Crosshair is sent to rescue an Imperial Governor who’s been taken hostage.

It’s a story we have seen many times – an imperialist force arriving to let people know they don’t actually own their own land but that it belongs to someone else. It doesn’t ever matter how long indigenous people have lived somewhere or what claims they have to their homes and industries – when the Empire arrives the only thing that matters is what those with big guns say.

This episode follows Crosshair, who continues to assume that if he does what he’s told, doesn’t question orders and keeps as close to being invisible as he can then he will be fine.

Such an approach to navigating a hostile power is one those of us from minority backgrounds know too well – stay unobtrusive, don’t make a fuss, do as we’re told even when what we’re asked to do damages us and those around us. It often feels not simply like the lesser of two evils but also the only plausible way to survive in the face of overwhelming power.

Crosshair has, in season 1, made his calculus clear – he sees the Empire as unstoppable and knows even minor provocations could leave him exposed and at risk of being murdered.

So he does what they demand and when power knows you will behave like this it will always give you the worst work, the most morally corrosive tasks. It does this because you can and will be a suitable scapegoat when needed but also, even when you collude, the acid power of Empire still acts to destroy those it colonises.

You could regard The Bad Batch as television for children but it has a laser guided understanding of the desolation of empire on the colonised and marginalised.

The story sees an independent world defending itself against imperial aggression. So far so normal. Yet the self-defence is portrayed by the Empire as the initiating aggression and the indigenous people painted as the enemy needing pacifying. Troops, including Crosshair and Cody, are sent to exert the Empire’s authority in a place where they have no rights to do so except the will to say the world belongs to them.

Cody is unsettled by the truth of the matter, Crosshair feigns indifference, because what else can someone trying to be invisible, trying to be the best citizen, do?

As you might expect this does not end well and the Empire does what the British did in India or America, or Benin, or in any other number of places. It does what the US did in South America and Iran and any number of places. It does what Russia is doing in Ukraine.

You can imagine that even before the credits roll wealth extraction has begun.

Verdict: This is a bleak episode in many ways, the moral destitution of the Empire lessened in part by the action and the response of both Cody and Crosshair but make no mistake – The Bad Batch has fascism and empire in its sights and is pulling no punches.

Rating? 8 orders out of 10.

Stewart Hotston