Welcome back! After spending some time with Cid and setting up a new player in the underworld of the galaxy far, far away, this week The Bad Batch turns its attentions back to the emergent Empire as the Bad Batch must rescue a familiar face. With the season finale only a week away, let’s take a look at how The Bad Batch begins to wrap things up in “War-Mantle.”
Oh, and spoilers. Obviously.
1. Running Through The Woods Of Life
Let’s face it, this episode’s opening is a pretty good metaphor for The Bad Batch‘s first season overall. Running through the woods, blind, looking for some way to freedom while the crushing weight of inevitability nips at your heels. Maybe that sounds cruel, but, honestly, this season hasn’t been all that much to write home about. Sure, I liked the last few episodes for actually bringing some depth to the whole affair, but given that this is the penultimate episode of the season, I was hoping for a bit more… more, y’know? Sure, it was nice seeing Gregor for a bit and it’s continually interesting to see the machinations of the Empire asserting their newfound dominance and swapping out the clones for the emergence of the TK troopers is a fun little wrinkle in the grand scheme of the galaxy far, far seay, but that’s all this episode really leaves me with: a sense of filling in the worldbuilding blanks over story.
2. Last Days On Ol’ Kamino
Kamino has been a… strange inclusion in this series. Sure, it featured heavily in the premiere and it was cool to see the way it was used as a sort of home base for the Bad Batch before the end of the wall. Somewhere for Clone Force 99’s orbit to always return to before it was brutally snatched away from them by the emergence of the Empire. While it left the Bad Batch without a home and adrift in the galaxy (something the series still doesn’t seem sure how to resolve), it was still kind of weird to see the show circle back to Kamino every so often.
It’s mostly felt like nothing more than a periodic reminder of Nala Se and Lama Su still being in the show and that Crosshair’s still kicking about and even now, in the second to last episode of the season, Kamino feels like little more than filler to break up the stuff with Gregor. All it really serves to do is remind us that the Empire is cutting ties with the cloners, which is something they established in the first episode. Nothing that’s happened in Kamino has in any impacted the outside story and it’s a real shame to see so much work go into such empty scenes. We’ll see where the finale takes us, but I’m ready to write off this entire subplot.
3. Infil, Exfil
Admittedly, this is where this episode shines, but that honestly feels like damning with faint praise these days. I’ve come to expect the middle of these episodes to be well put together, if pretty hollow action and this episode doesn’t disappoint. The action of Echo, Hunter and Tech all sneaking into the Imperial base to find their deserter before the cascade of close calls that makes up their attempted escape was all pretty exhilarating. This show knows how to do action, it just always seems to fall short on making that action actually matter.
Maybe I’m just overindulged by Superman & Lois, a show that is entirely about the consequence of action, but all of the action setpieces in The Bad Batch ring hollow because they entirely halt the storytelling. Nothing about any of our characters has changed by them being in these action-packed scenarios because an infiltration of an Imperial base is pretty rote for them at this point. There’s no curveballs, no hard choices to make. Nothing that actually challenges these soldiers or changes who they are by going through it.
4. Birth Of The Stormtrooper
This was something that was inevitable from the first episode and I don’t really know how I expected the segue from clone troopers to stormtroopers to go, but much like the rest of my complaints with this episode, this felt a little… empty. I don’t know, maybe it’s me, but I expected the introduction of the TK stormtrooper, especially given that they’ve designed these first generation TK troopers to look like Ralp MacQuarrie’s original concepts, to have a little bit more weight thrown behind it. Explore what it means for these reject clones to be without home and to be constantly hounded and to see not just their brothers becoming cogs in the machine, but also to those same brothers be discarded in favour of these new, zealous recruits to be moulded by the Imperial war machine. As much as I talked about the Bad Batch feeling like a bunch of stock character identities making their way through the stories and lives of others in the galaxy, this show is still ostensibly about them and there’s no real moment in which the episode explores what it’s like for the clones to be replaced.
Continued belowYou even have Gregor right there, who’s brain is so twisted by his experience in war that we know the entire rest of his life is irreparably changed, and the most he does is comment off-hand about how the new TK troopers aren’t clones before the episode swiftly moves on. I don’t know if it’s because, as I said in the last point, this show knows how to fill the middle of each episode with enough flashy action to distract from it’s shallow storytelling, but I was pretty disappointed that this introduction for the TK troopers fell so flat for me.
5. So, It’s Come To This
We’re a week away from the end of The Bad Batch (at least, the end of the show’s first season) and… I want to say, look how far we’ve come, but how far have we come, actually? Except Omega, all of our characters are more or less the same as they were at the outset. Hunter’s a little more open and Wrecker’s a little more well-rounded, but Echo and Tech are still the same stock characters they were fourteen episodes and the only one of the opening squad to go through any kind of character progression is Crosshair and all he did was turn into a cartoon villain. Yes, I know this is a cartoon, but still. Fourteen episodes and what do we have to show for it? A handful of cool adventures sandwiched between completely forgettable episodes and the biggest drop in quality from premiere to season finale I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve harped on about it for long enough, but that first episode was something special. It had enough story in one hour to carry the rest of the season and, frankly, I wish it had. After the set up, it felt like the show had no direction, no real end goal for the season in mind and now Hunter remains captured by the Imperials and is set to be interrogated by Crosshair and I just…
I can only hope that this season finale sticks the landing and turns my opinion on this show around, because otherwise this whole endeavour has kind of felt like a waste of time. With the enormity of the weight of Star Wars behind it and the prestige of being the follow up to The Clone Wars, I’m just shocked to see the people behind this show put so much effort into a story that has done nothing but spin its wheels. Fingers crossed.
