(no subject)

[skygiants]

I 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.

Comments

[osprey_archer]

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

This is such a megafranchise experience tbh. "I wish I could quit you," I say, weeping, as I prepare to throw things at the screen while watching the new Hawkeye show which I don't want to watch but it features Yelena Belova AND a Captain America musical, apparently, so how can I say no??

Anyway, I hope it turns out like your Bad Batch experience in being mostly worthwhile if occasionally frustrating! I think your clone feelings and my brainwashed supersoldier feelings have some overlap re: feelings about agency and characters who have been treated as less than human.

[skygiants]

IT'S HORRIBLE, I HATE HOW IT GETS US LIKE THIS. I don't want to care! And yet here we are! I also hope the Hawkeye experience proves ultimately rewarding in at least some respects ... (There is definitely a lot of overlap there -- when I decided I wanted to write about Star Wars clones with the serial numbers filed off for my current novella-in-progress, the only way I could think of to do the filing was to make them brainwashed cyborg supersoldiers instead >.> It's just interesting to look at the varied ways the military-industrial complex attempts to erase the humanity of individuals!)

[shadaras]

Someday I will get to s7 of TCW! and then yeah probably I will also watch Bad Batch...

I'm glad it was mostly enjoyable? That's pretty much the level of enjoyment I expect out of these cartoons at this point. :)

[skygiants]

Yeah, pretty much!! I still can't quite believe I'm currently on my second watch of Clone Wars ... when did I become this person?!

[starlady]

I'm not terribly emotionally attached to this show the way I was with Rebels, or even TCW, but I did quite enjoy it. The animation is beautiful and there's real tension in the story, since most of this involves characters whose ultimate fates are not known. I also like the twist on the accidental adoption here, which is that the kid is their sister and in some ways she knows more than they do.

[skygiants]

Yeah, I loved the emphasis on that at the end -- the reminder that Omega is a child and also chronologically older and in many ways more knowledgeable than her theoretically adult brothers. It's such an interesting dynamic and really leans into the weirdness of clone development in general.

Also, yes, it is gorgeously animated!

[chestnut_pod]

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

*nods glumly in 'Rohan anime'*

I'm glad it's at least enjoyable and functional for you! May Fives be discussed speedily and in our times.

[skygiants]

RIGHT. YOU UNDERSTAND.

I will hold out hope until the last scene airs!!

[ceitfianna]

You've summed up a lot of my feelings about this show and kind of why I haven't watched it yet. I"m going to because I'll probably end up enjoying it but I won't be watching it for the Bad Batch.

[skygiants]

Right, like, I've come round on them -- I like them much better here in this show than I did in S7! - but they were not the primary draw.

[stranger]

Huh. The SW franchise is definitely out of control, from this viewer's POV, but...

SW as an expanded universe has been doing in public what fanwriters were already doing as a subculture (for Trek and from about 1978 for SW and others). The spin-off and alternate-view story building is now an entertainment standard. Packaged entertainment giants (I'm looking at MCU and so on as well) are trying to do what storytellers and fans have always done. It certainly leads to richer world-building, especially taking the movie-serials and comic-book re-sets as potential backgrounds. There's more of this stuff than ever before, and you'd think it would include something for everyone.

But... it's not possible for one person to follow all the disparate storylines, any more than one can know all the ways an oral poet re-told The Iliad over a lifetime, or all the byways of Arthurian saga. You pick a subset to follow and hope you'll like it.

[skygiants]

Yeah, it is fascinating to see the ... mainstreamization? ... of this kind of expanded-universe storytelling! I remember when the MCU first started doing this and I said to my friends, "this seems like a really cool narrative experiment and I'm intrigued to see where it goes" -- and the answer, of course, is eventually not necessarily anywhere I really want to follow it, but as a narrative form the big-expanded-universe-with-multitudinous-threads is kind of an interesting one.

[sovay]

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.

May I ask? Since I do not watch any of these shows, but am interested in the general field of themes.

[ironymaiden]

I'll take a stab at this, if I'm following the question correctly.

