Chris

They’ve clearly decided that the more interesting story is his escape from the sarlacc and how he came to be who he now is - both of which are pretty important given a/ his apparent grisly death in RotJ and b/ how little we knew about him, other than “bounty hunter **** who captured Han Solo”.

This week’s episode is pretty immersive. There’s a little forward momentum but as you say, it spent a lot of time fleshing out who the sand people really are. A couple of things of note are Fett’s choice of name for them, simply “Tusken” and not “Tusken raiders” or “sand people” which could be deemed perjorative, and the way in which he asserts their “ancestral rights” to the Dune Sea.

Star Wars never spent much time exploring the cultures it portrayed. It was always pretty black and white, so the sand people were “bad” because they clonked Luke on the head and Boba Fett was “bad” because he picked up the job of bringing in our action hero, who had offended one of the galaxy’s leading crime families (which in the Star Wars universe now begins to look like a more-or-less legitimate grievance).

If the franchise is going to have a future beyond the central Skywalker/Palpatane family saga and its related events then it is going to have to attend to the uncomfortable fact that its universe is pretty two dimensional a lot of the time. I think this new series is addressing that and personally, I really enjoyed just spending time with the Tuskens last night.