The end is beginning for Star Wars: The Bad Batch this week, as the third and final season of the show begins streaming on Disney+. But it’s been a while since we caught up with the Batchers, so if you need a quick clone check-in before it all kicks off, we’ve got you covered.
The climax of season two saw Omega captured by Imperial forces—after the Batch were sold out by the seedy bar owner (and their former go-to underworld contact for odd jobs) Cid—while escaping from a mission gone wrong. Now in the control of the mysterious scientific research groups stationed on the planet Weyland, Omega has had a reunion with her former advisor and creator—and one of the last remaining Kaminoans after the Empire bombarded the planet at the climax of season one—Nala Se, as the two find themselves trapped and forced to cooperate with conducting cloning research for the Imperials.
Nala Se isn’t the only familiar face Omega runs into at Mount Tantiss. Crosshair, who stayed behind with the Empire to try and make sense of his own loyalty in the face of the changing regime, has now been turned into a prisoner himself, having extrajudiciously executed an Imperial lieutenant for his treatment of Clone Troopers on the remote world of Barton-4. Moved to Weyland to be used alongside other renegade clones for experimentation, he now finds himself crossing paths with a former teammate in much more dire circumstances this time around.
Hunter and Wrecker, meanwhile, were left horrified at Cid’s betrayal, and now have to regroup while they find ways to figure out where Omega has been taken. Which is tough, considering…
They’re also dealing with the loss of their brother, and the Batch’s technical expert, Tech. During a mission to Eriadu in an attempt to figure out where Crosshair was being imprisoned—after he managed to get a distress signal out to his former team—the Batch crossed paths with a resistance cell lead by Saw Gerrera, attempting to bomb the Imperial facility the Batch happened to be infiltrating. During the escape attempt, Tech found himself cut off from the team on a heavily damaged tram car, and sacrificed himself to give the Batch time to escape, plummeting to his death.
Arguably having the worst time out of anyone in the Bad Batch, really.
Season two saw the villain of the Imperials opposing our heroes switch faces. Admiral Rampart—the primary antagonist of season one—was betrayed by the Emperor and publicly exposed as the architect behind the Kaminoan bombardments, and promptly arrested. Taking his place as the show’s primary villain now is Doctor Hemlock, the lead scientist at Mount Tantiss, who has been pressuring the captive Nala Se into doing research for a mysterious, major cloning project at the Emperor’s behest.
It was Hemlock who ordered Omega’s capture, in order to get Nala Se to co-operate at Tantiss, but when Omega was brought to the facility she found a surprising new “sibling” at Hemlock’s side: Dr. Emerie Karr, who it turns out is just like Omega, a female clone created from the Jango Fett template, albeit this time matured into a full adult. Surprise sister!
A lot of the background of The Bad Batch’s transitory period from the last days of the Republic and into the full swing of the Empire has focused on the development of the next generation of Imperial armed forces. Admiral Rampart was a major advocate of moving away from cloned soldiers and into recruited civilians, funneling funding into Project War-Mantle, a research and training program that saw Clone Commandos train the non-clone conscripts and recruits that would replace them.
This climaxed in season two with the introduction of the Imperial Defense Recruitment Bill to the Senate, which would formally (and forcefully) retire clones from active service in order to ramp up recruitment for a new Imperial army. Although the bill faced pushback for declining to offer any kind of welfare support for the ousted clones, and was almost scuppered entirely by the revelation about Rampart’s embezzlement for Project War-Mantle and his involvement in the Kaminoan genocide, Palpatine managed to use Rampart’s exposure as a way to show the Senate that a need to move away from Clone troopers was necessary, garnering enough support for the bill to pass.
A combination of the Imperial Defense Recruitment Bill’s legislative journey and a growing realization among the Clones that service in the Empire is a very different beast to service in the Republic has sown the seeds for a growing Clone insurgency—spearheaded by none other than Clone Wars’ Captain Rex. Becoming a familiar face for Imperial deserters to turn to, Rex—now working with Echo, who left the Bad Batch to help his former brother-in-arms during season two—has recruited a number of Clone Troopers into a resistance group, including the likes of Clone Commando Gregor (from Clone Wars and eventually Rebels) and Commander Cody, to push back against the Empire, working with sympathizers in the Imperial Senate, including Pantoran representative Ryo Chuchi.
Bounty hunter Fennec Shand appeared in the first season of the show, as one of several hunters chasing Omega—although she was in fact directly hired by Nala Se in an attempt to protect the girl from the interest of Kaminoan prime minister Lama Su as he worked to keep Kamino in the favor of the Imperial Regime. Fennec failed to capture Omega herself, but showed up again to disrupt the efforts of rival hunter Cad Bane when he captured her on the junkyard world Bracca.
All we know is that she’s back in season three as someone Hunter and Wrecker turn to in a moment of need. “To pair them with the Batch again, because the last time they interacted was a very different story,” writer and Executive Producer Jennifer Corbett told io9 in a recent interview, “I think it speaks to what Hunter and Wrecker are willing to do in order to complete the mission, and the deals they’re willing to make.”
Shand isn’t the only familiar face back for season three though: a trailer revealed to the shock of Star Wars fans (and not-shock to anyone used to Star Wars reviving dead characters all the time) that none other than Asajj Ventress—the Dathomiran former Sith assassin for Count Dooku during the Clone Wars and then an independent bounty hunter—would be appearing in The Bad Batch.
Ventress had died during the events of the canon novel Dark Disciple, set during the waning days of the Clone War and adapted from unproduced scripts and story ideas for Clone Wars prior to its cancellation, sacrificing herself to save the undercover Jedi (and her paramour) Quinlan Vos from Dooku. But given that she was buried among the magic-infused lands of the Nightsisters of her homeworld, and the aforementioned “people rarely stay dead on Star Wars” dealio, it’s perhaps not too surprising that she’s now alive and kicking and ready to cross paths with our heroes.
So that’s where we are, who’s gone and who’s back. So what can we expect in season three? All eyes are on Mount Tantiss right now—not just for whatever project Hemlock has cooking for the Emperor, but for our surviving Batchers to rescue Omega before it’s too late, to see wherever Crosshair’s re-examination of his duty takes him while he’s imprisoned there, and to figure out just what is up with Emerie and her connections to both Omega and Hemlock.
But then there’s a billion other questions. How’s Ventress connected to all this? What’s Fennec up to? Will we finally see the end of the Clone Army? Who’s going to make it out of the show alive? Hell, even metatextually, Bad Batch’s conclusion puts an end to a very specific era of Star Wars animation, a medium and particular style that sustained the franchise through years of wilderness before its return to movies and streaming TV. If this is the end of the Batch, and the end of that era as we know it… what’s next? Is anything next?
Time will tell—but we’ll start learning at least some of all this when The Bad Batch season three beings streaming with a three-episode premiere this Wednesday, February 21.
