1x04 Chapter 4: The Gathering Storm

[7.4/10] This episode was well-made, well-acted, well-designed, and well-staged. Watching Boba Fett and Fennec Shand take down a kitchen’s worth of droids, or retrieve Slave I from Jabba’s Palace (er, Bib’s Palace I suppose?), or go hand-to-hand with some Gamoreons is all good stuff. Temura Morison and Ming-Na Wen continue to have a good shared on-screen presence together. And it’s nice to have the show, however bluntly, basically tell the audience “The flashback sequences are over now.”

But more than any other episode in the show, this one feel perfunctory. There’s no burning emotional question to be answered here, no broader character journey taken. Instead there’s fairly mechanical questions asked. How did Fett link up with Shand? How did she recover? How did he get his ship back?

THere’s nothing wrong with the answers “The Gathering Storm” offers for these questions, but they feel almost perfunctory. The answers are: 1. He found her, 2. He got her repaired at a mod bar, 3. He stole it back from Bib Fortuna’s stronghold. There’s nothing particularly interesting revealed in any of that. It’s more of a gap-filling from what we saw of the two of them in The Mandalorian. And while the material is solid, I’m always leery when Star Wars gets into perfunctory gap-filling mode. If the answers to the “How did they get the thing?” questions don’t have some deeper meaning, they feel hollow, contrived, or pointless. (See also: Most of Solo.)

The closest to something deeper we get here is an explanation of why Fett would help Shand in the first place, and why he wants to start his own house. The notion that he wants to take back his stuff and settle some scores, but needs other muscle and brains to be able to do it, is a solid one for why the bounty hunter would try to ally with an assassin. Shand deciding to stick around out of gratitude for him saving her life and recognizing his talents and loyalty does help cement their relationship, and it’s some combination of understated and undercooked.

Likewise, there’s something to be said for the idea that Boba recognizes that after his experiences with the Tuskens, he won’t get far without a tribe. He doesn’t think he can be a lone wolf anymore, and given his shitty experiences as a bounty hunter, he recognizes that it can all be done better, for the benefit of working stiffs like them. Again it’s simple stuff, but it’s good enough.

There’s just not much to the flashback portions of this one beyond showing how the pieces moved from one part of the board to the other. In the same vein, the present day portions of the episode are mainly piece-moving for the future, setting up the contours of a war with the Pykes and a tease for Mando coming into the fold. It’s not bad by any stretch, but there’s a table-setting vibe to all of it.

I don’t really mind it for an episode. The show did bring in Kevin Tancharoen, who has experience shooting Ming-Na Wen from Agents of Shield, so that’s nice. But there’s less that’s momentous in this episode than there are things that feel sound but mechanical. Hopefully now that the flashback sections are done, the show can start moving the ball forward with a little more conviction.

I enjoyed the episode very much, though there were some parts that seemed a bit illogical. The episode tells the story of how Boba found the dying Fennec and saved her life, taking her to the people who install the mechanical modification in their bodies. The girl that joins Boba's team in previous episode is shown in the background in this scene. Fennec now has a lot of tubes and wires in her tummy and I guess it may be rather impractical in combat situations, since she would be killed if these modifications were damaged? It also seems a bit stretched that she does not need any time to convalescence and is almost immediately ready to fight, moreover, she excels at it. Boba promises that he would let her go if she helps him to recover his spaceship, but in the end it turns out that Fennec started to like him and stays with him of her own volition. Boba kills all the speeder bikers responsible for the death of the Tuskens, and decides to revisit the place called the sarlac pit, where he assumes his armour is left (he doesn't know that the Jawas stole his armour while he was unconscious). I am not familiar with Star Wars lore, but it seems that the sarlac thing is some kind of the monster, and the protagonists almost get killed when it turns out that the creature is alive after all, I got some scare-jumps when it attacked them, which rarely happens to me when I watch shows ;) Thanks to Fennec's quick thinking, they kill the monster and later on, Boba offers Fennec partnership, based on mutual loyalty. Boba claims that living with the Tuskens taught them that an effective community must be based on family-like ties and he now aims to recreate it. Back in present time ;) Boba recruits the wayward Wookie to join his team, and organises a meeting with local leaders, asking them to support him in his war against the Pykes. However, they only agree to remain neutral and not to join the Pykes. There is the theme from "The Mandalorian" at the very end of the episode, so I hope Mando will have a cameo in the next episode. I like Boba but I rather miss Mando and the Baby :)