TV #14 of 2023:
Star Wars: The Bad Batch, season 2
The first year of this Clone Wars spinoff was a surprisingly propulsive affair, but this sophomore season struggles to recapture and maintain that sense of momentum. It’s still a solid delivery of weekly Star Wars thrills — although I question the decision to have its release schedule overlap with the current run of The Mandalorian — but with less of a guiding throughline about why we should care about these particular characters at this particular moment of galactic history. There’s some plot movement and bigger stakes from time to time, but mostly it’s a string of episodic filler like the franchise’s version of The A Team.
I also continue to feel that the members of this band of protagonists are not especially distinctive, and not just because they’re all literal clones voiced by the same actor. Wrecker and Omega are each relatively well-drawn, but their brothers Hunter, Echo, and Tech can often come across as roughly interchangeable from scene to scene. (One of them leaves for a few episodes this season, and I’m not 100% sure I can even remember which one without looking it up. The group dynamics don’t appear to meaningfully change in his absence.) An emotional finale seems likely to alter that situation going forward, assuming Disney renews the show again, but it’s a continued weakness in the storytelling here.
At its most interesting points, we’re at least getting a look at how the Empire transitioned away from clone troopers to imperial stormtrooper recruits, which is not an area that any previous series or movie has delved into before in much detail. The driving logic behind that push could be made more explicit, and I can only assume that all the nebulous talk about research into cloning is meant to eventually tie with what’s happening decades later on the Mando program (and possibly the sequel film trilogy), but it’s probably the main takeaway from this season beyond its downbeat ending.
[Content warning for gun violence and suicide.]
★★★☆☆
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