Every time an episode of Star Wars: The Bad Batch lands, Fantha Tracks will be giving their responses, and here are our initial gut feelings, deep dives and thoughts on episode ten and eleven of season three, ‘Identity Crisis’ and ‘Point of No Return’. Beware of spoilerific elements in here.
Ross Hollebon
Back-to-back Bad Batch gut punches. That is the easiest way to sum up the dual release of episodes 10 and 11 of the show’s final season. The main takeaway—no surprise—is the Empire’s succeed-at-all-costs approach to domination.
They kidnap and experiment on children. They terrorize the inhabitants of Pabu—destroying their ability to fish and earn a living. CX-2, the Clone assassin droid who leads much of the horror in his hunt for Omega, even kills one of his pilots to stop Hunter from stealing a gunship.
Cad Bane and Todo appear, frigidly stealing a young child from its mother (possibly the Iakaru species) then collecting a bounty from the Empire and its newest chief scientist, Dr. Emerie Karr—now overseeing critical elements of Project Necromancer. When she learns the specimens are children she begins to have second thoughts about what is happening at her scientific base led by Dr. Hemlock, who needs Omega’s high M-Count as a binding agent to move his research forward.
And Omega allows it to happen toward the end of ep. 11, surrendering to CX-2 in hopes of getting the lives of the villages on Pabu spared.
The Marauder is destroyed. Wrecker is hurt by the blast and remains unconscious (did Gonky survive?), Hunter swam ashore after the gunship crashed into the water, and Crosshair is dealing with his emotions after letting Omega surrender and his tracking beacon shot missing CX-2’s ship.
The Bad Batch is not in a good place, but Emerie has gifted Omega’s Lula doll to Eva, a “specimen,” to cheer her up, and before the attacks on Pabu, Omega presented Lyana with Tech’s broken goggles and her own Lula doll, originally from Wrecker, presenting two small moments of joy and hope in an otherwise gloomy pair of episodes. With four episodes to go, Omega, Hunter, Wrecker, and Crosshair will take any positive momentum they can get.
Mark Newbold
It never rains but it pours, and when it pours on The Bad Batch it’s a monsoon. That pretty much sums up this double-hit of episodes as things go from bad to worse to looking at the storm clouds for any kind of silver lining. During Identity Crisis and Point of No Return we lose Omega, watch the Marauder get blown to pieces Razor Crest style and see Wrecker hurled into the water as their safe haven of Pabu is taken by the forces of the Empire. Any advantage our heroes had fought and scrapped for is gone. As far as desparate situations go, this is as bad as it gets.
Quite apart from the unpleasantness of seeing children coerced into giving the Empire and Project: Necromancer what’s needed (with the ranks of Jedi decimated from thousands down to dozens in the course of one devastating evening on Coruscant the blood of easily controllable children their new way forward), it’s uncomfortable to see the nerves of Omega. She’s the smart one, the one who figures out that their options have diminished to dust, and how handing herself over is the only way to save Pabu and give them a chance to find Tantiss and free the other clones. She’s brave beyond words and holds her emotions in check until she’s alone, when the worry of the situation creases across her young face.
That Crosshair is the one she pins her hopes on is a rare sliver of light; that circumstances contrive to scupper his shot at tagging the ship with a tracker that would lead them to Tantiss is a crippling blow. This season has delivered many treats (including Batcher, who needs to be a plush toy asap) but the pairing of Omega and her brother Crosshair has been a joy. His pessimism butts against her eternal optimism (the Alpha to her Omega) and her can-do spirit has got them through numerous scrapes. It’s what fuels this final gambit to find Tantiss, but as we stand perhaps it’s one roll of the dice too far.
It can’t be overstated just how special this show is. There’s a confidence and ease to how the story is presented, a very natural way in which the lines are delivered by the cast and as it adds links to the chainmail of the broader Star Wars mythology, the fact that this is animation matters not one jot. This is heavyweight storytelling, and I can’t help but think that if this was a live action show the cast would be mega stars within the fandom and The Bad Batch would be as popular as any other Disney Plus show. As it is, we hold the show close as a treasured piece of GFFA entertainment that is lurching our emotions around like a learner driver who’s heavy on the brakes, and remain confident that Jennifer Corbett and Brad Rau are able to lead their team to a conclusion that will live long in the memory.
How they get our heroes out of this hole, that’s another thing entirely.
Jen Sopchockchai
Back at the beginning of the season, when Hemlock first shows The Emperor what he refers to as “the vault” I joked that perhaps there were a bunch of Grogus in captivity. And while not a baby Yoda was to be seen here, I wasn’t too far off from the idea. When the doors of the vault open, we discover a very Stranger Things-seque tableu: children joylessly playing at large round tables in a drab, metallic room.
Little ones with a natural aptitude for the Force have been a source of trauma ever since I saw Revenge of the Sith in theaters in 2005. Having coo-ed at them as they precociously engaged with Master Yoda in Attack of the Clones, I was extra primed for the gut punch that was a recently fallen Anakin igniting his lightsaber in front of a small crowd of innocent children. You can call child endangerment a cheap shot, but it works.
When watching these two episodes of The Bad Batch, I experienced a combination of the feelings I had during both Revenge of the Sith and Andor. A feeling of bearing witness to the unspeakable. Hemlock keeps children prisoner and subjects them to testing against their will, and all they want to do is go home to their families. I don’t even want to pull the parent card here. Just as a human with a beating heart, I could barely handle this.
The exposition within Episode 10 made me embarrassed that I hadn’t really thought through the very practical reasoning for all this literal kidnapping: that the Empire would want to target Force sensitive children specifically not only because they were easier to coerce or manipulate, but because new children being born with The Force were…the only ones left. The Bad Batch make it very clear that this was not a war, but a genocide, and I don’t know if I would have used that word before I saw so many of the brilliant shorts in Star Wars Visions or even Obi-Wan Kenobi. One could argue that authoritarianism and genocide comprise the project of this era or Star Wars.
