Quarantine Control #97: Riding Tigers Like Banthas

The hallmark of a doomed society is how we’re still having fierce (verbal and physical) fights over masks after nearly two — TWO — years into the COVID-19 pandemic. They’re proven to work, but that’s not enough for people who desperately want to free their faces and not subject their kids to the continued wearing of them. Mask wearing was notably common in other countries before the pandemic started, further proof of how effective they are. Yet, the audience desperate for them to go for whatever reasons are winning and taking the rest of society down with them. It’s another one of those opportunities where you can’t distract yourself with entertainment hard enough.

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Geoffrey Barnes

Now that the 5G from the booster shot and the flu shot have run through my veins, I’m, well, speaking more freely for this week’s entry compared to last week’s.

The Book of Boba Fett: Season 1(?) (2021-2022)
Source: Disney Plus
Episodes: 7

Sorry, it’s tough to talk about this series without delving into spoilers for the first two seasons of The Mandalorian and a portion of The Book of Boba Fett, though I will avoid them for the latter’s finale.

The Book of Boba Fett’s production team had a daunting task before them prior to its start. Boba Fett himself has been a popular character since his Star Wars introduction in The Empire Strikes Back and his not-at-all “death” in Return of the Jedi. But it’s never easy to build a worthwhile legacy around a character who’s both popular and miniscule in the grand scheme of Star Wars’ established lore. This was even harder when the task of a tough-guy Mandalorian was, and is still in the process of, being fulfilled by the titular Mandalorian (Din Djarin) in his show, a bounty hunter who finds himself an unlikely caretaker for the potential start of a next generation of Jedi. It was my hope that this would find a way to distinguish Boba from Mando, but it doesn’t quite succeed. Nice try, however.

The series picks up where the post-credits tease at The Mandalorian’s second season finale left off, with Boba (Temuera Morrison) and partner Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen) taking over Jabba the Hut’s palace on Tatooine. Whereas Jabba ruled by fear, it’s Boba’s desire to rule with respect for the people of Tatooine and the businesses that thrive around the area. This is all much harder than the pair, Boba especially, want to openly admit, with other groups like the Pykes desiring to take Tatooine for their own by any means necessary. We’re talking about a series called “Star Wars,” so no points for guessing how this will end.

The surprise, rather, is reserved for how it gets there. A significant portion of the first four episodes are dedicated to flashbacks as Boba reminisces while recovering in the Polynesian Spa Bacta Tank, including almost the entirety of the fourth episode. This fills in the blanks about what Boba was doing between RotJ and this series, and how he and Fennec formed a bond. When it comes time for the series to fully focus on establishing the modern-day storyline, Mando comes back into focus in an episode that feels like a prologue to the third season, one that doesn’t feature its title character at all. Even worse for Boba: It’s by far the best episode in the series. The sixth episode, which could also count as a Mando episode and in which Boba appears but has no lines, is the second best. It speaks badly of the series that the best episodes barely feature the supposed protagonist.

The bizarre aspect with the modern-day episodes is how it feels like Boba Fett is limping his way through. His goal to be the honorable daimyo of Tatooine (a term they use — Star Wars will forever wear its Japanese media inspirations on its sleeve) is fine, but it never feels as if he has a sure way of getting there. Fennec always has the ideas and pulls the plot along, but it’s clear she’s not in the lead. Again, this all ends predictably with the ruthlessness of those around the pair.

It’s also a crying shame that this show does Fennec dirty, who doesn’t get enough focus or a more convincing reason for what she’s doing. Needless to say, they didn’t capitalize on the tease of her purpose during The Bad Batch. It’s possible the second season of that animated show could further expound upon that, but it would have been nice to see that with Ming-Na taking charge in live-action. Perhaps The Book of Fennec Shand is needed.

The episodes directed by Robert Rodriguez, including the premiere, the third episode, and the finale, were the weakest links. Rodriguez is a fine director with a good history, but bizarre and awkward fight choreography and aimless story scenes were hallmarks in his episodes. It felt like he brought the worst of his Spy Kids expertise to this show as its overall showrunner, especially with the out-of-place-looking biker gang. I have no problem with corniness and cheese (consider the way in which Boba “died”), but here, it was ill fitting with the other content that happened around it. The series was at its best with episodes from other directors, particularly the second episode (Steph Green), the fifth episode (Bryce Dallas Howard), and the sixth episode (Dave Filoni). Howard’s in particular was a favorite even though it barely qualified as part of this series.

I could never hate anything Star Wars, so don’t take the criticism as me saying The Book of Boba Fett is a bad show. It’s merely an okay-though-entertaining one that didn’t justify its existence, and failed to make Boba and Fennec intriguing characters to follow compared to Mando and Grogu. I’m having trouble seeing them do anything interesting with Boba as the main character from here, though I certainly hope we see more Fennec. This show, in the end, has me very much looking forward to the next season of The Mandalorian; it partially accomplished one of its goals.

It also featured way too much Tatooine. Hearing that the next show will at least start there is no pleasure despite that being unsurprising given where A New Hope starts, but there’s admitted potential for planet hopping. My hope is that at least Star Wars will only get better from here, but perhaps they should think twice about giving Rodriguez creative control in anything involving the franchise, despite his talents.

