The clones’ future is threatened…

There is a lot going on in these two linked episodes. We see first hand what happened to the clones and why/how they were replaced by stormtroopers. There are a number of secondary characters in these episodes, some recurring and some we see here perhaps for the only time, yet they are all fleshed out.

Safe to say that not everyone in the Senate is ready to do whatever the Emperor wants even if others are working very hard to do exactly as required. We follow their struggle to do what is right, part of which is to follow the rule of law while their enemies use whatever is to hand to achieve their aims.

What was strangest is that Star Wars, alike with so many other SFF shows and stories, has never really had a strong sense of how power actually works.

Except here, in these two episodes we get something extremely finely crafted that delivers not just on the idea of the wrangling, compromises and never-ending games that characterise power wherever it is found, but also shows that on screen without it being boring.

The scheming is, as you might expect, contrived, but it works and when you’ve seen just how hard people work to get what they want in the real world, the twisting and plotting doesn’t feel particularly overwrought.

I was given a real sense of somewhere like Chile in the 1980s, Moscow in the early 2000s or much of the USA today. Places where the rule of law is followed politically, where deals are made outside of the channels designed to ensure they’re fair and independently adjudicated. Where a society’s checks and balances are being deliberately dismantled bit by bit.

Coruscant has become a place where freedom of the press is an afterthought and saying the wrong thing can get you disappeared.

The clones are secondary in this tale – supporting characters – and it works really very well. We see the story in more depth than them and we see how their experience is tempered by their own limitations.

Clones were not made for politics.

What struck me as particularly poignant was how the clones were treated as a non-people. Effectively stateless servants of the state to be used as property and without a voice of their own.

Politically it is painfully reminiscent of the plight of refugees and, in the UK, of the Gurkhas who had to fight tooth and nail and needed celebrity help to embarrass the British Government into treating them fairly after decades of serving their country.

Power loves those it can use, right up until they cannot be used anymore. Then it discards and moves on. Worse still, power, where it can, will start relationships like these with this freedom to abuse and discard built into its very DNA.

The Bad Batch gets it. The writing here is as smart as anything in Andor.

The ending is not happy – as we know by now. Watching the inevitable unfold is terrifying, not only because there is no hope for these literal slaves but also because this is an all too accurate mirror on the real world.

You can see Omega’s worldview being fashioned in these two episodes – her sense of justice and what is right and wrong. You also see her sense of obligation – that if she can act to challenge evil she should and in that she is dragging Clone Force 99 along with her.

It will be interesting to see where her arc takes us in the second half of the season.

Rating? 9 senators out of 10.

Stewart Hotston