Taking a Side Road
Catching up with a galaxy far, far away
With baseball at a stand-still, both this site and the main blog are starting to collect some dust. The Top Cards on Twitter (and its fallout) were the last things I discussed and I don’t want to get too far out of writing shape in case baseball does return soon. But what to talk about when the lockout is in full swing? Seems like it’s time to pivot to that other significant passion of mine.
With Disney running the show, there’s never much of a slow period when it comes to Star Wars. There might not be another movie on the active schedule but there’s plenty of other areas for discussion. Let’s hit on a few. I’ll try to go light on the spoilers but if you are invested in any portion of the Star Wars media galaxy and aren’t caught up, proceed at your own risk.
Obviously, most of the action right now is on the small screen. Disney+ hasn’t had many Star Wars series, though that is likely to change by year’s end, but what they have put out there has been interesting. Currently, The Book of Boba Fett is unspooling, with three chapters (as I write this) in the book (no pun intended) and four more on their way. Coming out of season 2 of The Mandalorian, where Fett returns and the post-credits stinger shows the major premise for this outing, there were a lot of expectations and speculations about what we’d see. I don’t think anyone was expecting this, however.
A few of us have a Star Wars group DM on Twitter and the general response to the show has been mixed. There’s no doubt that it’s a much slower burn than The Mandalorian ever was, especially the most recent season that saw so many ties to the larger universe appear (mainly Ahsoka Tano, Bo-Katan Kryze, and that certain final cameo). I read before TBOF Chapter 1 that there was supposed to be some mid-episode twist that would make you think differently about the show, but that didn’t seem to pan out. Maybe the reference was to the flashbacks that show what Fett did after falling into the Sarlacc pit but those, while interesting and giving context, didn’t seem to warrant that kind of hype.
Personally, I’ve enjoyed the show even if it’s not quite up to Mando levels. The development of Tusken Raiders from mindless attackers to unique culture may have started with Din Djarin negotiating with them to take down a kryat dragon, but it went to another level in this show.
I’m also finding the approach of Boba to be interesting and I’m wondering if it will be able to continue. When you saw Fett come in, wordlessly shoot Bib Fortuna, and take over Jabba’s throne, you would be forgiven if you expected some big crime/mob story, a guy enforcing his will over a territory and taking on other bad guys that wanted in on the action. Instead, we are seeing a guy trying to be a more benevolent ruler. As he says, he wants to rule by respect, not fear. Can that be done in such a harsh land? It would seem, at the close of the third episode, that he’s going to have to change his tactics quite a bit to be able to hold on to the property he thinks is his.
However things pan out, seeing this kinder, gentler Boba would have been unheard of for people walking out of The Empire Strikes Back. It feels like Boba was impacted by his father’s profession and subsequent violent end. It also feels like people are going to try to take advantage of his largesse and are going to wind up regretting it.
While TBOBF is the show currently on, I have a feeling it could be a footnote to the year by time December rolls around. I keep a little spreadsheet (because I’m all sorts of nerd) that schedules the Marvel and Star Wars shows upcoming based on the info we know and the guesses I make. With Moon Knight starting on March 30, it should end the last week of April. If I were a betting man, which I certainly am not, I would put money down that Obi-Wan Kenobi would start the next week, which is May 4. Kenobi is likely the thing everyone is going to talk about when it comes to 2022 and I’m very excited to see that.
(By the way, if you want my current guesses, I think She-Hulk starts soon after Kenobi, The Bad Batch season 2 and What If? season 2 overlap with BB starting late July, and Andor—which is supposed to be a 12 episode season—running from October until almost the end of the year. Perhaps Mando season 3 starts around Christmas, but there’s a better-than-even chance, assuming D+ doesn’t run two Star Wars shows at the same time, that it gets pushed to early 2023.)
The publishing side of the Star Wars universe has been active as well. The beginning of January brought two more additions to The High Republic series of books, as they start to close Part I of that plan. I have found all of the books that I have read in this interconnected saga to be worth my time. I’ve not gone so far as to get the youngest reader books, but the adult, young adult, and middle-grades books have had good stories while not feeling too simplistic as you move down the scale. The final adult book of the first part, Claudia Gray’s The Fallen Star, was a gripping story of pending disaster followed by actual disaster. I still can’t keep all of the characters straight over the books and comics, but I’ve got enough of a feel for who they are that when they are placed in danger I want to see them get out of it. Sadly, not everyone does as the curtain falls here.
The young adult and middle grades books understandably aren’t quite as intense but they aren’t anything to sneeze at either. You might expect the younger protagonists of those books to survive (and they typically do) but that doesn’t mean everyone else is safe. It’s been very interesting to see Jedi in their prime and the different ways they view the Force. The second part, apparently, is a flashback that goes even further back in Star Wars history before the third part (I would assume) resolves all that is left hanging. Looking forward to seeing how that develops. Phase two will start up in October, but there are still some books and media from the first phase to come between now and then.
Which leads us to the comic books.
There are quite a number of different lines going right now. There are three currently that are telling stories in The High Republic era, using characters from the books and creating characters that are then used by the books. There’s the main line, a Darth Vader line, a bounty hunters line, Doctor Aphra’s solo book (more on that in a bit), plus a “Star Wars Adventures” book that is typically for younger fans and the ongoing “Crimson Reign” event, which continues the story from the recently concluded “War of the Bounty Hunters”. It’s, as they say, a lot and I can’t say that I’m completely caught up with them all, though I do have them downloaded in my Comixology app.
The comics are fine—I’m more of a book reader so the style in general is not my favorite, even though I enjoy them—but I want to talk just about a couple of them.
The first is Doctor Aphra. If you aren’t familiar with the good doctor, she’s an amoral version of Indiana Jones. Artifacts aren’t necessarily for a museum if she can get some benefit out of them. She’s worked for Darth Vader (fairly unwillingly) and, much like Han Solo, eventually winds up doing the right thing…at least sorta. The character is interesting, but what is more relevant right now is that, way back when it started, it introduced a Wookiee named Black Krrsantan. If you are watching TBOBF, you’ll know him as the Wookiee the Twins used as their muscle. With this bounty hunter making the jump from the comics to the screen, you wonder if Aphra will be far behind. I don’t see a spot for her in the current show, but I could easily see Ahsoka run across her in her quest to find Grand Admiral Thrawn. Of course, that’s next year.
(To go on a slight tangent, it’s been announced that Dave Filoni, the keeper of the Star Wars flame, will be writing episode 5 of TBOBF. That got people thinking that maybe Ahsoka, a character he helped create and has affection for, might be coming to the series. I’ve seen speculation that Cad Bane shows up and they have the duel that was set to show up in Clone Wars. Me, I’m hoping that we get the live action debut of Hondo Ohnaka, because everything is better with Hondo.)
The second is the return of Crimson Dawn. The Solo movie left a lot of possibilities on the table for the criminal group. It appears that, at some point, they fell from prominence (probably when Maul was focused on chasing Kenobi) but they have made their return in the time period between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi and doing so with a splash, holding an auction to sell off a valuable item they had acquired—the frozen body of Han Solo. (Boba Fett had it stolen from him. It was a thing.) Seeing the return of the group, plus the fact that Q’ira is the one in charge, opens up a lot of possibilities for some of the ideas springing out of Solo to be perhaps modified and then put into a movie or show.
If there are other topics or questions you have about whatever is going on in Star Wars, drop me a comment here or ask me on Twitter. Hopefully we’ll have baseball back soon and you won’t have to get these sort of random messages very often!