Welcome back! The Bad Batch has been a funny ol’ time, hasn’t it? With a premiere episode that was so good that I keep comparing every episode to it, I had really high hopes for this show and have been slowly deflating at every turn in which it fell into the same easy narrative traps that plagued the early seasons of both The Clone Wars and Rebels. And, yeah, maybe I’ve been too hard on this show for being a kid’s show, but, let’s face it, I was hard on those shows as well and look how they turned out.
Which is what makes me really excited to get to this week’s episode because, spoiler alert, I actually really liked this one. So, let’s get to it and break down Star Wars: The Bad Batch‘s “Devil’s Deal.”
1. Peace In The House Of Syndulla
This… is not where I expected us to begin. I’ve been making it a point to avoid seeing previews or early reviews of The Bad Batch in between episodes if for no other reason than to maintain the feeling of being surprised on a first viewing and I have to admit that this is maybe the first time since the show’s premiere that that’s really paid off. I was fully taken aback by not only the opening of this episode, but, as we’ll get into, what this episode shaped out to be. I’ve been waiting for this show to take a genuine risk and embrace the malleability of cinematic form that something like Star Wars allows a project to do and, sure, they’ve done some cool stuff like the Cad Bane shootout, but nothing like this complete switch in perspective.
This is a Syndulla story. This is the story of Ryloth told through its people and their struggle for freedom in the face of war and oppression. It’s a story that’s been told patchwork throughout a lot of Star Wars media by this point so it is really, genuinely quite cool that The Bad Batch is afforded the opportunity to include it largely free from that wider context and is able to justify itself. There’s not necessarily an expectation that you’ll know about this stuff or, for example, why the inclusion of Cham’s wife, Eleni, is actually a key moment in Cham’s overall character arc, so it’s actually pretty cool to me that this show is finally cementing its place in the overall narrative flow of Filoni’s Star Wars canon.
2. The Machinations Of Peace
Ryloth is a world tormented by war. Its people have known little peace in living memory and that’s something that colors every narrative told of them. It’s kind of the only thing they have going for them and much like the Wookiee slave ship stuff, it’s kind of expected that any time Cham Syndulla shows up, the episode will be about Ryloth’s fight for freedom and peace. It’s a long, long running opera told out of chronological order across decades and generations of characters that is woven under this really quite arch interpretation of a fight between good and evil that drove Star Wars in the first place. Here, he Twi’lek people have fought a hard won peace against the Separatists and have been welcomed into the peace the Republic has brought for them by, effectively, winning the war.
This is actually something of a midpoint in the overall narrative of the Twi’lek people’s journey that’s been charted now across three shows, several novels and comics, and is still being told here. This is the turning point in that journey where the Twi’lek people realize that the peace they fought for is only more subjugation at the hands of a new power. So seeing Cham finally and somewhat reluctantly brokering for peace in the face of that new subjugation is pretty powerful. He hands the Empire his people because he knows that a stability is needed to build peace. Without knowing the full scope of what he is being offered, he chooses the devil’s deal. This is the most fun I’ve had with Star Wars in a long time.
3. What Cost A Future
I can’t believe this episode got me to care about young Hera Syndulla. Hera was never quite my favorite character in Rebels, but there was always something there about her that kept me coming back. The fierce temper and strong will and kind heart and motherly warmth and daring adventurousness, she was something new for Star Wars in a really cool way. Yet, I don’t know what it was, but I couldn’t quite help but roll my eyes when she popped up with Chopper. In the same way that it felt like Fennec Shand’s first appearance in the show felt like it used that cameo as a crutch, I was a little worried about what they’d go for here with Hera.
Continued belowI’m honestly glad to say that what I feared was far from what I got because this episode is about Hera. This is, frankly, her story. It’s the story of a girl who grew up in a war zone finally settling into peace only to have it ripped out from under her. It’s the story of a father selling his soul for a peace that never comes. It’s the story of not being able to fly.It’s honestly so good, I kind of have the urge to go watch Rebels again just to go through Hera’s storyline there. This is the kind of episode I’ve been wanting for so long, something that brings even just a little bit of meaning and depth to a part of the Star Wars timeline that could be a platform for some really interesting and relevant stories and I really think they nailed it here.
4. Shifting The Spotlight
It took me a while to actually realize that The Bad Batch weren’t even in this episode. I’m not going to say I didn’t miss them, but pulling focus away from them for a while wasn’t a terrible idea. This show has, I think, kind of struggled with trying to figure out how to tell a long running narrative that requires, y’know, characters to have arcs and developments with a main cast who are such self-aware cartoon personas that there’s really only so much you can do with them. Stretch them too far and they break, the effect shatters. It’s like trying to tell a story with mythology and depth and theme with, say, the Looney Tunes (cough Space Jam 2 cough); no one really cares about Bugs Bunny’s character arc or development because he’s a cartoon character and there’s only so much you can do within him before he stops being Bugs Bunny. Similarly, the Bad Batch got popular precisely because their arch and earnest personas allowed for these perfect action figure cartoon characters that are fun to be around and watch them interact, but they’re not characters necessarily designed with room for growth. Yet the show’s overall place in the narrative seemingly wants to tell stories about the price of loyalty and the struggle for liberation and, y’know, all the cool stuff that Star Wars is good at and it feels like they’ve just been weighed down by this need to fit their stories around this formulaic, fixed structure.
Actually moving away from the Bad Batch for most of the episode only to have them show up right at the turning point kind of got me. I was actually glad to see these idiots back. What worked, I think, was the focus on Omega meeting Hera and creating a specific moment that interweaves their narratives. Regardless of whether you know Hera as the daring pilot General of the Rebel Alliance or if you only know Omega as this keen, observant and similarly daring renegade clone, this connection they have over flying bridges this incredible gap in the narrative. The Bad Batch has floated in limbo for a little while now, but this felt like a moment that sealed itself to something important in the overall narrative of Star Wars and it was something as simple as two little girls bonding over wanting to fly.
5. Setting The Spark
Cham Syndulla’s narrative has always had a sort of out of the frying pan, into the fire dramatic irony to it that Star Wars seems to thrive on. Going from freedom fighter against the Separatists in The Clone Wars to the man who, in accepting an uneasy alliance with the Republic, handed over his people to The Empire, Cham is this interesting, sort of pariah figure. And it’s here we see that moment of betrayal and I have to admit, it’s kind of cool to me that it involved Rampart and Crosshair in a capacity away from their hunt for Clone Force 99. Rampart hasn’t really been used much in this story and his place in the story’s full narrative feels kind of up in the air, but his use here really worked for me. It’s hard to write new and interesting and layered characters within the framework of a character as rigidly defined as The Imperial Officer™ bad guy who has to appear in everyone of these shows. Whether it’s Tarkin or Agent Kallus or Admiral Konstantine or Governor Pryce or, hell, whether it’s Thrawn, they’re all much of a muchness within that framework.
Yet tying him so intrinsically to the storyline of Cham Syndulla and putting him in that position of power over characters that, frankly, I care about at this point does work for me in a way that making Rampart the boogeyman hunting the Bad Batch kind of doesn’t. There’s a matter-of-factness to the way he deals with using Hera’s involvement in Glie’s smuggling of weapons as bait to gain power that works for me. This is his nine-to-five. He’s not exactly the most complicated villain in the galaxy, but he’s what we’ve got right now and I will admit that, at least here, his position as the guy who kickstarts the entire Rebellion on Ryloth because he’s so blindly fascistic to use a child as a pawn in order to colonize the planet is pretty compelling. I am actually genuinely excited for where the rest of this season goes and I really hope this feeling isn’t brought down when the Bad Batch inevitably show up more in the next episode.
