At the end of last week’s two-part episode of Star Wars: The Bad Batch, Clone Force 99 said goodbye to one of its members: Echo (voiced by Dee Bradley Baker, as are all the clones of Jango Fett), who decided to depart from the team to join Captain Rex in his fight against the Empire.
This week’s new installment of The Bad Batch, entitled “The Crossing,” begins as another mission-of-the-week-type adventure, with our protagonists embarking on a mining expedition for Cid (Rhea Perlman), but evolves into a rather touching exploration of how the various members of Clone Force 99, especially Tech and Omega, deal with Echo’s departure.
“The Crossing” begins on an unnamed planet where Cid has evidently purchased an abandoned mine and sent the Bad Batch to recover its last remaining deposits of a highly explosive mineral called Ipsium– think Rhydonium from other Star Wars media, but… y’know… with a different name. Anyway, Hunter and Tech set about exploring the mine for Ipsium while Wrecker and Omega (Michelle Ang) stand guard outside. They kind of fail at that job pretty spectacularly when a thief makes off with the team’s ship the Havoc Marauder, but Omega makes up for it with her skill at extracting the volatile mineral. But since the ship is gone, the team has to hoof it through a series of chasms to a nearby outpost that Tech had made note of on approach to the planet. Along the way, they have to deal with a stampede of local fauna and an ensuing sandstorm that causes Tech to lose track of their container of Ipsium, which then explodes and traps our heroes in a cave-in. The close quarters allows these characters to express their emotions about recent events, with Omega reacting angrily to Tech’s perceived lack of reaction to Echo having left the squad. She storms off and finds a much larger deposit of Ipsium, while the others attempt to dig their way out of the cave-in.
But when Hunter and Wrecker urge Tech to go talk with Omega, it results in the pair falling into an underground aqueduct. Eventually coming up for air in another tunnel, the two have a heart-to-heart about the different ways they process change, and the others soon catch up with them, using the newfound Ipsium to blow a hole in the cave and escape. But their problems aren’t over quite yet, as they still don’t have a ship, the outpost turns out to be deserted, and Cid can’t send help for a few days. So this somewhat sentimental episode ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, with the team lacking sufficient rations and needing to find a way to survive their ordeal together. “The Crossing” has a number of really nice character moments, and I like how Echo’s absence was addressed with Omega struggling to cope with the way things have been evolving for herself and her fellow clones. The creative forces behind the series has taken another episode that could have easily been dismissed as “filler” and turned it into a key milestone in the bonding between these crewmates. I also like that, by all indications, it seems as though the back half of this season may have a bit more of a narrative throughline than the first did, with the Bad Batch seeking to reclaim the Marauder and figure out what exactly makes them click as a team.
New episodes of Star Wars: The Bad Batch are released on Wednesdays, exclusively via Disney+.