The OTHER Book of Boba Fett

The bounty hunter Boba Fett is a well-established character in Star Wars lore... but what was he like during the franchise's formative years? 

Transcript

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The following episode of the Approaching Whitespeed podcast contains pretty substantial spoilers for Last One Standing, The Tale of Boba Fett, but I'll let you know when we start getting into spoiler territory so that you can jump off. This episode is also being done with the assumption that you have seen or are at least familiar with the plot of the original Star Wars trilogy. I'm not even two weeks into this podcast, and I'm already playing fast and loose with the mission statement. I know that when you hear the name Star Wars, you're not thinking underground, obscure science fiction gem. But hear me out, because this story in particular has a weird place even in the turbulent mythology of Star Wars, and I'm willing to bet that there are even a few hardcore fans out there who have missed this one. So, for those of you who don't know, there was some drama a few years ago back when Disney first purchased the Star Wars IP. They had made the decision to decanonize all of the expanded universe, which was the video games and the books that were supplemental to the movies, in favor of this new canon that they wanted to develop themselves. What this means is that entire chapters of the Star Wars universe were rendered irrelevant to this new story basically overnight. But the story I have in mind was contradicted over a decade before this acquisition even happened. As of the recording of this podcast episode, the show The Book of Boba Fett has recently concluded, so I figured there was no more appropriate time than now to talk about the other Book of Boba Fett. I present to you Last One Standing: The Tale of Boba Fett by Daniel Keyes Moran. This story was one of several that were collected in this anthology called Tales of the Bounty Hunters, which was published in 1996, three years before the first prequel film, and therein you're starting to see where the contradictions I mentioned earlier are coming into play. Each of these stories focuses on one of the bounty hunters that was present on Darth Vader's ship in Empire Strikes Back, with last one standing, of course, focusing on Boba Fett. Up until now, Boba Fett was this Saturday morning cartoon villain. He was a faceless henchman, even in the movies and the holiday special, which means that he didn't really have any kind of consistent character until Daniel Keyes Moran decided to try to make a backstory for him in this one. Of course, this changed over the years, and now the most recent iteration of the character is a stoic and somewhat good-hearted and moral warrior who has aspirations of taking over a criminal enterprise. But the Boba Fett we see in Last One Standing is a fascinating walking contradiction of absolutism with a dash of bootlicking thrown in for good measure. This is a man who equates the word of law with morals, and he believes that anybody who is immoral or who breaks the law is deserving of nothing less than death. And on top of that, he is this anointed enforcer of morals. He believes the rebel alliance is irredeemably wrong just in the fact of their revolt against an oppressive regime, and he believes all of the blood that has been spilled in the resulting war is on the rebels' hands. He is staunchly opposed to any kind of drug or alcohol use. In his words, they are an insult to the flesh, and he will relentlessly pursue anybody he thinks is engaging in those sorts of activities. And the punishment for all of the slights that I have just listed are always the same. Either he kills you or he drags you away to the people who want you dead. At least he's consistent as far as his code goes. Maybe not his choice of employers so much, judging by Job of the Hut. But the fact of the matter is, this ego and this self-imposed moralistic crusade of his was with him from the very start, when he was a young man on the planet Concord Dawn named Jaster Marile. By the way, as a side note, once this story was deemed non-canon, Jaster Marile actually became his own separate character within the Star Wars canon. But when we first meet Boba Fett in this story, he is this disgraced police officer of sorts who's being held prisoner for killing another officer who we can only imagine committed acts Boba found objectionable. Notably, by the way, the story makes no mention of him being a clone of Django Fett, and presumably he lived his whole life on Concord Dawn until this incident. From here, he would go on to be exiled into the galaxy where he would become the bounty hunter we all know as Boba Fett. But already, from page one, we're starting to see the seeds of a very different version of the character that we've been used to since Attack of the Clones. From there, we see one of Boba Fett's early bounty hunts, in which he encounters a young Han Solo fighting in an arena on this hellish penal colony planet called Jubilar. From there, the novella kind of jumps around time-wise. It shows us Boba Fett's point of view during the movies. And I think this is a pretty good time to explain something I've noticed with the Star Wars books that I've consumed in general, and that is that it's a reading experience very much unlike most other science fiction books, in that it assumes that you have prior knowledge of a film before going into this one. It alludes to events and planets and characters that don't really make any major appearance in the novella. It