The Short Take:
With a macabre beauty rivaled only by the sinking of the Titanic, the Season 1 Finale of THE BAD BATCH wisely shows restraint, focusing on what really matters: the members of the Bad Batch reckoning with their complicated past while fighting for their lives. Unfortunately, we have to trade that in for the type of shocking revelations some viewers may have expected.
The Long Take:
[SPOILERS will be floating around this review like debris in the oceans of Kamino.]
Image Credit: The Ringer (a great website)
Kamino became a character unto itself in this episode. Having just come from watching Marvel’s What if…? with very mixed feelings about the animation style, I can unequivocally say that the artistry of this episode’s tragic vistas at times overshadowed the action, which was also superb. Filoni was so smart to intercut the scenes in which Crosshair’s relationship with the rest of the Bad Batch crumbles with images of Kamino exploding and breaking apart. Despite Hunter’s olive branching (though an apology would have been better), Crosshair digs his heels in and says he will not only stay with the Empire but will wait on Kamino for someone from the Empire to pick him up. A questionable decision, to say the least. Meanwhile, the breaking and sinking of huge pieces of Kamino’s facilities created the grandest sense of scale. How can such a sorrowful apocalypse, how can total destruction look so breathtaking, I wondered. I know that a Titanic comparison may invite some gaudy memes (I’m already thinking of Omega hanging onto debris like Kate Winslet), but this sense of dread filled every frame. Even though my rational brain assumed that all the characters would make it out alive because this is a Star Wars animated series — and there are children watching this, you monsters — I still felt the “there’s no way out” hopelessness on behalf of our characters. And that’s impressive. The drama of all these characters just trying to survive — despite it looking like they were goners multiple times — was stressful yet engrossing; I couldn’t look away.
I do confess that I thought AZ was going to eat it for a minute there. I had a whole thematic narrative unraveling in my head in real time: oh, this makes sense because he’s the last physical piece of Omega’s life on Kamino, so he’s got to sink and fall away too. But no, the selfless, chirpy droid will live to see another day. This outcome reminds me that no Star Wars character can actually shake their past. AZ will be a constant reminder, a relic of life in the Kamino lab.
And, oh, is that worth it because what is easily the best moment of the episode happens because AZ must live. Crosshair silently shoots a grappling hook into the water to pull a powered down AZ and a nearly drowned Omega to the surface. This subtext in which Crosshair’s actions clearly contradict his words made for such elegant and powerful storytelling. I’d actually say all the quiet exchanges of looks and conflicted actions were much stronger and more effective than the dialogue in this episode. I could infer an internal monologue for each character and how they all just yearn for things to be back to where they were. But, as Crosshair says, they’ve all made their choices and they’ve diverged paths in a way that, at least right now, or at least to him, cannot be undone. He says that he and Omega are “even” now, as if to imply that he only saved her life out of a life debt type sense of obligation, but I know in my heart that he cares about her.
Fellowship and loyalty are classic themes central to Star Wars storytelling, of course. The idea that a bonded group should stick together and look out for one another despite differences in perspective persists in many corners of the Galaxy. Or, at the very least, that tragedy strikes when characters who care about one another fall on different sides. The fundamental ideological differences between Crosshair and Hunter remind me of Kylo Ren and Rey, who clearly have a magnetic pull towards one another, but ultimately cannot reconcile their different perspectives on light, dark, right, wrong, and how to run the Galaxy. And I’ve seen several memes on Twitter comparing Crosshair and Hunter to Anakin and Obiwan in The Revenge of the Sith. In Han Solo’s arc in the original trilogy, he starts out as a character looking out for number one and can’t understand why Luke and Leia would join the Rebellion, but eventually turns around and comes back to help them. So perhaps there’s hope for Crosshair yet? We definitely see hesitation when he looks back at everyone else boarding The Marauder.
There’s something so believable about these characters as a family who can simultaneously stare each other down as enemies and save each others’ lives. And that’s not limited to the tension with Crosshair. I found Omega’s foolhardy attempt to save AZ by herself completely believable because, as I mentioned last week, we’ve spent so much time with her in other situations with other characters. I know some fans grew tired of Omega always wanting to save everybody, but, to me, those other “side quests” gave the moment she shatters her own glass tube and swims deep into the ocean (for a droid who seemed perfectly happy to “prioritize” her safety over his) so much more heft. She’s not just doing it because that’s a thing that heroes often do in ocean escape situations; she’s doing it because it’s a pillar of her character. (Ok, I’m climbing down from my filler discourse soap box again.)
My only quibble overall — and maybe I shouldn’t say quibble because the more I think about it, the more gaping a hole in this episode’s armor it seems — is that the few times when it might have made sense to convey new information, the episode repeated what we already knew. Omega talks about how Crosshair doesn’t have an inhibitor chip (even though he still cradled his head in pain….can we read into that at all?!) there’s kind of a rehashing of the arguments made in the previous episode, especially between Crosshair and Hunter. And AZ retells the story of the Bad Batch’s birth and tells them that Omega is actually older than the rest. I would have been fine with just a disaster film bottleneck episode — a pressure cooker that forces Crosshair and the rest of the Batch to work out their issues. But it just strikes me as odd that we got so many repeat points from the previous episode. Was Dave Filoni worried we hadn’t picked up what he was putting down?
Similarly, the big cliffhanger scene with Nala Se at the end just repeated what we already knew. Rampart saying she was of value to the Empire last week already implied that she would be involved in some kind of sinister experimentation.
On the other hand, seeing this new facility does cement my Grogu experimentation theory from last week. The uniform looks exactly the same as the one worn by Dr. Pershing in The Mandalorian. And the fact that we end with Nala Se’s indentured servitude means that the Empire dabbling in its own cloning isn’t just something that’s going to fade into the background. Nala Se and the empire’s new cloning program will feature prominently in Season 2. My only complaint? The scene would have been better as a post-credits stinger because it looks more to the future. (Oh wait, this isn’t a Marvel movie. I’ve been brainwashed! SEND HELP!) I felt distracted from the epic tragedy of the Bad Batch. And if this episode told us anything, it’s that this has been a story about these six characters above all else.
To think that this show took a group of side characters, added a completely new character in Omega, and made them all feel very dear and important is quite a narrative feat. I walk away from this first season a happy Star Wars fan, and can’t wait until the second season.