I almost feel like a prophet 
Cad’s arrival was apparent after the scene on Kamino. I like his updated look (though the hat was a tad too small), if not his less grouchy voice. Very western, very cool.
Another great episode.
This episode was good, and Cad Bane was great. I am sad that the Boba/Bane ending no longer seems to stand, unless simply pushed off for a time, but I hold out hope that perhaps we will see something of that arc later on, perhaps in this series.
While I’m a bit frustrated over the continuous cropping up of small galaxy syndrome, this is a more justified appearance. High value target, best bounty hunter in the galaxy. So yeah, I can see it. If they did it less often and with much less reason, I wouldn’t be complaining. But Cad is one of my favorites.
On the whole, this episode was quite good. I just still can’t get past boxcheck squad though. If you’re going to introduce something that is, on its face, nonsensical, you should explain how it came about. As I recounted earlier, there are many issues with the sudden appearance and subsequent use of the supposedly elite unit.
In other news, I noticed that Droids is now on Disney+, so that’ll be fun. I’ve always had a soft spot for the vintage Star Wars, excluding the Christmas special.
This episode was really nice. Cad on Shennec fight, Omega being resourceful, we get to know more about why she’s so valuable, conflicting interests, and an abandoned Kamino facility.
Sadly Taun We is now dead.
And those old Kaminoan clones … I do wonder why that facility was abandoned, what happened there? Why leave the genetic and biological material behind? Story hook!
Great episode.
I agree, but why’d she have to be a Jango clone? I’m sad now. :(
Figures, though. Perhaps I’ll find a way to retcon my story to fit with canon, but more than likely I’ll just ignore it and stay more solidly in Legends. But hey, if any of you see me with a character who’s a female clone of Jango, you know I had the idea before Bad Batch!
I suppose it’s alright, but it brings me back to the question of how much can you change before it no longer counts as a clone? I have to question the usefulness of DNA that’s been so thoroughly modified. Wouldn’t it be better to use Boba? Maybe give him a similar deal to his dad’s? Sure Omega was theirs originally, but she isn’t exactly pure Jango DNA.
Basically what I’m saying is, okay, so she’s a clone of Jango. But you’d have to engineer her code again in order to get back to something more like Jango (because building an army entirely out of Omegas seems ill-advised). Wouldn’t you be better off with a clone trooper’s DNA? There’d be less to change, wouldn’t there? Can anyone help me out with this? I’m a fighter plane. I’m not exactly an expert on meatbag biology.
Aside from that, I absolutely LOVED the “sky Tipoca.” The animation was breathtaking, the smoke and fog incredible, and the architecture brilliant. It perfectly captures the “Kaminoans in the sky!” vibe. It’s also a tremendously awesome hook for RPG stories.
Cad Bane was really pretty awesome. They’re really playing up the cowboy aspect, which I like a lot. I’m a bit bothered that he had so much trouble dealing with Shand, though. He’s the best bounty hunter in the galaxy at this point, and has probably at least a decade more experience than Shand, who’s new on the scene, and has gone toe-to-toe with Skywalker. Additionally, tactics were a bit off. For example, he should’ve used his flame projector a lot sooner.
Todo 360: He got blown up in a previous episode, which makes me wonder: Is this Todo 361, or has Bane gone through even more iterations since then? Perhaps Todo 588? I’d guess he uses backup droid bodies and programs them with backups of Todo, so that would probably mean Todo doesn’t remember all of his untimely demises. I wonder how those conversations go when Bane wakes up the new Todo? “The fifteenth?! I thought it was the first? Fifteenth of JUNE?!” (or whatever the month would be called).
Oh, and Shand’s reaction to getting a Kaminoan clone corpse dumped on her was gold.
I’m presuming that they made a point of showing that new metal plate on his skull to suggest to those of us who know of the unfilmed Boba/Bane story that it still happened, just off-screen. With a shot(?) to the head, and damage enough to require that plate, Bane may not be at the top of his game anymore.
Works for the viewers who know what was intended for Clone Wars, and to the average viewer who doesn’t, they’re less likely to think anything was off with Bane.
My first reaction when they revealed Omega’s nature was, “Wow…they are going to adapt the Boba/Bane story for Bad Batch.” But, with the plate, it looks like they’re just going to quietly consider it canon without showing it.
