Ever since his first appearance in 1980, Star Wars fans of old and new alike have clung to the legend of Boba Fett. Just by standing in the background and saying maybe a single line of dialogue and then dying in his second film appearance, fans have always been dying to know more about the character, and have even been advocating for his return from the “dead.” Just last year, Mandalorian season 2 did exactly that when it revealed the return of the Mandalorian armor-clad bounty hunter. Now here we are, a little over a year later, and Disney+ has now premiered the very first episode of the characters starring series: The Book of Boba Fett.
Spoilers for the first episode of The Book of Boba Fett are below!
Being the main focus of a story for the very first time, the show wasted no time adding layers to the past of Boba through flashbacks. First, we saw the striking image of young Boba Fett in Attack of the Clones holding the decapitated head of his father (yikes), before jumping into the longer flashback story that took up a majority of the episode’s runtime. Following Boba’s escape from the stomach of the Sarlacc, Jawas stripped him of his armor and he was imprisoned by some Tusken Raiders. He’s practically toyed with by the Tuskens to the point where the children just beat him up for what looks like no point other than “fun.”
The story takes an interesting turn when Boba (and another prisoner) are taken by a Tusken child to hunt for water in the desert by way of “black melons.” On the way, Boba and the Tusken stop to watch from a distance as a group of bandits finish up their work ransacking a Tatooine house, similar to Luke Skywalker’s (I love the visual similarities with the smoke, just like in A New Hope). They break some stuff, beat up a guy a little bit, and then leave an interesting mark on the side of the house. This one little sequence and that one little mark seem to set up more for the future of this show than maybe any other moment in the rest of the episode.
The mark immediately caught my attention and the amount of time the camera lingered over it made me assume that it had more importance than I would’ve otherwise thought. My brain spent a little while filtering through every file in my brain to try and track down what other organization might have an immediately recognizable logo to pin to these bandits. I thought the mark looked like two moons so my first thought was “Crimson Dawn,” last seen in Clone Wars final season and Solo: A Star Wars Story. But the logo for Crimson Dawn is far different than the one seen in the episode, so I was back to square one.
Pointed out to me by fellow Cosmic Circus writer Anthony Flagg (all credit to him), the audio descriptive track for the episode describes the bandits as “Nikto bikers.” For those who aren’t knee-deep in Star Wars lore and knowledge, Niktos are a species of aliens who were enslaved by the Hutts on both their own home planet of Kintan and on Tatooine. Following the death of Jabba the Hutt, the Niktos were freed from captivity and clearly, some of them went on to do some unfavorable shenanigans. That revelation immediately gave me a potential way to solve the mystery of the mark: because the Niktos were imprisoned by Hutts for a long time, it could be reasonable to assume they speak Huttese and therefore the mark on the wall could be a symbol of the Huttese alphabet.
So all it took was me hunting down a Nal-Huttese alphabet and boom – there it was. The letter “K” looks exactly like the mark that the Nikto bikers made on the side of the building. The question of “why the letter K” still looms large but there might be a simple answer. The subspecies of Nikto that we saw, the red Nikto, starts with a K. So, going with the clearest and most direct answer, the mark could be a sort of warning to the surrounding citizens that the Kajain’sa’Nikto are free from captivity…and not to be trifled with.
Before this show, for most fans, Boba was a clean slate of a character. They seem to have gone the noble route with the character and it will be interesting to see how he reacts to the retaliation against Jabba’s throne. Will he attempt to make amends? Will he admit to the relationship between him and Jabba being purely transactional? We still have 6 episodes of the series ahead of us to dissect the long mysterious anti-hero.
Episode 1 of The Book of Boba Fett is out now on Disney Plus and new episodes drop every Wednesday.
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