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Joseph Daniels

After a couple weeks of tiger-related movies, it’s time to tackle television shows.  Unfortunately, the pickings can seem rather slim when you try to go out of your way to look, and you might find yourself settling for watching garbage like Tiger King.  Other than that, the majority of what’s available to stream are, unfortunately, geared for younger audiences, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still good things to find.  We’ve covered stuff on the blog in the past which turned out to have tigers, including:

Beastars (2019)
Quarantine Control #1
Source: Netflix
Episodes: 24 (season 3 currently in production)
Tiger content: Bill (supporting cast), Gon (minor role; also appears as the main cast of a chapter of Beast Complex)

Beastars focuses mainly on cast members Legoshi (wolf), Haru (rabbit) and Louis (deer), with various cast members playing supporting roles in season one and two, but one of those cast members in season one is a tiger named Bill.  He, unfortunately, is pushed back into a minor role in season two in order to make room for characters like Ibuki of the Shishigumi (lion) and the Devourer (not going to reveal their species… watch it yourself if you want to know this spoiler).  Still, with season three coming up, there’s more opportunity to see stripes show up every so often.

The Lion Guard (2016)
Quarantine Control #11
Source: Disney+
Episodes: 78
Tiger content: Varya and her cubs, Feliks, Polina and Pasha (very minor roles)

Oh God, not this show again.  But seriously, you wouldn’t think that a show like The Lion Guard, set mainly in Africa, would feature tigers even though The Lion King’s Timon & Pumbaa did once or twice.  That said, Kion and his friends have a kind of world tour arc in season three where he journeys to the Tree of Life in order to treat his newly acquired scar so that he doesn’t turn evil and near the end, the group encounters some tigers who, it turns out, are only incidental to the plot.  Mostly, Kion needs to learn to be at peace with his scar, since everyone in both this series and The Lion King movies put too much stock in scars being evil.  At the current count of lions sporting scars, only 33% of them turned out to be evil.  If anything, this actually proves that scars aren’t evil.

As for television shows featuring tigers that haven’t been brought up on the blog yet… the pickings can seem slim, but thankfully, during the era of the Disney Afternoon, the company loved to make television shows based on their movie properties.  Just look back at the last two weeks of Quarantine Control and you’ll likely already know which shows I’m going to recommend this week.  These shows include:

The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1988)
Source: Disney+
Episodes: 50 + five specials
Tiger content: Tigger (main cast)

Basically, if you were to name the most famous Disney tiger, Tigger is high on the list.  He’s also the only tiger, so far, to appear in Kingdom Hearts.  Despite the sheer number of times the movie Aladdin pops up in the games, Rajah has yet to appear in them.

This series actually began before the Disney Afternoon, but was kept on television for years thanks to a strong line-up of episodes that respected the notion that children’s television needed to be entertaining for adults, too.  I remember how emotional “Find Her, Keep Her” made me whenever I watched it.  In the episode, Rabbit bonds with a young bird named Kessie and treats her like a daughter.  But baby birds eventually have to leave the nest, and Kessie starts to feel a strong urge to fly south, as birds often do.  Rabbit learning to let go is probably one of the best moments in the series and one of the greatest scenes Disney has ever animated.

Kessie doesn’t appear much in the series, but she’s my favourite character.  Yeah, you’d think my favourite character would be the tiger, but it’s Kessie.

After the end of the series, Disney continued to support the television continuity by releasing several specials, with the last one airing in 2002, technically making this series Disney’s longest running animated show, clocking in at fourteen years.  That’s a far cry from the three years they usually give everything.

Hey, Disney, if you wanted to break this record, you could always bring back Gargoyles and provide a proper season three instead of the garbage we actually got.

TaleSpin (1990)
Source: Disney+
Episodes: 65; two episodes missing from Disney+
Tiger content: Shere Khan (minor role, occasional antagonist)

In the urban jungle, a tiger must adapt in order to survive, and so Shere Khan develops from a predator who mercilessly hunts the forest in The Jungle Book into a hyper-capitalist businessman who is sometimes at odds with the crew of Higher For Hire, made up of Baloo and a cast of mostly original characters including Kit Cloudkicker and Rebecca Cunningham.  Khan doesn’t appear in very many episodes, since the flamboyant air pirate Don Karnage regularly stole the spotlight.  It was simply more fun to have Karnage attempt to ruin the day than to have a rich businessman throw money around in order to be a pest.  In a way, Shere Khan is also the direct opposite of Scrooge McDuck from DuckTales, who Disney desperately wants to promote as a benevolent member of the 1%.  While they aren’t averse to showing rivalries between the wealthy, like Scrooge’s regular clashes with Flintheart Glomgold and their mutual occasional clashes with Mark Beaks in the 2017 series, they don’t seem to like making wealth a bad thing, so there are occasional episodes of TaleSpin where Shere Khan appears and isn’t the main villain.  I think they wanted to give him more of a nuanced feel, a character who you never knew what side he stood on from one episode to the next, but it wasn’t until Gargoyles came along that they were able to pull it off in a much more satisfying manner.  If they wanted Shere Khan to be the kind of villain Xanatos was, he should’ve appeared in a few more episodes.

Incidentally, the name ‘Shere Khan’ actually legitimately means ‘tiger king’, so if you want to watch something with a character who actually earned that name instead of some garbage human with an inflated ego who is only a pretender to the title, you can’t go wrong with TaleSpin.  Or The Jungle Book.

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Apologies for the negativity in the lede, but there are times when venting about inanity happening is necessary. This was one of them. There are times when it’s tough to even think about potential lights at the ends of tunnels regarding the pandemic, but there’s still a chance that enough people will get vaccinated and boosted in large-enough numbers to mitigate the potential for future variants to take off — however small.