Abigail Liu
As subscribers to Disney Plus seem to keep realizing, television series that take place in the universes of popular movie franchises are starting to form a template of their own, changing the way we must now view popular entertainment. Long gone are the days of cherry-picking what to watch and when. Now, viewers are permanently fixed to their screens, watching the next episode and the next series, praying that they can stay up to date and follow the story through the next season. . But for now, it seems that viewers must know what happens to a minor character from the original movie that came out four decades ago to understand the entire premise of the series they actually want to watch.
Recently completed, the first season of The Book of Boba Fett (2021-2022) is following this trend that Disney Plus is attempting to popularize. With television series based in vast cinematic universes, such as those made by Marvel Studios and Lucasfilms, there is a lot that audience members must know before being able to watch them. MCU television series WandaVision (2021), The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), and Loki (2021-), opened this world, with a large proportion of their seasons often referencing the movies. The newest installment of the Doctor Strange series requires viewers to have watched WandaVision just to understand the trailer.
The season finale of The Book of Boba Fett was released on Wednesday, Feb. 9th, concluding what looks like just the first chapter of Boba Fett’s adventure in the Star Wars Universe. However, much attention has been directed away from the titular character and onto the newly iconic character the Mandalorian, Din Djarin, who took up a majority of the screen time of episodes five and six of the series. In fact, Boba Fett fails to make an appearance in episode five and can be seen for little more than a split second in the sixth, despite his name being in the title of the show.
Many fans joke online about The Book of Boba Fett being season three of The Mandalorian. Alan Sepinwall, a writer for Rolling Stones Magazine, argues that, while interesting to watch, the show does a poor job of giving the audience what they actually wanted in a Boba Fett series: Boba Fett and his journey from a rugged, silent bounty hunter to the esteemed daimyo of Mos Eisley.
“Devoting nearly 30 percent of the season to Mando, Grogu, Luke, Ahsoka, etc., no doubt made it more difficult to let the Tusken story play out at the length it needed, or to better establish the Mods and Black Krrsantan as actual characters rather than convenient sidekicks,” Sepinwall said.
Without mentioning spoilers, even the final scene of The Book of Boba Fett is focused on the Mandalorian. One can only hope to see everyone’s favorite space warrior red-head in Obi-Wan Kenobi gain premiere screen time in May of 2022.
As for what comes next, the only released information is the names of the seemingly countless titles and some actors featured in the MCU and Star Wars series coming soon.
Some shows to look out for:
- Moon Knight (Mar. 30th, 2022)
- Obi-Wan Kenobi (May 25th, 2022)
- She-Hulk (mid-2022)
- Andor (late 2022)
- Ms. Marvel (late 2022)
- Star Wars: The Bad Batch Season 2 (2022)
