The Bad Batch S2 Ep. 14 marks my own tipping point with a character.

Plus some predictions as we look to the finale.

The Short Take:

Episode 14 makes me feel like we’re on the precipice of something huge for next week’s finale. A certain character’s stock goes way up in my estimation. 

Image Credit: Star Wars News Net

[SPOILER ALERT: A distress signal will be futile if you proceed without having seen the episode.]

The Long Take:

*loudspeaker static* Attention, everyone: Crosshair is my guy now. He may have just surpassed all the other non-Omega Bad Batchers. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it felt good to root for him in this episode.

If anyone were to ask me to rank all the members of The Bad Batch (past and present), my answer would fluctuate depending on the time. I often say Tech is my personal favorite (see my review of “Faster”). Lately, I might be more inclined to say that Omega is the most complex, compelling, and generally awesome character and therefore my favorite. Wrecker is so lovable and Hunter is so cool. Echo is…fine. Maybe better than fine now that he’s gotten more to do, striking out on his own to join Rex and fight the good fight.

Crosshair would have always been at the bottom of my list. 

Part of that is just my bias as a fan — in any Star Wars story, I’m going to gravitate towards the good guys. 90% of my Funko Pops are light side characters; I only have an odd Darth Vader here or a Moff Gideon or Thrawn there. And while Crosshair’s breakup with his squad broke my heart at the end of Season 1 of The Bad Batch, Crosshair himself was a little too dark, a little too brooding, and too on the wrong side of Galactic history for me. 

Until now. This episode made me feel so much empathy for Crosshair because he very quietly — almost invisibly — protects his former squad mates from Doctor Hemlock, enduring intense torture over what seems like many days. And then, when he finally has a chance to escape, he doesn’t prioritize his own escape. He first tries to send out a coded warning to the others: “Plan 88 — The Seeker.” As far as I can tell, this hasn’t been uttered in any previous episode, but my best guess is that 88 is right before 99, as if it’s hiding behind Clone Force 99? (I suppose that’s a stretch.) “Seeker” at least more clearly refers to someone looking for them, which means that the squad must go into hiding to stay safe. 

Image Credit: StarWars.com

Right before he gets interrupted, I could hear Crosshair start to say something over the comms about Omega. And in general, I got the impression that he was mostly worried about Omega, who Hemlock calls the “rogue clone.” As a reminder, Hemlock, in a previous episode, found out from Kaminoan Prime Minister Lama Su that aquiring Omega was the only way to coerce clone scientist Nala Se into conducting research for the Empire. For some reason, Crosshair’s steadfastness in not giving up The Batch specifically for Omega warms my heart even more because the last time Crosshair saw Omega, she was trying to tell him that “You’re still their brother, Crosshair. You’re my brother too.” It’s nice to think that those words stuck with Crosshair more than they seemed to at the time. I’m also just a sucker for characters that try really hard to project a gruff exterior but actually do care on the inside. (Ahem! Wolverine. Ahem! Joel from The Last of Us. Ahem! Harrison Ford. What?) It’ll get me every time. 

Crosshair’s noble self-sacrifice makes the moment when the rest of the squad learn of his distress signal all the more painful, with a brick ton of dramatic irony falling down on me as Hunter very reasonably questions whether or not Crosshair’s message is a trap. (Cue Admiral Ackbar.) They have no reason to trust him, but I, as the viewer, have just seen evidence to the contrary. That’s pretty tough to take. 

Image Credit: Star Wars News Net

It looks like Crosshair’s situation may be tough to take for the female clone scientist too. We spend a lot of time watching her squirm or look unsure when her boss, Doctor Hemlock, gives a harsh command. There are a couple moments when it almost seems like she’s trying to help Crosshair, but not so much that she’ll get caught or accused of sympathizing. When she tells him, for example, that he shouldn’t try to endure the torture because there’s no way out, she’s giving bad advice, but the tone makes it sound like it’s coming from a genuine place of care. So maybe Crosshair’s attempt to protect Omega will ultimately convince her to betray Hemlock?