Huh, interesting. I didn’t pick up that it was a metal plate, I thought it was just some sort of patch on his… uh… head thing. Hmm… I’m surprised he’d survive a shot like that though. It must have been more of a graze shot, because he definitely didn’t have much protecting him there. It’s a very fine line between “serious brain damage” and “no lasting injury” though. I’d be very interested to learn more about it.
There’s nothing else, aside from what could be considered subpar performance, to suggest that he’s lost a step. Sure, the subpar performance could be that indicator, but there’s nothing specific or dramatic that sticks out as being “off” about him.
It’s a little clearer as a plate in the character model images they released after last week aired. But, you’re kind of on the same path as I was suggesting…he’s not so far off as to be a distraction except to a certain subset of the audience, but for that subset, there’s an implied way to explain it.
At the end of the day, as with any antagonist, their level of competence and performance is dictated by the story being told.
Having unaltered source material might be advantageous if you want to take your development in different directions. It is also possible the material can only take so many modifications before it becomes non-viable, so perhaps (in game terms) the original has more biological “customization hard points” available. Of course, none of that explains in-universe why this “original source” of Jango’s genetic material is female. For that, we most likely have to assume it’s an IRL push by Disney to insert a female character into the otherwise sausage party of the Bad Batch.
That. WAS. AWESOME!!!
Best episode since Cut Lawquane, by a longshot.
99.5% flawless.
“A mandatory curfew, for your protection.”
Hmm, where have I heard that before? 
I loved every moment of this episode.
As always, you can’t say enough about the animation. Absolutely gorgeous. And the AT-TEs were beautiful. I loved the added functionality that we haven’t really gotten to see before, and the indirect-fire aspect was great.
Speaking of which, we don’t see nearly enough indirect-fire in Star Wars, and the AT-TE is an example of just how potent it can be. Something I’d never really thought of before is how easily you can manipulate the velocity of a shot, and thus high, short arcs become much easier and far more precise. That was a very short-distance shot.
I loved the droid, the senator was great, I’m starting to really like Cid, and the Ithorian/Weequay make a great pair. I also greatly appreciated their use of stun. And that’s beyond the obvious of Bad Batch being great.
“I didn’t ask for a history lesson, Goggles,” is actually a great example of sneaky writing. There’s the rule about “show, don’t tell,” but that can sometimes be hard to follow. What they did here is they exploited Tech’s breadth of knowledge and talkativeness to fill in any unaware viewers on the significance of Raxus, without it breaking the narrative or seeming out of character. Then they had Cid cut him off, further reinforcing that it was “in-character” and not making it seem forcefully inserted.
And that brings us to the 0.5% problem: They were droid-popping clone troopers.
Okay, call them stun grenades instead of EMP grenades, but they look the same and sound the same. Always before in Star Wars (with the exception of the generic stun bolts), light blue has been anti-droid and light yellow has been anti-organic. From the stun setting on the electrostaves to the electronets. If they had simply changed the color to yellow, I’d have no issue with it. But as it is, it looks like they were droid-popping clone troopers.
Ah, I was fine with the blue color. That’s the color of their stun circles, too.
Yes, the indirect fire was great. Also loved the AT-TE crawling directly over the disabled one. Finally the legs are demonstrating their value over tank treads.
Loved Cid’s nicknames for the crew. Don’t think she’s come up with one for everybody yet. Omega is still “kid”.
Gobi: “But if we give up our weapons to a tyrannical government, we’ll be defenseless!”
Me: “Yup.”
Awesome episode all-round. I loved the political maneuvering, which was one of my favorite parts of Clone Wars.
I also love how the Bad Batch was the thumbnail for the episode, but they only got about a minute of screen time.
“Tech won’t let me fly until I can recite the ship’s specs from memory,” is definitely up there for top quote of the show.
However, on the point of flying as a feeling, don’t. READ YOUR INSTRUMENTS, PEOPLE! They’re there for a reason. Humans weren’t made to fly, which is why craft like me do that for you. Sure you can feel while you’re doing it, but read your instruments. Please?
I think Howzer is great. I especially like his haircut, I don’t think we’ve seen that on a clone before. I do, however, want to question his lucidity. I would have thought he’d be more “Good soldiers follow orders,” all stiff and “What happened to you, Howzer? We used to be friends!” kind of thing. Perhaps Order 66 didn’t reach Ryloth in the same way, or perhaps the clones are returning to “normal,” the further away from the event they get? It just doesn’t seem quite right compared to what we’ve seen earlier. He had too much hesitation and (almost) free thought.
