Well, I guess that's us done. It has left me worried, to be honest. I feel like I've been pretty down in the mouth about recent Disney+ offerings, and I don't want to be, but looking back at Boba Fett, it feels like everything I've been complaining about in the MCU shows has been on show in Fett, only worse.

I'm a Star Wars fan, but I'm not a superfan. I watched the OT, I watched the Prequels in the cinema. I played SWTOR for a good while, along with a few other games, but I've never really dived into the EU, and I stopped watching the Sequel Trilogy after TFA. I enjoyed Rogue One because of its focus on a tight, limited narrative with a clear beginning and end. It was connected, but it worked on its own too.

I'm not deeply invested enough to sign up for an endless, ever expanding, never concluding universe. To be honest, after seeing where it seems to be taking the MCU, I'm not sure I'll ever be ready to sign on for something like that. It seems pretty obvious that that's the goal here. The series was called Boba Fett, but the only things which changed were circumstances. No-one seemed to learn anything, or grow in any way. No painful realisations. Nothing. All the happened was that the universe was moved onwards through a timeline. People went from place A to place B.

It's like someone filmed an AlternateHistory fanfic, where the main concern is usually events, strategy, and geopolitics. Oh sure, people make that stuff happen, but the important thing, the core, is the events that occur around them. The people are largely incidental.

In the case of AlternateHistory, that's usually caused by people thinking primarily in timelines and sequences of events. In this case, though, I think it's more insidious. If they're to keep milking these characters forever, they can't grow. All growth eventually reaches an end state. They don't want that. They want to be able to keep using Boba, or Mando, or Luke, or whoever, forever. Even if their actors die, Disney can resurrect them in film. Oh, their digital clones can't really act, but that's not important. They don't need too much acting if the characters never have to grow or change.

So, going forward, I guess I'll watch what my time allows, and simply accept that I'm not going to get as much out of it as others. I'll get an occasionally comfortable timewaster, and nothing more.

Oh, and I felt like I was being gaslit during the credits sequence. I had to go back to previous episodes to make sure that I wasn't a complete thicko who didn't realise the chanting in the music was 'bobabobaboba FETT'. Legitimately thought for a while that it had been like that all along, and I'd somehow managed to miss it.

 

I would argue that Din Djarin and Grogu are exceptions to that. A lot of people online are crying foul, calling it a step backward to have them back together, but the circumstances and context speak to a certain degree of character growth and progress along their arc. At the end of Mandalorian season 2, they split up, Din with his quest complete and honor satisfied, Grogu on his way to continue his Jedi training.

Din returned to his people, only to be rejected by them for the compromises made on the path to fulfilling his oath. Grogu learned that old lesson about how you can't ever really go home again, and - for possibly the first time in his life - made a decision about his own future, and chose family over the life that had brought him nothing but pain. Now they are reunited, moving forward as father and son with no reservations and no ambiguity about their relationship. So while it looks on the surface like no progress has been made, they've actually made quite a bit of it.

In fairness to your point though, as far as I can tell, those two are the only ones in BoBF to have any kind of character growth or arc, and it wasn't even supposed to be their show.

 

A while back I posted about the Patterson Cut: a fanedit of the Kenobi show by Kai Patterson that turned it into a two hour movie. Well, he tackled another Star Wars product: The Book of Boba Fett.

Unlike Kenobi, which easily converted into a film due to its focused storyline, the Book of Boba Fett had multiple story threads operating side by side: Boba Fett's, the Mandalorian's and Grogu's, as well as Fennec Shand's. It also flipped back and forth between time periods and those story threads stretched across multiple shows and movies. As a result, instead of a single movie, the Book of Boba Fett has been turned into two. The story of Boba Fett is now told in chronological order, also featuring scenes from the Attack of the Clones, Return of the Jedi, and the Mandalorian. The first movie covers Fett's time as a captive and member of the Tusken Raiders up until his takeover of Tatooine as its new crime lord. The second film shows his struggles afterwards.

It's not as clean as the Patterson Cut, obviously, but it does fix a number of smaller problems. As an example, during the show Boba is given a tiny lizard as a "great reward" for helping stop the train that had been killing the Raiders. Originally, Fett is clearly thinking, "What the hell is this supposed to be for? Well, it seems to mean a lot to them, so just go with it" and gives his 'genuine' thanks. In the Patterson/Pentex Cut, there is no awkward pause and the lizard jumps straight into his nose. It just flows a lot better.

If you are interested, you can find out more about it (including links to where you can watch it) in the following video:

 

Cutting a turd in half doesn't make it not a turd, or stink less.