Star Wars has always been a mash-up of various genres: fantasy, science fiction, and western, among several others. But every once in a while it will lean hard in a certain direction to achieve different goals– Andor turned Star Wars into a tense political thriller for 12 weeks, and it worked great for what it set out to accomplish.
This week’s episode of Lucasfilm’s animated series Star Wars: The Bad Batch, entitled “Metamorphosis,” does a similar thing with horror and sci-fi, and it succeeds rather well, making it one of my favorite installments of this second season so far.
“Metamorphosis” starts out on an Imperial transport ship being plagued by an unseen terror, with heavily armed and armored stormtroopers cowering in fear for their lives. We then cut to the Empire’s secret cloning facility at Mount Tantiss (last seen in the first-season finale “Kamino Lost”), where a scientist named Doctor Royce Hemlock (voiced by actor Jimmi Simpson of Westworld fame– though as a big Late Show with David Letterman fan I know him best as Lyle the Intern) attempts to convince the Kaminoan cloning specialist Nala Se (Gwendoline Yeo) to participate in Emperor Palpatine’s covert project, to no avail. Obviously as Star Wars fans who have seen The Rise of Skywalker we all know what this is building towards, but it’s very cool to see the early machinations put in motion to bring Palpatine’s evil desire for unnatural immortality to fruition. Meanwhile on the Havoc Marauder, Cid (Rhea Perlman) sends a holocommunication to Clone Force 99, prompting them to investigate the wreckage of the doomed ship from the prologue. Arriving at their destination, the Bad Batch discover that the crew of the Imperial vessel have been eaten by an escaped creature while in transit to the cloning facility– and it soon turns out that it’s of the same species as the Zillo Beast that attacked Coruscant during The Clone Wars.
Yes, a tantalizing cliffhanger plot point set up in that other animated series way back in 2010 has finally paid off, some 13 years later. It’s a turn of events that will likely have fans cheering for creator Dave Filoni and his talented collaborators at Lucasfilm having played the long game on this one, but it’s also pretty neat that they found a way to tie it into Palpatine’s larger cloning narrative in the wake of The Rise of Skywalker. Anyway, the Zillo Beast goes on a rampage, wreaking destruction on a small village and growing to new proportions each time it consumes electrical energy. Clone Force 99 and Omega (voiced by Dee Bradley Baker and Michelle Ang, respectively) do their best to rein in the creature, but they’re interrupted by the arrival of Imperial forces, who capture the beast instead of killing it. Back at Mount Tantiss, Kaminoan Prime Minister Lama Su (Bob Bergen) arrives just after the Zillo Beast to collaborate with the Empire in convincing Nala Se to cooperate in the project. I thought this episode was fairly thrilling, and as I mentioned above I was especially impressed at how the series’ writers brought together two dangling plot threads to make something even more rewarding and powerful. As a side note, I also feel like I understand better now why this episode was scheduled to be released alongside the third-season premiere of The Mandalorian. In a way, it almost kind of highlights this as a special outing for The Bad Batch, and I hope the pairing draws in more Disney+ viewers who might be casual Star Wars fans to check it out.
New episodes of Star Wars: The Bad Batch are released Wednesdays, exclusively via Disney+.