Clones and Veterans
The Bad Batch season 2, which I’m almost done with, appears to be as much as anything else about the shitty way we treat veterans when they return to Civvie Street.
The Ark 2.7 “It Can’t Be True”
Lots of covers being blown in this episode. By the end:
Angus and Alicia are solidly together (aww, they’re so cute).
Garnet has admitted she has no genetic match in Hera because they don’t like clones breeding in case they make Gen 3s.
Trust has confessed that he can leave the brig any time he wants to (Garnet eventually gives up and lets him out)
Our lovely assistant doctor has admitted she fled to space to get away from her abusive and narcissistic ex and is now afraid to do relationships.
And Ava is Eastern Federation. Whatever that means at this point.
Lati also uses Kelly to try and murder Ava and poor Alicia. Garnet makes the very sensible decision to take both control units for Kelly’s implants and lock them up.
Well, sensible until somebody steals them, that is.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch 2.2 “Ruins of War”
The Batch are now on a separatist planet, and meet an old hermit who’s preserving his people’s culture and knowledge, hiding it from the Empire.
They don’t get any of the war chest, despite multiple times, but the hermit gives Omega a really cool kaleidoscope. Looks like she’s never seen one before.
They’re definitely starting to shift from survival mode to do something about the Empire mode.
Tech/Tek is kinda funny in this one.
Also, to my utter lack of surprise, Crosshair reported the entire squad dead. An Imperial officer is now perpetuating the lie to save face.
I knew he was going to do that!
Star Wars: The Bad Batch 2.3 “The Solitary Clone”
Clones versus clankers! Desix has battle droids, and has kidnapped their imperial governor in a bid for entertainment.
Enter Crosshair.
The droids don’t stand a change, but the clone troopers…except Crosshair…are starting to suffer major attrition, not from death, but from desertion. They were made too honorable, it seems, to be good tools of the Empire.
Is that the real reason the Empire decided to switch to using recruits?
The Ark 2.8 “We Don’t Kill Our Own”
Well, she does.
I do have a problem with ‘crazed Gen 3s” It’s too close to an Evil Race
Their leader wants to kill everyone, but I’m not sure about the rest of them.
They try to recruit Garnet on the assumption that she’ll be with “her own kind.” She’s not.
Thinking about it, the clone storyline here goes into passing and erasure both, but I hesitate to say anything’s a queer analogy…this is more like a slave revolt.
Maybe if they had treated the rescued clones as people, this wouldn’t have happened.
Also, poor Kelly.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch 2.4 “Faster”
My favorite part of the worst Star Wars movie was the pod racing…which was a blatant NASCAR parody.
“Faster” introduces us to racing as a blood sport…armed, lightweight speeders “not designed to race or for durability” and with no rules. It’s so dangerous most of the drivers are droids, who can be put back together. Sid is sponsoring a droid named Tails.
And gets talked into a side bet with an old frenemy. Of course, this goes south when Tails crashes, gets put back together, and then is crushed *while standing in the pits*.
Tech takes over as driver and wins in unconventional fashion (I successfully predicted he would trick other racers into taking each other out).
This is exactly what I’d expect racing to turn into on fringe worlds where the law ain’t welcome. I appreciated it.
But the Batch have been warned that Sid may not be as loyal to them. Mind you, she DID have the chance to sell Omega to the Kaminoans for a lot of money and didn’t take it…
Star Wars: The Bad Batch 2.5 “Entombed”
I was not expecting this episode.
“Indiana Jones is not an archaeologist” is something any archaeologist will tell you…likely while thoroughly enjoying the movies.
“Indiana Jones is a colonialist thief” is a more recent take that’s absolutely accurate.
And this episode plays with that. The Batch are talked into going treasure hunting by a professional treasure hunter…and this segues into a 100% Indiana Jones sequence of “tomb exploration” events. “We’re going to liberate it.”
I was like “Oh, something’s going to get liberated” because apparently I know these writers now.
