The Most Terrible Things That Boba Fett Has Ever Done

For a generation of Star Wars fans, there's no character quite like Boba Fett. This is in spite of the fact that the bounty hunter didn't do very much in the original trilogy. Instead, he was precursor to cool-looking but not very active Star Wars baddies like Darth Maul or Captain Phasma. 

But Fett's distinctive costume and the fact that even Darth Vader thought he could get too vicious ("No disintegrations!") captured the minds of kids everywhere. Thus, Fett has continued to be a constant presence across Star Wars media, whether it's in his origin story in the prequels, his widely praised reappearance in the second season of The Mandalorian, or him getting groovy on the dance floor in Kinect Star Wars.

However, through the majority of his appearances, both in the Star Wars movies and outside of them, Fett has exuded a wide array of slick and memorably ruthless behavior. This has ranged from slaughtering interrogation subjects to concocting bombings to even threatening other fan-favorite Star Wars characters. Maybe Fett didn't do much in movies like Return of the Jedi, but looking at his unforgettably merciless actions across all Star Wars media, it becomes clear that this guy has done a whole lot of terrible things.

In his first canonical appearance after Attack of the Clones, Boba Fett pursued a quest of vengeance against Mace Windu, the Jedi responsible for beheading his father, Jango Fett. This plot unfolded in the second season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars during the episode "Death Trap." Here, a young Fett takes on the identity of a clone trooper named Lucky. In this persona, he's able to infiltrates Mace Windu's quarters and place a motion-activated bomb in his room, all in the hopes of murdering the Jedi and finally getting revenge for his deceased dad.

While Fett is successful in both planting and setting off the bomb, it doesn't end up killing his intended target. An innocent clone trooper is instead slaughtered after inadvertently setting the bomb off. But in the wake of this unintentional killing, Fett doesn't give up on his plans for vengeance. Though he's initially reluctant to the plot, Fett decides to attack the reactor core of a Star Destroyer. This is a course of action that wouldn't just kill Windu but also everyone else on board. Through his bombing plan and subsequent attack on the reactor core, it's clear Fett is seriously grappling with the loss of his father by inflicting more pain on others. And it's also apparent that he's more than willing to kill anyone who gets in the way of his target. He may still be a kid, but Fett's already brutal beyond his years.

A few seasons after his first appearance in Clone Wars, Fett returned, a little older but still just as dangerous. In season 4's "Bounty," Fett had become a hardened soul thanks to an extended prison sentence. No longer just seeking revenge for his father, Fett was now inching close to his portrayal in The Empire Strikes Back by making a living as a bounty hunter. To pursue this goal, Fett secured a squad of fellow hunters to work with, gotten a mask to conceal his identity (albeit not one from Mandalorian culture), and had taken a job delivering a large chest to the powerful ruler Otua Blank.

While on his delivery mission, it was revealed that the chest didn't contain jewels or weapons, but instead, it held a young woman named Pluma Sodi, who was being sent to Blank as a forced bride. Upon realizing the cargo she was protecting, Asajj Ventress, who'd briefly joined Fett's crew for this assignment, began to express hesitation over the mission. But while the former Sith apprentice had a crisis of conscience, Fett demonstrated his growing grimness by remaining firmly committed to the task at hand. Whereas Fett's previous Clone Wars appearances had seen him express uncertainty over hurting innocents, the agony of Pluma Sodi fell on deaf ears here. Fett's ruthlessness sometimes manifests in shooting adversaries, and other times, it emerges in ignoring the cries of the helpless.

One of the many unfinished story arcs for Star Wars: The Clone Wars would've seen two of the most iconic bounty hunters in all of Star Wars rub shoulders. Boba Fett and Cad Bane were supposed to headline this untitled, four-episode storyline, which would've ended with a showdown between the two characters. A clip of this duel has been released showing that not only would Fett have donned his Mandalorian armor for this battle, but that their duel would've ended with both Bane and Fett firing at each other with such force that they're both sent falling to the ground. Given that Fett survived for decades after this storyline, it's easy to assume that Bane didn't walk away from this confrontation alive.

