Today saw the release of two new episodes of Lucasfilm’s acclaimed animated series Star Wars: The Bad Batch on Disney+, entitled “Identity Crisis” and “Point of No Return.” Below are my brief recaps and thoughts on these two installments.
This is the third time in this third and final season that we’ve received multiple new episodes of The Bad Batch on the same day, but this week’s double-header might be the most dramatic of all. The first of the two chapters, entitled “Identity Crisis,” focuses on the character of Dr. Emerie Karr (voiced by Keisha Castle-Hughes), who serves as the villainous Dr. Royce Hemlock’s (Jimmi Simpson) assistant at the Imperial cloning facility on Mount Tantiss. But first we witness the somewhat horrific abduction of a Force-sensitive child on an unnamed planet. The infant demonstrates his abilities in public, and then an Aqualish citizen reports him to a “Class-1″ bounty hunter, who turns out to be Cad Bane (Corey Burton, reprising his voice role from Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett, and earlier episodes of this series). Bane’s retrieval of the child reminded me an awful lot of another professional hunter– namely Din Djarin– and his early efforts to collect the bounty on “The Child,” who we have come to know as Grogu.
Next we cut to Tantiss, where Dr. Karr approaches Dr. Hemlock about the possibility of a promotion to chief scientist after the arrest of the Kaminoan Nala Se (Gwendoline Yeo). Hemlock agrees, and Karr is given access to some of the more secretive areas of the facility, including “The Vault,” where kidnapped Force-sensitive children are kept for testing. Here, Hemlock warns Karr not to become too attached to the subjects, and so Karr must refer to them by number instead of name… although throughout the episode her sense of morality starts to get the better of her. The tipping point arrives when Bane and his droid Todo 360 (Seth Green) arrive with their new acquisition. There’s also a point where we see what happens to one of the children when he tries to escape, and naturally this does not help improve morale at the station. We get a cameo appearance by Governor Tarkin (Stephen Stanton), who questions the financial burden of Hemlock’s program on the Empire, and this spurs Hemlock to check in with the Clone X trooper (Dee Bradley Baker) who has apparently extracted intel about Phee Genoa and her relationship with Clone Force 99 from smuggler Ciddarin Scaleback, though that all happens off-screen.
“Identity Crisis” concludes with Dr. Karr offering a gesture of goodwill to one of the captive children, in the form of the makeshift tooka doll that Omega had crafted during her stay at the facility. Then we get into today’s second episode, entitled “Point of No Return,” which begins at a droid-run refueling station where the Clone X trooper follows up on his pursuit of the Bad Batch by furtively hacking into the navigation system on Genoa’s (Wanda Sykes) ship. This leads him to Pabu, where the members of Clone Force 99 are all preparing to leave, in the interest of keeping the island-planet safe. Omega (Michelle Ang) leaves some mementos behind– including her actual tooka doll and Tech’s broken goggles– in the home of her friend Lyana Hazard (Andy Allo) and they say goodbye to her father Shep (Imari Williams), but their departure is interrupted by the explosion of their ship the Marauder, caused by Clone X’s sabotage. This leads to an immediate Imperial occupation of Pabu, with Wrecker sidelined by a concussion and Hunter (both Baker) dropped into the ocean during an attempt to hijack an enemy vessel.
This leaves Omega and Crosshair (yes, Baker) to come up with a plan, and they reluctantly settle on the idea of the former surrendering herself to Clone X and the other Imperial troopers so that the latter can fire a tracking device onto their ship before it flies away. This proves to be more difficult than it sounds, as Crosshair is ambushed by stormtroopers while enacting the plan and winds up missing his shot as Omega is rather dramatically taken away toward Mount Tantiss once again. I really enjoyed both of these episodes, but I would actually say that the first of the two was my favorite, in that getting to know Dr. Karr felt like the show was giving us something new. The second chapter was indeed quite exciting, but just kinda ended up where we’ve been before– with Omega in Imperial custody and the Bad Batch having no way to track down her location. I’m sure it will be interesting to see how they eventually figure it out over the remaining handful of episodes, but at this point I’m finding myself much more interested in the character-based installments than the action-heavy ones. Either way, I’d call this a very strong pair of outings in this increasingly tense final season.
New episodes of Star Wars: The Bad Batch are released Wednesdays, exclusively via Disney+.