Crosshair’s catastrophic failure is a perfect example of a turn in the story that wasn’t entirely surprising; and yet, that fact has no negative effect on my viewing experience. The foreshadowing of a pivotal moment in which his diminished accuracy (his yips) would precipitate a devastating loss was very obvious, considering what we had seen prior. Too many frames lingered on his shaking hand. We made too much of a point to have Omega try to help him heal. But that doesn’t mean that my heart wasn’t breaking the moment he fired and missed the ship taking Omega away to WHO KNOWS WHERE (I mean, we know it’s Tantiss, but none of the clones know how to get there).
The last shot of Omega cinched this moment perfectly. We know she is being noble and brave by giving herself up to Hemlock to protect everyone else on Pabu, but that doesn’t mean she can’t also be terrified on the inside. The look on her face, when no one else was around, demonstrated such a humanizing vulnerability, which we sorely needed in stark contrast to the dehumanizing tactics employed with the young “specimens” in the vault.
I am reminded of an episode of The Clone Wars called “Padawan Lost,” in which Trandoshan hunters capture Ahsoka. She discovers that she has joined the ranks of several other younglings trapped on the planet to provide the Trandoshans with sport. She snaps them all out of their despair and empowers them to overthrow their captors. She shows them the power they have when they think they have none.
When Emerie Karr tells Nala Se that the children don’t belong in the vault, she laments that she can’t help them because she doesn’t have “that kind of power.” Nala Se’s cryptic response of “Don’t you?” sets up the eventual realization that they don’t have to take it. They won’t have to be complicit. Omega, as we’ve seen already, is the best character to facilitate that realization for all the victims on Tantiss.
(This is condensed and edited – with permission – from Jen’s The Long Take review, which you can subscribe to here)
Eric Onkenhout
In Identity Crisis, Hemlock promoted Emerie Karr to lead scientist of Project Necromancer, replacing Nala Se, who is currently indisposed. Karr is granted access to The Vault where she is introduced to the program’s specimens — children of the Force taken from their families. Hemlock explained the importance of Omega to Emerie, noting that she is the only successful binder to have replicated an M-count, and thus must be found. Shortly after, the bounty hunter Cad Bane arrives with another new Force-adept, this one an infant. Disturbed by the nature of Project Necromancer, Emerie is faced with a difficult decision.
In Point of No Return, Phee makes a pit stop but doesn’t realize Imperial operative CX-2 snuck aboard her ship and decrypted her navicomputer. Meanwhile, fearing Omega’s safety, the Bad Batch prepares to leave Pabu for good. Their departure is interrupted, however, by the arrival of the clone assassin and the Empire. The Imperial forces quickly lay waste to the city as they look to force the Batchers out of hiding, but Omega has a plan.
Both episodes this week had super-heavy themes. And I get that it’s the period in which The Bad Batch occurs that makes this series so intense and dark. Emerie Karr’s connection to Omega and ethical beliefs will be the reason why she turns against Dr. Hemlock and the Empire. There are two different types of scientists. The ones who experiment without asking if they should (Hemlock), and ones like Karr. Typically the ones who defy the natural order of things tend to lose.
In episode 10, even though things were going really badly for the Batchers and Omega, I felt like if Omega’s plan worked, they would be fine because they’d track her position and rescue her…again. But Crossfire wasn’t able to hit his target, and CX-2 got away with Omega. To top it off, Omega has no idea that she is not being tracked.
There are only four episodes left! I cannot imagine how intense the last few are going to be, but judging by the episode titles, hopefully, things will end on a high note. Something The Bad Batch hasn’t had many of.
Dan Lo
George Lucas originally made Star Wars to be kid-friendly, but the Star Wars universe itself has been anything but that. If kids aren’t being recruited into an ever devolving Jedi order, they’re getting kidnapped for stormtrooper training. Or, as we saw in the latest double feature of The Bad Batch season three, snatched from their homes for Project Necromancer. Yikes.
While the sinister cloning program is not new to Star Wars overall nor even to this show, taking center stage in Identity Crisis did initially feel like a hard left. The title characters saw no screen time, and it felt like the story took an unnecessary pause with no regard to its own momentum. If we were left with that as a cliffhanger, the sentiment would have been true but Point of No Return immediately put the events into perspective.
Once again the clone assassin complicated matters for the Bad Batch, this time flushing them out of the closest thing they’ve ever come to having a safe haven. I know there’s been plenty of post-Order 66 Star Wars since Attack of the Clones, but it still feels odd to see LAAT/i gunships working against our heroes instead of aiding them. Was it my imagination, or did the music during those scenes have faint echoes of Kylo Ren’s theme?
There’s been no recent emphasis on Crosshair’s shaky hand and we know he has probably been meditating to some degree, but I have a feeling the old Crosshair wouldn’t have missed the tracking device shot. He wasn’t the only one to have suffered defeat, of course. Hunter had just washed ashore after bailing out of a crashing gunship, and Wrecker isn’t even conscious at the moment although signs seem to indicate that he’ll pull through. And of course, Omega is now on her way back to Tantiss in complete radio silence.
Well, that last part isn’t entirely true. At least in part because Omega has an unlikely ally waiting for her in Dr. Karr. The safe bet is she’ll eventually be rescued, but Rogue One has already paved the way for a darker outcome too. Either way my guess is she somehow won’t end up being the ultimate key to Project Necromancer, otherwise Moff Gideon’s Imperial remnant wouldn’t be on an active hunt for Grogu many years later. With four more episodes left in the show there is still plenty yet to be learned.
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