After how things ended with The Clone Wars final season it’s fair to say my excitement for this show shot through the roof. Seriously, the final four episodes of Season 7 of Clone Wars are easily the best thing Star Wars has produced in the last twenty years (we’ll just ignore the awful middle arc of that season) and the starting arc that introduced the Bad Batch to us was entertaining enough that the idea of a story with those characters wasn’t unappealing. Also, the time period and surrounding story we were promised for The Bad Batch sounded so interesting and full of potential for rich and impactful stories. What we ended up getting wasn’t quite that, but it was still a very pleasant watch.
For starters I can’t gush over the animation quality of the show enough, the number of times you could pause the show and the frame would be good enough to hang up as art was unreal, some of the wide shots, specifically of terrain or of spaceships in flight, were gorgeous and looked as if they were plucked from one of the films. This quality improvement wasn’t solely contained to the backgrounds, the characters too had more detail and style to them than the characters in The Clone Wars, while still being faithful to that style of animation, it’s a visual delight that any lover of animation will enjoy purely based on how it looks.
The main plot of the show is where it shines, this back-and-forth between The Bad Batch and their abandoned member, Crosshair. What Filoni and his team are able to do with the batch, Crosshair and throwing Omega into the mix, is impressive. It sets up a really fascinating dynamic, especially with the reveal in the second last episode *spoilers*, that Crosshair was acting of his own volition, at least for part of the time he was with the Empire. It’s quite nice storytelling because you can now view the whole season slightly differently, with the knowledge that Crosshair viewed it as his family abandoning him and not attempting to come back and rescue him. With the ending as well, I thought it was thoroughly refreshing to have Crosshair stay true to what he believed in and not go and join the bad batch immediately, it gives room for the story to grow in different directions than immediately wrapping it up with a nice bow.
However, the show struggles where most of the Filoni Star Wars shows, specifically the first seasons of said shows, struggle – in the middle sections of the show. To classify the middle chunk of the show as filler would feel too extreme for this show as it’s not… but it kind of is. For starters, for the majority of the episodes a very similar structure is followed: The Bad Batch arrive somewhere to do something to earn money, Hunter doesn’t want Omega on the trip so tries to get her to stay away from the action but in the end the Bad Batch run into trouble and Omega comes to the rescue. Now these episodes are by no means bad, they’re super fun, short watches but it gets a little jarring when most of the series is filled with episodes that function like this. Anytime an episode contained a concurrent story with Crosshair, or even the politics of Kamino, I was far most invested as this was moving the central storyline forward. Granted there were some benefits to it, we did get some breadcrumbs of how the Empire was phasing out clones to favour stormtroopers, something that I thought was initially going to be the central plot of the show, however this tended to happen in the storylines with Crosshair and not the batch themselves.
It’s disappointing as the batch themselves are very underutilised, in their own show. The most egregious example of this is Echo. I don’t know if the writers decided to sideline him since he’d had some screen tIt’s disappointing as the batch themselves are very underutilised, in their own show. The most egregious example of this is Echo. I don’t know if the writers decided to side-line him since he’d had some screen time in The Clone Wars, but the lack of his character was incredibly jarring, you’re lucky if he had more than a few lines per episode. He essentially functioned as a droid for the duration of the show and sadly wasn’t as fun as some of the iconic droids that we’ve seen in Star Wars. It’s upsetting as he was one of the few developed clones to come out of the previous show, so to see him completely unused in the show was a bizarre choice. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get much better with the rest, Tech essentially functions like you’d expect him to by his name, as the team hacker person and Wrecker again is aptly named for what he does in the show, he likes to destroy stuff. Both these characters do get there moments though, especially Wrecker, he gets some nice development with Omega. Speaking of Omega, this feels like Omega and Hunter’s show and I’m not mad at that, they’re both fun and engaging on screen, specifically Omega though, she’s just a brilliant addition to the Star Wars universe, both in terms of her story and her character, she was a great balance to the batch, and I loved the relationship she had with both main and side characters. It just, as I mentioned previously, felt a little hollow in the episodes that weren’t plot focused, very paint by numbers, yet still an enjoyable painting.
While it’s not the most amazing animated show in the world, for a fan of Star Wars I do recommend the show, for its stunning animation, for the voice talent, Dee Bradley Baker deserves an Emmy for his work in this, it’s seriously impressive, for the engaging main plotline and for the promise of an interesting future. It may not be the best thing Disney’s produced for Star Wars but it’s easily the most consistent and an easy, fun watch.
★★★1/2
