Laser blasts rain from the sky. Tapoca City sinks into the watery grave of Kamino. The Bad Batch scramble to safety through the fire and the flooding within. Star Wars: The Bad Batch finally reaches the conclusion of its first season and, boy howdy, do I have some thoughts on this episode and the show as a whole.
Let’s dive in. Spoilers ahead, obviously.
1. All Is Lost
Let’s get the praise out of the way early before we really break the episode apart. This is what I’ve been waiting for. This is the level and the scale of drama I’ve been dying for this show to be at since its first episode. I’m still not entirely sure why this finale got split in two because I feel like opening and closing this season with two whopper, one hour episodes would really have made the stakes in this episode feel even more impactful. Picking up right where we left off last time, Tapoca City is being bombarded by Imperial Star Destroyers with the Bad Batch trapped inside. The rest of this episode, for better or worse, focuses on our heroes having to battle their environment and their own fatigue to survive. It’s very straightforward and is honestly one of the reasons I wish this was just one episode because there’s honestly not a lot here that was worth having a cliffhanger for. There’s no twist revelation, there’s no secrets uncovered. It’s straightforward survival of the situation set up in what should have been the first half of the finale and, honestly, it doesn’t really do much with what stakes it does set up.
Though, while I do tend to focus my breakdowns on the story beats of the episode and the narrative and structural flow, I have to mention and appreciate the artistry on display here. This episode in particular has some of the strongest art direction I’ve seen in the show with fantastic use of digital matte paintings to expand the scope of the visuals to encompass the scale of the devastation. It really sells the threat level imposed on our heroes, finally making it feel like these elite, badass soldiers are actually in a situation where you worry as the audience about how they’re going to get out safe. It’s not much, as we’ll get to, but it at least makes it look pretty.
2. Congratulations, You Are Being Rescued
That being said, I will give props because the episode immediately jumps into a scene of Omega and AZI potentially sacrificing themselves to save Crosshair. We’ll get to Crosshair and his characterisation in this episode, but I loved this as an apotheosis moment for Omega. We’ve seen her go from this pretty shy, entirely sheltered and very curious child into a genuine survivor with a strong compassionate and selfless streak; so much so that, at the drop of a hat, she’s willing to put everything on the line to not leave her brother behind. And it’s not without setup, either: this is fully an extension of Hunter’s saving Crosshair at the end of the last episode. It does lead into something I’ll get into about how Omega is, at this point, basically an extension of Hunter, but it also plays into showing that the Bad Batch is willing to stay and die for Crosshair rather than leaving him for dead, a courtesy that Crosshair didn’t exactly show for our heroes earlier in the season.
It’s still a fantastic opening to the episode and builds immediately on the stakes set up in the first part of the finale, which is another reason why I still think it should have just been an extension of the midpoint of an hour long finale. This split still feels totally weird to me and I think if I were to ever go back to this season, I would have to watch the two parts of the finale back to back.
3. You’re Gonna Die Here, You Know
As I mentioned last week, Kamino has been handled kind of… strange in this show. We spent a it of time on Kamino during The Clone Wars, enough to associate it as something of a home for the clones. The world they were born onto, grew up on and where they were trained to become the soldiers that would defend the Republic. Taking that and using it in the premiere as a way of stranding the Bad Batch now that the Empire has taken over, returning to Kamino was a bittersweet moment in the last episode. It held both the anticipation of returning home and also the apprehension of the familiar and hurtful memories of losing that home and fear of what now lives there. Then it all got blown to smithereens.
Continued belowSo, now, we have this really poignant sequence of the Bad Batch having to escape as their home is literally torn down around them. As I’ll get to, I really wish this finale (both parts) had actually been the mid-point of the season and not the endpoint and the destruction of Kamino is a perfect example of why. As I mentioned last week, this is a point of no return for the show. The Bad Batch have been drifters, nomads since being forced off of Kamino and they loosely settled on Ord Mantell, but there was always the limbo of returning to Kamino being an eventuality. We knew we were going back. Now, there’s no going back. It completely shifts the dynamic of the Bad Batch and forces them to find a new home and I would have liked to have seen that in the latter half of the show rather than filling this series with episode that, frankly, felt like killing time until we got here.
