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Our latest exploration into Boba Fett’s history (it’s Fettday today!) wraps up his appearances in Star Wars storytelling before the events of A New Hope. We’ll be talking about his last interaction with Asajj Ventress, and a brief sabotage of Han Solo. Punch it!
Transcript
Star Wars 7×7 episode 2712. Well, it’s Monday, which means it’s Fett Day, and we’re going to talk about the last stories in which Boba Fett appears before the events of A New Hope. Punch it!
Hey, Rebel Rouser, I’m Allen Voivod. This is Star Wars 7×7, your daily dose of Star Wars joy. And thank you so much for joining me for it. So here we are with Fett Day. Boba Fett appears in the novel Dark Disciple, which is part of the Clone Wars Legacy, if you will. Or at least I guess technically, it was until it then became the Dark Disciple novel. That’s the novel by Christie Golden that came out in 2015, and it adapts eight episodes of the Clone Wars that never got produced.
Now the novel primarily concerns itself with Quinlan Vos and Asajj Ventress. But Boba Fett does come into play in the novel. He appears in it a few times, and so that’s what we’re going to be focusing on today.
We’ll start with the general premise and how Boba Fett gets involved in this thing. So the Jedi Council is trying to figure out how to deal with the Separatists, and they come up with a plan to assassinate Count Dooku. They send Quinlan Vos, the cowboy Jedi, off to try to do this, but he wants to have some sort of companion to go along with him. Master Yoda suggests Asajj Ventress, who is no longer under Dooku’s employ. We’ve talked about that in previous episodes because it’s come up.
And so Vos goes down into the Coruscant underworld to Level 1313, where he finds Krayt’s Claw hanging out in a bar. In particular, he finds Bossk and gives him a little Force nudge, saying that he’s looking for the “bald banshee,” and he’s pretending to be a bounty hunter in his own right, trying to figure out how to deal with Ventress, claiming that she’s stolen a couple of bounties from him, and he’s trying to locate her. Bossk says, oh, yeah, I know somebody who might know.
And so Bossk brings Vos to Boba Fett, saying, hey Boss, this guy is looking for no name, the rookie. That’s how they know Ventress, because of course, Ventress didn’t give her name in that episode, “Bounty,” and Boba Fett’s like, yeah, rookie, don’t you believe it. She knows exactly what she’s doing. And he mentions that she’s doing a job on Pantora. It was a job that Boba Fett said he was potentially interested in himself, until he heard that she was involved in it, and then decided he wanted nothing to do with the job whatsoever, which under the circumstances of the episode “Bounty” in The Clone Wars, yeah, you can probably figure out why.
So Vos takes off to find Ventress, and as he’s leaving Fett mutters that Vos has no idea what he’s getting himself into, which is kind of true. And Vos reflects in the narrative that that’s the most exciting part for him.
And then Boba Fett shows up later on in the novel, when Vos has been captured by Count Dooku and is being tortured by him. And, yeah, I don’t know how much to tell you about this to give you what you need to know. But basically, first of all, we’re in spoiler territory for Dark Disciple, in case you haven’t figured that out. Anyway, Vos was being trained by Ventress to be able to kill Dooku by opening up into the dark side of the Force. And basically, when things go wrong and Vos gets captured by Dooku, Dooku essentially decides to finish the dark side training and tortures Vos. And there’s other stuff that happens because Vos’ Jedi Master had been killed previously, and Ventress told Vos that it was Dooku who killed his Jedi master. But really, it was Ventress.
Now, Vos’ particular unique Force power is psychometry, where he can touch an object and feel things about the history of the object. Dooku gave Vos his old Jedi master’s blade, and Vos realizes that Ventress was lying to him, that Ventress was actually the one who killed the Jedi master. So that causes problems that you need to be aware of for this next part where Boba Fett shows up. Oh, yeah. And the other thing you need to know is that Vos and Ventress have fallen in love with each other, and Ventress is distraught and needs to get Vos rescued from Dooku.
So she goes to Krayt’s Claw and says, I need your help. And Boba Fett rakes her over the coals and is like, oh, really? What was that you said? And in the narrative, Asajj thinks to herself that she had underestimated just how wounded the boy’s pride was as a result of the events of that episode, “Bounty.” And so it’s going to cost her. As a result, it’s going to cost her just about all the money she has managed to sock away as a bounty hunter, a quarter of a million credits. And Boba doesn’t want any part of this deal. Basically, he still just wants to walk away. But for Bossk and the rest of Krayt’s Claw, that’s more money than they’ve heard of in quite a while.
They’re super excited. And so Boba Fett is basically willing to say, all right, you guys go do it. But the syndicate gets a cut, that’s the Krayt’s Claw Syndicate. And Ventress is like, no, it needs to be the whole team. I need you, too.
And Boba Fett says, all right, fine, whatever. And while Ventress is watching the other members of Krayt’s Claw go, Boba draws a blaster and ends up sticking it right in her face before she even realizes it and says, I’m not the kid you left on Quartzite and I know you’re going to betray us. They don’t know it, but I know you’re going to do it. And if you double cross me, you’re going to pay for it. And then he does a little blaster twirl, probably a little bit like his dad, and then takes off.
