"If there is a bright center to the universe, you're on the farthest planet from it," says Skywalker in response to C3PO's question. The desert planet of Tatooine is almost nothing but sand broken up occasionally by a Jawa sandcrawler and the bones of a Krayt dragon, but we have no reason to doubt him when we watch Star Wars: A New Hope for the first time. Mos Eisley is a small and seedy frontier town with no frontier worth exploring. Tatooine is a wasteland.
Until it is. Tatooine is happening despite the assertion by Luke. It is the center of a large crime organization. There is a thriving racing scene. It has a lot of giant monsters. It was the place where the One wanted to bring balance to the force. Tatooine is the bright center of the Star Wars universe and I am sick and tired of it.
Tatooine is in six of the 11 Star Wars movies. It was in both The Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons and in The Mandalorian's first two seasons. Tatooine is mentioned in three of the five live-action films.
There is so much Tatooine-madness throughout the franchise that it causes a continuity problem with the original assessment of his home planet. Every time the franchise comes back to the desert planet, it's wasting a chance to take us somewhere new. I think it is reasonable to assume that the Star Wars universe has about the same number of planets as ours. Even if it only had a hundred planets in it, the Star Wars universe feels smaller and less imaginative than it would be if it had more.
Tatooine can't escape the planet's dusty shadow even when it heads to other worlds. Jakku is a stand-in for Tatooine in The Force Awakens, meant to make fans who were put off by the prequels feel like they're in a different place. In The Rise of Skywalker, Rey, Poe, and Finn visit to find that Sith dagger, which is a desert planet. We spend most of our time in the big city, but we also spend a lot of time with the character of Jedha.
It doesn't have to be this way. George Lucas had the technology to make any environment he could imagine by the time he began work on the prequels, so he was able to make Tatooine look like it did in Return of the Jedi. Star Wars is set in an alien universe that can allow for anything, like the jungles of Felucia, which we see when Aayla Secura is killed. The Last Jedi showed how creative Star Wars planets could be. There is a red crystal core covered in white salt on the planet where the Resistance makes its final stand.
Tomorrow, The Book of Boba Fett will premiere on Disney+ and will take us back to Tatooine and Jabba's palace as the ex-bounty hunter/ex-Sarlacc snack attempts. The Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series will most likely feature Tatooine next year, since it is set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, when Obi-Wan is the most hands-off babysitter. Who knows how many more times the planet will be in the Star Wars movies and TV series?
Maybe The Book of Boba Fett will show us that he and Fennec are off-world for a criminal enterprise after being imprisoned to Tatooine. I want to see something new and not be covered in sand. I don't like sand. It is coarse and rough and it gets everywhere, like Tatooine.
Wondering where our feed went? The new one can be picked up here.
