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Sep. 26th, 2021 10:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI will be honest: I knew I was going to watch Star Wars: The Bad Batch from the moment they aired a trailer featuring Rex, but in a glum sort of 'you-got-me' way where I expected to want to fight it most of the way. I didn't particularly care for the Bad Batch episodes in s7 and while I am, obviously, as you all know, wildly overinvested in The Star Wars Clone Experience overall, the Bad Batch initially gave me some "Not Like Other Girls Clones" vibes that I didn't love -- I'm much more interested in further explorations of the individuality of (and war crimes against) quote-unquote standard-issue clones and following a group of Only Special Clones felt to me like a distraction from the main tragedy of how Order 66 depersonalized the clone troops.
...and I still do kind of feel a little bit that way -- I would truly, truly love to have at least one perfectly regular-issue non-Bad-Batch clone included in the main cast and to actually explore and interrogate the tensions there -- and, like, it's not the postcanon clone show that I personally would have designed, but nonetheless I did actually end up having a great time over the course of the first season! In large part because I am easy for the following elements:
- Unlikely Adults Accidentally Adopt And Become Overinvested In A Child ... is this becoming the pattern of more or less every Disney-era Star Wars story? Absolutely. Unfortunately I Remain Here For It.
- Look, Here's A Character Or Location You Know From Another Star Wars Property! I feel especially confliced about my enjoyment of this tbh because I do actually think that "show you a reference that you are pleased to recognize and make that a building block of narrative delight" is a sort of lazy form of storytelling to which large franchises are increasingly prone, and yet Bad Batch gave me Cad Bane and Fennec Shand have a bounty hunter fight" and this did indeed provide a powerful source of narrative delight. But, like, on the other hand, I do think that many of the stories the Bad Batch is telling provide really interesting connective tissue for bits and pieces of the Star Wars universe on a narrative and worldbuilding level -- I happened to be rewatching the original Ryloth episodes of Clone Wars at around the same time that I watched the Hera episodes of Bad Batch, and I do think that together they provide a more compelling and complex narrative than the first Ryloth episodes did alone, as well as setting up neat stuff for Rebels and doing more to complicate the clone situation than much of the rest of the show does.
So, like, I don't know if The Bad Batch is good per se in and of itself, but I do think it functions pretty well as a kind of early-Imperial-era anthology show with the Bad Batch themselves and the related Kaminoan metaplot serving as a thread of connective tissue between the situations that it wants to explore and develop. I'm enjoying it a lot and looking forward to the next season, and, also, if nobody in the show ever has an actual conversation about Fives, I will be personally furious.
...and I still do kind of feel a little bit that way -- I would truly, truly love to have at least one perfectly regular-issue non-Bad-Batch clone included in the main cast and to actually explore and interrogate the tensions there -- and, like, it's not the postcanon clone show that I personally would have designed, but nonetheless I did actually end up having a great time over the course of the first season! In large part because I am easy for the following elements:
- Unlikely Adults Accidentally Adopt And Become Overinvested In A Child ... is this becoming the pattern of more or less every Disney-era Star Wars story? Absolutely. Unfortunately I Remain Here For It.
- Look, Here's A Character Or Location You Know From Another Star Wars Property! I feel especially confliced about my enjoyment of this tbh because I do actually think that "show you a reference that you are pleased to recognize and make that a building block of narrative delight" is a sort of lazy form of storytelling to which large franchises are increasingly prone, and yet Bad Batch gave me Cad Bane and Fennec Shand have a bounty hunter fight" and this did indeed provide a powerful source of narrative delight. But, like, on the other hand, I do think that many of the stories the Bad Batch is telling provide really interesting connective tissue for bits and pieces of the Star Wars universe on a narrative and worldbuilding level -- I happened to be rewatching the original Ryloth episodes of Clone Wars at around the same time that I watched the Hera episodes of Bad Batch, and I do think that together they provide a more compelling and complex narrative than the first Ryloth episodes did alone, as well as setting up neat stuff for Rebels and doing more to complicate the clone situation than much of the rest of the show does.
So, like, I don't know if The Bad Batch is good per se in and of itself, but I do think it functions pretty well as a kind of early-Imperial-era anthology show with the Bad Batch themselves and the related Kaminoan metaplot serving as a thread of connective tissue between the situations that it wants to explore and develop. I'm enjoying it a lot and looking forward to the next season, and, also, if nobody in the show ever has an actual conversation about Fives, I will be personally furious.
