With Omega thankfully reunited with Hunter and the rest of the Bad Batch, it’s back to business as usual as Cid has another mission for the gang. However, this is a mission that will touch on some of the darker days of the Bad Batch’s past and question their standing in the galaxy.
Join me as I dive into Star Wars: The Bad Batch‘s tenth episode, “Common Ground,” in Five Thoughts! Oh, and spoilers, by the way.
1. Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch
This is a nice surprise of an episode. While the last few outings of The Bad Batch have been pretty insular, focusing on the story surrounding Omega, this opens things up in a really interesting way by touching on a part of the galaxy rarely seen. The thing about the Clone Wars, the diagetic event, is that if you only know that war from seeing the Prequel Trilogy, you’d be hard pressed to answer who the Confederacy are or why they’re fighting. The Clone Wars, the show, did a lot to humanise that conflict by devoting entire arcs to explore the people on the worlds who are fighting for their independence. It’s a strange conundrum because The Clone Wars gives the conflict just enough depth that you can see a war in which both sides think they’re fighting for what’s right for their people and can’t see the puppet master pulling the strings until it’s too late, but if you only experience them in the movies all you get is some weirdos in robe swinging laser swords at robots.
There’s a lot of really interesting political drama that can be found in this era of Star Wars which, even though the Prequels are oft maligned for their politics, could have elevated those films in a lot of ways. Getting to finally see what happened to those Confederate worlds after the ascension of the Empire is a great idea for an episode and… if I’m being honest, it still kind of left me wanting more by the end, but c’est la vie. It’s still exciting.
2. Fighting For The Other Side
What was probably the most exciting part, in fact, was the idea that, all of a sudden, these clone veterans who are on the run from the Empire have to extradite a Separatist senator from Imperial occupation. That’s just fantastic drama right there given that, frankly, Clone Force 99 have seen a lot of their brothers killed by the droids that existed to, from a certain point of view, protect the interests of the Separatist ideologues who never fought their own battles. Now, I get that Star Wars is for kids and there’s only so much sociopolitical drama they can actual tackle before they need to interrupt it with some action, but you can’t give me a story in which the survivors of a proxy war have to work together against the occupying force that bested both of them and not want me to see that explored in the character drama.
Sure, Echo has some lines about how he thinks it’s a trap or whatever, but like… this is a guy who was tortured for months? years? by Separatist forces to the point where he still freaks out around droids and the show just doesn’t have the space or time to let him stop and have a conversation with Senator Singh about any of it except to say one line to him at the end to show that he’s over it or something. Again, yes, this is a cartoon for kids, but I think one of my problems with The Bad Batch is that the double sized opener set such a high bar for the drama of the show and how it would blend political world building and intimate character storytelling and the regular 20-something minute episodes just can’t fit it all in and be fun, exciting adventures for children. You either need the longer runtime to let things slow down or you jettison the depth to focus on the cool action and, well, they mostly did the latter and I can’t blame them, really. I just wish each episode could be an hour long, I guess.
Continued below3. Left Behind
I’m not going to lie, it was kind of weird to me that this is the mission that they decided to leave Omega behind on given how many other dangerous missions she’s been on, but then I remembered how much they had to get through to get her back from Cad Bane and I let it slide. Especially given that last week was a pretty Omega heavy episode and it makes sense for the pendulum to swing in the other direction for a bit. I did like that they gave Omega a subplot about the dejarik stuff and continues to show off that, yeah, she’s a naturally very tactical thinker and now that she’s free from the overbearing environment of Kamino that her ability to take care of herself is catching up to her curiosity, but… it’s a little thin on the ground is all I’m saying.
Mostly the fact that some off-screen dejarik games paid off the Batch’s debt to Cid, that feels a little cheap to me. That was, really, the driving force keeping them on Ord Mantell and doing these missions and pretty much the only thing that shaped the middle of this season and it was just… undone off-screen? Nah, I can’t be doing with that.
4. Aftermath
The Bad Batch has struggled to juggle it’s two core premises this entire time and, honestly, it’s still a major problem in this episode. The worst part is that the surface level stuff is all really good. The show looks fantastic, the art style has aged impeccably since 2008, and the animation and voice acting and score continues to push boundaries of what can be achieve on this scale… and yet. On the one hand, The Bad Batch is an intimate, character drama driven show about a group of clone specialists on the run from the burgeoning control of the Empire. Sure, great, I’m all on board. The problem is, it’s also about the state of the galaxy in an incredibly crucial turning point of galactic events as Palpatine’s Empire grows in power, cementing a regime that will last over two decades.
This episode should have been the perfect bridge for the show’s two identities, by playing into story threads continued from The Clone Wars while looking ahead to where the show goes from here. Instead, Alexander Siddiq barely shows up as a Senator Singh, sounding like he recording his lines on Zoom in his bathroom, and the character is such a non-entity that any genuine drama that could have been derived from his storyline is just dead in the water. It’s such a shame because this felt like it could be an episode to live up to last week’s banger, and it just fizzled out over the course of the episode.
5. Extraction
That being said, they keep nailing the action and I can’t help but stick around for that. Actually seeing the Phase II clone trooper armour used with the same faceless, massed menace that would later characterise the stormtrooper is a fantastic touch because we’re used to seeing clones and their armour and weaponry as inherently good and now we get to have a feeling of pure dread when the Batch is faced against an AT-TE. It flips the tables quite nicely even if it is purely a visual touch and that’s pretty much my problem with the show in general. What works for me is the visual stuff, all the stuff on the surface. The action is fantastic, it’s paced really well, and it has an interesting place in Star Wars history that makes seeing the Batch use only non-lethal on the other clones something that I can tell is pretty neat. But that’s it. It’s neat.
It’s not deep, it’s not interesting. The characters refuse to evolve or change in any meaningful way beyond their stock role in the ensemble. We’ve barely seen the state of the galaxy and even here, when it would most behoove the show to slow down and take their time to explore some resonant themes, what they deliver is some breakneck action that delights in the moment, but has no foundation to support it. I really, really, really want to like this show, but it needs to make some serious considerations about what the show is even about by the time a second season rolls around.
