The first season of The Bad Batch was a bit of a mixed bag. It explored a time period we hadn’t really seen in the franchise before, showing us the immediate aftermath of Order 66 and the not-so-quick descent into the Imperial era. At the same time, the story felt a bit aimless, focusing on side missions and the titular batch of genetically mutated clones taking care of a child — not unlike every single Star Wars show until Andor.
Likewise, the first season teased but didn’t fully engage with the relationship between Clone Force 99 and its “regular” clone brothers. The Bad Batch generally acted superior and vastly different from the other clones and mostly avoided reckoning with how their brothers were now the bad guys.
Thankfully, the premiere of season two seems to have taken steps to improve things, and it finally has the characters asking questions. Granted, this is no Andor, but it’s at least closer to the best parts of The Clone Wars, just set during an even darker period in the timeline. The two-part premiere picks up a few months after the first season’s events with a scene that brings to mind Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean movies, with the batch running from giant crablike creatures with a treasure chest at hand. It’s a fun, lighthearted way of getting us reacquainted with the characters and their dynamics as well as showing the big changes — namely, how capable Omega is at defending her brothers.
Soon enough, though, they’re sent on a new mission to a familiar location: Count Dooku’s palace on the planet Serenno. Turns out that since Dooku is dead and the separatist movement is over, there’s now a huge war chest just sitting there in his palace ripe for the taking. Although hesitant at first, the group is convinced to go on the mission since the money could help buy the members a future.
While Hunter, Wrecker, and Tech are in it for their own gain, Echo can’t help himself from thinking larger. He suggests using the money to fight back against the Empire, buying weapons and numbers to help their brothers. Herein lies the biggest change The Bad Batch introduces in season two — a conflict within Clone Force 99 as Echo finally thinks about the implications of their clone brothers now fighting for the very forces they were created to fight against. It makes sense, of course, since Echo fought alongside “regs” for most of the war as one of them. This disillusionment carries across both episodes and is sure to cause some strife (and thematic resonance) in the future.
When they arrive on Serenno, the team finds the city in ruins after being bombarded by the Empire, and the treasure has already been looted. While trying to steal their own piece of the pie, Tech explains to Omega that the war chest consists of the riches from all the worlds that Dooku and the separatists controlled and exploited in the name of his war effort. This prompts Omega to ask how that’s any different from what they are doing themselves.
This episode, while not fully diving into it, does raise some interesting questions about how the clones view the separatists as well as themselves. Aren’t they kind of doing what the Separatist Confederacy did? They’re seeing the Republic (now the Empire) as a corrupt state and fighting to stay out of it. But of course, the clones can’t admit it, since they were quite literally bred to fight the separatists.
After the heist goes terribly wrong, the team is split up, and Tech, Echo, and Omega are rescued by a local named Romar. He tells them to leave the treasure and go home, that it is cursed. Dooku didn’t steal only from outside worlds but from his own people, and his quest for power ruined everything for the locals. Later, at Romar’s home, Tech sees their host working on a data core, which he calls a piece of separatist technology before being corrected by Romar, who explains that it’s a Serennian archive, technology that had been appropriated by the separatists for their war.
Romar is just trying to preserve his people’s history and knowledge from a time before the war, which Tech is surprised to hear — he never thought about the planet’s being its own place with its own peaceful culture. This is one thing The Clone Wars excelled at, making us look at the war as more than just living beings fighting droids and instead as a complex (and ultimately misguided) conflict fought by people who had some genuinely good reasons and goals.
While in hiding, Omega receives a kaleidoscope from Romar to play with — though she immediately asks if it’s part of the treasure and is disappointed when she learns it isn’t. Because the first season spent so much time with Omega as the defenseless girl who needed to be saved by the squad and the members’ reactions to having to take care of a girl, it didn’t really have time to explore the fact that Omega is a child in a war zone. Sure, she’s technically older than her brothers, but Omega had never experienced life outside Kamino, and now all she knows is to fight and kill.
Ultimately, the batch is forced to go home empty-handed, leaving the war chest behind to save their lives. Omega is disappointed because the treasure could have given the group the life they might have had if they weren’t stuck with her, but Echo convinces her to just let it go. As he explains, they were never going to have a normal life, regardless of Omega joining the team. After all, if they had stayed behind, they would be working with the Empire, or worse.
After they escape, we cut back to the clone trooper in charge of the operation on Serenno as he is reporting back to his superior, Vice-Admiral Rampart, the same man who ordered the bombardment on Kamino. Rampart tells the trooper that there’s an inaccuracy in his report: It states that Clone Force 99 tried to steal the war chest. Of course, that cannot be since they perished on Kamino. If Tarkin were to find out about this and discover that the Empire failed in capturing or killing Clone Force 99, there would be severe consequences. So instead, a new report will be submitted to correct this “mistake.”
It’s a short scene, but it just may be the most poignant moment yet in The Bad Batch, as we see the start of the Empire as a doomed state of bureaucracy and greed. It’s a similar side of the Empire that Andor showed — cruel, detached, uncaring, and quite fragile. The Empire is full of redundancies, mistakes, and flaws that everyone overlooks because no one wants to take the fall. This is the Empire that will allow a rebellion to be formed because they cannot imagine anyone daring to question them, let alone act against them, and they don’t want to admit that they could ever be challenged.
When the clone trooper refuses to change his report, to lie, Rampart executes him. This is the beginning of the end for the clones, a force that was literally created and bred to follow orders but is now working for an Empire that cares not about orders but the bottom line. Despite having inhibitor chips and forced obedience, the clones still clearly have morals and they stick to their missions (which they consider morally just). They can’t fathom officials who lie, cheat, and care more about their own political gain than the mission or the well-being of the Empire.
It’s a terrific start to the season. Let’s just hope this isn’t the best of a bad batch.
The Mission Report
• We meet a new character! Wanda Sykes joins the cast as Phee, a very cool pirate with the humor of, well, Wanda Sykes. In her brief introduction, she already feels like a good and humorous addition to the self-seriousness of the batch, joking with them and almost flirting with Tech.
• Sadly, we don’t see Crosshair in this episode, but he is surely brooding as usual.
