We’re a week away from the return on Disney Plus of The Bad Batch for its third and final season, and executive producer Jennifer Corbett and supervising director and executive producer Brad Rau sat down with Gizmodo to discuss three key characters from the season, Emerie Karr, Asajj Ventress and Fennec Shand.
io9: What was the process for bringing Ventress back like? Was she a character you wanted specifically to bring into this story, or one offered to you as a potential way to tell the story you had this season?
Brad Rau: We love Ventress! I’ll just say, without going into too many details, as a creative team—not just me and Jen—once we knew this was possible, we got really, really excited. A lot of talk went into it, a lot of thought went into it. Even for the design, we looked to unfinished episodes of Clone Wars, the ones that were the inspiration for Dark Disciple—there were already designs that were created and some early story reels.
We wanted to honor that look—her incredible hair, that incredible lightsaber. “What color is that lightsaber!?” Oh my god, there’s so much going on. A lot of that came from [Clone Wars’ unfinished episodes], so we were really, really excited to be able to honor that, and in Bad Batch for a very specific reason [as part of] Omega’s story.
io9: Ventress isn’t the only returning character—aside from the Clones, we’ve got Ming-Na Wen back as Fennec Shand. Given the stories The Bad Batch is focusing on this season, why was it important to get her in the final season too?
Corbett: She’s just an incredible character, and [Ming-Na] is such a fun person to be around. To pair them with the Batch again, because the last time they interacted was a very different story, I think it speaks to what Hunter and Wrecker are willing to do in order to complete the mission, and the deals they’re willing to make.
We wanted to bring someone back who is that sort of character [to make the Batch go] “Oh, are they going to make this deal?” She was the perfect fit, because she’s the boss! Having them in this episode [with her] doing what they do, I mean… it was fun from breaking the story all the way to the end of animation. I was just like… loved to have her, love to have her in many other things!
Rau: Ming-Na is on fire in the episode, she’s so good at giving the soldier boys guff. She’s incredible.
Be sure to listen to tonights episode of Making Tracks, the first of a trio of roundtables that this episode see Fantha and a number of fellow Star Wars outlets sit down with Brad and Jennifer.
