Josh Reviews Star Wars: The Bad Batch Season Three

Star Wars: The Bad Batch is an animated Star Wars show set immediately after the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire.  It’s a sequel/spin-off of the animated Clone Wars show.  The series focuses on “the Bad Batch”, a group of Clone Troopers with genetic mutations that make them look and act differently than the rest of the mass of generically identical Clones.  While the other Clones have been programmed to serve the Empire, the Bad Batch has gone off on their own.  At the end of season two, the young female clone in their charge, Omega, was kidnapped by the Empire.  As season three opens, Omega is being held captive on Tantiss, the site of a secretive cloning project run by Dr. Hemlock, in service to the Emperor.  For some reason, Omega is important to their work.  The Bad Batch, meanwhile, are searching for Omega…

This third and final season of The Bad Batch is consistent in quality with the first two seasons.  That means the episodes are visually stunning, with absolutely gorgeous animation.  I enjoyed every episode.

And, at the same time, I remain disappointed with this series.  It never felt to me like it every truly came together.  Both of Dave Filoni’s previous animated series, The Clone Wars and Rebels, started off a little shaky in their first seasons.  But both shows grew and developed marvelously as they continued, giving us characters I fell in love with and stories that reached a powerful emotional climax by the end.  But that never happened for The Bad Batch.  I think a key problem was that the titular heroes never seemed to find their purpose.  I thought at first that the show should have been like The A-Team, showing us a team of mercenaries with hearts of gold taking missions across the Star Wars galaxy, while always trying to stay one step ahead of the Empire.  My opinion changed when we got to season two, and saw storylines in which Rex and Echo were (off-screen, between episodes), actively fighting the Empire and trying to help save Clones.  Then it seemed clear to me that THAT is what our Bad Batch characters should have been doing.  And yet, that never happened.  Through all three seasons I kept thinking, OK, THIS event will galvanize our heroes into action… but that turn never occurred.  I think that’s a key reason why the show always felt somewhat aimless to me.  Why does this show exist?  Why are these stories important?  I wish there was an answer.  I wish the Bad Batch had teamed up with Rex and gotten involved in the first burgeoning steps towards the Rebellion… or that they’d actively gotten involved with helping Clones, maybe starting a Clone revolt against the Empire (something fans have often suspected happened between Episode III and the original Star Wars, which would explain why we didn’t see any Clone Troopers in the Original Trilogy).  The show dropped hints that maybe Omega had Jedi powers… but nope, that turns out to be a red herring.  Heck, even in the finale, the Clones barely make an impact.  I thought they’d rescue hundreds if not thousands of Clones from Tantiss, but we only see them save like 12 Clones…

“Aimless” feels like a good way to describe this show.  The individual episodes were almost all pretty solid.  But very little felt like it went anywhere.  The series finale is called “The Cavalry Has Arrived”… I’d expected to see many of the characters the Bad Batch had previously encountered come together to help them… and yet none of them do!  We don’t get to see Rex, or Cody, or Ventress (more on her in a moment), or the Clone kids… heck, we don’t even get to see Batcher!!  (That’s the dog-creature Omega had adopted as a pet.)  I couldn’t believe it.  It made all those individual episodes/adventures feel pointless.  And how about Cid??  We spent SO MUCH TIME with Cid (the shady character voiced by Rhea Perlman), and then she was written off, off-screen, in season two and never seen again.  (She’s mentioned once in this final season, but never seen.)  Again, I do not understand that choice.  I’d thought Cid would either become an ally or an enemy of the Bad Batch… but instead she’s just forgotten.  So why did we spend so much time with her in the show’s first season and a half??  Again, it makes that all feel pointless and like a waste of time.

I did enjoy watching this show, don’t get me wrong.  I cannot praise enough the gorgeous beauty of the animation.  Seriously, the lighting on this show was out of this world.  This style of CGI animation has come so far since the clunky first season of The Clone Wars!!  This show looked amazing.

I liked the Bad Batch characters (all voiced by Dee Bradley Baker, who has voiced all the Clones on all of these animated Star Wars shows) and I loved Omega (voiced by Michelle Ang), a smart, brave young heroine.

I loved the way the show, throughout its run, dipped into Star Wars lore.  I loved that they brought back Ian McDiarmid to voice The Emperor; I love that we got to see Rex and Cody again, and also Saw Gerrera, Tarkin, Fennec Shand, Cad Bane, Hera Syndulla & Chopper, Bail Organa, Nala Se, the wookiee Jedi padawan Gungee, and many other characters.  I loved seeing the Zillo Beast again.

A highlight of this season was the return of Asajj Ventress!!  That was amazing!!  Ventress, of course, was a major villain on the animated Clone Wars show.  But we never learned what became of her when the Clone Wars show was cancelled (when Lucasfilm was acquired by Disney).  An eight-episode final arc for her was written for the planned but never realized final season of the show.  That storyline was eventually adapted into the novel Dark Disciple by Christie Golden.  That novel ended with Asajj’s death… but I was pleased to see that end reversed by Asajj’s appearance here.  I loved this new version of Asajj, who has moved away from the Dark Side and is now, if not a hero, at least more centered and at peace with herself.  (And she has hair now!!! So funny.)  I loved every moment of Asajj’s one-episode appearance here.  I’m shocked they didn’t bring her back for the final story-arc.  I hope we see this character again soon and get to learn more about what’s happened to her since the end of the Clone Wars (and whether any of the events of Dark Disciple are still cannon).

