Disney Plus premiered The Bad Batch on May 4th in honor of Star Wars Day. The series is the second brand new Star Wars TV show to be brought to the streaming service, but it definitely won't be the last. After the success of The Mandalorian, Disney announced a whole slew of new shows, both animated and live-action, that they would be bringing to Disney Plus.
The Bad Batch is the spiritual successor to Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Lucasfilm Animation began their Clone Wars show back in 2008. It was a massive success that ran on the air for five seasons. A sixth season came to streaming services in 2014, two years after Disney purchased Lucasfilm. Disney produced a seventh and final season of The Clones Wars for Disney Plus just last year.
The Bad Batch picks up right where The Clone Wars left off, but it focuses on a small team of clone troopers. They are known as Clone Force 99, and strange genetic mutations set them apart from regular clone troopers. The Bad Batch made their first appearance in the very first season of The Clone Wars.
The team contains five members, each with their own unique abilities. Hunter leads the team. Wrecker provides tank-like strength. Tech serves as, well, the team's technological expert. Crosshair blasts enemies apart with his excellent marksman abilities. Echo is "more machine than man." Together they work their way through one successful mission after another, and Disney hopes they'll succeed in bringing more fans on board for the Disney Plus Star Wars shows.
Spoilers Ahead for The Bad Batch episode 1.
Aftermath
If you've never seen a single episode of The Clone Wars, don't worry. The Bad Batch has been carefully designed to be friendly towards anyone with an interest in Star Wars. The season's first episode "Aftermath" is an hour long, to allow plenty of time for all the show's major players to be introduced.
It opens on one of the final battles of the Clone Wars. Jedi Depa Billaba is working with clone troopers to blast apart an incoming robot force. Her padawan, Caleb Dume, soon arrives with the Bad Batch in tow as reinforcements. The members of the Bad Batch quickly dispatch the robot fighters. Peace only lasts a moment, however. At that point, Emperor Palpatine sends out Order 66 to all clone troopers. Depa Billaba is immediately shot down by the troopers who were aiding her just a few minutes earlier. Caleb Dume goes on the run.
At first, the Bad Batch are confused by this sudden turn of events. The only one of them who is in support of killing Caleb is Crosshair, but Hunter helps the young padawan to escape. The Bad Batch leave the battlefield to return to Kamino. There they meet a mysterious female clone named Omega and learn that the Republic has been dissolved and replaced by the Galactic Empire.
Admiral Tarkin soon arrives on Kamino to test all the clones. He wants to see if they are worthy of serving in the Empire's army. The Bad Batch are sent to deal with "insurrectionists" who turn out to be nothing more than scared citizens running from Imperial control. The team decides to return to Kamino to help Omega escape from whatever Tarkin has planned. They soon discover that Crosshair, like all regular clones, has an implant that compels him to follow the new Empire's orders. A battle erupts, and the team escapes with Omega.
Easygoing Fun
Anyone who's intimately familiar with the details of the galaxy's transition from Republic to Empire won't find any surprises here. The new elements introduced by the episode are so openly telegraphed that they, too, fail to surprise. Crosshair's implant isn't much of a reveal because his aggressive insistence on following orders throughout the episode is easily seen as being out of his character, even for those who haven't seen him in previous Star Wars entries. Omega will likely offer surprises further into the season, but from the moment she's on screen it's easy to tell that she'll be joining the team. The only potentially surprising development here is that the issue of Crosshair's implant isn't resolved by the time credits roll on this first episode.
All that said, "Aftermath" is no less enjoyable for being utterly predictable. There are three distinctly exciting action set pieces in the episode. The animation is top-notch. Though it stylistically resembles The Clones Wars, it looks orders of magnitude better than that show's 2008 premiere episode. The voice acting is superb. Dee Bradley Baker voices the entire Bad Batch team and all of the clone troopers. He does an admirable job making each of the characters distinguishable. If someone needs to look away from the screen for a moment, they'll still be able to follow what's going on.
"Aftermath" presents a promising, if underwhelming, opening to The Bad Batch. As long as Disney takes the show in exciting directions from here, everything will be just fine.