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

I still watch The Bad Batch because it is an animated show set in the Star Wars universe between Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope. I don’t watch it because the central characters are interesting, the story is exciting or the worldbuilding is substantial. None of those would describe the state of the show at the midway point of its third and final season, even if they fleetingly applied in prior instances.

I’m honestly taken aback by how this show — billed as a sequel to the generally consistent and occasionally glorious Star Wars: The Clone Wars and a prequel to the series-high Star Wars: Rebels — seems to have been greenlit without a clear mission statement. Why these characters? What is their journey? What does their story say about the galaxy at large? How do they grow in the face of adversity? How do those they help grow after their time with the Batch? We’re about 45 episodes into this show, and I’m not sure any of these questions were even answered when development on the series started a half-decade ago.

I’ll admit: I have spoken highly of the show on occasion in the past. The first and second seasons have some standout individual episodes even though their overall arcs leave much to be desired. Both seasons end in strange anticlimaxes, although the second is slightly better than the first.

I’ve also consistently written that the show is at its best when the Batch turns its gaze toward the plight of its fellow decommissioned Clone Troopers suffering under the thumb of an Empire that sees them as, at best, expendable cannon fodder and, at worst, experimental material for dark science experiments. That’s the story The Bad Batch has been leaning toward all along, particularly with its ongoing subplot about Clone Commander Rex going around recruiting old Clones for his little rebel cell. That’s the story that, going into a third season, seemed likely to be the clear driving motivation of our little family as the series reached its conclusion.

Instead, we’re midway through, and once again, Rex has cameoed for a two-part episode that ends with him outright telling Hunter, the supposed leader of our crew, that he needs to focus on helping the other Clones instead of just returning to self-imposed retirement on an island paradise. What the fuck? What is this show?

It’s truly bizarre that, at this stage, we still have a much more popular character injecting any sense of energy or direction into our main characters. The Clone Wars was essentially an anthology with a core cast we frequently returned to — Ahsoka Tano, Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, Rex. It was structured to cover a three-year war, and that template allowed for digressions and one-offs that nonetheless fit the overall setting. It’s imperfect, but there was a lot of creative leeway to tell any kind of story George Lucas and company wanted to cover. Rebels was a more focused series about a specific rebel cell that happened to be structured like a family. Over time, they developed nemeses and goals that fit their story but their relationships and their drive to make the galaxy a better place were most important.

I couldn’t tell you a single mission that Hunter, Wrecker, Tech or Echo have chosen to take for any reason other than, for a time, an ill-defined mercenary payday. They’re bland, flat characters with no wants or needs. Omega (voiced by Michelle Ang) is usually treated as the de facto leader of the Batch given her headstrong desire to push them out of their listlessness, but her decisive nature comes at the expense of her older brother-fathers doing anything at all.

This is never clearer across the whole show than in the first act of the third season, which focuses on Omega escaping Tantiss, an imperial science facility, by enlisting the help of former Batch member Crosshair. A one-off episode in the middle of this arc shows Hunter and Wrecker wandering around being essentially worthless. There’s no sense of urgency from those two Clones regarding Omega, and Omega really doesn’t need their help anyway. When they do finally reunite, she just sort of finds them hanging out and doing jack shit.

Meanwhile, the big lore reveal is that Omega is Force-sensitive, something fans have generally picked up on since the series premiere in 2021 — and a story beat that could’ve actually been used in a fun, pulpy way during their adventures over the last few seasons rather than held as a big moment toward the series’ end.

Frankly, I’m aghast at how genuinely uninspired the storytelling is in The Bad Batch. After resolving the reunion subplot, the next two episodes focus on integrating Crosshair with his old family once again. Crosshair is a standout character because, unlike his brethren, he actually wanted something — a place in the new order of things. He betrays them early on and goes on to commit heinous war crimes before betraying the Empire in the best episode of the entire show (Season 2’s The Outpost). That moment is what led him to imprisonment on Tantiss and his eventual rescue by Omega. He’s now back with the team, and they don’t entirely trust him. Good thing all of that basically resolves itself thanks to the flow of more giant-monster plots rather than propulsive and engaging storytelling.

This all comes back to the big moment at the end of the seventh episode where Rex tells Hunter the Batch should be trying to find Tantiss to rescue their fellow Clones. After two-and-a-half seasons, Hunter’s main concern is protecting Omega from her pursuers, as she’s once again wanted by the Empire. He still lacks any broader goals and needs someone else to provide them for him. Sure, there’s some thematic ideas at play: The Batch represents perfect soldiers without anyone to aim them, and they don’t know what to do after the Republic has fallen. That’s fine for a first-season arc, but we are now three seasons into this goddamn show, and our characters are still unmotivated, passive participants in a grander story we barely get to see.

Why isn’t this show about Captain Rex traveling the Galaxy to save other Clones, heal them from Order 66 and make amends for what the Clones were forced to do? That’s a story we see once or twice every season, and it’s so much more interesting than this.

If the show must be about the Bad Batch as a squad, however, why didn’t the first season feature them finding purpose doing much the same thing, the second season concern the shadow of Tantiss over the remaining Clones, and the third season find them taking the fight to the Empire? Oh, wait, that’s basically what we see happening every time Rex shows up in the show, with those episodes bookended by the Batch sitting around acting worthless and complaining about taking any sort of action at all.

