Fromm Here to Eternity

A Race to the Finish

Writers: Peter Sauder and Steven Wright

Medium: Television

Air Date: September 28, 1985 

Timeline Placement: 15 BBY

 

The finale of the Thall Joben/Fromm Gang/Trigon One story arc. The droids and their masters finally arrive on Boonta for the big speeder race, but Sise Fromm is still pissed about the loss of his base and apparently all of his wealth and underworld power and he shows up with son Tig and henchman Vlix Oncard looking for some revenge. 

 

The Fromms hire notorious bounty hunter Boba Fett, in his first EU appearance since the Clone Wars, to make our heroes pay for ruining his life. Fett advises Fromm that Jabba the Hutt has put a bounty on his head, but he'll refrain from collecting it and take Fromm's job instead because Fett "owes him a favor."

 

Boba Fett's appearance in this episode is noteworthy for a few reasons, one of which being how it informs the chronology of his life in the Expanded Universe. Prior to Attack of the Clones and the revelation that Boba had begun life as a clone of his "father," Jango Fett, the earliest events in his backstory were told in the short story "The Last One Standing: The Tale of Boba Fett" by Daniel Keys Moran. In that story, we first see Fett wearing his signature Mandalorian armor and operating as a bounty hunter in the year 12 BBY. However, a short prologue set an unspecified number of "years" earlier revealed Fett's past, supposedly before becoming a bounty hunter or even going by the name "Boba Fett," as a Journeyman Protector known as Jaster Mereel.

 

To this day, fans remain quick to throw this story under the bus whenever discussing pre-prequel Expanded Universe stories that were rendered non-canon by George Lucas's second Star Wars trilogy. They are, of course, completely wrong, as Fett's past as Jaster Mereel was salvaged by the Star Wars Insider article "The History of the Mandalorians." This article also incorporated the Star Wars Tales comic Outbid but Never Outgunned, which revealed that Fett had a young daughter, into his post-PT, pre-OT life. The result was a new backstory, largely left up to implication, wherein at some point Fett gave up bounty hunting to start a family and lived under the name of Jaster Mereel, revealed in the comic Jango Fett: Open Seasons to be the name of his father's mentor.

 

Fett's appearance here in "Race to the Finish" sets the outside cap on how early this phase of his life could have occurred. Taking all these sources into account, we can arrive at this rough timeline of Boba Fett's mostly untold backstory:

 

32 BBY: Boba Fett is "born" on Kamino as an unaltered clone of his father, Jango Fett, the so-called last of the Mandalorians until a bunch of retcons made that not true anymore. 
 
22–15 BBY: Following the death of his father at the outset of the Clone Wars, Boba Fett becomes a bounty hunter himself. He starts off working primarily for Jabba the Hutt, but Jabba apparently forgets who he is at some point because when the Hutt hires him in 5 BBY during the Han Solo Trilogy he acts as if it's the first time they've ever met.
 
c. 15–13? BBY: At some point he meets fellow bounty hunter Sintas Vel, and the two eventually have a daughter named Ailyn. Fett gives up the bounty hunting life to try to be a family man, taking the name of Jango's adopted father, Jaster Mereel, and becoming a Journeyman Protector on the world of Concord Dawn. His attempt at giving his daughter the idyllic family life he never had comes to an abrupt end when his wife is raped by a fellow Protector named Lenovar and Fett murders him, breaking his oaths and ending up exiled from the planet. He abandons his assumed name and returns to bounty hunting.
 
12 BBY: Boba Fett takes a job on the planet Jubilar, where he sees Han Solo for the first time when the 17-year-old is forced to fight for his life in a gladiatorial arena after being arrested for cheating at cards. 

 

What does all this have to do with the Droids animated series? Absolutely nothing, but it's way more interesting for me to talk about.

 

It's also worth mentioning (not really) that The Droids Re-Animated ties Sise Fromm's rise to power in the criminal underworld to Boba Fett eliminating his rival Klin Kartoosh, despite the novel Darth Plagueis establishing Sise as major player in that scene during Palpatine's rise to power in the Old Republic, before Boba was even decanted born. Oops! 

 

Anyway, Fett sends his droid BL-17, a Mandalorian Battle Legionnaire manufactured by the Separatists during the Clone Wars, to become friends with C-3PO in order to get close enough to assassinate Thall and the others. Threepio tells Kea that he and BL-17 "graduated from the same production facility," which I would have thought the EU's continuity-weavers would have spun into a reference to Affa, the planet where C-3PO was originally constructed 80 years before Anakin Skywalker reassembled him from junked parts. Like maybe the Separatists had a manufacturing plant there during the war or something. But I don't think it ever gets mentioned. Maybe BL-17 was just lying about it.

 

But eventually some junk falls on BL-17 and crushes him to death. Fett tries to capture the White Witch but he gets owned by R2-D2, allowing Thall Joben to win the race (and a kiss from Kea). Despite failing at the job he was hired to do, Fett decides that he's had enough and turns on the Fromms, capturing Sise, Tig, and Vlix and taking them to meet their fate at the hands of Jabba the Hutt. The implication, as much as this tepid cartoon for babies can make one, is that they're all going to be murdered, explaining their absence from the criminal underworld in the OT.

 

Sadly, this grim fate was retconned away in order to the accommodate the continuity of the MyComyc comics The Stolen Ship and The Secret Disk, which depict Tig Fromm and Vlix Oncard still alive after the conclusion of this story arc. Keep in mind that Lucasfilm didn't consider these obscure Spanish comics officially licensed products and that half of them don't even fit the cartoon's continuity in the first place, but whatever. It's revealed in The Droids Re-Animated that the Fromms were able to convince Jabba to spare them "by paying the Hutt a sizable percentage of their business dealings and promising to commit their Annoo-dat clones to eradicating the Mandalorian Death Watch diaspora." 

 

The Death Watch was a Mandalorian splinter faction created for, and killed off in, the comic Jango Fett: Open Seasons. But that stupid Clone Wars cartoon brought them back for some reason, so I guess this retcon is an attempt to clean up the mess it left behind by taking the Death Watch back off the table again. Being wiped out by the villains from a Saturday morning cartoon show is about the fate they deserve. Oh I guess it didn't take though because they're still around in the Star Wars Galaxies MMO.

 

Speeder mogul Zebulon Dak offers Thall, Jord, and Kea a job designing and building racers, but according to his company policy, R2-D2 and C-3PO would have to be memory-wiped in order to remain with their masters. Aboard the The Sand Sloth after the racer, presumably heading back to Ingo yet again, the droids overhear their masters deciding to reject the job offer in order to keep their little found family together. Artoo and Threepio decide to sneak off the ship in an escape pod as their masters jump to lightspeed, giving them the freedom to take the opportunity they've been given. "Yes, it was a sacrifice, Artoo," says Threepio, "but that's what friends are for."

 

And the adventure continues...