Josh Reviews The Bad Batch Season Two

The Bad Batch is an animated Star Wars series set in the days immediately following the fall of the Old Republic and the rise of the Empire.  It’s a spin-off of the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars series, featuring a group of irregular clones who each are somewhat mutated from the “normal” clone soldiers.  Together they form “the Bad Batch”.

I like this show a lot, but after two seasons (click here for my review of season one) I still feel like it hasn’t quite clicked.  There were episodes in season two that were absolutely magnificent, perfectly classic Star Wars storytelling.  The problem is, those great episodes tended to be the ones in which the show’s main characters didn’t appear.

When this show works, it works like gangbusters.  The animation is spectacular; truly next-level great.  Every frame of the show is beautiful.  The lighting is truly incredible; just gorgeous and nuanced.  These Star Wars animated shows have always had great action, but on this show they continually find ways to top themselves.

I love the idea of a show set in the early days of the Empire.  I’ve long felt this was a fertile time-period for stories, as I have so many questions about what happened after Episode III and how the galaxy (and the many characters we’d met in the prequels and especially the Clone Wars animated series) were transformed.  We’ve gotten lots of great moments exploring those ideas in the first two series of this show (though it was really Andor that became the show I’d always wanted to see).  I’m particularly pleased that, here in season two, the show focused in on the long-standing mystery of the Star Wars universe of what happened to all of the Clones after the fall of the Republic.  We know that, by the time of the original Star Wars, the Empire was using Stormtroopers, and the Clones were nowhere to be seen.  It’s a delight to see this show finally dig into this story.  (No surprise, it’s pretty ugly for the Clone Troopers we got to know and love in the animated Clone Wars series.)

Where The Bad Batch lets me down is that it still feels, two seasons in, that there’s no mission statement for the show or its characters.  I know it’s not great to complain about a show not being what I want it to be; I should judge the show for what it is.  But I feel like it’s so clear what this show should be: this should be The A-Team, with the Bad Batch characters doing their best to help people across the galaxy, while staying one step ahead of the Empire.  They should be helping their fellow Clone Troopers, who are being tossed aside or even brutally murdered by the uncaring Empire.  Or they should be helping innocent civilians, who are being trampled under the Empire’s heel.  In episode after episode, the Bad Batch team see this sort of suffering.  And again and again, they don’t step up to the call, but instead keep going back to running pointless missions for Cid (the low-level criminal/bartender).  Halfway through the season, in a magnificent two-parter, the Bad Batch meet up with Rex (the beloved character from the Clone Wars show who was Anakin Skywalker’s main Clone commander), and they see how much their fellow Clone Troopers who are still under the Empire’s control need their help.  But they don’t stay with Rex to help; they go back to Cid at the end of the episode.  I couldn’t fathom why the characters would do this.  Why wouldn’t they help their brother Clones??  One of the team, Echo, actually leaves the team so he can stay and help Rex.  As a viewer, I wanted to watch that show — the one with Rex and Echo helping Clones — rather than the Bad Batch show with random Cid missions.  In the season finale, after the death of a main character, there was a moment with Hunter in which I thought that finally, finally, he was going to see that they can’t have let this person have died in vain, and they have to do their best to make a difference in the galaxy.  But no, that scene goes in another direction, and Hunter says it’s time to retire from being soldiers and go back to the isolated island on Pabu where they’d taken shelter a few episodes earlier.  What?  Aargh!

I have no objection to a show with stand-alone episodes.  That’s basically what The Clone Wars show was.  But I have to feel like I have a reason why I’m watching this show and these characters, and I still don’t quite feel that with The Bad Batch.  Frankly, I’m longing for this or any other Star Wars show to give me the thrill that watching the animated Star Wars: Rebels show did.  By the end of season two, Rebels was on fire, and the show felt to me like absolutely essential Star Wars storytelling.  That show still was very episodic, with most episodes being their own stand-alone adventure.  But there were story-threads and character threads that wove the episodes together, and it felt like the show had direction and was building towards something (that being the formation of the Rebel Alliance).  I want to feel that sort of importance and direction from The Bad Batch.

I don’t want to complain too much, because as I noted above, this season gave us some absolutely spectacular episodes!!