Their approach to incriminating Cham was interesting. In their position, I’d have taken a different tack. Sure, if I were really in control and could do whatever, I’d have an entirely different method of government, but I’m talking about this specific situation.
What I’d have done is free Hera and use her presence to further incriminate Gobi. “He tricked a young, impressionable little girl into helping him smuggle weapons so that he could use her and her father as a shield if he were caught.”
Not only does that buy you some “merciful” points, but it casts a hero of the war, a potential rallying symbol, in a bad light, and may turn the populace against him. Additionally, you already have Cham wanting to believe in you and believe in peace. Doing this should bring him over to your side by justifying some of his “warm fuzzies.” That, in turn, should make the populace more willing to go along with you.
Doing it this way, killing one leader (albeit unpopular) and then imprisoning the other (much more popular) leader is asking for trouble.
Orn Free Taa’s death: STOP MESSING WITH YOUR OWN CANON. Sure his later appearance was a novel, but it was an “officially canon” novel. Shooting Taa in the head kinda screws that up.
Hunter: “Omega… it’s a big galaxy.”
Me: “Yeah? Well you haven’t been acting like it.”
So Taa didn’t die. Well, that’s a very dangerous way to almost kill him. YOU SHOT HIM IN THE HEAD! That has to be an extremely precise shot to not be fatal. If he’d shifted slightly, or if Crosshair had twitched, Taa’d be dead. Would the Empire care? Maybe not. But still.
Glad they didn’t mess up their canon.
Excellent, excellent episode all around. Other than the small galaxy jibe, no complaints.
I’m fascinated to find out more about Howzer’s situation. The inhibitor chip seems to either not be as effective as advertised, or to be wearing off. I’m inclined to believe the latter, it’s more interesting. But yes, Howzer is awesome, and my initial “Ooo, cool!” seems to have been borne out.
Omega’s comment about “If you were captured, I’d come for you, so we should go for her parents” is actually something of a non sequitur. Sure, Omega’d go for the Bad Batch and they’d go for her, but it doesn’t logically follow that they’d therefore go for someone else’s parents. In fact, it could be all the more reason why they wouldn’t. If they do, it would put them at serious risk of losing one or more of the “family,” for no relevant gain. So while it elicits sympathy, it does not actually provide a good reason to go rescue Hera’s parents.
Did they do the “right thing”? Sure. But her argument wasn’t great (as expected from a ten-year-old).
The animation, as always, was utterly fantastic. Right down to the subtle lines at the corner of Howzer’s eyes.
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Agreed and all fronts.
I was actually rooting for Hunter to stand his ground and refuse to go. The arguments for were weak.
Edit:
It would have been cooler in my opinion if she went with Hera alone to try and make a plan and the Bad Batchs hand is forced to go and help her after she gets captured or something at the refinery.
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I agree, though I am amused that the Bad Batch keeps getting dragged into “charity cases.”
Doing the “right thing” in spite of the costs can be an admirable quality (“can” because it can certainly go too far), and their willingness to sacrifice for others is commendable. Now, at a certain point, it becomes imprudent, but I’m not going to object to anything that’s happened so far.
They are first and foremost soldiers, bred to have intense loyalty for their brothers and a great sense of self-sacrifice. It’s one of the things that drew me to the clones initially.
So basically, “yes, Star Wars has a small galaxy problem, but they also have stories in a different, earlier era that can’t really be connected so no”?
High Republic is disconnected simply by time. They can’t be connected except in some certain ways, like locations or very long-lived characters, and I don’t know enough about High Republic to address either. For all I know, High Republic may have its own small galaxy problems.
I’m not saying they can’t connect stuff. When you connect bits of the story, you’re weaving a cohesive whole. If everything was completely separated from everything else, Star Wars wouldn’t be as interesting as it is. But when practically every major character from every show runs into practically every other major character from every other show (timeline allowing), yes, it’s a small galaxy problem.
There are ways to defray that or minimize the impact, but at a certain volume or with certain characters (especially when “chance” or “coincidence” are involved), you can’t justify it.
I very much enjoyed The Mandalorian season 2, and some of those characters were long-time favorites of mine, but I was disappointed that they took something that was doing its own thing in a corner of the universe, and then tied it back in to everything else.
For some of the particular tie-ins, they had good reasons. Same as in Bad Batch. But when it’s tied in to so much, the significance of all of the tie-ins is cheapened and it creates a small galaxy problem.
As always, mileage varies.
It’s often a case of the great paradox once mentioned by Bartholomew Jojo Simpson: “Well, you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t.”
