Star Wars has done some massive expansion on its own canon in the last ten years under Disney’s ownership; by now, even the most peripheral characters have been padded with extensive backstory and/or new developments, and that is especially true of the Star Wars underworld and its unsavory characters. Boba Fett went from his limited appearances in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi to becoming a franchise icon with his own TV series (The Book of Boba Fett). The same can be said of lethal gunslinger and bounty hunter, Cad Bane: After a modest amount of appearances in projects like the Clone Wars animated series, Cad Bane has grown into a much bigger figure in the franchise.
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One of the new Star Wars streaming series, Tales of the Underworld, made Cad Bane one of its central characters. As we learned more about the bounty hunter’s origins and the formative events of his early life, it completely changes the way Star Wars fans view the tragic saga of Bane and Boba Fett’s shared arc in the franchise.
Cad Was Once Boba
Tales of the Underworld‘s three short segments about Cad Bane reveal his childhood on the planet Duro, where he grew up as “Colby,” a poor orphan running the streets with his best friend Nico. The boys stole and pulled schemes to survive, eventually impressing a local gangster named Lazlo, who always wore a brown cowboy hat on his head. Colby and Nico joined Lazlo’s crew, but the life of crime was short-lived: during a heist gone bad, Nico was captured by the cops, while Colby had to flee Duro with Lazlo and the gang, fully committing to a life of crime. Years later, Colby would return home as “Cad Bane,” having inherited Lazlo’s cowboy persona and gangster edge. “Cad” solidifies his gangster reputation by killing the Marshall who killed Lazlo. He also sets up his first major rivalry, as buddy Nico is revealed to have become a local cop after his childhood arrest. Nico brings things full circle by being the one to finally arrest Bane, earning the bounty hunter his first stretch of jail time (but not the last…).
This backstory reveal for Cad Bane quickly changes our perception of his arc with Boba Fett. The two meet years later, during the Clone Wars, when Boba was the co-conspirator of a Republic jailbreak alongside Bane and his fellow bounty hunter Bossk. However, thanks to Tales of the Jedi, we now know why Cad Bane saw something in young Boba Fett, having known the clone’s father, Jango Fett, and knowing what it was to be left alone, after your (criminal) father figure is taken away.
Daddy Cad Was Never Going to Work
Cad tried to take Boba under his wing and be to the boy what Lazlo was to him. It’s not hard to understand from the rest of the backstory given in Tales of the Underworld that Cad wasn’t the most effective father-figure, nor could he be. “Colby” was too young to truly understand that Lazlo wasn’t being nurturing or good to him: he manipulated and brainwashed a young boy who was alone and unprotected. That lack of empathy and actual love eventually took its toll; while it’s never been fully explored, we know that at some point during the Clone Wars era, Cad Bane started to formally train Boba Fett as a bounty hunter. However, the two eventually had such a bad falling out that Cad largely fell off the underworld map, as Boba Fett, Bossk, IG-88, and others rose to prominence as the next generation of bounty hunters for the Imperial Era.
Again, it’s never been explicitly spelled out, but there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that Cad Bane was rigidly strict (at best) or outright abusive to Boba (at worst) during their years together. It explains why Boba Fett became such a hard-edged loner as a bounty hunter: the loss of a father and the abuse of a bad surrogate father would definitely affect a young boy.
Karma Killed Cad Bane (Not Boba Fett)
The Book of Boba Fett‘s climax found Cad and Boba having a western-style duel in the streets of Mos Espa, which ended with Cad’s death. Again, Tales of the Jedi twists the thematic knife (or ‘echoes like poetry’) by revealing the Shakespearean tragedy of Cad’s previous life.
During the years Cad Bane was in jail for killing the marshal, he lost touch with his lover, Arin, never knowing she was pregnant with his child. Arin and Nico fell in love and settled down, with Nico committing to raising Bane’s son like his own. After getting out of jail, Cad couldn’t let his grudge go. He hunted down and confronted Nico, shooting his old friend down in the street, in front of his kid. It was only afterward that Bane realized what he’d done and fled in shame.
Bane felt the same compulsion working for the Pyke Syndicate in the New Republic Era, when the Pykes tried to step on Bob Fett’s creation of his own syndicate, and takeover of Mos Espa. He had to track down his former apprentice and challenge him to a duel in the streets – and just like before with Nico, Cad proved to be the better gunslinger. However, Boba Fett had found moral redemption through his time living with the Tusken Sand People (after escaping the Sarlacc Pit); Bane never saw it coming when he was defeated and killed by Boba’s gaderffii stick. Book of Boba Fett showed us the horrified look Cad Bane died with on his face, and now we can’t help thinking that his final thoughts were actually a profound Karmic realization.
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