Of course, Fett doesn’t know this, but there is no reason for the episode to spend as much time on Fett discovering something the audience already knows. The audience has seen Fett recover his armor on Tython in The Mandalorian. The audience knows his armor isn’t in the Sarlacc. This is most obvious when Fett takes his Firespray gunship out to examine the Sarlacc pit to recover his armor. There is a frustrating sense of The Book of Boba Fett spinning its wheels. There might be an argument if there were an interesting story to tell there, if these elements existed as part of a more compelling narrative, but “The Gathering Storm” moves in depressingly straight lines as it joins the dots. The audience doesn’t need to see how Fett and Shand met any more than they need to learn how Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) got his name. The audience could safely intuit a lot of this from Return of the Jedi and The Mandalorian. It even explains how Fett recovered his “Firespray gunship.” Just about the only thing it doesn’t explain is when Fett realized “Slave I” wasn’t a cool name and why he rebranded. It explains how Fett encountered Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen) after she was left for dead during the first season of The Mandalorian.
It explains why Fett waited to overthrow Bib Fortuna (Matthew Wood).
“The Gathering Storm” exists largely to prevent any fan from trying to “um, actually…” the show. It’s all connective tissue, but it’s not very compelling. The flashbacks in “The Gathering Storm” feel very much like they are tidying up loose plot threads and drafting a Wookieepedia article, rather than revealing anything particularly interesting and compelling about the character or his world. In contrast, the flashbacks that drive the first half-hour of “The Gathering Storm” are completely superfluous, offering fairly boring answers to questions that really didn’t need to be asked. As cheap as it was to massacre an entire tribe to generate pathos, the mass murder of the Tuskens provides a tangible motivation for Fett that has more emotional resonance for his journey to the top of the underworld than “money is pretty great, huh?” The flashbacks themselves were inelegant, but they had purpose. Fett’s time with the Tuskens humanized the character.
That said, at least those earlier three flashbacks set up (however clumsily) the emotional stakes of The Book of Boba Fett. Fett coming back doesn’t really need any explanation. Fett has never been a particularly complicated or nuanced character, and the screen time of the flashback sequences in the previous three episodes was already longer than his combined screen time in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. It’s debatable whether any of the previous flashbacks were really “necessary” in terms of explaining what Fett did in the interim between Return of the Jedi and The Mandalorian. It’s not as if Star Wars has never done prequels.
Given how much of these first four episodes have been given over to filling in the gaps between Fett’s seeming death in Return of the Jedi and his return in The Mandalorian, it’s worth wondering why the first half of this event series wasn’t simply positioned as a straight-up prequel. However, the flashbacks that eat up the first two-thirds of “The Gathering Storm” are particularly egregious even by the relaxed standards of the show’s pacing. It appears that, like all great artists, Boba Fett needs to think about his entire life before he plays. This discussion and review contains some spoilers for The Book of Boba Fett episode 4, “The Gathering Storm.”Īt the very least, “The Gathering Storm” suggests that The Book of Boba Fett is finally willing to stop living in the past.Īs Fett (Temuera Morrison) emerges from the bacta tank towards the final third of “The Gathering Storm,” a service droid helpfully announces, “You are completely healed.” This is convenient timing, as the memories that Fett was replaying had taken the audience up to his appearance in The Mandalorian.