Today saw the release of the fourth episode in the third and final season of Lucasfilm’s popular animated series Star Wars: The Bad Batch on Disney+, and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this installment.
At the end of the previous episode of The Bad Batch, Omega (voiced by Michelle Ang) and Crosshair (Dee Bradley Baker, who voices all the adult male clones of Jango Fett), and the lurka hound Batcher (also Baker) had escaped the cloning facility on Mount Tantiss using a stolen Imperial shuttle. And at the beginning of this week’s episode, that shuttle has emerged from hyperspace in pretty terrible shape, forcing them to make an emergency crash landing on a backwater planet. So these two protagonists once again find themselves on an off-the-beaten-path world occupied by the Empire, and must venture into a local settlement to find a way off into other parts of the galaxy without alerting their enemies, who are– according to Crosshair– monitoring all long-range transmissions.
Meanwhile, back on Weyland (the planet that houses the Mount Tantiss facility), Dr. Royce Hemlock (Jimmi Simpson) interrogates Nala Se (Gwendoline Yeo) about Omega and Crosshair’s escape. During this conversation, Nala Se claims that Omega’s shocking blood test results were a “false positive,” but this doesn’t deter Hemlock from wanting to capture the clone once again. Then we cut to our heroes, who have walked to the spaceport in the hopes of boarding another shuttle off-world. They don’t have chain codes they can show to the customs officer, so Omega offers to make a bribe, which turns out to be much steeper than she was anticipating. This forces our two travelers to come up with another plan– card gambling in a nearby cantina.
There, Omega manages to hustle a Trandoshan out of a heap of credits, and this works until an Imperial officer named Captain Mann (guest star Harry Lloyd from The Theory of Everything) takes the alien’s seat and begins playing against Omega. The young clone still wins the game, but Mann demands she pay a hefty fine for gambling in the first place, then kidnaps Batcher before heading to an airfield. And that’s where this episode’s climactic confrontation takes place, with Crosshair and Omega first attempting to stealthily retrieve Batcher, then resorting to a full-on attack when that strategy doesn’t work (hence the title of this chapter). They set loose all the animals being held in cages, overwhelming the Imperial force, and hijack a larger cargo vessel to make their egress in this time around.
Outside of the ending, which sees Omega and Crosshair rendezvousing and reuniting with Hunter and Wrecker on a distant moon, I didn’t feel like there was a tremendous amount going on in this particular episode. The outcome is otherwise pretty much the same as where things left off last time, with Hemlock in pursuit and the protagonists on the run. But I feel like that might be the status quo for a big chunk of season three, as this series hurtles toward its conclusion coming at the beginning of May. I was also slightly annoyed that Omega immediately wanted to return to Tantiss to rescue the other clones in captivity there– sometimes her ambition to do good in the face of extreme danger can be irritating. I do suppose it was nice to see Crosshair and Omega bonding a bit further as their uneasy alliance continues, and it is intriguing to see just how welcoming Wrecker and Hunter are going to be about their estranged brother’s return to the flock. I’ll look forward to more on that prospect next week.
New episodes of Star Wars: The Bad Batch are released Wednesdays via Disney+.