Yup. When they pull out the “Heart of the mountain” it liberates a giant dragon mecha they can’t control which starts destroying the environment, including the treasure hunter’s poor droid (don’t worry, she’s backed up to disk).
They have to put it back.
It’s not at all subtle. It’s so obviously saying “Indiana Jones steals things” and maybe “We should give them back” whilst being a fun romp.
But I was not expecting a backhanded Indiana Jones homage from this series at all.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch 2.6 “The Tribe”
The Wookiee tribe, that is. While engaging in a transport job, the Batch come across a caged Wookiee. A very familiar looking Wookiee.
It’s Genji! The Wookiee Padawan from the lightsaber building exercise. Somehow the kid escaped and has been surviving…but there’s a good price for Wookiees on the slave market. They rescue him, of course, and to show their growing heroism, offer to take him to Kashyyk.
Which is under threat. The Imperium has funded pirate types who are collecting Wookiee pelts and destroying the trees.
Q: Why do the Wookiees protect all forest and live within it?
A: The trees are Kashyyk’s other sentient species.
If the Wookiees are telling the truth that the trees came up with the plan, then…
Given what we now know about plant cognition, I’d buy a sentient tree or, more likely, a sentient forest, probably conscious in a very different way from us.
Genji probably won’t survive long term, but he’s alive for now. But in this galaxy?
“They’re just kids. But they don’t get to be.”
Star Wars: The Bad Batch 2.7 “The Clone Conspiracy”
Q: What do you do when your constitution precludes a standing army made of citizens?
A: Get non-citizens to fight for you.
At a lower tech level this wouldn’t work; the highly armed non-citizens would eventually revolt and destroy or take over or, at the very least, demand citizenship.
When you can design your soldiers in a lab, it works, but they don’t see the moral irony; if it’s wrong to make people with a stake in your society fight, then how much worse is it to have your fighters not have that stake? Both the Roman and the U.S. armies recruit(ed) non-citizens with the same promise; serve us faithfully and you will become a citizen.
No such promise is made to the short-lived clones.
And now they don’t have a homeworld and know they’re considered obsolete. This is going to be bad if they revolt; and the chances are high.
Senator Chuchi (sp) knows that staving this off means giving the clones something, but she doesn’t even consider giving them full rights.
The Republic was fascism under a fancy veil. The Empire is merely the veil removed.
(The Batch don’t appear in one cell of this episode)
Star Wars: The Bad Batch 2.8 “Truth and Consequences”
So, in come the Batch to steal the Venator’s command logs and provide Chuchi with the evidence she needs to bring down Rampart.
It all goes beautifully according to plan. Problem is, it’s not their plan. After all, they’re ultimately up against Palpatine, a Sith Lord.
He twists their truth to harm the clones…he wants to get rid of them now they’ve served their purpose.
Echo leaves with Rex to work the problem, although he promises he’ll be back in an episode or a few. (Or maybe we’re going to be using him as a split viewpoint?)
Star Wars: The Bad Batch 2.9 “The Crossing”
“I may not process feelings the way you do, but I still have them.” Overall, I haven’t been hugely impressed by Tech as an autistic character. But that’s a good line.
Sid asks the Batch, because she apparently has no actual miners, to check out an ipsium mine she just bought. Ipsium is hugely valuable and also extremely volatile and prone to exploding on contact with the air, when nudged…you get it.
Unfortunately, somebody sold Sid a pig in a poke. The mine is all but depleted and its on a planet where the mining industry has collapsed, likely because there’s no longer enough easily accessible ipsium. They do find a better mine, but manage to blow it up.
The spaceport is abandoned.
None of which would be a problem if somebody hadn’t stolen the Marauder! Which everyone blames on Wrecker, who got left on watch on his own, but I have to say Tech takes a share of the blame because uh, security system?
They’ve lost Echo, they’ve lost the ship, could things get any worse?
I know.
Never say any line related to that.