After filing my Mando review for the week, I couldn’t wait any longer and had to listen to Rebel Base Card’s “Breakfast Pack” Q & A for the week. In that episode, the Gregs pondered why Crosshair only stunned Emerie Karr when he’s basically killed everyone else without breaking a sweat. I agree with them that it’s very likely that Karr, who speaks with an accent eerily similar to Omega’s, could be another clone of Omega, or at least a clone that uses Omega’s DNA as a baseline. The one observation I’ll add to this ongoing conversation is that the huge red tinted goggles that Emerie wears may just be there to obscure her face just enough so we won’t realize until later that she’s basically an aged up Omega. I think it’s very possible that Crosshair recognizes Emerie as an Omega clone and as such does not want to hurt her more than he has to.

Image Credit: Star Wars News Net

Doctor Hemlock, on the other hand, will show no such restraint if he discovers his own underling has betrayed him. I’ve found Hemlock to be pretty terrifying so far; I’d say that, in terms of perverse delight in suffering, he’s potential competition for Doctor Gorst, our child death scream torturer from Andor. His emergence from the yellow gas and subsequent exposition that he has developed an immunity to his pet toxin gave me the shivers. His name may be a little heavy-handed at first blush, as Hemlock is a highly poisonous plant that attacks the central nervous system until the victim suffocates. This may be how Doctor Hemlock’s toxic gas works. 

The most famous case of hemlock poisoning, however, may add enough complexity to the reference. Socrates died by drinking a hemlock tea; the ancient Greeks forced him to choose: deny his democratic, humanist ideals publicly or receive a death sentence. I can certainly see Crosshair being the Socrates figure here, unwilling to budge and accepting of his own death to maintain his integrity. I’m not sure how, but Doctor Hemlock is bad news for Crosshair. Could it be that he doesn’t make it out of the season, but does enough in these final episodes to redeem himself posthumously? Before I might not have cared as much, but now I’m very worried.

I appreciated how this episode brought together the three big storylines from this season: Crosshair becoming more and more disillusioned with The Empire, The Bad Batch trying to decide what kind of life to live, and Echo/Rex/Senator Chuchi fighting and advocating for clone rights. It seems inevitable that they will all converge at Mount Tantiss during the two-part finale next week. 

Could there be a subtextual link between Bad Batch and Mando next week as well? What I mean is, what if what goes down on Mount Tantiss in the Bad Batch finale drops at the same time we see Doctor Pershing or Moff Gideon continuing cloning experiments in The Mandalorian? That would be very cool, and, selfishly, would make me feel like the doubling up of two Star Wars shows at once was really worth all the (albeit joyful) juggling. At the very least the Bad Batch finale could provide some new information or context for Gideon and by extension the Empire’s agenda in The Mandalorian. 

[MILD SPOILERS for The Mandalorian Season 3 to date. Skip the following paragraph if you aren’t caught up.]

Image Credit: Vulture

There’s precedent for this on a smaller scale within The Mandalorian, as we have already seen the mountain peak poking out into Coruscant in both the Prequel Era flashback to Order 66 this week and the present timeline Amnesty Program plot from last week. Seeing the mostly obscured peak now and back then shows how it has not changed, at least visually; the planet and the Galaxy built up around it, however, has changed in so many ways. Could we see the same thing, but with the Empire’s cloning program? I hope we do. 

I’d like to circle back to Crosshair as we look towards the finale, as he made such an impression for me in this episode. There have been some complaints that Crosshair has not appeared in enough of Season 2, only popping in for an episode here and there. We have gone several consecutive episodes without seeing him at all, as he has only appeared in Episode 3: “The Solitary Clone,” Episode 12: “The Outpost,” and now this week’s Episode 14: “The Tipping Point.”

Each of these has been a knockout episode almost entirely focused on him, though. He has had the most compact yet the most potent arc this season, going from an unflinching “good soldiers follow orders” attitude in Season 1 to utter loneliness and under-appreciation in “The Solitary Clone,” followed by a sense of injustice and revenge in “The Outpost,” and finally culminating in outright defiance of The Empire in “The Tipping Point.” Along the way, he has had meaningful interactions with other clones like Cody and Mayday. Those have led him to his tipping point. We shall soon see what spills thereafter.