Book Of Boba Fett’s Finale Failed The Tusken Raiders

Warning: Contains spoilers for The Book of Boba Fett episode 7.

Despite the prominence earlier episodes had given them, The Book of Boba Fett finale wasted the potential of the Tusken Raiders. With how divisive a part of the show the Tusken Raiders were, the finale was the perfect opportunity to provide them with the perfect payoff. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort happened, and the finale fully cemented how much the Tusken Raiders dragged the show down.

One of the biggest criticisms of The Book of Boba Fett has been its uneven pacing, and the Tusken Raiders have been at the heart of that problem. The first four episodes spend a lot of time on flashbacks to Boba Fett’s history with a group of Tusken Raiders that took him in after he escaped the sarlacc pit, and while the flashbacks were good at fleshing out Fett’s history between Return of the Jedi and The Mandalorian season 2, they ultimately dragged the story down a lot. Not only were the flashbacks incredibly lengthy, thus taking time away from the underdeveloped story of Fett being the new Daimyo, but they didn’t appear to have any noteworthy impact on the show as a whole, beyond showing what Fett had been up to before The Mandalorian. Whatever impact the Tusken Raiders had on his personality isn’t as clear as it could be, and the subplot is mostly removed from the larger story, thus making it harder to get invested.

The Book of Boba Fett finale was a chance to finally provide some ample payoff to the Tusken Raiders, but nothing of the sort happened. Despite how much attention the show gave to them in the first four episodes, the finale does nothing to capitalize on the importance that the show had made out for them. There are some references and thematic callbacks here and there, but the Tusken Raiders are very much removed from the finale, which makes all of the flashbacks to them feel like a waste of time.

Book Of Boba Fett Struggled To Make The Tusken Raiders Flashbacks Matter

The biggest issue with the flashbacks to the Tusken Raiders was, again, how disconnected they were from the rest of the show. The Book of Boba Fett was billed as a show about Boba Fett taking Jabba the Hutt’s place as the crime lord of Tatooine, but that story was mostly underdeveloped from start to finish. There was a multitude of problems with the Daimyo plot line, but a big one was that there was never any time to fully develop it because the show spent so much time on the Tusken Raiders. The question of what Fett was doing between Return of the Jedi and The Mandalorian had to be answered, and the flashbacks did a good job of that, but the problem comes from how they don’t matter beyond that.

Fett’s actions in the present day are completely removed from everything he did with the Tuskens. The Tusken Raiders flashbacks tell the audience how Fett got to be where he is, but they neglect to say anything about why he’s the kind of person he is; in short, his character doesn’t appear to go through any significant change because of the Tuskens, even though it’s the kind of thing that would easily spark change. Not only that, but the main plot of the show with Fett being the Daimyo and fighting the Pykes for control doesn’t relate to them in the slightest. The finale tries to bring the Tusken Raiders back into relevance by revealing that the Pykes killed them, thus allowing Fett to avenge them, but not only was it too late for The Book of Boba Fett to try and make them matter, Fett already assumed he got his revenge when he killed the bikers who were framed for the crime, so nothing really changed with the revelation.

Why Didn’t The Tusken Raiders Return In Book Of Boba Fett’s Finale?

One of the biggest ways the finale failed the Tusken Raiders was just by not having any of them appear. While Fett’s tribe was dead, there are numerous other tribes of Tusken Raiders running around Tatooine, and if Fett felt as integrated into his own tribe as the show made him out to be, then it would make sense for him to try and go to them for help, especially when the show kept saying that the Pykes’ forces outnumbered his own. The Tusken Raiders also had their world and characters fleshed out when Din Djarin teamed up with them to kill a krayt dragon in The Mandalorian season 2, and with Din helping Fett fight the Pykes, there would have been even more incentive and justification for other Tusken Raiders to get involved.

Nothing of the sort happens, though. The only sort of cavalry Fett gets in the finale comes in the form of Grogu, Peli Motto, the citizens of Freetown, and his new pet rancor, with Tusken Raiders never being brought up outside of the reveal that the Pykes killed Fett’s tribe. Both The Book of Boba Fett and The Mandalorian before it did a lot of work to flesh out characters that the movies made out to be nothing more than violent savages, and with The Book of Boba Fett making the Tusken Raiders central to the plot, the finale was the perfect chance to bring all of that work to its natural conclusion by having them be the big heroes saving the protagonists. Despite that, the show chose to not capitalize on the opportunity, which makes all the work that’s been done with the Tuskens feel weird, as a result.

The Book Of Boba Fett’s Finale Was One Last Tusken Raiders Failure

One of the biggest failings of the finale was its inability to give any real closure to the Tusken Raiders flashbacks. The show kept talking about how important the Tusken Raiders were to Fett, and episode 2 does a good job of showing that, but the rest of the show doesn’t do a great job of showing why they were important to him and what sort of impact they had on his life. This is best shown when Fett kills Cad Bane with his gaffi stick. The act was clearly meant to be symbolic of Fett avenging the Tuskens by using their weapon to end the battle with their murderers, but the Tusken Raiders had so little relevance to the main story before that point that it ended up falling short.

Both the flashbacks and The Book of Boba Fett, as a whole, would have benefited greatly from any attempt to better integrate the flashbacks into the overarching story. If Fett was shown to go through more explicit change either before or after their massacre or if the show had spent more time developing the present-day story of Fett being a Daimyo, then it would have been easier to justify the Tusken Raiders flashbacks and make them work with the story. None of that happened, of course, and the end result is a subplot that helped make the show a cluttered mess all the way to the end.