I’ve written about this before, but I was excommunicated from previewing Disney+ content last summer after shitting on the streaming service’s Marvel series Secret Invasion. Later, I was advised Disney was accusing me of leaks for shows they never actually showed me. “This isn’t about what you wrote,” I was told. I don’t believe that to be the case. Frankly, the shows they’ve released for their two largest franchises have been pretty shaky over the last nine months or so, with the exception of Ahsoka, and Disney has circled the wagons with its preview content to aim it at a specific level of influencer with neither journalistic scruples nor a desire to rock the boat. For every journalist at a major outlet they have to include as to not look choosy, there are five or six fan YouTubers whose primary concern is maintaining access to the financial lifeblood of their clickbait channels. That’s also why they still leak plot information and ignore embargoes, as I was not doing. It’s about getting their reactions up as quickly as they can, and that’s just the game Disney plays now.

I only bring this up because the early reactions to this season of The Bad Batch — which encompassed everything through next week’s episode — were glowing and profoundly positive, extolling a show that had finally found its path forward. Influencers advised fans that although none of the season trailer’s big cameos would appear in the first half of the season (which is a spoiler, but who’s counting?), these episodes were filled with the kind of direction the show had lacked until this point. Given that the sources lack a critical bone in their bodies, it was difficult to not question these reactions.

Especially because as a critic, I’d been given the first 14 episodes of Season 2, and I felt much the same way about those episodes when they first aired. How could I feel any differently when the complement of review material featured the best episode of the season last? As a critic, it gave me confidence the show would pull out all the stops for a meaningful and interesting finale. I didn’t say Season 2 was perfect, but I certainly felt a bit higher on it during my preview / review than I have about the show at any other point in time.

I struggled to wonder if I’d be writing such a critical review now if I was given the preview content for Season 3. Does the show play better if you watch it all at once, in such a way that the massive amount of emotional downtime feels smaller in comparison to the occasional instances of world-building and actual development? I just don’t know if that’s how I would’ve felt about Season 3. Even the most recent episodes about Rex and his gang are weirdly slow and sparse affairs. Perhaps there’s a world where I was one of the dissenting voices on whether the creative team is sticking the landing on the show. It wouldn’t be the first time I ended up looking like a real asshole among the fanboys on Rotten Tomatoes.

Not that it really matters. That’s not what Disney wanted in exchange for access to its content, and I’m content to write out my feelings anyway — divorced from a sense of obligation to the studio to make them want to send me more of their middling IP extensions.

Consumer Report

I haven’t written a Serial Consumer in six months or so, but my update here isn’t that substantial. I’ve really slowed down on my collecting (if you can believe it), mostly grabbing clearance figures when they drop in price. The truth of the matter is that the pandemic-era boom in the collector market has mostly fallen apart, and corporate America is finally catching up.

My primary action figure line is the Star Wars Black Series, which dominates a good half of the wall space in my office with a chronologically organized display of more than 1,000 figures. Sometimes I feel like I should put them away and let the wall breathe a little more, but I still feel happy looking at them, and my kids do, too.

Still, I’ve bought relatively few since the end of Ahsoka, with the exception of blowout deals or figures my brother found. I grabbed the orange-lightsaber versions of Baylan Skoll and Shin Hati from Ahsoka because they’re relatively hard to find; no red lightsaber bullshit for me, OK? I grabbed some Clone Commandos because they were $12 a pop and Luthen Rael from Andor because he was $10. Small stuff like that. I’m excited to eventually find a good price on the forthcoming Padmé Amidala and Anakin Skywalker figures from Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, which will surely drop by Christmas.

After that … well, I said the boom was busting, and the fact of the matter is we don’t know what comes after that. Back in the day, we had a pretty good idea of what kind of figures would show up for about a year in advance; that’s just not the case now, because the toy market is on life support and Hasbro isn’t committing to much in the long term. I’d love to eagerly anticipate a plastic memorialization of most of the cool characters from Ahsoka. But to be blunt we haven’t even seen a proper version of Fett from The Book of Boba Fett yet. That show is over two years old.

I’m kind of getting over it.

I did make one major collecting purchase: I earned a substantial bonus at work, and about a week ago, Disney Store put a bunch of its Galaxy’s Edge lightsabers on sale. I took the opportunity to order the Ahsoka set, which features her two hilts from the new show with white blades included (which I’ve wanted for a while). Given the general going price of collectibles at this level, the price was quite the deal. I basically got two sabers for the price of one.

They arrived yesterday, and I’ve got to say I’m slightly disappointed in them. Simply put: They’re fucking huge (and supposedly smaller than the original versions). Now, that’s not entirely inaccurate: Ahsoka’s hilts are certainly longer than average ones. What makes the toy versions feel so strange is that these are also strangely flattened. You can’t wrap your entire hand around them. They look gigantic and feel gigantic. I can’t complain about the price — and they’re certainly the only affordable versions of these lightsabers available — but I wish they were a little better.

I hadn’t purchased a lightsaber since November 2022, back when I was hit by the one-two punch of Qui-Gon Jinn and a clearance Darksaber. I have 19 of them at this point, and I’m always hoping to find decent deals, but buying this set feels like the first time I’ve added them to the wall and thought, “I’d have been find not owning these.” They’re still cool, but not up to the standards I’ve experienced from the line in the past. Good sale price, though.

What I’d Buy

When it comes to The Bad Batch, I already own the main characters (in their Season 1 armors), as well as a few Clone Commandos and retired Captain Rex. That’s all I really need from this series. Sure, I’d love to see one of the Clone Operatives, I guess, but I’d clearance-wait him. Right now, my figures from The Bad Batch share shelf space with my Solo: A Star Wars Story section, and it feels appropriate — two Star Wars products I have mixed feelings about that I won’t really be investing in, toy-wise, ever again.