Today saw the release of the fifth episode in the third and final season of Lucasfilm’s acclaimed animated series Star Wars: The Bad Batch on Disney+, and below are my brief recap and thoughts on this installment.
At the end of last week’s episode, the young female clone Omega (voiced by Michelle Ang) was finally reunited with her adult male brothers Hunter and Wrecker (both Dee Bradley Baker) after being helped to escape the cloning facility on Mount Tantiss by Crosshair (also Baker), who had served as one of their main antagonists over the past two seasons. And as “The Return” begins, the crew of the Marauder has gotten some sleep. Omega wakes up with her Tooka doll to find Wrecker and Hunter chatting in the hold of the ship, and they tell her that Crosshair had already left by the time they got up. So Omega ventures out to the shore (apparently they have returned to the island-planet of Pabu) to coax Crosshair back into the fold.
Crosshair is doing some target practice with the droid AZI-3 (Ben Diskin) in an attempt to recover from the shaky hand he’s fallen victim to recently, and Omega urges him on to finally having a conversation with his brothers, who are understandably reluctant to trust him after everything they’ve been through. Then Echo (Baker yet again) arrives for another reunion, and the gang all decide they need to dig up more information about Tantiss and the clones who remain in captivity there. Crosshair suggests they go back to the outpost that served as the location for his change of heart last season, which has now been completely abandoned by the Empire. At first, Hunter is hesitant to take Omega along, but she soon convinces him that she needs to be there, and the newest addition to the team– Batcher the lurka hound– comes along as well. There, they find that the defense system has gone down with the power, but they are able to pull up a list of clones who were taken to Mount Tantiss on the planet Weyland.
The remainder of this episode is spent accomplishing two things: fighting off a giant snow-wyrm (it’s a pretty interesting coincidence that this chapter dropped the same week that Dune: Part Two– which features enormous Sandworms– arrived in theaters) and getting Crosshair to earn Hunter’s trust again, basically by saving him from said wyrm. Oh, there’s also another homage to Jurassic Park (I’m sensing a pattern in this season so far) as Omega guides Wrecker to an exterior maintenance shed where he needs to restore power to the defense system after his brothers lure the wyrm outside the perimeter. I enjoyed this episode, and definitely consider it a necessary one– we absolutely needed to have Crosshair’s return to Clone Force 99’s good graces spelled out for us, and Hunter says as much with a line of dialogue: “You thought we’d take you back and not ask questions?” And it’s great to hear Crosshair finally verbalize what’s been going through his mind since he first visited “The Outpost” last year. The action here is fun, the character moments ring true, and mostly it’s just good to have everyone (mostly, as Tech’s absence was glaring) back in the same place again.
New episodes of Star Wars: The Bad Batch are released Wednesdays, exclusively via Disney+.