4. There’s Always A Bigger Fish
Listen, I’ll try not too harp on this too much, but I’m absolutely sick of The Bad Batch and the obligatory monster that shows up just because we have a runtime to fill. It’s happening in, as far as I can tell, every episode. There’s some point, around the halfway mark, in which the episode just throws in some weird creature of the environment to stall our heroes from achieving their objective. Because that’s all it is, really, is a way of stalling. It’s purely creating a narrative obstacle just for the sake of the need for something to happen. It’s the equivalent of rolling up a monster real quick because, all of a sudden, your party’s in a corner of the dungeon you didn’t map out and you just need there to be something big for them to fight.
This show has lacked a lot in terms of narrative depth and characterisation and I’d be hard-pressed to argue with someone describing this show as little more than the randomly generated adventures of some action figures. We’re in the finale and instead of taking the time in Nala-Se’s lab to allow for some characterisation because, I don’t know, you’re in the wreckage of your birthplace trying to rescue the brother who betrayed you? they spend most of the episode with our crew in a really long tunnel running away from a big and scary fish. Now, I’m not mad about there being a big fish for them to run away from because, yeah, it does lead to the pretty poignant scene where Crosshair saves AZI and Omega and pays his debt in kind. But. Like I said earlier, this episode offers little in the way of actual narrative development because most of it is our heroes running away from a really scary fish. It’s shallow storytelling and when there’s as much artistry involved (again, as I’ve noted previously), I can’t help but want better because there is no lack of potential for this to be an interesting and engaging show and all I get is a big fish.
5. All You’ll Ever Be To Them Is A Number
Now that that’s out of my system, let’s talk about the note that this season ends on for our characters. Having finally made it back to the Marauder and to safety, the Bad Batch offer a place for Crosshair, allowing him to return to the fold. An offer Crosshair resoundly denies, citing his nature and, well, everything he’s done up to this point. He digs in his heels and dies on his hill for the Empire. And he’s left alone on the platform and the episode fades into that familiar CREATED BY DAVE FILONI card. It’s… fine. What really makes it is the cutting remarks from Hunter and Omega about, you know, family and stuff. It’s pretty much just the same thing they’ve been talking about the entire episode which, again, is why this finale feels kind of empty. This finale marks the first meaningful reunion between Crosshair and the rest of the Bad Batch and, again, it’s down to just Hunter and Omega to carry the entire narrative of the show. Wrecker and Echo get some lines earlier in the episode, but there’s never a feeling of the group feeling like, well, a group. A collection of differing of opinions and personalities that might bond and clash over different issues. Instead, anyone who isn’t Hunter or Omega is relegated to a couple of jokes every now and again and at this point, for better or worse, Omega kind of just parrots whatever Hunter said.
Continued belowThe actual scene of Crosshair’s refusal to join his brothers and the parting between our two parties is done well and Dee Bradley Baker and Michelle Ang deserve so much credit for what they bring to the material, but there’s no way around it: the material isn’t good enough for them. Baker is bringing his A-game to every episode, voicing no less than five distinct, main character voices and he’s bringing it to scripts that read like they were doodled on a napkin.
In Conclusion: You’re Still A Brother To Me
I don’t know what to do with this show. The more I think about it, the more it falls apart for me. I stand by what I’ve said all along, that the show’s premiere absolutely nailed it in terms of setting up the show. It promised action and drama and engaging characters and shadowy intrigue and ends on a spectacular note following both a betrayal and a new bond. It was everything they needed to do to sell me on this show given that, going in, I wasn’t really expecting much. The Bad Batch didn’t exactly impress much in the final season of The Clone Wars so the announcement that they were headlining their own follow up to that show wasn’t exactly high on my list of things to look forward to. But it’s Star Wars and Dave Filoni’s still mapping things out and I gave it a go. Now, sixteen episodes later, I feel a little justified in not really expecting much. That premiere that I loved so much ruined the rest of the show for me as it fell into rote, kid’s TV plotting and actively shirked adding depth to the material set-up.
I don’t know where we go from here. I don’t know what the second season will shape up to be. I know I’ll probably still watch it in the hopes that a good show materialises out of this, but this first season? She’s a dud.
