Welcome back to our coverage of Star Wars: The Bad Batch! For those that haven’t been following along in Boomb Tube, let me lay it out: this season has been a major improvement on season one in almost every way. It hasn’t been perfect, but it has furthered each character’s story in important ways, opened the story up to being about more than just Clone Force 99, and has finally established itself as a key, necessary piece of the Star Wars galaxy.
1. Old Habits
One of the frustrating parts of season two has been the growth has been somewhat held back by doing 4-5 season one-ish episodes. Even more frustrating than that is that they chose for “The Summit” to be one of those episodes. Sure, we got a fun Saw Gerrera cameo, but the episode felt very much like the episodes that made this show skippable for so much of its first season. Yes, it was important for them to attempt to track Rampart, but the episode just felt like a retread.
Also, and this is of no import whatsoever, didn’t the setting sort of remind you of that train heist in Solo? This isn’t a criticism, I just couldn’t place where that setting reminded me of, and then it came to me.
Anyway, this episode ended with a set piece that teased great danger and felt like an appropriate ending for the season, but it took 20ish minutes of relatively boring action to get there.
2. Tech
The one piece of “The Summit” that felt strange, and sort of presaged the tragedy of “Plan 99,” was Phee Genoa admitting her feelings for Tech and calling him ‘brown eyes.’ I’m not against some romance in this show, but this felt absolutely forced and came out of nowhere. As soon as it happened, I thought “Oh, so Tech is going to die,” and then he did. This was too much of the ‘don’t worry, I’ll be back fine / one day from retirement’ trope, which is a shame because Tech’s death, a sacrifice for his brothers and sister, was a tragic moment imbued with so much meaning and love. Coming from a character that is mostly emotionless, that type of move could’ve felt hollow or insincere, but that’s not the case.
Tech’s journey into emotional understanding has been happening all season, which is part of the reason that the Phee Genoa stuff felt so strange. We already saw Tech become more of a real boy this season. But his decision to put everyone else’s survival over his was Tech reverting back to his true self. He looked at the situation from a logical, cold perspective, and saw there was no way they could all survive. He ran the odds, and found the best way to proceed. And so, the sacrifice feels more substantial because of his growth, but Tech is still who Tech always was.
In a way, Tech is the reason that the Empire is terrified of the clones. Yes, Order 66 was programmed into them, but they were created to not just do one thing. They were made to be near perfect soldiers, and while you can get them to do something they don’t want to, they will ultimately revert back to what you made them to be. And good soldiers, yes, follow orders, but more than that, [in this very specific context] good soldiers do what is right. The Empire wants the clones gone because they can’t sap them of their programming. They didn’t develop in the ways that regular folks did. They don’t seem to want to retire and relax and have a better life. They don’t want to assimilate into a role that isn’t theirs.
They are soldiers. This is who they are. And even though Tech grew beyond that into something more, the foundation of who he is will always be a solider. And he did the soldier’s duty. He will be missed.
3. Betrayal and grief
Cid’s betrayal was not unexpected, nor should it be seen as anything other than the logical endpoint of her relationship with Clone Force 99. She was never going to actually protect them; they had a relationship built on need. They needed money, she needed shit done. But the betrayal still hurt, because of how close it came to Tech’s death. It hurt even more when Rampart produced Tech’s goggles as one last ‘fuck you’ to Hunter and Wrecker.
Continued belowNot to get too analytical about this, but this is actually a really good representation of grief. When someone is grieving, they are more susceptible to being brought down, emotionally, by small things. When you’re grieving and you spill a cup of coffee, that coffee becomes the avatar for all that you’ve lost in your life for about 3 seconds, and then you come to. And so, when Cid betrays her ‘friends’ and when we get a concrete reminder of Tech’s loss, it just feels like the bleakest shit in the universe, even if nothing has really changed from five minutes earlier.
4. Omega
Of course, Rampart is really there to collect Omega, and between Omega’s hinted at Force sensitivity, the revelation that the Empire are working on extracting something from the Zillo Beast, it is very clear that this is setting up the cloning of Palpatine which, eventually, brings us to The Rise of Skywalker. It is incredible how frequently Star Wars uses animation to fix bad filmmaking, isn’t it?
The capture of Omega is, obviously, a terrible thing, but again, this season has changed Omega in a way that makes this feel even more tragic. We saw how she could barely handle Echo’s departure, and now Tech’s death has broken her down even further. She is learning about loss and heartache and sacrifice in ways that seem too cruel for a kid of her age, but that’s often how life is.
When Omega finds Crosshair, it is a slight glimmer of hope in her shattered life, even if he’s basically comatose and left her in the lurch the last she saw him. It’s a reminder that while some things are gone, not all hope is lost.
5. …and her sister?
And then came the big revelation of the episode: Emerie Karr, the scientist we saw working with Rampart a few episodes back, is Omega’s ‘sister.’ Presumably, that means that she’s another clone, and one that clearly is different from the other clones we’ve met so far. This answers a lot of questions, but poses far more. Rampart knows she’s a clone, right? Where do her loyalties lie? What are her plans for Omega?
Overall, this season has been such an improvement over the first, and with a bunch of really interesting ideas planted for future seasons, I can’t wait to get more of these stories. This is very, very different than how I felt after season one. Enjoy the break, and we’ll be back (hopefully) soon with more Bad Batch.
