The Bad Batch S3E12 and 13 go topsy turvy with one returning character.

Musings on scruffy-looking Nerf-herders.

The Short Take: 

There’s an inevitability to all this, with the exception of one familiar face, which I will proceed to overanalyze.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers for both Season 3 Episode 12, “The Juggernaut” and Season 3 Episode 13, “Into the Breach.” There are also spoilers for Star Wars: Rebels as context for my commentary on these two episodes.]

Image Credit: StarWars.com

The Long Take: 

Are they trying to “Hot Kallus” Admiral Rampart??!

I’m embarrassed to say that this is what I thought to myself after watching last week’s episode, S3E12 “The Juggernaut.”  Initially, I experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance because the last time we had seen Vice Admiral Edmon Rampart, he was completely clean-shaven, with a very forgettable crew cut. When The Bad Batch finds him in an Imperial labor prison, however, he’s sporting a full beard and shaggy ‘do. The intent of this prisoner-chic makeover is likely to reflect Rampart’s change in status from high level Imperial officer to lowly inmate. To show how long he has been toiling away in this labor camp.

Still, all I could think about was “Hot Kallus.” 

Image Credit: Distractify

Image Credit: StarWars.com

This thought will surely stymie those who have not seen Star Wars: Rebels, and, more specifically, Rebels fans who have not spent an inordinate amount of time on the Internet. Allow me to explain. A major antagonist in the early seasons of the series, Agent Alexsandr Kallus begins as an Imperial Security Bureau (or ISB, featured prominently in Andor, for those keeping track) who leads the hunt for the Ghost crew. Then, in a pivotal episode of Rebels — Season 2 Episode 17, titled “The Honorable Ones” — Kallus and Zeb become trapped on an icy moon and form an undeniable bond that later, as many fans infer, leads to a romantic relationship. This sets Kallus on a path to becoming a fully-fledged Rebel spy in Season 3 Episode 10, “An Inside Man.” He does a complete 180 through this redemptive arc. 

Image Credit: StarWars.com

And with this change in character, from the dark to the light, comes a whole new look. When Kallus makes his joyful post-conversion return, he, like Rampart, gets a scruffed-up makeover, with a longer, middle part hairstyle and a fuller beard. He looks better than ever, and so meme makers and forum frequenters everywhere dubbed him “Hot Kallus.” It caught on so much so that Dave Filoni commented on the “Hot Kallus” phenomenon on a panel at Star Wars Celebration Orlando in 2017, saying that his new hair “symbolizes his freedom.”

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It’s the symbolic power of hair that I’m primarily interested in as I think about Rampart’s potential arc at the end of The Bad Batch. An esteemed colleague of mine and Senior Editor at Large of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sarah Mesle, came up with the brilliant concept of “hair studies,” which conducts cultural analysis by way of examining a character’s hair. In the description of her forthcoming book, Tangled, Mesle specifically proposes that “the intensity white women feel about their hair…reflects its powerful capacity to enforce norms of gender and class.” In borrowing this hair studies concept and applying it to Star Wars, I would say that scruffiness, especially as a transition away from Imperial “clean cut-ness,” signals not only rebellion, but all the morality that accompanies it: heroism, goodness, and freedom, as Filoni himself says. Everything the unfeeling, oppressive, and totalitarian Empire is not.

But that tousled heroism usually has a roguish tinge. Han Solo, of course, is the OG scruffy-looking nerf herder. He does not have a luscious beard like Rampart or Kallus, but his haircut certainly reads as wild and free. Leia is both attracted to and repulsed by him because, as a smuggler, he is a free agent with no institutional ties. He’s not quite drinking the Kool-Aid of the rebellion and not falling in line but, in the end, is still morally good and on their side. 

Image Credit: Tenor

Dare I invoke rugged individualism here? I’m not sure I have the time to do a full rundown of manifest destiny and, ironically, imperialist impulses at the core of the American ethos as it potentially relates to Star Wars, but I think that rabbit hole is definitely there. I’m just not ready to pull on that thread yet, as it may lead to a sinister ideological ouroboros that I am not prepared to accept. 

Image Credit: Tenor

Where does all this leave Rampart by the end of “Into the Breach” this week? Before this episode, I conjectured that perhaps — using some convoluted and irresponsibly inaccurate form of algebra — scruffiness transitively signifies Rampart’s defection from the Empire, and perhaps even a redemptive heel turn. (It’s also very possible that Rampart may end up just being a heel, full stop, but more on that in a moment.)

