“If there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from,” says Luke Skywalker in response to C-3PO’s question about the place he and R2-D2 have landed. The first time we watch Star Wars: A New Hope, we have now no cause to disbelieve him: The desert planet of Tatooine is nearly nothing however sand damaged up sometimes by a Jawa sandcrawler or the bones of a Krayt dragon. The greatest metropolis we see, Mos Eisley, is small and seedy—a frontier city with no frontier price exploring. Tatooine is bleak, empty, and desolate.

Until it isn’t. Despite Luke’s assertion on the contrary, Tatooine is going on. It’s the middle of an enormous crime group. There’s a thriving pod-racing scene. It’s dwelling to a number of big monsters. It’s the place the One Destined to Bring Balance to the Force was immaculately conceived. In phrases of the franchise’s canon, Tatooine is the “bright center” to the Star Wars universe—and I’m sick and bored with it.

Tatooine is in six of the 11 live-action Star Wars films: A New Hope, Return of the Jedi, all three authentic trilogy films, and The Rise of Skywalker. It made appearances in each The Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons, and Din Djarin and Grogu cease by Tatooine not as soon as however twice throughout The Mandalorian’s first two seasons. And, only for good measure, Tatooine is talked about by title in three of the remaining 5 live-action movies.

I’m not irritated that there’s a lot Tatooine-madness all through the franchise that it causes a continuity downside with Luke’s authentic evaluation of his dwelling planet (okay, sure, it does, however I acknowledge that’s nitpicky and is my very own cross to bear). It’s that each time the franchise returns to the desert planet, it’s losing a possibility to take us someplace new. There are an estimated 100 billion planets in our galaxy, and I feel it’s cheap to imagine the Star Wars galaxy has about the identical. But even when it solely had a hundred planets in it, that leaves dozens and dozens of recent locations to take us as a result of each time we head again to Tatooine, the Star Wars galaxy feels smaller and fewer imaginative.

Tatooine has loomed so massive that even when the franchise does head to different worlds, it may’t escape the planet’s dusty shadow. In The Force Awakens, Jakku is clearly a stand-in for Tatooine, meant to make followers who have been delay by the prequels in acquainted territory—and to offer new protagonist Rey as equivalent an origin to Luke Skywalker as attainable. In The Rise of Skywalker, Pasaana—the world Rey, Poe, and Finn go to to seek out that Sith dagger—is yet one more desert planet. And whereas we fortunately spend more often than not there within the large metropolis, Rogue One’s Jedha is one as nicely.

What’s so galling is that it doesn’t need to be this manner! You can blame manufacturing prices or scheduling points for coming again to Tatooine in Return of the Jedi, however George Lucas had the know-how to render any surroundings he may think about by the point he started work on the prequels, as we noticed within the raging ocean world of Kamino in Attack of the Clones, and the volcanic lava planet Mustafar in Revenge of the Sith. But even these have a transparent foundation in real-world environments, and Star Wars is set in an alien galaxy that may enable for something—just like the psychedelic jungles of Felucia, which we glimpse for a tantalizing second when Aayla Secura is killed in Sith. But, because it did in myriad different methods, The Last Jedi confirmed precisely how inventive Star Wars planets might be. Crait, the place the Resistance makes its final stand, is a planet coated in a crust of white salt masking a crimson crystal core—which results in the beautiful and wholly distinctive picture of speeders parting the white and leaving blood-red wakes behind them.

That’s what Star Wars might be giving us on a regular basis, however tomorrow, The Book of Boba Fett premieres on Disney+ and takes us not solely again to Tatooine however to Jabba’s palace because the ex-bounty hunter/ex-Sarlacc snack makes an attempt to exchange the Hutt as the world’s crime lord. And subsequent 12 months, the Obi-Wan Kenobi TV sequence will virtually actually function Tatooine, provided that the present is about between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, when Obi-Wan is serving because the galaxy’s most hands-off babysitter. And who is aware of what number of extra instances the planet will make an look on all of the myriad Star Wars films and TV sequence within the works?

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Maybe The Book of Boba Fett will shock us, and take Boba and his new greatest good friend Fennec off-world for some prison enterprise after being initially shackled to Tatooine as soon as extra. I simply need to see one thing new, dammit, and one thing that isn’t coated in sand. I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and tough and aggravating and it will get all over the place… very similar to Tatooine, come to consider it.

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