Welcome back! Now, I’ve been hard on Star Wars: The Bad Batch. I know, it’s a kid’s show, I know. I’ve reviewed (almost) all of Star Wars: Rebels and the first season of Star Wars: Resistance for the site so far, I know what to expect from Star Wars cartoons. However, I’ve just felt like the episodes following the show’s premiere simply didn’t live up to the hype that premiere had. However, I was really willing to put that aside and give the next episode as fair a shake as any before and… well, you’ll see.
Spoilers, obviously.
1. On The Run, Still
Last week, I went off on a bit of a tangent about how these past couple of episodes, not including the premiere, felt a tad same-y. They begin and end in the same place and, largely, the same lessons are learned. I gotta be honest with you here because that’s literally my only job is to tell you what I think and… I can’t help but feel the same here. Once again, we open with the Bad Batch on the run and out of luck and needing some small miracle to keep things together which, honestly, isn’t a bad setup for a show, but it does feel like we’re opening and closing in largely the same places with largely the same overall conflict having moved only slightly onwards.
Maybe it doesn’t help that the other show I’ve been watching for the show has been Superman & Lois, a show in which so much happens each week I genuinely struggle to fit it into only five thoughts, but so far, The Bad Batch has been pretty stagnant. Now, I get that this is, ultimately, a cartoon for children, but that premiere episode really had me expecting more… stuff to happen, man. Not that stuff didn’t happen in this episode, it was all about establishing the fact that the Bad Batch haven’t slipped out from under the radar as they thought they had, but in terms of the overall structure of the episode, it really felt like much of what we’ve already seen.
2. Blending In
If there was one thing I did really like from this episode, it was the Bad Batch having to go incognito to get supplies. We saw a bit of this in the second episode, but with Cut around there was a feeling of Hunter and that tagging along while someone else did the active blending in. Here, there’s no safety net. We actually got to see that sort of improvisational nature that makes them a good elite squad in the battlefield used to an extent that wasn’t necessarily militaristic. Echo and Hunter haggling with that merchant was fun and a nice way of capturing the essence of the characters in an environment they’re not used to it. I know you’re probably expecting a but, but there really isn’t. This was fun and cool and I want to see more of this, that’s just everything I have to say about it, really. If anything, I think it’s a shame that Tech and Wrecker had to stay with the ship to do whatever they were doing with the transponder or whatever. I get it, it’s a whole thing about them getting their ship off a wanted list and there was some good banter in those scenes, I just would have liked Wrecker to tag along.
3. Shennec Fand, or Curiosity Kills The Lothcat
You know, I don’t really know what I expected from a Fennec Shand appearance in this show given that she only ever showed up in The Mandalorian to do cool action stuff, but… I kind of wanted more from this. Yes, it’s cool to hear Ming-Na Wen do the voice and having her be tracking Omega specifically and the way she had to use some interesting tactics of manipulation to separate her from Hunter, but, again, I was kind of hoping from a bit more… oomf from it all. I don’t even really know how to put into words exactly what disappointed me here or even if it was a disappointment at all. Maybe it’s just that after such a spectacular and powerful first episode, the rest of the show so far has been kind of doing the bare minimum. This is a Rebels level episode conflict. The drama of Omega being not only hunted, but being so very close to being actively taken just didn’t didn’t hit home here.
Continued belowIt’s hard not to compare this to The Mandalorian given that it actively draws that comparison by including Fennec in the first place and so the natural comparison to be drawn is in how each show creates drama through threats against Grogu and Omega. With Grogu, the simplest level of danger is often enough to sell an entire episode given that he is both very cute and largely helpless. It makes the threat of separation from Din so powerful because we know he’s incredibly unlikely to be able to fight back or return on his own power that it makes the eventual separation heartbreaking because we know how final that is. Here, Omega can handle herself just enough that it’s hard to make her naïveté such a threat. I get it. She’s a kid and she’s a sheltered kid and she’s written from that perspective. It’s just that in terms of the wider drama of the show, you can’t bank every episode on “What if something happens to Omega?” and have it only operate on this level. She just wanders into danger and has to be rescued because she’s too trusting. I don’t mean to sound grouchy, I just expected the drama of this show to be a bit more nuanced given just how good that first episode is.
4. More Machine Than Man
Sometimes I forget Echo is a reg. Maybe it’s a testament to the fact that maybe I don’t know everything there is to know about Star Wars, but I honestly forget until it’s brought up. He just blends into what the Bad Batch is that it’s hard for me to remember how he got here. Which is why I really liked that this episode let him go off and have story of his own, especially that it had him pretending to be a droid and then having to rely on droids for help. Given his past and remembering what his reaction to waking up surrounded by droids was in the first episode, it was cool to see him having to forge a relationship with them in order to save the day.
See? I can be nice about this show. I mean, if there’s anything to complain about, it’s that I think he got over his animosity, such as it was, for droids a bit too quickly? But, again, it’s a kid’s show. They’ll probably do this same story hook with Echo a couple more times by the end of the show because they’ll have forgotten about this one.
5. Aw Fart And Nae Poo
I was talking to the esteemed senior editor of this site and my good friend and former Force Ghost co-host, Brian Salvatore, about this show the other day and he asked me something I wasn’t expecting. He asked me if I thought that The Bad Batch would be a better watch if he banked an episode every other week and watched them in an hour-long, two episode sitting like the premiere was structured. Now, I don’t have an answer to that and I certainly can’t experiment and find out giving that I have to get one of these out every Monday, but it took me a second to really ponder it. These past few episodes have been slight. Even given that they’re only 20 something minutes long, it feels like a lot of story stretching is going on. I don’t want to say filler because, well, I don’t necessarily think it’s filler. It’s not that there’s boring stuff happening in between interesting stuff to kill time until the next cool episode. It’s more that each episode so far could have been interesting with a little bit more going on and a little bit more nuance to the drama and I don’t say that as wish fulfilment, either, because I know that the show can do those things. It can be surprising and earnest and emotional and dramatic because that first episode nailed all of those things. It felt like a real show, it felt like something you needed to be watching. Right now, I don’t know if I needed to see any of these episode following it and that’s a real shame.
