Forced to land for repairs, the batch find themselves up against the local fauna as they try to replace a vital part of their ship.

Not being someone who’s watched all of The Clone Wars, I struggled to really connect with the first couple of episodes of The Bad Batch. It didn’t really feel as if it was bringing much new to the table – in many ways in fact, it felt quite formulaic, with a mismatched group of heroes and their cutesy little sidekick. But here, it actually does start to really show what it might be for.

The basic story beat following the Batch themselves remains fairly simple – the ship is malfunctioning and they end up crashing on a remote moon and having to make emergency repairs. There’s echoes of The Empire Strikes Back as that job is made a little more difficult by local fauna who have their own designs on the parts being used, as well as the gang having to use breathing masks to go outside. But it’s in how the show uses this framing device that I started to see more there.

Omega is potentially more than just a cutesy sidekick and this has been hinted at previously. But here we get a real look at not only what she is capable of as an individual, but what she brings to the team and what she means to them. This is a bunch of warriors used to serving a purpose in a utilitarian setting – they are not prepared for the requirements of looking after a child, or providing for that child’s needs and comfort. There’s some lovely quiet character moments both for Omega and the Batch themselves as the episode figures all this out as it goes.

And then, in perfect parallel, we have the other half of the episode’s narrative which follows Crosshair as he is given command of a squad of Imperial soldiers and sent to finish the mission which he and the Batch ‘failed’ against Saw Gererra’s rebels. New character Vice-Admiral Rampart is convinced that this sort of co-operation between clones and regular human soldiers might be the ideal solution the new Empire is searching for, and Tarkin allows this test.

There’s tension between Crosshair and his new squadmates, who don’t see why he should be in charge of them and are fairly vocal about the fact. The way that tension pans out though, is unexpected. It starts to really showcase how this show isn’t just ‘dark’ but also very much examining the grey details of the universe as a whole. We may have often wondered how the good intentions of the Republic so swiftly became perverted to the dark impulses of the Empire and it seems that this is something the show will really start to explore going forward. The Imperial soldiers who have volunteered may not be as straightforwardly ‘bad’ as you might expect, while at the same time carrying the exactly qualities and attitudes that could see them become that over time.

As to Crosshair himself, there’s an insistent suggestion by Omega that perhaps it’s not his ‘fault’ he’s behaving as he is to his former comrades, but his actions here raise the question of how correct she might be and whether redemption might be possible for him. Then again, given that this is a universe in which both Darth Vader and Kylo Ren enacted mass murder on behalf of their respective factions and still found redemption, perhaps we can’t write him off just yet.

Certainly there’s a lot going on ‘under the hood’ with this episode, and if this is the way that the show intends to go moving forward then maybe my early concerns about it being a little unnecessary were unfounded. To paraphrase Sheev Palpatine, I shall watch this one with great interest.

Verdict: Suddenly it seems a lot clearer what this is going for – I hope it carries on in this vein. 9/10

Greg D. Smith