Hold onto your Lulas for The Bad Batch S3 premiere.
An emotionally strong start that raises questions about where the series will go.
The Short Take:
It didn’t take long to get back into the heartache with which we concluded last season. Moving at a quick pace in just three episodes, I’m excited and uncertain about what lies ahead.
[SPOILER WARNING: There will be spoilers for all of The Bad Batch to date — especially the first three episodes of Season 3 that just dropped on Disney+. There will also be references to the events of The Mandalorian Season 3.]
Image Credit: Gizmodo
The Long Take:
I had no idea that Lula, Omega’s stuffed tooka doll, would have this much of an emotional payoff. I just didn’t. I do have my own Lula plushie at home, and have always loved that the soft toy facilitated a deep connection between Omega and Wrecker when he gifted it to her. Though, incidentally, Wookieepedia lists her as a “co-owner.” As an adult who often buys stuffed toys for my kids but really for me too, that made me chuckle.
Even still, to my surprise, Lula has gone from a cherished yet very much in the background prop to an emotional pivot point for the series. And, in retrospect, that makes a lot of sense. Having almost always been there, Lula can reflect the hard-earned development and relationship building through three seasons with these characters, such that when we see that adorably droopy face sitting alone in the Marauder, hunched over like a dejected velveteen rabbit, it is an instant and ever so painful reminder that Omega is no longer there and that this family has been broken up by the Empire. I was, dear reader, gutted.
And rightly so. They lost Tech at the end of last season. Echo went his own way to help Rex. Hunter is running around the Galaxy taking uncharacteristic risks alongside Wrecker because he is desperate to find Omega. Meanwhile, Omega and Crosshair have been taken prisoner by Dr. Hemlock on Mt. Tantiss. They are a squad broken and scattered.
In these first three episodes of the new season, Lula emerges from the cuddly shadows as an emblem of the home that the members of Clone Force 99 had and lost at the end of Season 2. Omega desperately tries recall, regain, and retain a sense of home by making her own tooka out of the straw she finds in the lurca hound bedding. To her, making a replacement Lula is a way she can not only feel comforted, like she’s not alone in her “room” (more like cell), or entertained because she now has a toy to play with; it’s a way to recreate a semblance of the family and life from which she has been ripped away. Lula, after all, became Omega’s at the same time Wrecker made Omega her own room on the Marauder, cementing his (and by extension the rest of the Batch’s) acceptance of her as a part of their family and their home.
Image Credit: Slash Film
Lula serves as an external emblem of the Batch’s bonds as well. In Episode 2, “Paths Unknown,” the other young clones or “regs” as Hunter and Wrecker call them (voiced by young Boba Fett from the prequels, Daniel Logan, by the way!), see Lula on the Marauder — which they are about to HIJACK — and change their minds. The presence of Lula helps them see that despite their assumptions, Hunter and Wrecker really do care about Omega, in a way that even goes beyond “loyalty,” which is the term one of them initially uses to describe what to them is unfamiliar behavior for clones. And I don’t blame them necessarily. It sounds like they were raised as lab rats, barely survived the implosion of Dr. Hemlock’s last lab, and have been stranded on this planet of “slither vines.” Is this where I say that they seem like sarlaccs, but maybe a slightly different version that crossed over from The Last of Us? Someone who is an expert in the evolutionary biology of sarlaccs should enlighten me in the comments.
Image Credit: Screen Rant
These first three episodes spend a lot of time showing that clones can defy their original “design” to be the Empire’s cold and lonely soldiers (and I specify that because we obviously see clones looking out for each other in a band of brothers style in The Clone Wars series). They can look out for one another and care about one another like family even when the Empire does all it can to isolate and dehumanize them. The slither vine boys, as an example, are very skeptical of Hunter and Wrecker at first, but then they come around.
Similarly, the whole arc with the lurca hounds and Omega befriending Batcher features so many echoes (no pun intended) of isolation and rejection. Crosshair tries to wave off Omega, saying she should look out for herself and not worry about him, even going so far as to admit that at his first opportunity for escape he’s not going out of his way to take her with him. But Omega refuses. Meanwhile, Omega shows Batcher love and compassion, which makes her a powerful friend and ally. The Empire, however, through Hemlock, insists that this is weakness. Batcher becomes too domesticated and is no longer fit for duty, according to him. Omega then has to have a similar “Just go! Leave me here and save yourself!” moment with Batcher. So all these characters are having to navigate connection, isolation, and survival. Batcher really is a metaphor for Omega. She may be more “domesticated” than the average clone, but that has only made her stronger, like it is revealed Batcher is.
Image Credit: Wookieepedia
There are few places more isolating than prison, and I really appreciated the invocation of the prison story genre in these first few episodes. To see Omega going through the motions of a soul-crushing prison routine: wake up to a monotone greeting from Emerie about all the work to be done, collect all the blood samples, complete chores in the lab with Nala Se, walk by Crosshair in the hallway without being able to talk to him, and then at night tend to the lurca hounds while little by little stashing away straw so she can make a doll is extra devastating. When I was chatting with
about this, he made a really smart connection to the first episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi, in which we find Obi-Wan numbingly repeating the same mundane tasks daily as a means of survival.But how do we reasonably make a prison Star Wars movie with a child? This isn’t exactly “One Way Out” in Andor, despite my saying at the end of last season that this series as gotten darker and darker with each season. One of the broader challenges of writing Omega as a character is that she may be gifted physically and mentally, some might even say enhanced, and, in certain respects, wise beyond her years — and YET, she is still a child. So the series constantly has to remind us of that to keep her grounded, believable, and relatable. I thought the writers adapted her prison story well in that context. They still have her scratching the wall to mark the days that pass. They have her sneak away contraband in her lunch box, but to make a replacement tooka doll rather than cigarettes. To see her incrementally using a spoon to dig an escape hole in the wall may have been too Shawshank.
