Today saw the release of the 12th episode of 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 double-header of The Bad Batch episodes, Omega (voiced by Michelle Ang) was taken away from her friends in Clone Force 99 and back toward the Mount Tantiss Imperial cloning facility, while Hunter, Wrecker, and Crosshair (all played by Dee Bradley Baker) were left without a way to track her location once again. This week’s new episode, entitled “Juggernaut,” opens with Omega actually arriving at Tantiss and being reunited with the villainous Dr. Royce Hemlock (Jimmi Simpson), who welcomes her “home” and takes her to see Dr. Emerie Karr (Keisha Castle-Hughes) for further testing. Dr. Karr is still hesitant to perform her duties after having met the other children who are being kept in the “Vault,” but she tries her best not to show it around Dr. Hemlock.
Meanwhile on Pabu, the members of the Bad Batch regroup after the Imperial occupation of the island-planet comes to an end… I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense that the Empire would leave Clone Force 99 alive considering how willing and capable they’ve proven themselves to rescue Omega before. Regardless, they immediately try to come up with a way to find Tantiss, and Crosshair conveniently drops that he may know a way to locate the facility. Apparently he was reluctant to share it before because he didn’t really want to return there, but now that they have Omega again he doesn’t really have a choice. Anyway, Phee Genoa (Wanda Sykes) shows up and offers to take them where they need to go– an Imperial labor camp where the former Vice Admiral Rampart (Noshir Dalal)– who had previously been arrested by Grand Vizier Mas Amedda in season two– is serving time. Sadly it’s not any of the labor camps or prisons we’ve seen on The Mandalorian or Andor, but it still looks like an unpleasant place to live out the rest of your life anyway.
So the bulk of the remainder of this episode is a big, fairly exciting action sequence wherein the Bad Batch breaks Rampart out of Imperial captivity in exchange for information on how to get to Mount Tantiss. And then for the denouement we’re back at Tantiss to watch Dr. Karr complete her test, confirm the truth to Hemlock about the girl’s high M-count, and then for Omega to be placed in the Vault alongside the other Force-sensitive children. It would be a dark place for her to end up, but don’t forget there are still three more episodes to go in the series, so plenty of opportunity for there to be a happy ending for at least some of our protagonists. As for this installment, I could take or leave the action-heavy middle section, but the conversations between Hemlock and Omega were pretty interesting, especially when we got a little bit more information as to why exactly a second donor is needed to complete Project Necromancer. Hopefully that picture becomes ever clearer over the coming weeks.
New episodes of Star Wars: The Bad Batch are released Wednesdays, exclusively via Disney+.