even goes as far as to reference other short stories and other anthologies that Daniel Keyes Moran participated in. The clearest example of this, and this is a minor spoiler, by the way, is Boba Fett's Escape from the Sarlac Pit, which is described in detail in another short story in another collection, but is just totally glossed over in Last One's Standing. I understand the irony in pointing this out in a podcast that assumes you have seen Star Wars, but I digress, I just wanted to touch on the intertwined nature of the Star Wars expanded universe as a whole. Over the course of Last One's Standing, Boba Fett develops this unhealthy obsession with Han Solo. When he pieces together that the same man in the Rebel Alliance was the young boy he saw in the Gladiator Arena on Jubalar, he kind of perceives Han as this avatar of everything he isn't. Where Boba Fett holds the laws of the Galactica Empire sacred, Han Solo thumbs his nose to them and operates in complete disregard for them. Where Boba sees drugs and alcohol as an insult to the flesh, Han Solo is off gallivanting and smuggling those very drugs and alcohol for criminal organizations. In Boba Fett's mind, Hans stands as this monument to lawlessness and chaos, where Boba fancies himself as this instrument of justice and order. But anybody who knows anything about Boba Fett knows that there's a pretty big disconnect between this code of his and the actions he takes and the people he serves. This is even touched upon within the story. He has this encounter with Princess Leia in which she calls him out as a hypocrite because for all his chest pounding and bravado about the laws of the Galactic Empire, he's still working and killing for a scumbag like Job of the Hut. The very same scumbag who the man he hates, Han Solo, was working for. Boba shrugs this off as he's using Jabba the Hutt as a means to an end to further his career and to possibly capture Lu Skywalker if he ever tries to rescue Han, and he dismisses the murders he commits as merely a part of the bounty hunting job, which is legal and therefore moral. The story eventually progresses past the scope of the original Star Wars trilogy, and it picks up 15 years after Return of the Jedi, we see things from both Boba Fett's and Han Solo's perspective as we learn about the new state of the galaxy. The Rebel Alliance has become the new republic, and both men don't really know what to do with themselves or who they are in this brand new post-empire state of affairs. Where Han Solo hasn't smuggled cargo or fought a rearguard action against oppressors in so long, and where the laws that Boba Fett held as the central fact of his life no longer have any meaning, they both feel lost and aging and left behind as history church without them. It's really interesting stuff, and I love the look that we get into both of their psyches during this time. That's about as far as I'm willing to go without getting into details on the ending of Last One Standing. So if you're adverse to spoilers as to how this whole story comes together, this is your opportunity to jump off the train now. But before you do, I leave you with this. Star Wars is such a Titan at this point that it's basically a genre in and of itself. And it contains all of the hidden underground gems that such a status might imply. There's way more to be enjoyed from this Star Wars genre than simply the movie, so I highly recommend delving into Tales of the Bounty Hunters or the other expanded universe stuff if you want to sample a taste of something familiar yet new at the same time. So anyway, this is your final spoiler warning. I'm about to go into the ending of Last One Standing now. Towards the end of the story, both Boba Fett and Han Solo find themselves in the highest position they've ever been in their lives. Han Solo is the husband of a major, major mover and shaker in the New Republic in Princess Leia, and Boba Fett has just secured easily the biggest bounty in terms of credit worth he's ever had in his life. In fact, at this point, he has enough money to actually retire from bounty hunting for good, and he would finally be able to address the wounds and trauma that he sustained during his time in the Sarlac Pit. Boba Fett even entertains an entire new venture completely outside the realm of bounty hunting or dispensing justice. He finds these music discs that the Empire had suppressed during their reign, and he makes a promise to someone that he will distribute them and sort of revive the art that it represents. But despite the comforts that both men enjoy, they both regress into the habits and the identities that they had carried with them before. Han Solo decides in his boredom to go on another smuggling run, and Boba Fett is tipped off of his intentions and decides he can't let go of his hatred for the monument to lawlessness that is Han Solo, and decides to pursue him. This sets up a collision course that serves as the climax for the story. Last One Standing concludes with Han Solo and Boba Fett, old and grizzled as they are, standing upon the soil of the planet where they first met, pointing guns at one another and unable to make a move because one can kill the other at any second. The conversation they have, brief as it is, is just rife with the implications of what these two men could have been had they just let go of their old grudges or their former glories. And in the end, they stand at the crossroads of whether to trust the other to let them walk away, or to fall into combat once more and decide once and for all who the last one standing will be.