Star Wars: The Bad Batch Season 1 Ending Was Too Clone Wars To Be Great

One of the biggest problems of the first season of Star Wars: The Bad Lot is that it looks a lot The Clone Wars‘ the last. Bad batch, Disney Plus’s first new animated series Star Wars, stands out on its own, taking advantage of a much smaller cast of characters and a dramatic change in status quo to give it a fresh start and tell a unique story that newcomers they can go on. It’s just that most of what made that story resonate was related to the previous show.

This may ultimately be the point: One of the reasons Disney continues to create new Star Wars content is to steer audiences toward its old Star Wars content. In this way, new Bad batch fans could become Clone wars fans, and maybe even Rebels fans, etc. In his face, The bad lotThe first season was an occasionally dark but mostly light adventure about a gang of misfits pushed to the seedier side of the Galaxy. Cleverly interwoven throughout that adventure were elaborations on great ideas from other Star Wars stories, but there were few ideas that The bad lot could call his own. In its first year, the series was about narrative transition.

That is not necessarily a defect. Star Wars: The Bad Lot It ended its first season by literally blowing up the last significant milestone in the history of the prequel trilogy, and completely immersing its clone trooper protagonists in the dark age immediately preceding the original trilogy. In the two-part season finale, “Return to Kamino” and “Kamino Lost,” the namesake Bad Batch returns to the facility on the stormy planet of Kamino, where clone troopers are trained and trained. Their daring rescue mission goes awry, as Vice Admiral Rampart blows the facility to pieces from an orbiting Star Destroyer, and the newly formed Galactic Empire tightens its grip on what was formerly known as The Republic.

In the staging of an ending that is decidedly about a sudden and violent transition, the dual purpose of The bad lot they intersect perfectly. His main story is about his Clone misfits: the bruiser Wrecker, the leader Hunter, the geek Tech, the cipher Echo, trying to confront and save his wayward brother, the sniper Crosshair, who willingly joined the Empire, despite the fact that it is free of the inhibitor chip that has forced most of the Clones to line up. Meanwhile, deep down, a meta-story unfolds that extends what came before in The Clone Wars: Illustrates how the Empire was not an overnight creation, but a gradual decline, the consequence of a long war in which many people forgot their reason for fighting.

The metahistory is where The bad lotThe most interesting potential lies in, but it’s also the biggest possible stumbling block of season 1, thanks to its eventual revelations about Batch’s boyhood partner Omega. Omega is revealed to be, like Boba Fett, an unmodified clone of Jango Fett, allowed to grow at a more regular rate than usual forced-aged soldiers, and is not bred for combat. Through Omega, The bad lot can potentially grow to maturity and present a new angle on The Clone Wars’ fascination with nature, nurture and personality in this dark age for the galaxy. It is specially intended as a contrast to the way Boba Fett turns out, as Jango Fett’s “son”, the source material of the clones’ DNA. As a singular work, The bad lot Going in that direction is exciting, but one of the many Star Wars projects, it’s daunting to consider that in keeping with the series’ usual obsessions of making a large galaxy as small as possible, all current Star Wars television shows and futures are connected to Boba. Fett somehow.

At worst, the new era of Star Wars canon can seem like a game of incrementalism, where entire projects are limited to narrow periods and places in canon. This can work and has: The Clone WarsAfter all, it produced over a hundred episodes of a conflict that the movies hardly saw fit to portray. At other times, however, limitations make Star Wars feel smaller, rather than bigger, much like how The bad lot seems to commit to the same general ideas that The Clone Wars, only with a warmer found family story added.

At the same time, the animated side of Star Wars tends to start the series off frivolously and let them grow in maturity as they go, until they become thoughtful examinations of the franchise’s subtext in gestalt. There is no reason not to expect the same from future episodes of The bad lot. After all, the line between the end of one era and the beginning of another is not as clear-cut as we would like, but flying one with a Star Destroyer is a good letter of intent.

Season 1 of The Bad Batch airs in its entirety on Disney Plus.

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