Requested By
What do I know about this series going into it?
I’m generally familiar with the Star Wars universe and Star Wars lore. I’ve watched about half of the movies, the first season of Andor, and isolated episodes of The Clone Wars. Through pop-cultural osmosis I recall The Bad Batch is a series about a unit of clone Stormtroopers who are all defective in some way, and it takes place between the prequel trilogy and the main trilogy. Beyond that I don’t know any details.
Recap
The opening music is far more dramatic than I would have expected; I thought this was going to be a comedy.
Spaceships fly over a dark forest. In the forest hide what music and camerawork declare are the heroes, on their way to an enemy base five kilometers away.
Inside the base, a “Dr. Hemlock” orders stormtroopers to guard “the vault”. He’s informed that an insurgent has been captured. He interrogates the insurgent, “Rampart”, who gloats that Hemlock has already failed. But Hemlock insists he hasn’t: “I knew Clone Force 99 would try to capture Omega.” Clone Force 99 are the good guys, and Omega is a young, female clone, apparently of vital importance to the Empire.1
After the interrogation, Rampart and an alien in the next cell over (who has a long and narrow neck and head) look at each other meaningfully. They seem to know each other.
Elsewhere, a man and woman are in a control room. The man is an infiltrator; the woman works in the base. She used to be a bad guy, but has turned coat and says she can help him get into the vault.
In another room, four color-coded children (Green, Yellow, Blue – holding a small dog – and Red) are plotting their escape. Yellow says some things that make me think she was a member of Clone Force 99; I think the four might collectively be Project Omega.
Red distracts the guard droid while Yellow attacks and disables it. They drag it to an alcove to reprogram it. The guard notices she can’t see anybody but Blue from her vantage point high above, so she comes in and asks Blue where the others are. But they’re already on their way back from the alcove. “Where were you?” demands the guard, a Dr. Scalder. “With the droid,” they reply.
Thanks to Yellow’s reprogramming, the droid zaps Dr. Scalder from behind, leaving the kids unguarded. They take a panel off a wall and escape.
The captions in the next few scenes give me some info as to who is who: the clones in the forest are “Wrecker” (who is injured), “Crosshair”, and “Hunter”. The infiltrator is “Echo”. The kids who just escaped aren’t Omega, Omega is a different kid, part of something called Project Necromancer.
Ah, never mind, the very next scene’s captions say Yellow (and only Yellow) is Omega. The four kids are sneaking through some kind of control room, but Bayrn, Blue’s dog, whines and gives them away. Omega quickly sneaks away from the others. While the stormtroopers locate the other kids, she pulls a lever that starts draining water from a tank of some kind.
Before they can do anything about the kids, the “Zillo Beast” that was in the tank is released from stasis. It wakes up and eats all the stormtroopers, whose weapons are ridiculously ineffective against it.
Echo and his friend arrive in the vault to find it swarming with stormtroopers and Dr. Hemlock, investigating the escape. Echo blends in thanks to his stormtrooper uniform, while his friend (identified as “Dr. Karr”) actually works on the project.
News of the Zillo Beast’s escape reaches the vault, and Echo knows it must have been Omega’s doing, “because it’s exactly what I’d do”.2
Meanwhile, outside, it’s deceptively quiet. The trio (for simplicity I’ll call them Clone Force 99 from now on, even though I know they’re technically a subgroup of the team) have reached the base and are spying on it from a short distance. Wrecker is still wounded, but insists on continuing the mission; Crosshair’s hand is shaking, but he too hides this from the others. Crosshair decides to go in by himself, but the others refuse. While they bicker, the Zillo Beast bursts out of the side of the base. “Echo’s handiwork or Omega’s?” asks one clone. “Omega,” another replies.3
Meanwhile, the kids reach the bottom of an enormous ladder; they’re going to climb out to the same exit that the Zillo beast used. Green hesitates, afraid of heights, but Omega persuades him.
Elsewhere in the base, Dr. Hemlock orders his subordinates to send the shuttles after the Zillo Beast. “Won’t the rogue clones be able to exploit our weakened defenses if we do that?” he is asked. But his plan is to make them think that, thus drawing them into a trap. Said trap involves unleashing a quartet of evil robots that, based on the music, have probably appeared earlier in the series.4
Clone Force 99 enters the base through the Zillo-shaped hole. Immediately they encounter the robots and a ridiculous number of stormtroopers. Wrecker wants to take them but Crosshair orders the others to fall back while he covers their escape. He’s obviously going to die.
