The Bad Batch is back for one more season on Disney +, completing the sweeping, tragic story of what became of all of the clones in Star Wars after the Galactic Empire arose and replaced them all with conscripted, infamously bad-at-aiming stormtroopers. But because that’s such a huge story to tell, the opening half of season 3 seems to be mostly focused on setting up a grand finale without tipping its hand too much about the details.
Problem is, what I’ve seen of season 3 so far is mostly setup with little payoff. The first eight episodes dawdle when it seems like they should be ramping up to an action-filled crescendo. One of The Bad Batch’s strengths is the way it adds layers of detail to what we know of Star Wars lore, and season 3 does this, too – sometimes at the expense of moving the story along.
Say what you will about the Disney era of Star Wars, one thing current-day Lucasfilm has been really good at is filling out what we know about major points on the canon timeline. Consider Order 66: There was a time when all we knew about Chancellor Palpatine’s secret plan to eliminate the Jedi came from Revenge of the Sith. But now flashbacks in a handful of projects (including The Bad Batch) have given us a much broader understanding of what happened when the Grand Army of the Republic’s clone troopers turned on their lightsaber-wielding generals.
The real value in what I’ve seen of The Bad Batch season 3 is how, once again, Lucasfilm is filling in the blanks on another important piece of Star Wars lore: “Somehow, Palpatine returned.” Possibly one of the lamest lines in The Rise of Skywalker, but the nuts and bolts of how the Dark Lord of the Sith rose from the dead and assumed power a second time are laid out in The Bad Batch season 3. This is a spoiler-free review, so I’ll spare you the details, but the dark work the Empire is doing behind the scenes in this series is all in service of Sheev Palpatine’s master plan to rule the entire galaxy for as long as possible.
As it did in season 2, The Bad Batch continues to elevate Lucasfilm’s animation house style. I remember when The Clone Wars premiered in 2008: When I saw the animation, right away I didn’t love it. But I sure do now. Back then, the way the characters moved seemed clunky and robotic (even though some of them were actual droids). Some 16 years later, those movements are smooth and fluid, and the backgrounds and environments are vibrant and full of detail. It’s been really fun to see the style grow and develop and get better and better over the years. It’s never looked better than it does at the end of The Bad Batch’s run, and I can’t wait to see where they take it next.
So lots of good lore info in season 3, animation looks fantastic – those are some positives. What about the negatives? First, we have to talk about all this setup We get a lot of info about cloning and how it’s being used, we get a lot of clear examples of the Empire’s escalating cruelty, especially in the way it treats the clones, we get to spend a lot more time with Crosshair, who seems to be building a relationship with Omega. All important for world-building, character development, and plot advancement but… I’ve already said it before: I’m assuming the best of season 3 is yet to come. That includes answers to all of your biggest questions about the final season and the way it’s been marketed. Is this truly the end of the clones’ story? We still don’t know. Did Tech survive his big fall in the season 2 finale? We still don’t know. How is Asajj Ventress even alive? We still don’t know.
If Lucasfilm expects to deal an emotional gut-punch by bringing Tech back, that’s the kind of revelation they’re gonna save for the back half of the season. As for Ventress, Count Dooku’s former apprentice and Clone Wars’ villain dies in the canon novel Dark Disciple, leading fans to wonder how and why she would appear in The Bad Batch, which takes place years later on the timeline. She’s out there somewhere – just not in the first eight episodes, which deal mainly with Omega’s captivity within the Imperial cloning project on an undisclosed planet. It’s during all of this that Palpatine himself pays a visit to the secret facility and we learn that he’s obsessed with replicating subjects with “M-counts,” which Star Wars fans will know as a reference to midichlorians. This supports a lot of what we know about Emperor Palpatine sinking a ton of resources into this effort that eventually involves Grogu from The Mandalorian and even indirectly leads to the birth of his granddaughter, Rey. All cool connecting threads, sure, but the main story and character seem to tread water a bit as we get through all of that. Normally, I’m the annoying type of Star Wars fans who relentlessly tracks the canon and obsesses over details like this, but even I found the episodes to drag on a little as a result.
At the outset of season 3, the squad is split up and in survival mode, spending several episodes just trying to reunite. The structure follows the formula established in previous seasons: Smaller three-episode arcs move the story along while a much larger arc plays out in the background and The Bad Batch slowly begin to understand that their clone brothers and sisters may not have much of a place in the new Empire.
Omega remains central to the plans of The Bad Batch as a squad, but she also emerges as a crucial piece of Palpatine’s whole cloning gambit for pretty spoilery reasons we won’t get into here. As a full-blown member of The Bad Batch, each squad member can rely on Omega in mission situations, which has been a fun bit of development for the character, not dissimilar to the way we watched Ahsoka Tano grow in power and ability across the span of The Clone Wars. We’ve obviously gotten to spend much more time with Ahsoka, and perhaps some day we’ll be able to say the same thing about Omega. But for now, she seems like she’s on a similar trajectory as a character, in more ways than one.
All the time spent with Crosshair this season makes it obvious he’s dealing with the fallout from his decision to betray his brothers and join the Empire. The Empire, he came to understand, totally sucks, and even though The Bad Batch is at first reluctant to welcome him back into the squad, Crosshair is able to work through some of his guilt and trauma by way of sniping and exploding some stormtroopers. He’s stuck in the same facility as Omega as the season opens, and it’s fun to watch them work together: Crosshair has to drop his tough guy act and accept that Omega is just as capable as any of the clones regardless of her age.
Another bright spot to note here is an easy one: Dee Bradley Baker’s performance as The Bad Batch and any other male clone in the series. Giving a unique voice to all these different copies of the same guy is such an impressive feat, especially when Crosshair, Hunter, Wrecker, and Echo are each off on their own mission, as they are at the start of season 3. Michelle Ang also delivers a memorable performance as Omega, who I’m truly hoping to see continue after The Bad Batch wraps up as a series later this spring.
