The following contains spoilers for The Mandalorian Seasons 1 and 2 and The Book of Boba FettNow that the Star Wars saga of films has wrapped up with The Rise of Skywalker, many of the stories we’ve seen since 2019 have taken place on television streaming on Disney+. The Mandalorian Seasons 1 and 2 introduced fans and audiences alike to a new protagonist, the titular Mandalorian, Din Djarin, played by Pedro Pascal, along with the viral pop-culture sensation of Baby Yoda aka Grogu. The show takes place in between the original and sequel trilogies — specifically, five years after the fall of the Empire at the hands of the Rebels and Jedi master Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill).
With new characters also comes the promise of new stories, settings, and adventures. However, with showrunner Jon Favreau and longtime Star Wars architect Dave Filoni, the appearance of more familiar faces and places of Star Wars is no surprise. The introduction of Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) and Bo-Katan (Katee Sackhoff) into the live-action shows and the return of beloved characters since the original trilogy such as Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) and Luke Skywalker, Favreau and Filoni are uniting all corners of the Star Wars universe and chronology into the streaming shows.
While I’m grateful to see these characters interact together, and often for the first time in live-action, many of their scenes take place on the Outer Rim sand planet of Tatooine, the homeworld of both Anakin and Luke Skywalker. There might have been a sense of nostalgia and excitement at first, but the over-reliance on Tatooine is beginning to diminish the special quality of the Skywalkers’ home planet. Tatooine has become mundane.
Tatooine was originally introduced in A New Hope. Luke’s feelings about the planet can be summed up in his words to R2-D2, “If there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from.” While the planet does have a beautiful binary sunset going for it there’s not much else going on in Tatooine apart from working on a moisture farm, looking for power converters at Tosche Station, getting occasionally ransacked by Sand People, or drinking with lowlife criminals in the Mos Eisley Cantina. In The Phantom Menace, Luke’s father, Anakin, has a similar childhood on the sand planet. Anakin works for — which is a euphemism for how he and his mother were actually slaves for — Watto and his mechanic shop. While pod racing is a form of entertainment that helps distract from the mundane every day, it is also a reminder of how Tatooine’s most vulnerable only live to serve the rich, powerful, and corrupt, such as Jabba the Hutt.
Later, once Anakin (Hayden Christensen) has grown up to be a young man and Jedi Padawan in Attack of the Clones, he describes his distaste for sand to his beloved Padmé (Natalie Portman), “I don't like sand. It's coarse, and rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere.” To both Skywalkers, Tatooine has always been a place to escape from. The planet also holds a sense of trauma — for Anakin, that’s where his mother died at the hands of the Tusken Raiders, and for Luke, that’s where his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru were killed by Stormtroopers.
But while Luke and Anakin eventually moved on from Tatooine, the minds behind Star Wars storytelling can’t seem to. When Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, plans for the return of Star Wars were immediately underway. JJ Abrams was brought on board to jumpstart the sequel trilogy with The Force Awakens, which introduced the new protagonists of Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) alongside Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), the son of Han Solo and Princess Leia and the failed student of Luke Skywalker.
While these new characters held a lot of promise for ushering in a new generation of Star Wars, The Force Awakens ultimately became a rehash of everything that came before. Like the Skywalkers, Rey comes from a mundane desert planet. Instead of Tatooine, it is Jakku — but by all appearances, they are exactly the same. Rey works for Unkar Plutt, who profits off of junk scavengers like Rey. She, too, wanted to get off-world and find her own adventure. Fortunately, for Rey and sand-haters in general, she did.
But while Rian Johnson brought some new settings in The Last Jedi, such as the salt planet of Crait with its visually stunning red salt and the casino planet of Canto Bight, JJ Abrams couldn’t help but return to everything familiar in The Rise of Skywalker. We get yet another sand planet — Pasaana. While the Festival of the Ancestors provides a sense of color and celebration to the otherwise monotone desert landscape, Abrams doubles down on sand by returning to the sands of Tatooine in the film’s final scene. Sure, a recreation of Luke’s childhood home elicits some sense of nostalgia, but other than that, there’s something quite disjointed in the storytelling of Rey’s character. She started on a desert planet only for her final scene to end in another one.
While part of the allure of The Mandalorian was its approach in bridging the gap between the original and sequel trilogies, the return of Tatooine was a surprise. In season 1, When Din Djarin lands on the planet, he seeks a mechanic to repair his ship and finds Peli Motto (Amy Sedaris). He and Grogu also face off with another assassin, Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen).
In season 2, we explore more of Tatooine. Mando comes across the marshall of Mos Pelgo, Cobb Vanth (Timothy Olyphant), who happens to be wearing the Mandalorian armor of Boba Fett (last seen falling into a Sarlacc pit in Return of the Jedi). In exchange for Boba Fett’s armor, Mando helps Vanth and the people of Mos Pelgo defeat a krayt dragon. Later, Mando runs into the bounty hunter himself, as Boba along with a resurrected Fennec Shand come looking for the armor. After helping the Mandalorian rescue Grogu from Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito), Boba and Fennec return to Tatooine again to kill Bib Fortuna and take over Jabba’s criminal empire.
This brings us to The Book of Boba Fett, the latest Disney+ Star Wars series filling in Boba’s story since his fall into the Sarlacc pit and almost exclusively takes place on Tatooine — at least, the first four episodes that are actually about Boba Fett. Perhaps it’s the slow pacing of the show as it alternates between flashback and the present that makes Tatooine such an insufferable setting to watch. But most likely, it’s probably a lot of Tatooine fatigue. The creatives behind The Book of Boba Fett, too, seem to not know what else to do with the planet.
The introduction of a ragtag group of cybernetic teenagers on flashy, colorful speed bikes seems to be an attempt to diversify Tatooine’s setting, but their inclusion comes off as ill-fitting for the otherwise dreary desert planet. There are some interesting additions to Tatooine’s lore, such as the Tusken’s history with the Dune Sea and confirmation that Tatooine once had vast oceans. The politics of the various territories of Tatooine is intriguing, too, as Boba navigates alliances with the Hutt twins and other families.
But with such an expansive universe, it’s hard to imagine why Star Wars can’t seem to leave sand behind. There are other familiar settings that can still be fleshed out, such as Coruscant, which we only return to in brief flashbacks in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. How does the city-planet look like after the fall of the Jedi Temple and the subsequent fall of the Empire? We could have had a glimpse of it in Colin Trevorrow’s version of Episode 9 before Abrams took over and decided to return to Tatooine.
Hopefully, as the conflict between Boba and the Pyke Syndicate reaches its climactic end with the final episode of The Book of Boba Fett, we can finally leave Tatooine to rest. Though, the upcoming Obi-Wan series with the return of Ewan McGregor indicates that Tatooine will still be present in live action Star Wars. But elsewhere, in shows such as Ahsoka, which sets up Anakin’s former Padawan in search of Grand Admiral Thrawn and Ezra Bridger in the unknown regions, there is an opportunity to truly expand the Star Wars universe into new and unfamiliar settings.