But the attempt to escape fails and all three are captured: Hunter is shot by a shuttle (how is he not dead?), Wrecker is electrocuted, and Crosshair is stepped on while reaching for a gun to save Wrecker.
Conveniently, when the three are taken to holding cells they pass right in front of Echo and Dr. Karr. But Echo has a good sense of priorities: Their situation is not going to get any worse in the next few hours, so I should first find and save the kids, then come back for the team. Which he does, shooting some stormtroopers who had the kids cornered. For some reason he calls Omega “Havoc 5”, whatever that means.
They agree to split up: Dr. Karr takes Blue, Red, and Green to a shuttle and flees the base, while Echo and Omega go to rescue Clone Force 99. We see Dr. Hemlock torturing one of the clones (I still can’t tell them apart). He plans to “recondition” them, but has to cut the torture session short to answer a call from Governor Tarkin.
Meanwhile, Echo and Omega reach the prison cells, shoot the guards, and free all the prisoners, including Rampart and his tall thin friend “Nala Se”, who Omega also knows. But Clone Force 99 is being held elsewhere, in the “training room”. Echo asks the prisoners to help them, and though Rampart wants to flee immediately, the others readily agree.
Nala Se isn’t coming with them, though. She wants to go to destroy “her science”, which is related to either the conditioning or the creation of Red, Blue, and Green. Or maybe something else; it’s not explained.
Meanwhile in the videoconference, Tarkin chews out Hemlock, doesn’t believe the latter has everything under control as he claims, and says he’s on his way to find out firsthand.
Elsewhere, Nala Se takes out the guard in the database room.
She’s about to delete the data when Hemlock comes in. No, not Hemlock, maybe it’s Rampart? Is he a bad guy? “Tell me everything about Project Necromancer,” he demands, with a gun pointed at her.
Echo sends Omega to do some scouting in the vents surrounding the room in which Clone Force 99 is held captive. Over radio, she tells Echo to create a distraction so she can free them. He starts a firefight in the room below; with the guard watching the firefight instead of the prisoners, Omega leaves the vent and releases Clone Force 99’s manacles one by one. But before she can finish, the guard notices and captures her.
As if this was planned, Hemlock arrives. He presses a button that releases a gas in the room below, subduing Echo and the former prisoners. He actually wasn’t lying to Tarkin; he could’ve pressed that button at any time, but wanted them to think they were succeeding.
In the datacenter, Rampart transfers all the information to his datapad thing. “The empire should be willing to give anything to get it back,” he says, because stealing from and blackmailing a totalitarian regime is an idea that has never backfired. He shoots Nala Se for good measure – and she drops the bomb she was holding, killing them both and destroying the datacenter.
Back in the prison room, the restraints that Omega released were just barely enough; Clone Force 99 gathers their strength and break through the rest of the restraints one by one. The cuts come quickly and I can’t entirely tell what’s going on; they seem to be throwing metal panels from their torture pods at the bad guys. People fall and die, other people get up, there are explosions and robots and I feel very lost. With all going to hell in a handbasket, Hemlock gives up, handcuffs himself to Omega, and drags her away.
Crosshair and one of the other clones (I don’t know what happened to the third) pursue Hemlock onto the inconveniently long and exposed bridge that leads to his shuttle.5 They can’t risk shooting him without hurting her, but he also can’t risk killing her, so it’s a standoff.
She stabs him in the leg, which is close enough. They shoot the handcuffs to disconnect them, then shoot Hemlock and he goes over the side of the bridge. The three return to the ruined base, get into another shuttle that Hemlock was too stupid to take, and flee the planet.
Moments later, three massive triangular Empire ships come out of hyperspace above the planet. Tarkin comes down to the base to assess the damage, and he is not happy.
With all of Hemlock’s research destroyed, Tarkin decides to cut his losses. He’s shutting down the base permanently, and the funding will go instead to Project Stardust, which I bet is the Death Star because Star Wars shows are not allowed to not be related to the main plot.
Much later, we’re on another planet, sunnier and more peaceful and probably out-of-the-way. Echo and Dr. Karr watch the kids as they adapt to their new life. Omega asks another clone if they’re going to find the other kids’ families. He says they’re working on it, but his eyes say he already knows the families are long dead. They discuss their future: with the mission over, and no other missions, all they want is peace and freedom to “choose who we want to be”. “Like what?” “Whatever we want.”