Omega isn’t the only one to have lost her home, though, and these first three episodes do a fairly good job of keeping Omega’s and Clone Force 99’s story tied to the bigger story of the Clones post-Order 66. The Batch have for some time now, of course, been representative of all the Clones in the Galaxy who do not have a home. None of them have a place to go or call their own now that they have become obsolete, replaced by storm troopers. Last season we saw Senator Chuchi standing up for them and trying to advocate for their rights in an Empire that has left them behind in favor of a newer, shinier army. And in Kenobi, we see a live action version of an unhoused clone, sitting in the streets of Daiyu with nowhere to go. And so, in thinking about what these three episodes might mean for the resolution of this season and the series, it seems as though whatever lies ahead has to give us some closure on what exactly happened to the Clones during this period. And not just to pragmatically shade in canon so that we have an explanation as to why they aren’t in the Original Trilogy, but to complete the journey they have been on since The Clone Wars series, through the prequel films, and now through this series.
Image Credit: IGN
I’m going to be honest, I have no idea what that could look like. Will all the characters we know and love meet a novel yet tragic end, in the style of Rogue One? Will Rex and Echo’s crusade converge with Clone Force 99 and all rescued Clones retire peacefully on Pabu, which essentially becomes their adoptive planet? We hear reference to the safe haven in the premiere when Hunter tells the three young slither vine clones that they know a place that is safe and where people will take care of them. Will that eventually become true on a larger scale? Or will Omega be the lone survivor, preserving the memory and carrying on the legacy of her brothers in a new, future series?
Regardless of where the series finale goes, I am struck by just how fast the season has gone by, plot-wise. It already feels like we are on the verge of Omega and Crosshair reuniting with Wrecker and Hunter, in as few as an episode or two from now. I thought we would be midseason before Omega’s escape or Hunter closing in on her location. I could still be wrong about that and we might be in for a slew of side quests that keep them apart from one another longer. We know from the trailer that Fennec Shand and Cad Bane reappear. It stands to reason that this is because Hemlock now knows Omega’s true value as the only clone to maintain an uncompromised “M count.” (I read this as midi-chlorians, though I appreciate the ambiguity to keep those who prefer not to acknowledge their existence off our backs). On the one hand, this is promising because it clears the runway for where this season can go before the end. The uncertainty I just expressed feels exciting.
I have felt this surprise and excitement at the pacing of a season of Star Wars before, though. The Mandalorian Season 3 had a similar effect on me early on when I said, “Hold on, we’ve already made it to the Mines of Mandalore?” But, this early resolution that clearly conveyed “the arc of this season isn’t about what you thought it was going to be about” gave way to numerous pacing issues and frankly bizarre turns (waves at Jack Black and Lizzo — I still love you!) that incurred a lot of confusion and criticism. (And that’s coming from someone who enjoyed Season 3 more than most!) So part of me is slightly concerned for this third and last season of The Bad Batch.
In fact, when I think back to my one and only criticism of these first three episodes, it’s that we kind of retread familiar plot territory with technically a new reason overlayed onto it. Before, Hemlock wanted to capture Omega because he wanted to use her as leverage to force Nala Se’s elegant test tube holding hands. Omega is on the run and then finally captured. By the end of S3E3 “Shadows of Tantiss,” we’ve reset this plot because now that Hemlock knows how special Omega is genetically speaking, he will stop at nothing to bring her back to the lab so he can live out his dream of claiming glory as Palpatine’s premiere scientist. The return of Fennec and Cad Bane to chase down Omega — as happy as I will be to see them again — feels repetitive, even if the motivation is new.
That feeling of returning to where we’ve been before may be our own fault, though. Perhaps we all just theorized too correctly too soon from the start, presuming we knew where this was all going. Season 3 of The Mandalorian and Season 3 of The Bad Batch have a consequential “canon connection,” to borrow a phrase from
, that we get confirmation of here: Project Necromancer. This, of course, is the plan that Moff Gideon reveals at the end of Season 3 (Chapter 23 to be exact): that he is trying to produce Force sensitive clones. In the The Bad Batch episodes, we get an obvious tease from Nala Se (“Project…” followed by a well-timed interruption) that is said in full in a conversation between Palpatine and Hemlock. Is the road to The Rise of Skywalker paved in captive Grogus? I really want to know what was behind that secret lab door. Fans have been speculating about all this since the first season of The Bad Batch. So again, I’m of two minds: it’s thrilling to finally get confirmation of these theories, but there’s also a deflated feeling to it all being inevitable.Image Credit: StarWars.com
All that said, I keep the faith and then some. I’d like to think that the final season of a series would intrinsically demand a much clearer and cleaner season arc. And it is probably naive of me to rule out any and all surprises for the remaining 12 episodes, especially where the implications and tie-ins to the rest of Star Wars canon may be concerned. For now, I will simply squeeze my Lula tight and focus on the captivating family story this series has at its center.
It's way too easier to steal the Marauder. You'd think the Bad Batch would have learned their lesson after the Oliver Twist in Space two-parter in season 2.