Season Review: Star Wars: The Bad Batch Season Three

After twelve years and seven seasons, with a couple of damn long breaks and two other shows coming out in between, Star Wars: The Clone Wars finally ended in May of 2020 with its seventh and final season, completing the journey to show the events that took place between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. But, for whatever reason (possibly to keep the animators employed so they didn’t just work on twelve episodes and get laid off), a sequel series to was created to follow the direct aftermath of the fall of the Republic and rise of the Empire, following a rogue bunch of defect Clone Troopers as they tried to find their place in this new galaxy while also looking after a younger clone, Omega. This was The Bad Batch, a spin-off of an arc from Clone Wars’ final season that was, essentially, the most Interquel an Interquel could get. Not only did it take place between Attack of the Clones and A New Hope, but also between the recently finished Clone Wars and its pseudo-sequel, Rebels, hence all the cameos from characters who would eventually lead that show. But after three seasons of that, Clone Force 99 has completed their final mission, so let’s take a look back at that and see how the series as a whole stacked up against its peers.

The double edged sword that The Bad Batch as a series has worked with throughout all three seasons is that it is a smaller and less consequential story that even some of the other shows it is directly connected to. Many of the battles in The Clone Wars were chronological footnotes, but they involved key franchise characters like Anakin, Obi-Wan, and eventually Ahsoka. Rebels followed a lesser known group of characters who wouldn’t get the spotlight in the Galactic Civil War, but they went toe to toe against Darth Maul, Admiral Thrawn, and even Palpatine. The Bad Batch keeps its canon involvement light, which in turn reduces some of the weight on what things happen, but in turn allows the story to feel more personal as we see the Batch bond and grow, while also seeing the gradual but definite darkening of the galaxy at large as the Empire’s grip seeps into every world and street corner. And with this final season, that culminates with the clones, not just The Bad Batch, but even previously unknown clones like Emerie, fight against the Empire in their own way and reclaim their own fates, not letting their existence being defined by being made to die in a manipulated war.

And yet…I really don’t think this series needed to be this long. Even just three seasons seems like belaboring the point of what the good parts of this are. Honestly, I probably would’ve made this a miniseries that shaves things down to the barest essential plot points of these three seasons but keep it tightly paced. Yes, you lose a lot of Omega’s development and adjusting to the rough real world around her, as well as Crosshair’s time with the Empire, but you also lose a lot of the more drawn out plots and erroneous cameos that plagued the first season and hopefully keep the more interesting parts of the second (ironically the best parts of the second season were the episodes not about The Bad Batch). Overall, this show can really only be recommended to those who finished all seven seasons of The Clone Wars and four seasons of Rebels, which has got to be a small venn diagram. But if Twitter is anything to go by, it’s got to have some audience, so I have little doubt we’ll see some of these characters again soon. But I cannot stress enough that we gotta take a break from this era. May the Ninth be with you!