They sit in a dramatic tableau and the episode ends.
In a post-credits scene that inexplicably appears before the credits, adult Omega is walking through a cave. There’s a ship inside, and suddenly a bunch of lights turn on. Hunter is there, and she wants to recruit him for the Rebellion, so this is decades later, during the time of the original trilogy. Ah, no, it’s the other way around: she’s trying to sneak off to join the rebellion, and he was lying in wait to stop her. “We want to keep you safe,” he says. But it’s clear his heart isn’t in it, and he lets her go.
“She’ll be fine,” he tells his pet dog. Will she? Do we know?
Unresolved questions
What does Omega plan on doing for the Rebellion? Will she get killed? Does she appear in other Star Wars media?
Did they ever find the parents of Red, Blue, and Green?
What do Clone Force 99 do with their lives after retiring? Why is Hunter the only one with Omega at the end?
Presumably Omega and the others are still officially fugitives for having destroyed the base. But with Hemlock’s research shut down, does the Empire hav anyone assigned to actively search for them, or can they find peace and quiet so long as they keep their head down?
What is Project Necromancer? Was it related to Red, Blue, and Green or not?
Echo and Dr. Karr said they were planning on talking to some Senator whose name I can’t remember. Does that go anywhere?
What happened to the Zillo Beast? Was it recaptured? Killed? Did it escape to live free in the forest forever?
What was with Crosshair’s hand shaking? What injury or illness was he hiding from the others? Is he alive?
Ratings
Story: 6/10. A good story, though a lot less complex than it initially appears. It looked initially like there were lots of different moving parts but ultimately (with the sole exception of Rampart) there was a clear divide between “the bad guys who captured Omega” and “the good guys who want to free her”.
There were a few issues. I didn’t find the scene where Clone Force 99 breaks free of their restraints to be very believable, given their injured and exhausted state. Nothing the black robots did made them truly worthy of the “dun dun dun” in their introduction. And a lot of the plot revolved around the bad guys being idiots:
Keep an enormously powerful and angry beast in a state that can be released by the pull of a lever, no authorization code required
No contingency plan for its escape; whatever weapons or technologies they used to capture it in the first place are nowhere to be seen
A guard catches a child undoing a prisoner’s restraints, and assumes that was the first one she touched; no need to check that the other restraints are still in place
No understanding of the concept of taking cover, instead just marching down narrow hallways like carnival targets
When fleeing, choose the farthest, most inconveniently located shuttle possible.6
Writing: 9/10. Rather than give a general description of the quality of the writing, I want to single out two moments. You can extrapolate from these the quality of the writing throughout the episode:
The stormtroopers who captured Red, Green, and Blue were confused about the very presence of children on the base.
Confused. Not alarmed. Why? Because the writer of that scene said to themselves, “The people assigned to guard the Zillo Project wouldn’t know that there are kids inside the top-secret vault”. In other words, the writer took the effort to embody the character who is speaking. Standard for writing, you say? Only for main characters; not when you’re writing a single line of dialogue for Stormtrooper #1004. That takes effort, and thought, to avoid a mistake that most viewers (including me) would never have even noticed.One of the children asks Dr. Karr “You were helping us?” She answers, “I am”.
There’s a lot of subtlety in those deceptively simple lines. The child is surprised to learn that Dr. Karr is on their side, and innocently jumps to the conclusion that she always had been. There’s a sad tinge there: Dr. Karr must have been an active participant in whatever awful things were done to these children. The child wouldn’t have expressed that much surprise if Karr were anonymous or the token “good” jailer.
And Karr’s response combines both assent and letdown: “I am”, present tense, with the tiniest extra emphasis on “am” (kudos to the actress for delivering that line very well). “Those horrible things I did to you before, child, I did when I wasn’t on your side. But I’m sorry, and I’ve changed.” All that, packed into two words. A lesser writer, or a good writer who couldn’t trust the cast to deliver the line properly, would have needed to spell all that out.
The writing wasn’t perfect; Green refusing to climb the ladder was needless padding. But over all I was impressed with how the story was executed.
Production: 8/10. High-quality, nay, very high-quality voice acting. I never felt like the actors were reading from their scripts, which is a common failing in even some of the best animated shows. Good animation.