Because it’s just as easy to skew too far in the other direction. For example, one of the (if not the) best super-hero shows on TV right now is Superman & Lois. If you haven’t seen it, it’s part of the CW’s “Arrowverse.” (And, in 20 seconds in the premiere, it displayed more understanding of the character than a decade or more of movies have.) Like the rest of those connected shows, it’s been off doing its own thing in this, its inaugural season. But, as the storyline’s been building, it’s been harder and harder to avoid asking the question, “So…why isn’t he calling Supergirl? Or Flash? Or the Legends?” And, at least for me, that finally reached a breaking point in the past two episodes.
—SPOILERS BELOW FOR THE PAST FEW EPISODES OF SUPERMAN & LOIS–
Once it was revealed that Morgan Edge was Superman’s half-brother, the question of why he didn’t call Supergirl became harder to ignore. Then, when Superman pledged loyalty to Edge to save his family, I had to question Lois calling John Henry Irons - a relative stranger from another Earth who specifically came to kill Superman because the Superman in his reality was evil - rather than Superman’s own cousin. Then finally, the most recent episode had John Diggle - former sidekick on Arrow - show up, someone who’d worked alongside the various characters before, and who had spent previous weeks appearing on Batwoman and The Flash respectively, but not suggesting calling in any of the other shows’ characters, despite the level of the threat posed by Edge and a now-possessed Superman. Now…the answer to that is simple: the show is called “Superman & Lois,” not “Every Arrowverse Super-Hero,” Irons is a character introduced on the show, and the David Ramsey/Diggle appearances were a throughline for this year’s shows in lieu of a full-on crossover. But, if Star Wars has a “small galaxy” problem, then the Arrowverse, for example, has the opposite “large world” problem.
It’s one thing to keep the various strands of a shared universe to themselves to tell their own stories, but at the same time, part of the appeal of a larger stable of characters is using them and seeing them interact.
In that case, however, it actually is a small world. There is a very limited selection of characters to choose from, and they all are in fairly close proximity.
The key is to treat your world according to its expansiveness and the characters’ relevance to each other. It sounds like “Superman & Lois” isn’t doing that well.
So I would not say it’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t, but rather that there is a medium to strike, and you must “size” your world appropriately. So yes, in some cases skewing too far to the other side can be a problem, but that is just not the case for Star Wars. Star Wars is far too far on the small world side of things, and you’d have to push it pretty dramatically in the other direction before you ran into any problems with it suddenly becoming “too big.”
Again, mileage varies.
Despite being set throughout a literal galaxy, the storytelling of Star Wars has never really paid more than lip service to that scale. I’d chalk that up, even unconsciously, to the initial inspiration being the Flash Gordon serials, and their relatively contained setting. From a practical business standpoint, it becomes a question of why a new series, movie, etc should get that Star Wars (or Marvel, or DC, or Harry Potter, or whatever) branding if you’re not going to be using the pieces on the board. For every person wanting a new Star Wars story to stand completely on its own with few (of any) direct connections to any others, there’s someone who wants to see them intersect. And for each of them, there’s someone, who doesn’t have a hard and fast preference either way, and if a story works with or without that cross-pollination, great.
Well, season 1 of The Mandalorian sure did pretty well for being completely unconnected to preexisting characters. As for “pieces on the board,” the Star Wars setting is itself a piece on the board. It isn’t like something set on Earth, where there’s nothing tying it to the property. By its very nature it is inextricably connected to Star Wars. “Pieces on the board” can apply to species, planets, cultures, equipment, etc., not just characters.
Something Star Wars does very well is equipment and vehicles. Those are things you’d expect to see in a variety of places because they aren’t unique, but they’d also be fairly rare. So seeing a YT-1300 in the background adds to the worldbuilding, as does introducing new gear and new equipment. It’s a big place; there will be many varieties of just about any piece of gear you could ever hope to want.
And just to reiterate, I’m not against connections. I’m against the unnecessary connections and against overconnected stories. Sometimes, a story by its very nature will be connected to others. That’s fine. Again, I’m against the excesses.
Like I’ve said throughout, there are good reasons why characters would encounter each other Cade Bane as “the best bounty hunter in the galaxy” is a good example, as is Bo Katan in the second season of The Mandalorian (though I have my issues with that. That’s a discussion for another time, however).
But when you overdo it, or rely too much on coincidence to make it happen, it detracts from the worldbuilding, and it detracts substantially.