The clones head to the peaceful island of Pabu…

This is a lovely little episode that exists both as a palette cleanser for the audience and also as a small moment of joy for the clones.

Having cut ties with Cid, the team are a little lost and wind up being taken to a small settlement far from the empire which is inhabited by other refugees both from the clone wars but also from the oppression of the empire.

They quickly make themselves useful yet, more importantly, they’re invited to stay and make new lives regardless of their utility to the community.

This offer lands as a moment in which they can consider a future which, until now, they’d had no luxury of contemplating. It’s a breath of fresh air to see the clones considering what life might like without having to live hand to mouth in what effectively amounts to their car.

We know it can’t last but for a moment there’s something wonderful about seeing the clones catch a break.

Perhaps equally interesting is how Omega finds something unexpected – friends her own age. A lesser show might have elided this point – setting her on a path to being a great warrior. Or it might have filled the screen with other children all along and infantilised her.

The Bad Batch never forgets that the clones, including Omega, are refugees and their lives are unstable, poverty stricken and precarious. In that kind of existence you take your family where you can find it but your horizons are never far away because what you can control is so small, so limited.

For Omega to make even a single friend her own age is almost revolutionary and certainly a reminder that The Bad Batch hasn’t forgotten who she is – a young woman coming to be an adult. She isn’t a clone warrior in waiting, she is not a chosen one, she is a person who is still discovering who they are and this attention to detail elevates the show above others which might stand alongside it (and in many ways I think that includes Andor where there’s no diversity of this kind and hence many perspectives on the rise of the Empire are lost).

Verdict: The equivalent of a weekend break to the country for the show but a welcome one at that.

Rating? 7 sea walls out of 10.

Stewart Hotston