But yes, now we get the idea that maybe Boba Fett has done a little bit of growing since his last encounter with Asajj. So the mission is pretty straightforward. Boba Fett and Krayt’s Claw need to provide a distraction and keep battle droids occupied while Ventress goes into the prison and breaks Vos out. That is, in theory, how it’s supposed to go. They get to Serreno because he’s being held at Count Dooku’s Palace.
And Krayt’s Claw folks asked Ventress, why is Dooku interested in this guy anyway? And Ventress tells them the truth. Says he tried to kill Dooku, and all of the Krayt’s Claw bounty hunters are kind of like, smacking themselves like, oh, God, this is bad. We should have known that before we went in there, and and Ventress has to reassure them, nope, it’s still the same deal. And I’m taking on the riskiest part. There are shuttles flying in, get their attention, keep them occupied.
So they blow up a shuttle, get ready to steal another one while Ventress goes into the prison. And it turns out that Vos, with all the stuff that I just explained to you a little bit earlier, is really mad at Ventress and has gone all the way over to the dark side of the Force with his training and torture via Dooku. And so they have a huge battle. And basically Ventress figures out that Vos is not going to relent. He’s trying to kill Ventress, so at the very least Ventress can kind of lead him outside, where maybe some of the other members of Krayt’s Claw can help her subdue Vos, and they can take him away.
And so they get outside the prison where all heck is breaking loose and shockingly, Bossk has managed to capture Count Dooku in the midst of all of this. Dooku wasn’t even supposed to be there, but he’s got him, and he’s got him, like, in a little net webbing thing that Bossk has with his blaster and has him at blaster point on the ground. The Clone Wars could have ended right there, except for the fact that Bossk wasn’t getting paid to kill Dooku, and so he doesn’t. That, of course, is super frustrating.
And as they’re exiting the prison, Vos basically Force throws Ventress across the landing pad, and it’s Boba who hauls her up and is like, hey, what’s going on? Because they were supposed to be in and out in 15 minutes, and he was yelling at her as she was running in like, 15 minutes! And Vos is now out and sees Dooku on the ground, and they’re basically like, leave him, leave him, let’s go. And Boba doesn’t seem to acknowledge that this is Quinlan Vos, doesn’t seem to recognize him from their encounter earlier in the book, but they’re basically like getting on one of these shuttles that they’re going to steal.
Ventress essentially says, leave me, I’m going to deal with this. And Boba’s like, no, you’re coming with me. And he is the one who kind of drags her onto the shuttle so that way everybody can escape. And when they’re finally on the shuttle, Ventress says to Boba Fett, you could have left me back there. And he says, yeah, but I’m not you, which is intended to be a dig at Ventress, and she takes it as such, but doesn’t say anything because she’s like, she realizes the truth of it, and she’s crushed by what happened with the encounter with Quinlan Vos.
So yeah, things are really bad. And Boba Fett, not necessarily knowing how bad things are, just kind of kicks her while she’s down, basically. And there’s one last mention after that situation happens where Ventress is reflecting that she had expended whatever meager goodwill she may have had with Krayt’s Claw as a result of that failed mission. Although it’s kind of strange to consider that maybe any goodwill has been lost, because they all got paid and they got to steal a shuttle in the process, Ventress is the only one who suffered any losses as a result of that operation. She paid up front for it and didn’t get what she was hoping for.
But it does go to show that Boba Fett has matured significantly from the events of “Bounty” when we saw him last. So this was supposed to be season seven of the Clone Wars, if this had actually become episodes as opposed to a novel, but still, it’s the same time frame situation. That’s as opposed to season four of the Clone Wars, which is where we saw Boba and Ventress have their first interaction in the “Bounty” episode. So it’s at least a year later. And apparently Boba has matured and seems to have more concern for his teammates than perhaps he did when we saw him in season four, and when Ventress was considering that he wasn’t very much of a leader because he wasn’t asking for the welfare of his teammates in that whole adventure.
There is everything that you need to know about Boba Fett from his appearance in Dark Disciple. There are a couple more Boba Fett appearances that happen in the canon timeline prior to the events of A New Hope, and they happen in the IDW Comics in the Star Wars Adventures comics for younger readers.
There are three of them, one of which he just gets briefly mentioned and has nothing to do with anything you need to know. One of them, he is present where Max Rebo’s brother gets involved in some hijinks, and he’s just kind of standing around in the background. The only other one that you might actually want to know about is a story where Boba Fett is hired by some Gamorrean guy to delay Han Solo on a job that he’s running. This guy’s name is Crob Vel, and maybe I should step back one pace and say that Boba Fett apparently has a debt that he owes this guy.
And so to pay off that debt, Boba goes to find where Han and Chewie are doing some sort of job and shoots at him in space, which makes the Falcon have to make an emergency landing on the planet, and it slows down their turnaround time for the job that they’re doing. So that when they get back to this Crob Vel person, they have to apologize and grovel and be more in debt to him and have to run more jobs to him. Crob basically pays Boba Fett to get Han Solo to have to do more work for him. And that’s it. That pretty much covers every adventure in the canon timeline for Boba Fett before he appears in the Special Edition of A New Hope.
And that right there is going to do it for our Fett Day coverage today. It just remains for me to say thank you so much for joining me for it as always. And may the Force be with you, wherever in the world you may be.