It's official: Clone Force 99 will return in season 2 of Star Wars: The Bad Batch on Disney Plus. The first season premiered on May 4th, 2021, with new episodes airing every Friday. While the first 14 episodes have been released, there are still two more chapters in the first season that are set to premiere on the streaming platform in the coming weeks.
Created by Lucasfilm's Dave Filoni, The Bad Batch is an animated Star Wars series that follows Clone Force 99, a.k.a. The Bad Batch, a group of defective clones who possess desirable mutations that make them lethal in battle. The series is a spin-off of another popular animated show, Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Also created by Filoni under the guidance of George Lucas himself, the series followed Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Anakin's padawan, Ahsoka Tano, during the events of the Clone Wars, a galactic wide conflict that took place between the prequel films Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith.
There are no plot details for the second season of The Bad Batch at the moment, but that's to be expected since the first season is still airing on Disney Plus. In the most recent episode of The Bad Batch, titled War-Mantle, the gang faces off against the newly recruited Stormtroopers, the infamous footsoldiers of the evil Galactic Empire. While the new show doesn't seem to be as popular as other Disney Plus Star Wars content such as The Mandalorian, the series has been fairly well-received, especially from fans of its predecessor, The Clone Wars. However, despite the show being titled after the titular Bad Batch, Clone Force 99 might be the least interesting thing about the series.
The Bad Bad is set right after the fall of the Republic, during the formation of the Galactic Empire. This is a very interesting time period that hasn't been explored too much in the recent Disney Star Wars canon. As a result, fans are getting a close-up look at how and why the Empire made the transition from Clones to Stormtroopers (turns out the Empire is kind of cheap). While we don't know exactly how this season will end, it seems like The Bad Batch may be at the forefront of a clone uprising, something many fans have speculated for a while now.
The Bad Batch has also gone to great lengths to draw connections to the final film in Disney's divisive sequel trilogy, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. In that film, it was revealed that the villain Supreme Leader Snoke had actually been created by Emperor Palpatine and that the dark lord of the sith was back via some kind of cloning technology (it's still a little unclear). Considering that The Bad Batch is primarily focused on a group of clones, fans can probably expect to see more of Palpatine's grand plan fleshed out in future seasons.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 2 will premiere sometime in 2022 on Disney Plus.
Source: Disney | Twitter