Having Fett be responsible for killing Bane would've been as strong of a signal as any that this kid had grown up into the Boba Fett that had captivated the imagination of so many Star Wars fans. After all, from his very first Clone Wars appearance where he shoots an alien in the back without even looking, Bane had been established as a ruthless figure you couldn't help but fear. It was hard to imagine anyone being able to take him down. Having Boba Fett be the one to kill Bane, then, was a momentous sign that the bounty hunter who had to be reminded not to disintegrate his targets had well and truly arrived.

Jhordvar isn't an incredibly famous character in Star Wars lore. Only appearing in a flashback in the now non-canonical book Boba Fett: A New Threat, it's hard to imagine even the ironic fandoms that have emerged for throwaway Star Wars characters like Dexter Jettster or Constable Zuvio sprouting up around Jhordvar. If the character does have one claim to fame, though, it's being at the center of one of Boba Fett's more memorable kills.

In A New Threat, it's recalled how Fett tracked down Jhordvar for Jabba the Hutt. Upon finding Fett, Jhordvar incurred the bounty hunter's rage by calling him "lackey." A fight broke out between the two, and though Jhordvar was a formidable fighter in his own right, it was only a matter of time before Boba Fett killed him. The nastiness of Jhordvar's demise doesn't end there, though. Both Fett and Jhordvar's corpse were caught in a sandstorm right after their fateful confrontation. Once it was finished, Fett only saw fit to take back Jhordvar's hands to Jabba, leaving the bounty hunter's corpse desecrated and left to rot in the desert. 

In this encounter, Boba Fett's lack of respect for the living is show to extend to the dead, as well. It's also demonstrated that, among his many other abilities, Boba Fett can lend something memorable to even an extremely throwaway Star Wars character like Jhordvar.

A memorable order given to Boba Fett in The Empire Strikes Back comes in the form of Darth Vader warning the bounty hunter that there will be "no disintegrations" when it comes to handling Luke Skywalker and company. In the years since that line was spoken, fans have long wondered what exactly it would be like if Fett actually disintegrated a target. After all, none of Fett's other onscreen appearances, whether they're in The Clone Wars or The Mandalorian, have involved him disintegrating anyone.

Within the pages of the short story "Added Muscle" from the anthology novel From a Certain Point of View, fans finally got a chance to discover just what it would be like for Fett to blast someone to smithereens. In this story penned by Paul Dini, a flashback sequence revealed that one of Fett's earliest missions for Darth Vader went extremely poorly. Said mission occurred prior to the events of A New Hope and involved Fett encountering a trio of Rebel spies on Coruscant. This interaction eventually ended with Fett using his disintegration skills on the spies, much to the chagrin of Vader, who wanted the targets brought back alive and in one piece. Through this grisly story, it becomes readily apparent why Vader would have to give Fett a firm reminder about disintegrating targets in The Empire Strikes Back.

While it may seem like The Empire Strikes Back was the first instance of Boba Fett and Darth Vader crossing paths, media outside of the movies has made it apparent that the two characters had many prior encounters before the fifth Star Wars film. One such encounter was the impetus for the comic Star Wars #5, which saw Boba Fett being hired by Darth Vader to track down a figure who'd worked alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi during the events of A New Hope. Now on the hunt for his bounty, Fett was willing to achieve his goal by any means necessary ... including murder.

While trying to track down this individual, Fett encountered a number of people, including Rodians and a group of moisture farmers, that he interrogated for information regarding his target. Once they told Fett what he needed to know, they weren't released back to their humdrum lives but promptly killed by Fett himself. To Fett, the value of these people was judged by their worth to him. Once they had nothing to offer him, he properly disposed of them. This approach even extended to an unnamed farmer at the Mos Eisley Cantina who, after being viciously interrogated, dropped a bombshell revelation to Fett that the man he was looking for was named Luke Skywalker. In one of his earliest missions for Darth Vader, Fett was on a hot pursuit that left a long trail of corpses behind him.

While many were introduced to Boba Fett through The Empire Strikes Back, that live-action Star Wars movie wasn't the first appearance of the character. Fett actually made his debut in one of the most reviled pieces of Star Wars media – The Star Wars Holiday Special. In between scenes featuring Harvey Korman as a cooking robot and Bea Arthur crooning, there was an animated segment entitled "The Story of the Faithful Wookiee." In this short story, Boba Fett arrives as a newly introduced character riding a dinosaur-esque creature, intending to help Luke Skywalker and friends on their mission to retrieve a mystical object that serves as the plot's MacGuffin.

