Desperate to rescue her parents, Hera reaches out to the Bad Batch for help. But with Crosshair still on Ryloth, their job won’t be easy.

After not really being much of a part of the action last week, the Batch are back in full force as Hera uses the frequencies given her by Omega to reach out to them and ask for help in rescuing her parents. And this sets up a more interesting set of threads than you might expect.

Firstly, despite the fact that the Batch have taken on Omega and clearly care for her, they’re still soldiers, and mercenary ones at that, and they aren’t in the business of taking on lost causes. That means it’s down to Omega to take what she’s learned under their tutelage already and talk to them in their language to get them interested.

Meanwhile, Cham and his wife are still prisoners of the Empire, though Captain Howzer is clearly having increasing doubts about exactly what’s going on with his new bosses. Admiral Rampart is of course pursuing the propaganda line of Cham having attempted to assassinate the Senator, but Howzer knows that isn’t true – how much longer can he keep serving a cause he doesn’t believe in.

And because the lives of our heroes aren’t hard enough of course, they also have Crosshair on site to cause problems. This means that they aren’t able to quite rely on their usual repertoire of tricks so freely, as their old comrade anticipates their moves.

It’s another perhaps surprisingly adult instalment of the show, with some complex stuff going on as our characters find their way through some tricky situations. The Batch have managed, so far, not to make any definitive choices in the new galactic conflict beyond survival, but the more we see of them interacting with various rebellious forces, the more it seems obvious that at some point that choice will be made, willingly or otherwise.

Verdict: Another decent instalment that somehow manages to make the universe feel bigger even as it introduces more characters we’ve seen before. 8/10

Greg D. Smith