He has certainly become more likable since he grew out his hair. I raucously enjoyed watching him throughout this episode, whereas I had been at best indifferent and at worst annoyed by him in Seasons 1 and 2. He had some fabulous one-liners in this week’s episode, like “I’m standing right here,” “I didn’t make it to vice admiral on looks alone,” or “You’re the ones who stand out like overheated Gamorreans” that made me genuinely happy he was there. 

Does this mean, then, that he’s on a Kallus-esque path to redemption? I became considerably less sure after “Into the Breach” because, as good a time as I was having, it seemed like a.) he is still a jerk, just a funny one and b.) he still gets high off the Imperial supply. On multiple occasions he expresses glee at being able to inhabit his old occupation (especially ordering others around), saying “I’ve missed this.” Thus, I became more rather than less convinced that if given a whiff of coming back, he would double cross the Batch in a heartbeat. Hunter does remind him that the the Emperor threw him under the bus to maintain his cover, but, unlike Crosshair, Rampart hasn’t had a revelatory moment through which to realize that he’s just as disposable as the clones he says he despises.

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Hypothetically, if Rampart is not “Hot Kallus”-bound (though I’m not ruling it out yet), then what would explain all the newly-found joy rather than disdain that I feel at the sight of him? Perhaps a perverse pleasure in the topsy turvy. Russian formalist M. M. Bakhtin devised a theory called the “carnivalesque,” which classifies literature as a way to potentially upend or subvert social norms, and I think a version of that idea may be at play with these two episodes of The Bad Batch allowing me to like Rampart. The easiest way for me to explain the concept of the carnivalesque is to — and bear with me — recall the musical number “Topsy Turvy” in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996). There’s a holiday in the film called “Topsy Turvy Day” or “The Feast of Fools,” in which social norms are temporarily lifted and people have permission to “break the rules.” This tradition would later become what we now know as Mardi Gras.

The song’s lyrics actually do a pretty decent job explaining the general concept of the carnivalesque: 

Once a year we throw a party here in town

Once a year we turn all Paris upside down

Every man's a king and every king's a clown

Once again it's Topsy Turvy Day

It's the day the devil in us gets released

It's the day we mock the prig and shock the priest

Everything is topsy turvy at the Feast of Fools

In particular, The Feast of Fools invites a reversal of power dynamics set in place by social norms. A dog would be walking its owner, or, as the lyrics here indicate, anyone can be a king and “a king’s a clown.” For Bakhtin, every day is Topsy Turvy Day in literature, as stories, and especially stories with humor, give us permission to safely indulge in subversion, without real world consequences. And so, I think that the circumstances of Rampart’s freedom, of his forced team-up with The Batch, allow me to safely root for a bad guy because he has been foisted upon the good guys.

Obviously my opinion may change by the time the series finishes — with two more episodes there’s a lot more he can do to lose my favor — but right now I might actually classify Rampart as an antihero. Isn’t an antihero, after all, the ultimate carnivalesque character? A character we like and support in spite of their failure to exhibit heroic goodness? A character that allows us to indulge in the morally taboo?

In this, again, hypothetical scenario, Rampart and Kallus could not be more disparate. Kallus is the platonic ideal of red coat turncoat — bad guy turned good. Rampart, at least so far, is still bad, but the show has said it’s okay to laugh with him and think he’s fun, at least for now. He isn’t necessarily good, but we just have temporary permission to be entertained by his ego rather than disgusted by it. Han Solo is likely somewhere in between the two, being a good guy with below average scruples.

So maybe, then, scruffiness signals more than a binary turn to the Light. It’s a more inclusive marker for those in a liminal, subversive morality. For Kallus, his scruffiness challenges the idea that a bad guy will always remain a bad guy. Han Solo’s scruffiness challenges the idea that heroes need to be perfect or wholly committed to the greater good. I’m hesitant to declare what Rampart’s messier locks mean, but it’s clear to me that they signal some kind of shift. He’s not just a straightforward Imperial bad guy anymore. Will he be a hero? An antihero? Or revert back to a villain? As long as it’s not that last option, I’ll be satisfied, I suspect.  

Image Credit: StarWars.com

I spent all this time honing in on scruffy Rampart because, to be honest, most of the rest of these two episodes was fairly predictable. No less dramatic and emotionally impactful, of course — I loved seeing Omega rally her “specimen” troops, for example. But her trying to break out of The Vault and set free everyone being held captive on Tantiss seems inevitable at this point. What will happen to each member of Clone Force 99 in the process is still up in the air, of course (*bites nails*), but I do think that we have been marching towards an infiltration of Tantiss for several episodes now.

Regardless of what his scruffiness means for his morality, Rampart is by far the most intriguing unknown quantity as we move into the conclusion of this amazing series.