There were moments when the music and the plot seemed to be at odds, where the music was shouting “good things are happening!” during a setback for the heroes or vice versa. I also docked a point for the bad handling of the breakout scene; that could’ve been storyboarded a lot better.
The real heroes of this episode are the editors, who made excellent use of cutting from the chaotic Zillo rampage inside the base to the silent, peaceful forest outside it.
Characterization: 6/10. I want to give this more, I really do. As I said above, the writers made sure to pay attention even to the most inconsequential characters, and write dialogue from their point of view. And I loved the impression I got that Omega is the most dangerous of the “bad batch” clones, leaving a trail of destruction everywhere she goes.
But unfortunately I didn’t get any sense of personality out of the rest of the main characters. Echo, Hunter, Crosshair, and Wrecker didn’t do or say anything that I haven’t seen a million times from cookie-cutter squads of marines or Navy SEALs or police officers a thousand times over. Even now I couldn’t list their names without looking it up, tell you which one was which without captions, or name a single character trait of any of them.
I can’t imagine, given the evidence of the rest of the episode, that the show as a whole neglected those four. Maybe it just didn’t have time in the chaos of the finale. But it’s not a good sign that the writers couldn’t give any example as to what the good guys would do when they retired at the end of the episode, serving up only a weak “whatever we want”.
Clarity: 6/10. While I was able to follow the basic plot pretty easily – Omega has been captured, the others need to get her out – some of the execution was confusing. I couldn’t tell the difference between the four adult members of Clone Force, and I had a lot of trouble following who was restrained and by how much during the breakout scene. there was still a lot I didn’t understand.
Closure: 4/10. To decide on the closure rating for this series, I basically have to make wild guesses as to what it was like. A lot depends on why Clone Force 99 has been fighting its battles, and why it decided now to stop.
Have they been fugitives from the Empire since the first episode? If so, they’re still fugitives now, so the story shouldn’t end – unless Dr. Hemlock was literally the only one looking for them, Javert-style, and now that he’s dead nobody else in the Empire cares, so they’re free.
Have they been going on missions based on finding people who need help and helping them? If so, nothing in this episode tells me that sense of justice and goodness is gone, and there’s no reason for them to stop.
Have they been going on missions based on orders from somebody they consider their commander? There was a brief mention of a squad member who died, so that could be it. But I didn’t get the impression that they resented being sent on those missions and that the death of that squad member was liberating.
Have they been working for the Empire throughout the series, and only once Omega was put in a vault (either at the beginning of the final season, or sometime in the last three episodes) did they decide to rebel? This makes the most sense given what we’ve seen; the final arc represents a permanent change in circumstances.
Has the entire series, all three seasons, revolved around rescuing Omega? That would make this episode closure of the highest order, but I definitely didn’t get that vibe.
I’m sure there are other possibilities too. But the problem is this gives a wide range of possible ratings, anywhere from 2 to 10.
In the end, I as always give the rating based on how this one episode feels in isolation. And this has middling, less-than-average closure. There is some – they’re retiring from fighting – but that comes from the last two scenes, with nothing in the rest of the episode to even hint in that direction.
Do I want to watch the series now?
I’ve never been much interested in Star Wars. I watched Andor because I was told it was very high quality – which it was – and I watched a few of the movies as a teenager, but I’ve never been drawn to this particular universe. Still, though, there’s nothing objectionable in the series, and it seems to be well made.
How can the clone of a male be female? Did they leave the Y chromosome out when performing the cloning? If so, I hope they duplicated the X chromosome, or she’ll have Turner Syndrome. Actually, do humans in the galaxy far, far away even have the same genetics we do?
This makes sense, as they’re clones. But why don’t all the other stormtroopers also know it’s what an escaping Omega would do? Aren’t they clones too? Does the Bad Batch have a unique shared psychiatry?
A funny joke, but two minutes ago Echo said explicitly he would do the same.
Can’t he leave the Zillo alone and recapture it later? There no advantage to going after it right now. Deal with the rebels first, then recapture the Zillo when you’re more organized.
Are there no more shuttles inside the base? Did Red, Blue, and Green take the last one? Maybe he really likes this one shuttle because it’s got seat warmers.
In fairness I can’t entirely blame the show for those last two. They’re staples of Star Wars design going back to Episode IV.
this was a gem, thank you