Serial Consumer celebrates and interrogates Evan’s relationship to franchised media and his addiction to purchasing its licensed products.

Common Ground promises an ideological test for the Batch but doesn’t quite deliver. The episode opens with Cid explaining a new mission that will help pay off their debts: Rescue Raxus Senator Avi Singh. Raxus was the home world of the Confederacy during the Clone Wars, and naturally the Batch is hesitant to help anyone involved on the CIS side of things. They do so, however, because their debts have continued to pile up and they have no real choice. Hunter leaves Omega behind with Cid because their experience with the bounty hunters has made him wary of putting her in further danger.

There are a few good bits in Common Ground, namely the political stuff showing the Imperials start to invade Separatist planets. The neat thing about the Clone Wars is that the Separatist movement was, in part, a populist movement against the aging and corrupt Republic we see during The Phantom Menace. The Republic, which the Jedi fight for, is an imperfect democracy. There are reasons why smaller worlds want to leave it. However, the Separatists are a movement by and large funded by massive space corporations who just want to avoid paying taxes. As the opening crawl to Revenge of the Sith reads: There are Heroes on Both Sides. Evil is Everywhere.

So setting up the Batch with Separatists whose motivations were sympathetic is an interesting way of exploring this post-war environment. Unfortunately, there just isn’t a lot of that going on once they reach Raxus. There are some really fun fight scenes and a Walker chase scene, but otherwise this is something of a breather episode after the multi-part mid-season extravaganza from the last few weeks. Frankly, the mission and lesson (“Omega can handle her own”) makes it feel like this was written for earlier in the season.

It seems to represent the end, for now, of the Batch working off debts to Cid. I’m glad if that’s the case; I don’t hate the set-up of them working for her, but she hasn’t provided them many interesting missions. I’m hoping they’re able to find some more colorful adventures over the next few episodes.

On the collecting front, I’m still waiting on a few orders to arrive. My buddy Alex grabbed me the last epic collection of The New Republic in Australia, so that’ll be coming once their current COVID crisis is under control, and my pre-order of The Old Republic Omnibus is also set to ship next week. Hopefully I find the new wave of figures at Walmart sometime soon. Other than that … nothing form this episode I’m too interested in finding.