The first one that made me sit up and take notice was episode three, “The Solitary Clone,” which finally gave me what I have wanted to see for twenty years: the story of what became of Cody after Episode III!  Commander Cody was Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Clone commander in Episode III, and he was a major character in the animated Clone Wars show.  I have always wanted to know what happened to Cody after he betrayed Obi-Wan in Episode III.  What did Cody feel about that, afterwards?  Did he regret his actions?  Or did he still see Obi-Wan and all the Jedi as traitors?  I was thrilled that Cody finally re-entered the Star Wars story here in this wonderful episode, in which we see that Cody is still a soldier fighting for the Empire, but he’s starting to see that the Empire is not worth his loyalty.  This was a brilliant episode, and I desperately hope we’ll see Cody again.

Then came the fantastic two-parter of episodes seven and eight, “The Clone Conspiracy” and “Truth and Consequences”.  Episode seven was another episode in which the Bad Batch characters were entirely absent.  (It’s interesting to see this approach in Star Wars TV these days.  The Book of Boba Fett had two episodes in which Boba Fest didn’t appear, and the third episode of The Mandalorian season three only had Din Djarin & Bo Katan in the opening and closing segments, which the rest of the episode was an unexpected focus on Dr. Pershing.)  This episode was almost an animated episode of Andor, as we got a fascinating glimpse into life on Coruscant during the Empire.  We actually get to see how the Galactic Senate operates under the Empire (yet another thing I’ve been dying to see for years!!).  And we finally get the story of how the Emperor manipulated events to phase out the Clones and create his new army of Stormtroopers.  The Bad Batch characters enter the story in the second half, and they try to help Senator Chuchi (a character we saw on the Clone Wars show) to protect the Clone soldiers.  But in a tragic twist perfectly fitting for this era in the Star Wars timeline, our heroes succeed only for it to be revealed that they’ve done exactly what Palpatine wanted and wound up helping his evil plan unfold.  I was a thrilled to actually get to see the Senate, and the Emperor himself, on this show!!  I loved that.

Yet another highlight episode (that again did not feature the main Bad Batch characters!!) was episode twelve, “The Outpost”.  Following the end of season one, I’d been wondering where the show was going to take Crosshair.  Would he be the series’ main villain, or were they playing the long-game of a redemption story?  It seems like the latter, judging by the developments this season, and in particular in this episode.  This was a wrenching story in which Crosshair finds that he can no longer ignore the brutality of the way the Empire is treating the surviving Clone Troopers.  What a great episode.  (It would have been even stronger if season one had done a better job at establishing why Crosshair made the decision to leave his team and stay with the Empire, instead of pretending for the whole season that he was being controlled by the chip in his head.  Oh well!)  (I also wonder if the show is going to ever return to how we saw Crosshair brutally murder innocent people early in season one.  Can he really be redeemed from that?  Will his endgame be that he’ll sacrifice himself to save Omega?)

Watching this season of The Bad Batch along with season three of The Mandalorian, it was fascinating to see how both shows — though set decades apart — seemed to have a sub-story weaving through their episodes about Cloning.  It had previously seemed like Cloning vanished from the Star Wars galaxy after the Clone Wars and the rise of the Empire.  But these shows seem to both be telling us that’s not the case.  On The Mandalorian, we’ve seen hints about the experiments that Dr. Pershing and his bosses (first the villain “the Client” played by Werner Herzog in the first season, and then Moff Gideon) have been working on some secret project involving Grogu’s blood.  (My guess has been they’re trying to artificially transfer Force-wielding powers.)  And here on The Bad Batch, we see that the Empire has kept a few Kaminoan scientists alive, and in this season we’ve met the mysterious Dr. Hemlock, who is working in secret on some sort of Cloning project for Tarkin and the Emperor.  What is this all about?  My guess is that Dave Filoni — who spent years trying to retroactively fix the Prequels through his animated shows — is now trying to retroactively fix the Sequel Trilogy and do what those films failed to do: explain where Snoke came from.  In The Rise of Skywalker, in the Emperor’s lair, we saw a brief shot of what looked like Cloning tanks, which had what looked like versions of Snoke’s body in them.  I bet we’re going to discover that The Emperor was already working on a plan to survive death via Cloning even at the very start of his reign.