Though Fett initially acts as a helpful figure, it's later revealed that he's no ally. R2-D2 ends up discovering that Fett is communicating with Darth Vader so that he can reveal the location of the Rebels to the helmeted Sith. This deception doesn't last long. Eventually, R2 communicates this news to the rest of the crew, which prompts anger from Han Solo and forces Boba Fett to scurry away — but not before vowing vengeance on the team. The now non-canonical adventure doesn't see Boba Fett at his most grisly, but it does show him as a duplicitous, self-serving being right from the start. Such behavior made sure that The Star Wars Holiday Special as a whole had more to offer Star Wars fans than Chewbacca's father enjoying some virtual-reality singing a little too much.

In The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader is a man on a mission. He's been chasing after Luke Skywalker and company for quite a while, but the good guys keep eluding his grasp. So the villain decides to hire a little extra help, sending out a call for a crew of bounty hunters. Among those answering the call are ruffians like Dengar, Bossk, and of course, Boba Fett in his first live-action appearance. He isn't onscreen for a full minute before Vader turns to Fett and orders him to refrain from disintegrating his quarry. The prowess of Fett is firmly established here, as the deadly Sith has to reign this bounty hunter in.

Fett lives up to this reputation throughout the rest of the movie as he slickly tracks an unwitting Han Solo through space and later places the frozen space pirate on his ship, Slave I. Fett doesn't even blink at his mission here, with his only moment of real hesitation coming when he thinks Solo might be killed in the carbonite freezing process. This isn't because he's worried the process is too cruel. Instead, his only concern is how it'll impact his finances. "He's no good to me dead," Fett observes, referring to the large bounty that Jabba the Hutt has put on somebody bringing Solo back alive. Fett's inclination to put money over people and his ability to keep a cool head are both exemplified throughout his mission in Empire Strikes Back.

The world of Star Wars is vast enough that critical events can happen off-screen without viewers even knowing about it. Consider the showdown between Boba Fett and IG-88, an event that apparently happened off-screen during the timespan chronicled in The Empire Strikes Back, per the book Ultimate Star Wars. 

In the Empire movie, bounty hunters Fett and IG-88 were both summoned by Darth Vader to pursue the Millennium Falcon. However, viewers only saw Fett place a tracker on Solo's ship and eventually join Vader in confronting the characters on Cloud City. IG-88 is never seen again in The Empire Strikes Back, but the Ultimate Star Wars book reveals that his story didn't end with his one-scene appearance. It turns out IG-88 followed Fett to Cloud City to try and get the bounty on Solo's head. Not one to share a reward or have someone follow his trail, Fett ambushed the droid and handily defeated IG-88. 

Though he was left to become trash in Cloud City, IG-88 did manage to survive and eventually had further adventures in Star Wars media, such as Star Wars: Force Collection. However, his defeat at the hands of Boba Fett took the droid out of commission for a good long while. It was a brutal course of action that showed that, just as there's no honor among thieves, the same is true for bounty hunters living in that galaxy far, far away.

Everyone loves Grogu. That little guy formerly known as the Child has quickly become one of the most beloved Star Wars characters of all time. In the process of spawning more memes than you can shake a wampa at, he's also helped to put The Mandalorian on the map. And only 14 episodes into the show's run, audiences had become totally captivated by Grogu ... which made him the perfect target to emphasize the cold-hearted nature of Boba Fett.

When Fett first meets Din Djarin, the lead character of The Mandalorian, he's not there purely to shed more blood. Fett, having emerged from the sarlacc pit, wants to get his Mandalorian armor back. To instill some leverage into the scenario, Fett remarks that he's got an ally, Fennec Shand, poised with a sniper rifle nearby. While Djarin notes that his armor would protect him from any sniper blast, Fett clarifies that Djarin wouldn't be Shand's target. Instead, at Fett's signal, the sniper would shoot and kill Grogu, who's sitting down a short distance away, meditating so that he can call out for any other Jedi in the galaxy.

By the time this episode aired, Boba Fett had existed in pop culture for over four decades, and his ruthless reputation was well-known. But by threatening to kill a beloved character like Grogu, Fett's cold-hearted nature was taken to a whole other level and established for a whole new generation of Star Wars fans.