They don’t think they’ll get the ship back, but the ship’s a character, she’ll be back as well as Echo. And maybe one day they’ll even get Crosshair to grow up.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch 2.10 “Retrieval”
So, this episode is a pretty classic story. Their ship was stolen by a scavenger working for an ipsium mine boss named Mako. Who is telling the workers the ipsium is degraded, they’re lucky to still have jobs, you get the picture.
What I like about this particular storyline is that it doesn’t end with destroying the mine and freeing the workers.
It ends with them saving the mine for the workers. They’re ipsium miners. It’s what they know. But now without the boss siphoning off the funds, they can be wealthy ipsium miners…running the mine as a workers’ cooperative.
There’s a lot of liberation narratives that frame somebody’s profession as a cage they need to be freed from. Nah, it’s not the job. It’s the boss.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch 2.11 “Metamorphosis”
You know you’ve changed genres to horror when otherwise sensible characters start saying things like “How hard can it be?” and “I’ll be fine.”
The first part of this episode is a homage to Alien(s) and that entire genre of space horror. The second part is basically a kaiju fight against a cloned zillo beast, but I appreciated the homage. There’s a monster. Somewhere. It’s eating people. You don’t know where it is or what it is.
Creeepy.
But just as creepy is the empire’s cloning plans, to weaponize the beast’s DNA…but for that they need the full cooperation of a certain Kaminoan scientist, and…
…now they’re looking for Omega. Because Omega always has somebody hunting her.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch 2.12 “The Outpost”
The clones are being decommissioned and abandoned on civvie street…of course, even better would be if they simply weren’t around.
Crosshair thinks he’s special. He’s going to be just fine. Trustees are never just fine, not in this situation. He’s assigned to accompany a Lieutenant who openly hates clones (calls them “used equipment”) to relieve some clones guarding a ‘high value’ cargo.
Undermanned, no good gear, it’s clear from the moment they land that this mission is as much about getting the clones killed so they won’t be a problem as anything else.
And Crosshair finally snaps. Took you long enough! Unfortunately, he doesn’t manage to escape. Hey, boys, you got somebody to rescue over here…
Star Wars: The Bad Batch 2.13 “Pabu”
Meanwhile, the rest of the squad have no idea what is happening with the regs or their former comrade. Instead, they’re now trying to hide from an angry Sid.
May, the archaeologist/treasure hunter, has an idea for a place they can go…a quiet island named Pabu on an obscure planet, home to refugees from the war.
It’s immediately obvious that the Empire will find this place and bad things will happen, but the immediate threat is an earthquake and tsunami.
If the ocean leaves, don’t follow it.
They agree to stay and help rebuild the damage, but I can feel the ominous dread in the very fact that this place seems so…safe.
Nothing in this galaxy is ever safe.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch 2.14 “Tipping Point”
We start with a good, old fashioned jailbreak – in SPACE! It’s actually pretty cool. But now the Batch know where Crosshair is being held, that he’s turned on the Empire, and that the Empire is looking for them.
They haven’t gotten to their presence on Pabu endangering the sanctuary yet, but it’s pretty clear.
Question…do they rescue Crosshair? Last time he did this, it was a trap. But with Echo back with them and a growing desire to fight the Empire (and fear that they can’t), things just got interesting.
(The scientist is dumb. He should know he can use Crosshair as bait, but he isn’t doing so).
Star Wars: The Bad Batch 2.15 “The Summit”
The enemy of my enemy is my…annoying and inconvenient obstacle. This episode is what happens when two groups have mutually exclusive infiltration plans.
The Batch wants to infiltrate the Mad Scientist Summit to plant a tracker on Hemlock’s ship (Doctor Hemlock is such an awesome mad scientist name).
Unfortunately, our old friend from Onderan plans on blowing it up.
These two plans don’t gel and neither side is going to give up. There is a pretty spectacular kaboom, including the ship they put the tracker on – argh!