The final episode of the debut season of The Bad Batch arrives, and just like the previous two episodes, it’s an absolute cracker. In this second part of the finale, we rejoin Clone Force 99 as Tipoca City continues to sink, pummelled by the Imperial Star Destroyers hovering mere kilometers away in the Kamino rain. It’s the start of an action-packed episode that just like every episode before it contains a lot of heart, insightful character moments, pinpoint animation and gloriously evocative Star Wars music.
The added wrinkle is the presense of Crosshair, the estranged member of the batch now allied to the cause of the Empire. It’s his constant prodding and poking of Hunter that fuels the drama as at every perilous turn the viewer isn’t sure whether he’ll turn on his brothers, and neither are the characters. As the city is hammered, floors flood, blast doors close, and the struts under the ocean buckle and snap, sending the city to the base of the sea with the batch inside. We’re used to the ingenuity of the squad, covering each other and coming up with inventive ways to figure out problems and situations, and this is as dangerous a corner as they’ve ever been trapped in. One moment it’s Tech finding a route, then Omega with her knowledge of the city, while Crosshair snipes at Hunter, his doubts evident as his poker face falls. Wrecker sees it, he’s the first to say they’d have him back, but as the situation deteriorates and the batch end up in the room they were cloned, they learn not only is Omega older than the rest of them – presumably growing at a normal pace like Boba Fett – but also that there’s only one way off Tipoca City to the surface inside medical tubes, and Nala Se’s droid AZI-3 is their only hope.
That the batch get off the ocean floor is no surprise, although perhaps the entire crew surviving is, but at this stage that’s really not the point. Not only are we watching the establishment of the Empire and their infamous heel coming down on the heart of the galaxy but we’re also navigating the increasingly complicated relationships between the batch and their older sister. Omega has been a breath of fresh air to the franchise, a character who started as an innocent and who over 16 episodes developed, learned, observed and combined that into information that was of benefit to her brothers. She is protected and very much welcome within their ranks, and as the show has grown she’s become their conscience as well as a valuable member, and season two will surely continue that development.
There is a coda, after Crosshair refuses to stay with the batch as the Havoc Marauder blasts off Kamino. We see Nala Se arrive at an imposing Imperial base carved into the side of a mountain, her services now under the ownership of the Empire. We can only imagine that this story thread is the beginning of the decades-long path to Exegol and the return of Emperor Palpatine in The Rise of Skywalker, but that’s for another day. For now, we have a season of post-Order 66 stories and a group of new characters that have quickly become a part of the Star Wars fabric, and even though we have Star Wars Visions, The Book of Boba Fett, and quite possibly Obi-Wan Kenobi and Andor before then, season 2 can’t come quckly enough.
Read our previous reviews of The Bad Batch here:
