Warning: SPOILERS for The Book of Boba Fett episode “Stranger in a Strange Land” are ahead!
Up until The Mandalorian Season 2 started airing on Disney+, within the official Star Wars canon, bounty hunter Boba Fett was believed to have died in Return of the Jedi when he fell into the Sarlacc Pit. But just like in the Legends continuity, Boba did indeed survive, though we never learned specifically how this happened while he was hanging out with Pedro Pascal’s Din Djarin. This has now been rectified thanks to the premiere episode of his spinoff series The Book of Boba Fett, though there’s more to the story than him simply breaking free from the Sarlacc.
Star Wars fans will recall in Return of the Jedi that right as Boba Fett got a bead on Luke Skywalker during the skirmish over the Great Pit of Carkoon, Han Solo inadvertently struck his jetpack with a weapon retrieved from one of Jabba the Hutt’s minions. Boba subsequently tumbled into the Sarlacc, and for anyone else, this would meant being digested within that beast for over a thousand years. Fortunately, the bounty hunter was still wearing his incredibly durable beskar armor and had a working flamethrower, so he was able to burn his way out of the Sarlacc and crawl back up to the Tatooine surface.
Unfortunately, that trying ordeal ended with Boba Fett losing consciousness, during which time a band of Jawas stripped him of his armor, setting the stage for Timothy Olyphant’s Cobb Vanth to procure that from the scavengers later. Back to Boba, as if being left for dead in the middle of a Tatooine desert wasn’t bad enough, not long after, he taken prisoner by a group of Tusken Raiders and brought back to their camp. Tied up next to a Rodian and kept watch over one of the Sand People’s Massiffs. Boba tried to escape, but because the Rodian snitched on him, he didn’t make it too far and was beaten in combat by one of the pursuing Tuskens.
The next day, one of the Tusken Raider children, specifically the one Boba Fett decided not to kill during his failed escape attempt, took our main protagonist, the Rodian and the Massiff out into one of Tatooine’s dunes. After witnessing a home being robbed and vandalized by unidentified criminals, the group settled in an area where the little Sand Person instructed its prisoners to dig for little pods containing water.
This task was interrupted by the Rodian accidentally awakening a giant, six-limbed desert monstrosity that killed the red-skinned alien and nearly killed the Tusken child had Boba not not climbed onto the creature and choked it to death with his chain, just like how Leia Organa dispatched Jabba the Hutt. The survivors returned to the Tusken camp, and Boba was rewarded by the tribe’s leader for saving the child with some water.
At this point, it’s worth mentioning that these flashbacks unfold during The Book of Boba Fett as dreams the title character experiences while he’s undergoing batch treatments. In the show’s “present-day” narrative, Boba and Ming-Na Wen’s Fennec Shand are busy establishing themselves as the new shot-callers of the criminal empire previously run by Jabba the Hutt and Bib Fortuna. The duo are targeted by assassins after they visited the cantina in Mos Espa run by Madam Garsa Fwip (where the Max Rebo Band is now performing). With the help of their two Gamorrean guards, Boba and Fennec survived, and the latter tracked down two of their fleeing assailants, killed one and captured another.
So the mystery behind how Boba Fett survived the events of Return of the Jedi has been solved, but there are still some narrative gaps to be filled in between then and where we find him in The Mandalorian Season 2. Luckily for viewers, and not so much Boba, his bacta treatments look to be a regular thing rather than just something he goes through when he’s been injured in a fight.
If that’s the case, then The Book of Boba Fett’s remaining episodes should delve into key moments from his post-Episode VI past, such as how he earned that gaffi stick from the Tusken Raiders and discovered that Cobb Vanth had his armor, through his dreams. Meanwhile, we'll continue to follow along with him and Fennec Shand in the “present” establishing themselves as power players in Tatooine’s criminal ecosystem.
New episodes of The Book of Boba Fett drop Wednesdays on Disney+, and there are plenty of other shows set in a galaxy far, far away coming up. Find out what’s ahead by scanning through our upcoming Star Wars movies and TV shows guide.
