I said this last week. There is so much room for expansion for the Star Wars universe.There are so many facets that haven’t been touched. The Bad Batch and other animated shows give that opportunity to crawl through them. And that’s what we get this week with the a former Bad Batch member’s excursion to Desix to deal with the Separatists and their little issue with Imperial control.
We get that asshole, Commander Cody, coming back into the fold, leading a team including original Bad Batch member Crosshair. Throughout the early part of “The Solitary Clone,” I found that my care for the Separatists dropped dramatically when I saw Cody and Crosshair come together. Cody is irredeemable in my eyes for turning on Obi-Wan. I’ll return to that later.
There are flashes that keep me involved in it, like when the Governor of Desix mentioned “Dooku was right all along.” The intricacies of these minor moments are what make these shows so great. These are the callbacks and mentions that get me hooked. That’s why I rated Tales of the Jedi so high. We got literally everything we needed. We got a returning cast of characters that a lot of fans felt were done dirty. They came back, an we got an expansion of lore around them that made their choices in the movies make sense.
There’s a lot of tension with Crosshair, mainly because you see that no trooper wants anything to do with him. I think having a wildcard like Crosshair and the “is he still on the Bad Batch’s side, or has he gone back to full loyalist?” plot. Having him back is something that will cause a lot of really cool ripples down the line. There’s another asshole clone we need to talk about, though.
What The Bad Batch has done is try to redeem the irredeemable with Cody. Watching Revenge of the Sith for the first time, seeing Cody take out Obi-Wan sucked. They had been through a lot during The Clone Wars, and I got attached to this. They had such great chemstry. I knew that Order 66 was going to happen in some form, but watching it in person sucked. Fast forward, and Cody is in command of his own regiment.
After Cody managed to get the soon to be new Governor Grotton free of Ames’s captivity by having a change of heart and yielding to his compassion. Grotton is freed, and orders Cody to kill Ames. Crosshair takes the dilemma out of Cody’s hands, and pops her dead. You see the crisis of conscience wash over him as Ames falls to the ground. When they get back to Coruscant, Cody’s crisis takes over, and ultimately goes AWOL. “The Solitary Clone” ends with Crosshair getting put onto a new squad, supposedly to hunt down Cody.
It was cool to take a break from the squad and to take a ride out to another planet to see some other stories unfold. Seeing what happened with Cody after the Clone Wars, where he betrayed the badass known as Obi-Wan. I hate Cody, but I love that Filoni and crew are following up on him to expand his story. I’m happy that due to Cody’s betrayal, Crosshair’s loyalty will be tested. This was an episode that feels like filler at first, but has the potential to be a font of plot lines going forward.
The building blocks are in place for a very epic reunion in the later episodes of the series. I’m excited for all of this.