The Bad Batch S3E10 & 11 tap into the darkest timeline.
I revisit the Prequels and Alan Watts’ Zen Buddhism.
The Short Take:
This eventful two-parter takes a grim turn. Even though I wouldn’t say any of the events here shocked me, they still piled onto my heart like a ton of bricks.
[SPOILER ALERT: Catch up quickly, because spoilers abound!]
The Long Take:
To begin, I invoke Master Kenobi: I have seen... an episode of The Bad Batch... of them…tormenting younglings.”
They went there. They came for the younglings. And I was completely blindsided emotionally.
And this is in spite of seeing something like this (but not quite like this) coming. Back at the beginning of the season, when Hemlock first shows The Emperor what he refers to as “the vault” — but, very deliberately, the episode doesn’t show us — I joked that perhaps there were a bunch of Grogus in captivity. And while not a baby Yoda was to be seen here, I wasn’t too far off from the idea. When the doors of the vault open, we discover a very Stranger Things-seque tableu: children joylessly playing at large round tables in a drab, metallic room.
Image Credit: StarWars.com
All of the “specimens” in the vault are alien species. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I didn’t notice any humans at all. Is this purposeful, either by the show or the Empire? Perhaps it is easier for Hemlock and the Empire to experiment on alien species because they can feel more detached from them?
Alien or not, little ones with a natural aptitude for The Force have been a source of trauma ever since I saw Revenge of the Sith in theaters in 2005. Having coo-ed at them as they precociously engaged with Master Yoda in Attack of the Clones, I was extra primed for the gut punch that was a recently fallen Anakin igniting his lightsaber in front of a small crowd of innocent children.
You can call child endangerment a cheap shot, but it works.
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While no children were involved in Andor, the Disney+ series instilled a similar sense of dark, bleak, “this is humanity at its lowest” type cruelty. From the sinister design of the prison on Narkina 5 to the proprietary blend of torture employed by the ISB (especially on Bix), I constantly had this feeling that Star Wars had reached deeper into the darkness than it ever had before.
When watching these two episodes of The Bad Batch, I experienced a combination of the feelings I had during both Revenge of the Sith and Andor. A feeling of bearing witness to the unspeakable. Hemlock keeps children prisoner and subjects them to testing against their will, and all they want to do is go home to their families. I don’t even want to pull the parent card here. Just as a human with a beating heart, I could barely handle this.
The exposition within Episode 10 made me embarrassed that I hadn’t really thought through the very practical reasoning for all this literal kidnapping: that The Empire would want to target Force sensitive children specifically not only because they were easier to coerce or manipulate, but because new children being born with The Force were…the only ones left. When Hemlock says that there aren’t many adults with Force powers around, my brain very quickly completed that sentence with, “Because the Empire exterminated (nearly) all of them.” I’m not sure this sunk in when I originally watched the Prequel films (as a young adult myself), but newer stories like The Bad Batch make it very clear that this was not a war, but a genocide. And I don’t know if I would have used that word before I saw so many of the brilliant shorts in Star Wars Visions or even Obi-Wan Kenobi. One could argue that authoritarianism and genocide comprise the project of this era or Star Wars.
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This use of childhood innocence to convey just how low the Empire will go is so powerful that it made me like one of my favorite characters a lot less. I have never been delusional enough to think that Cad Bane was a good person, but I have always thought he was ineffably cool — a surly gunslinger who was ready for anything. But seeing him hand over a toddler to Emerie Karr made me think that he was so morally bankrupt that I couldn’t fist pump him when he appeared on screen anymore.
Yet again, I wasn’t exactly surprised to see Cad Bane here. He’s among the best bounty hunters in the galaxy. He, like Fennec Shand who returned a couple episodes ago, has already appeared on the show, and, of course, we had seen him in the trailer.
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I know critics often use how predictable a story is as a handicapping metric; the more predictable a story is, the less original and/or the less rewarding it is. But that’s simply not the case here. There’s a certain satisfaction I can derive from seeing previous episodes so clearly pay out storytelling dividends.
Crosshair’s catastrophic failure is a perfect example of a turn in the story that wasn’t entirely surprising; and yet, that fact has no negative effect on my viewing experience. The foreshadowing of a pivotal moment in which his diminished accuracy (his yips) would precipitate a devastating loss was very obvious, considering what we had seen prior. Too many frames lingered on his shaking hand. We made too much of a point to have Omega try to help him heal. But that doesn’t mean that my heart wasn’t breaking the moment he fired and missed the ship taking Omega away to WHO KNOWS WHERE (I mean, we know it’s Tantiss, but none of the clones know how to get there). I am ready for Crosshair to go into full Pedro Pascal as Joel in The Last of Us, with the highest levels of vigilante daddy protection, in future episodes.
The last shot of Omega cinched this moment perfectly. We know she is being noble and brave by giving herself up to Hemlock to protect everyone else on Pabu, but that doesn’t mean she can’t also be terrified on the inside. The look on her face, when no one else was around, demonstrated such a humanizing vulnerability, which we sorely needed in stark contrast to the dehumanizing tactics employed with the young “specimens” in the vault.
I have heard some amount of outcry that this season of The Bad Batch is getting too dark for an animated series. And, if you’ve been watching with young kids, I can see how these two episodes would be really tough.
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Yet, sometimes the light is easier to see in contrast to the dark. In fact, one could argue that we can’t have light without it. That the dark defines the light. When I was in high school, which was, probably not so coincidentally, when I first saw The Phantom Menace, Alan Watts’ philosophical text, The Book: On the Taboo of Knowing Who You Are, written in 1966 by a Buddhist-inspired philosopher who was central to the hippie counterculture movement, was a very influential text. I had been assigned to read it in my high school English class, and thought it perfectly synced with my Star Wars fandom.
Looking back at the book now, I have more questions about the cogency of its sprawling claims, but the concept of not thinking of light and dark as a battle but as a symbiotic relationship whose balance can ebb and flow, still holds. Watts, for example, says, “There are many other ways in which the game of Black-and-White is switched into the game of "White must win," and, like the battle for survival, they depend upon ignoring, or screening out of consciousness, the interdependence of the two sides. In thinking of good vs. evil as a conflict rather than a relationship would produce a desire for all light and no dark. Yet, the Yin and Yang of the Dark Side and the Light Side has always been a fundamental concept in Star Wars. The story has never been about one eliminating the other, but rather restoring balance between the two.
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What lies ahead for Omega — a beacon of light wherever she goes? I am reminded of an episode of The Clone Wars called “Padawan Lost,” in which Trandoshan hunters capture Ahsoka. She discovers that she has joined the ranks of several other younglings trapped on the planet to provide the Trandoshans with sport. She snaps them all out of their despair and empowers them to overthrow their captors. She shows them the power they have when they think they have none.
When Emerie Karr tells Nala Se that the children don’t belong in the vault, she laments that she can’t help them because she doesn’t have “that kind of power.” Nala Se’s cryptic response of “Don’t you?” sets up the eventual realization that they don’t have to take it. They won’t have to be complicit. Omega, as we’ve seen already, is the best character to facilitate that realization for all the victims on Tantiss. They may be entangled with The Empire’s darkness, but they can use that to play Watt’s game of Black-and-White.