Planning the Boba Fett arc now.

It’s a great looking arc, with some nice unique ideas, and a nice bit of bridging into the OT aesthetic. It could do with some trims, but it’s really good. The emotional core is Boba and his relationships with Killian, Mace Windu, and Aurra Sing. It’s kind of an Anakin episode that becomes an Ahsoka episode, which is perfectly fine. Plus, it’s got a lot of good ponchos in it, so you know it’s going to be high quality.

In the first episode, Boba infiltrates the cruiser, shows off some skeet skills, fails to kill Mace via a bomb, so takes out the whole ship instead. Anakin and Mace prioritise helping the cadets over pursuing the villains (nice and heroic). It’s one of those episodes where it feels like not much happens, but it’s good fun the whole time because of the character work. I reckon you could trim this episode a fair bit, though. The skeet stuff can probably go, though I’d still like to preserve some Killian since his personality is interesting and it pays off later when he demonstrates real sympathy for Boba.

In the second episode, the ship has already crashed (there’s one shot of it crashing in the newsreel which I may or may not be able to use), and Anakin and Mace go to the crash site to attempt to rescue the soldiers who went down with the ship. They encounter another Boba bomb and end up trapped, while R2 fends off monsters and the bounty hunters solo, tricks the bounty hunters into leaving, and then flies all the way to Coruscant to get help.

As much as I enjoy R2’s plucky resourcefulness, and his scenes are fun, I think his antics here distract us from the emotional core of this episode. I think I’m going to trim this quite heavily - now, the bounty hunters have set the trap on the crashed ship, kidnapped Killian, and left the planet entirely before Anakin and Mace arrive, so we don’t see them on the planet at all. (I’m happy to infer that having destroyed a Republic ship, they know that overwhelming force isn’t far behind.) Anakin and Mace dutifully look for survivors, before falling into the trap as before. Mace ruminates over Boba, and then the Republic rescue party just shows up and rescues Anakin and Mace. (Again, I don’t think that’s problematic at all, the crashing ship had comms and distress beacons.)

In the third episode, it even opens with Republic people going “oh look, turns out Boba kidnapped Killian”, so that fits nicely with my plans so far, and not having to see them on the surface. The bounty hunters go on the run to Florrum where they meet Hondo, and Ahsoka and Plo travel to the Coruscant underworld to see what they can find out. Plo even teaches Ahsoka (a bit more subtly) to slow down, rendering Lightsaber Lost basically useless now except for Yoda saying “teach younglings”. After some good Boba development he’s caught by Ahsoka and Plo and taken to jail on Coruscant, where he’ll stay until the Rako Hardeen arc.

Unfortunately, the episode ends a bit weirdly. Firstly, Aurra in the Slave-1 crashes out of sight with a big explosion, and the Jedi don’t bother to investigate that, apparently thinking “well she’s definitely dead so that’s wrapped up nice and neatly”, though it later turns out that both Aurra and the Slave-1 were fine. And secondly, the episode ends with Boba angrily saying to Mace “I’ll always hate you” and Mace responding with no more than a “yeah well tough, now off you fuck to prison”. Which isn’t a great conclusion. But there’s nothing that can be done about that.

In terms of the episode’s name, I’ve got no idea. The core of it is this kind of battle for Boba’s soul, and while we all want Boba to end up as a badass, what happens here is that we see his softness, and it’s good. ‘SINS OF THE FATHER’ is evocative and encourages the viewer to keep an eye on Boba’s behavioural inheritance from Jango, so maybe that, though it doesn’t really deliver on it. It’ll entice the new viewer at least.

As I say, I do think this episode renders Lightsaber Lost redundant, especially since the whole point of LL is that bit of character growth for Ahsoka. And with the Holocron crisis and now this exploration of the underworld, we’ve done a lot of Coruscant recently. Obviously I’ll keep the Lightsaber Lost link up and everything, I think I’m just going to downgrade it to the Complete Cut, for our completionists only. It would have been nice to add Lightsaber Lost’s ending to the end of Seven Warriors, so after she teaches the village she goes on to start teaching the younglings, but the context is too heavily related to slowing down and not losing your lightsaber, so I don’t think it could work.

In terms of the placement of this episode relative to others I currently have near it, there are two main things to consider. Firstly, Aurra Sing. She just appeared in the Holocron arc working for Bane, and now she’s apparently leading this group. That’s OK - Bane’s clearly a way more senior bounty hunter so she might well take jobs for him while also progressing her own career - but the two episodes may therefore warrant a bit of breathing space. Secondly, Hondo. He appears in Seven Warriors (AKA Bounty Hunters), where he’s introduced as having a “history” (without details) with Anakin and Obi-Wan, but Ahsoka is also there. Ahsoka also engages a little with Hondo in this episode. In neither episode do they acknowledge having already met each other, so I think it doesn’t really matter what ordering I use. Hondo’s line about bounty hunters being scum in Seven Warriors is made a bit more fun if we know Aurra Sing is his ex-girlfriend, but I don’t think that’s a strong enough reason to reorder them. I think, in order to give Aurra a couple of episodes to shift from Bane mode to Boba mode, season two might look like this:

s02e01 - Seven Warriors (AKA Bounty Hunters)
s02e02 - Massacre
s02e03 - Boba Fett arc
s02e04 - Corruption on Mandalore
s02e05 - Assassin (though I’m not certain I’m keeping this episode)
s02e06 - The Return of Maul
s02e07 - Senate Spy (intro to Geonosis)
s02e08 - 2nd Battle of Geonosis
s02e09 - Worms (aftermath of Geonosis)
s02e10 - Maul Piracy

leaving season 3 to open with Ahsoka’s new look (after the trauma of Worms) and feature the shades of grey and Lux Bonteri arcs leading up to the Mandos finding Maul.