now going to be the protagonist to make way for a villain that's probably going to be... Emilia Clarke. Yay. No thanks.
There's a profound moment in this latest episode. Boba Fett tells Fennec that he needs to retrieve his "Firespray gunship" from Jabba's palace. Everyone with any functioning brain cells knows that he didn't need to say anything other than "my ship" in order for both Fennec and the audience to understand what he was referring to. But the rebrand of Slave I takes precedence, and the writers happily played along with the corporate edict. Everything in this show is a rebrand, and they're not disguising it. And the vast majority of fans will re-calibrate their perceptions and associations to happily accept Disney rebrands because they have a compulsive need to enjoy whatever carries the Star Wars label. And Disney knows it. Well, God bless the fans who can enjoy this. But I've been learning that I'm not one of them.
Sorry for the long rant.