The Star Wars prequel films introduce a standing army made of clones - soldiers who are dedicated, excellent, have no families, and are slaves in all but name.

In The Clone Wars the clones are shown to be individuals who are shaped by a variety of experiences. They all have their own (self-assigned) names and a flair for hairstyles, tattoos, and armor decoration. They have friendships and fall in love and are highly regarded colleagues of the Jedi commanders. We come to see them as whole people who deserve freedom and to be rewarded for their service. You start really questioning why anyone ever thought creating a disposable clone army was okay.

We know what is inevitably going to happen to these men; in Revenge of the Sith the Emperor utters a code phrase that activates a mind control chip that causes them to turn on the Jedi. They won't even get to question an unlawful order (as we see clones do previously) - I found it particularly brutal that they all start repeating the phrase "good soldiers follow orders".

[sovay]

a code phrase that activates a mind control chip that causes them to turn on the Jedi. They won't even get to question an unlawful order (as we see clones do previously) - I found it particularly brutal that they all start repeating the phrase "good soldiers follow orders".

That sounds devastating; thank you for the context. (I tapped out after the second of the prequel films and had not seen the scene in question, either.) I take it the Bad Batch are immune to the mind control or otherwise able to resist it, therefore any narrative that follows them dodges most of the horror that happened to more or less literally everyone else they knew and worked with?

some Bad Batch spoilers if anyone reading cares

[ironymaiden]

the conceit of the "Bad Batch" is that they are one-off variant clones with specialized skills (or in the case of Echo, a regular clone that has been through a lot of trauma and has become a cyborg). they hold themselves apart from the other clones, which they refer to as "regs".

you're correct, they have a mixture of defective chip interfaces and removed chips in the group. they're upset and confused by what has happened, but they also didn't have strong relationships with the Jedi, never completely lose control, and don't have a sense of brotherhood with the regs.

[skygiants]

IT'S EXTREMELY DEVASTATING. The most brutal and effective arc in Clone Wars (for me) involves a clone soldier who starts investigating a friend's 'malfunction', discovers the secret of the chip, and goes rogue in an attempt to warn his brothers and Jedi commanders; his efforts are not effective and he does not survive the experience, though his warning and the investigation he did eventually enables the survival and liberation of another character at the end of the show.

As ironymaiden said, the Bad Batch have a complicated and semi-antagonistic relationship with other clones and are indeed mostly immune to the effects of the chip. One of them is impacted and becomes an antagonist throughout the season (gubhtu vg'f riraghnyyl erirnyrq gung ur qvq vaqrrq unir uvf puvc erzbirq cnegjnl guebhtu gur frnfba naq unf orra npgvat ba uvf bja ibyvgvba bhg bs n frafr bs frys-cerfreingvba engure guna haqre zvaq pbageby) and this is of course emotionally distressing for the team, but the sort of inherent distrust and mild contempt that the Bad Batch have always had for 'regular' clones means that they don't have profound feelings about what's happened to the regs as a whole, and it's really a shame -- especially because I think there is genuinely a lot of interesting nuance to mine in the pre-existing dynamic between the regs and the Bad Batch that ties into the clones' complicated relationship with individuality and in-group solidarity, and adding at least one regular clone to the main cast rather than only having them as intermittent one-offs would give significantly more opportunity to draw that out.

[musesfool]

You perfectly encapsulate why I haven't yet watched it, though I also know I'm going to at some point. The fact that they haven't talked about Fives gives me pause, though. He was my favorite non-Rex clone and I am still steamed that no one listened to him despite knowing that the story had to play out the way the story plays out. Otoh, the photosets of Captain Howitzer (I think that was his name) were intriguing.

[skygiants]

Right! Echo is RIGHT there! albeit somewhat underused -- there's a lot to read in between the lines about the difference between Echo's relationship with the regs & the chip & everything that's going on and that of the other Bad Batch clones, but you really have to read between the lines because very little of it is explicitly onscreened and it REALLY should be.

I loved Captain Howitzer extremely, though!