More thoughts on season two of The Bad Batch.  (Beware SPOILERS…)

• The early episodes seemed to be trying to develop the friendship and partnership between The Bad Batch and Cid, presumably to help explain why the Bad Batch kept working for her instead of going off on their own.  (This was the focus of episode four, “Faster,” in which Tech band Omega help Cid get out of deep trouble with a former partner in crime.)  I wish that had gone somewhere.  I could see a version of this show in which these outlaws (the Bad Batch and Cid) develop a close relationship of mutual respect and friendship.  But we never got that depth; I never understand why the Bad Batch kept hanging around Cid and working for her.  I was very surprised that, when the Bad Batch finally left Cid, it happened off-screen, between episodes.  Why not show us that confrontation??  That was a double-disappointment, because when Cid re-enters the story in the season finale, it’s painfully obvious that she’s going to betray them.  So not only is there much of a surprise to her betrayal, there’s no real emotional impact.
• This season developed the new character of Phee, played by Wanda Sykes.  I like the idea of this character, and she’s fun in episode five, “Entombed,” when we see she’s an Indiana Jones type adventurer/tomb-raider.  But I didn’t buy that the Bad Batch would trust this somewhat shady character who’s a friend of the somewhat shady Cid.  I wish the show had given the characters more of a reason to trust and bond with Phee.  And I wish we’d gotten to better know her.  Who is she, really?  Is she a criminal with a heart of gold?  What’s her backstory?  Why is she hanging with this bunch of Clone soldiers?  I liked the idea of her developing a flirtation with Tech, but I wanted to better understand what she saw in Tech.  Frankly, because she was introduced as a friend of Cid’s, I never quite trusted this character, so the impact of her final scene with Tech in the finale was diluted.  (That scene also telegraphed that something bad was going to happen to one of the two of them.)
• Watching this series, it felt to me like there was some duplication between Tech and Echo.  They both had similar skill-sets.  When Echo went off with Rex mid-season, I figured that the writers had realized that as well and so decided to write Echo off the show.  That was a good fake-out for the death of Tech in the finale.  Tech’s sacrifice was an emotional moment, and it worked well.  In hindsight, I could see the effort the writers had made this season to better develop Tech.  My main complaint with the death of Tech is what I’d noted above, that I’d thought that this would finally be enough to galvanize Hunter into committing the team to helping people.  That Hunter makes the opposite choice made Tech’s death seem meaningless to me, which was a letdown.
• That whole fight on the collapsing gondola in the finale was spectacular, a terrific action set-piece in a season full of great action set-pieces.
• I loved seeing Tarkin in episode 15, “The Summit,” though I was surprised Tarkin seemed so passive in the face of an assault on his own sanctum.  And I was over-the-moon happy by the brief cameo of Rogue One‘s Inspector Krennic!!  That was fantastic!
• I was also happy to see the return of Saw Gererra!
• I liked seeing the Empire looting Count Dooku’s former lair in the season premiere.  That makes sense.
• I loved getting to visit Kashyyyk, the Wookiee homeworld, in episode six, “Tribe”.  It was a fun surprise to see that the Wookiee Padawan Gungi (from the Clone Wars show!) had survived the Purge.  (I guess I have to make peace with the fact that modern Star Wars has ignored Yoda’s comment to Luke in Return of the Jedi that, “when gone am I, the last of the Jedi will you be.”  We know that Ahsoka and Ezra were still alive at that time, and the Obi-Wan Kenobi show stablished that there was a whole Underground Railroad of Jedi who escaped and went into hiding.)
• Another great Clone Wars show callback was the return of the Zillo Beast (in episode ten, “Metamorphosis”)!!  We’d seen that Palpatine had plans for the Beast back in those original Clone Wars episodes, so it was fun to see that thread picked up here.

I definitely got a lot of enjoyment watching this second season of The Bad Batch.  No episode was really bad, and several of the episodes were absolutely amazing, finally telling stories I’d been hoping to see for many years.  But I wish the show and the characters had more direction.  Two full seasons in, I want to feel gripped by this show in a way that I haven’t yet been.  The pieces are here; this could be a spectacular Star Wars show.  I’d love to see this show take a step up into greatness in the next season.  For now, it’s a fun show to watch, but it’s not yet essential Star Wars viewing.  (But if anyone reading this hasn’t watched Star Wars: Rebels… do yourself a favor and go watch that show!!  Now THAT is essential Star Wars viewing!  Especially with the live-action Ahsoka show coming…!)

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