For the third week in a row ‘The Bad Batch’ has hit it out of the park. The series is becoming the perfect example of serialized storytelling with each episode building on what has come before. The Bad Batch are just the bookends in this chapter and we have now reached the point where Omega can stand be herself as a full rounded and believable character without it seeming like a departure from the story we have been watching.
This series creates its mysteries but it is not afraid to answer them and there is a pace to the story that doesn’t leave you hanging. It is refreshing to watch a show that tells its story and is not worrying about what they need to hold back for later seasons. Here, at the midway point of the first season, we get the big question of who or what is Omega answered.
Star Wars has always had a Westerns influence but this episode, even though it is set in a cloning facility in the clouds, visual resembles the ‘Old West’ of 70s cinema more than anything they have done before. Everything has sepia tones, looks decrepit, and dirty looking clouds resemble dust storms blowing in. Cad Bane, after kidnapping Omega in the previous episode, has arrived at a disused cloning factory to collect his bounty from the Kaminoans unaware that Omega is cunning enough and has the skills to free herself. With her escape the plot of this series really kicks into gear. The Empire are after the Bad Batch because they are a threat to the new order, the Kaminoans want Omega for her genetic material but want her dead, and Nala Se (the Kaminoan scientist) wants Omega so she can protect her. We get the reveal that Fennec Shand has been hired by Nala to protect Omega but that is not the big revelations. With a quick Wookiepedia search and exposition dump Tech delivers the information that people have been waiting for – Omega is a Fett. She is the last pure first generation clone which technically makes her a sister of Boba with Boba being the Alpha (a fact I called here). Now, how pure she is is in question because she is female but this is Star Wars science and if she is unaltered and aging naturally it makes her the oldest clone we have seen in the show so far.
Outside of the big reveal, which hasn’t been revealed to Omega herself, Omega gets a ton of character development. She talks her way out of being held hostage, works out how to contact the Batch herself, and questions her existence when faced with the realities of cloning. She walks amongst cloning tubes, similar to the ones that have been popping up all over Star Wars at the moment, in a scene reminiscent to ‘Jurassic Park 3’ or ‘Alien Resurrection’, and stares at the horrors within. You half expect one of the clones to move or a Snoke face to be revealed. Not realising that Fennec is there to save her she pushes a cloning tube onto her and out pops a Kaminoan, god knows what they have been up to in the old facility but they are not just about Jango clones.
A large chunk of the episode is devoted to the showdown between Cad Bane and Fennec Shand. Bane is now the old King and Fennec is the young up and comer chasing is crown. She introduces her self by killing Taun We, the high ranking Kaminoan, who was there to pay Bane, and taking the money. She then goes toe to toe with Bane and eventually bests him but doesn’t kill him. This is the beginning of the changing of the guard in the bounty hunter ranks. While they are fighting Omega escapes the planet in an old spacecraft and makes her way back to the Batch. Hunter promises never to take her back to Kamino but tellingly doesn’t reveal her origin.
The episode sets up so much not just for this series but for the Star Wars universe as a whole. There is now conflict between the Kaminoans, conflict between the bounty hunters, and the Fett bloodline reveal could be played out in a number of places. Will Boba find out (I’m sure he will) and what will his reaction be (probably not good) are big threads left dangling. And then there is the question of how will the knowledge of her heritage effect Omega when she finds out. Can the moral code of the Batch Batch override her genetic code?
Great entertainment and probably the best looking Star Wars animated episode to date.
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