Shall we dig a little deeper into the season?  Beware some SPOILERS ahead.

I really liked that the show didn’t rush Omega’s rescue at the start of the season.  I loved the choice of starting the season with an episode totally focused on Omega’s life in captivity on Tantiss, and not cutting back to the rest of the Bad Batch characters until the second episode.

Some of this show’s best episodes have been ones where they cut away from the main Bad Batch characters.  That, by the way, gives you a sense of the key problem of this show…  I wish I cared more about the characters.  It’s weird that for a long stretch of this season the show basically became the Omega and Crosshair show, guest-starring Echo.  I wish they’d found ways to give the rest of the Bad Batch more to do.  I loved all the Crosshair stuff, and I’m impressed what a great job they did making him a compelling character here in this final season.  I wish they’d done a better job with his story back in season one.  (I still object to the choice to spend that whole first season pretending to the audience he was being mind-controlled, only to reveal in the finale that wasn’t the case.  Because of that lame fake-out, we never got to understand Crosshair’s perspective and why he made the choice to side with the Empire over his friends.  That’s critical to understanding his arc.)

The season as a whole has a very strange structure.  The whole first chunk of episodes is about Omega being imprisoned on Tantiss, and the Bad Batch trying with increasing desperation to find and rescue her.  I really enjoyed that, and I liked that those stories played out over a number of episodes.  But then in the second half of the season Omega gets recaptured and the whole story starts all over again.  It feels very repetitive!  It feels like there could have been better ways to structure this story.

Throughout the show, they’ve danced around the truth of Hemlock and the Emperor’s goal on Tantiss with “Project Necromancer”.  To me it seemed clear: they were trying to create Clones who could access Jedi powers.  This would explain where Snoke came from (he was revealed as a Clone in The Rise of Skywalker) as well as give some background to the Emperor’s miraculous return in that movie as well.  (This also to me clearly connects with storylines in the background of The Mandalorian — specifically “the client”‘s experiments on Grogu.)  So why doesn’t the show ever actually bother to explain Necromancer?  In the finale, they TWICE cut away at the moment when characters are explaining what Project Necromancer really is, most hilariously when Nala Se is about to explain it all to Rampart.  What is the point of playing coy about this?  That the show couldn’t even be bothered to give an actual explanation and resolution to this major storyline is, for me, another prime example of the show’s weaknesses.

I’d expected the secret vault on Tantiss to contain the bodies of dead Jedi, so I was pleasantly surprised by the twist that inside were imprisoned Force-sensitive kids.  That was a good switcharoo.

When the Empire finally finds the Bad Batch on the peaceful planet of Pabu in “Point of No Return”, we get a thrilling and dark episode in which the Batch find themselves cornered and out of options.  That was a highlight of the season.  (Though it was undermined for me when we learn later that the Empire weirdly didn’t stay there.  I’d figured this idyllic planet was now permanently occupied by the Empire.  But, nope, in the finale we see that the Bad Batch and the rescued Clones are able to return there.  Apparently all the residents are cool with that, despite the terror they’d been through because the Batch were hiding there… and the Empire somehow never thinks to check back here?  That’s all very silly to me.)

I was intrigued by the evil masked Clone super-trooper.  In Star Wars, so many characters wear masks that it’s hard to tell if a new masked character, when introduced, is supposed to be a mystery.  But we got so many lingering shots of the helmet of that character, CX-2, that I was sure the show was telling us that his identity was supposed to be a mystery.  So I spent many weeks guessing as to his true identity.  And then, in the finale… the show never shows us his face.  I’d guessed he was a clone of Crosshair, and when we meet a Cloned evil Bad Batch team in the finale, it seems like that was confirmed.  But that evil Bad Batch winds up being barely a factor in the events of the finale, and, once again, the show never actually takes the time to confirm who or what they are.  What a weird choice.

(Though the evil Bad Batch team barely factoring into the events of the finale tracks perfectly, because the real Bad Batch themselves are also, strangely, barely a part of the finale!  It takes them forever to get into base, and when they do, they’re immediately captured.  Sigh.)

I liked the fast-forward at the end of the finale.  I like seeing grown-up Omega, and I like the idea that she’s going off to join the Rebellion.  (Though it’s CRAZY to me that the Bad Batch NEVER DID.)  I hope we someday get to see more of her grown-up adventures.

This show feels to me like a big basket of missed opportunities.  I continue to think this is a wonderful time-period for new Star Wars stories to explore!  I loved the ways season one explored the transition from Republic to Empire.  As a long-time Star Wars fan, I’ve long dreamed and wondered about that stuff!!  I wish we got more if that.  More importantly, I wish we better understood what average Clones thought and felt after Order 66.  Were they mind-controlled by their implanted chips or not??  After killing the Jedi and fulfilling Order 66, did they ever question what they’d done?  Or were they permanently locked-in to loyalty to the Empire?  How much of their original personalities were retained?  I wish the show had better answered these questions.  I was so happy when the show brought back Cody for one episode in season two… I’ve spent decades, since Episode III, wondering what happened to him… and I’m so bummed the show never brought him back or told us more of his story.

I wish this was a cooler and more interesting show.  I wish it had grown into a show I loved, the way The Clone Wars and Rebels did.  I don’t know what went awry behind the scenes, and why this show never clicked in.  I hope it’s not too long before we get a new Star Wars animated show, and I hope that show winds up being more compelling that this one was.

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