(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

[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.