skygiants: clone helmet lit by the vastness of space (clone feelings)
Really truly horrible to realize that over the course of its third season I have become a person who genuinely thinks The Bad Batch -- a show that, when it was announced, filled me with nothing but a sense of wistful ennui for all the hours I was going to spend watching it against my own will and better judgment! -- is the best Star Wars television I have experienced barring Andor. Absolutely appalling to discover that I genuinely think the long arc is extremely well executed! that its characters have moral nuance and complexity! that it does a better job of any other Star Wars media properties of digging into systemic clone dehumanization! that it retroactively justifies Expandspoiler )! and that it does all this without leading any of its characters towards their ultimate Jedi destiny or showing a single Skywalker on screen!

Is any of this actually true? Who can say. I don't know anymore and you probably shouldn't trust me. All through Season One I was like "this is a perfectly fine self-indulgent Star Wars show for children" and then throughout Season Two I started gradually tilting my head like "IS the tragic postcanon clone show about the horrors of the military-industrial complex that I've been wanting for years bursting its way out of the Hijinks-Filled Children's Show cocoon in which it's been lurking all this time?" and now Season Three has happened and it's ALL horrors of the military-industrial complex ALL the way down and all the stuff it turns out they have been building for three seasons genuinely landed for me??? how could this happen to me. Just When I Think I'm Out etc etc

Okay one thing I do feel confident in saying is the fact that Bad Batch has bar none my favorite heel face turn arc in all of Star Wars, the Heel Face Turn Galaxy Long Ago And Far Far Away, because it is NOT about the power of love and it IS about radicalization through solidarity. Expandand I am going to talk about it more under a spoiler cut )

I also really love that the show counterbalances its long redemption arcs with a couple different iterations of allies who are fun and compelling characters to have onscreen and also end up eventually betraying our protagonists -- and not in silly "lol Hondo is up to his tricks again!" ways, nor by dramatically Falling to the Dark Side, but just by making selfish and petty decisions out of fear in the way that people sometimes will do. This is especially good because broadly speaking the show often is the kind of show in which our plucky youthful protagonist who wants to believe in people and make connections with them is proven right; it makes it genuinely surprising and impactful on the occasions that she's wrong. Expandspoilers again )

And! Also! I love that the the show lets its characters have different priorities, and act on them, eventually to the point of permanently splitting the party in a way I did not think would be allowed -- Expandyet a third round of spoilers )

Let's see, what else ... I do really love Omega, she's a Good-Hearted Protagonist Child but I love how visibly you can see her growing into adolescence over the course of the show and that she never forget that although she's a child among adults, she's also paradoxically the oldest among them. I also, God help me, love all the absurd cameos. ExpandONE LAST SPOILER ) The Bad Batch is a good show!! Maybe. If you trust me. Which you shouldn't. I'm emotionally compromised by clones and that's just going to go on being true.
skygiants: clone helmet lit by the vastness of space (clone feelings)
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 Expandmild spoilers for some specific episodes and interactions )

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.

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