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

I wrote a midseason essay on this past season of The Bad Batch as well as a brief review of two other episodes in the back half. None of my criticisms about those episodes or the season were ameliorated by the lackluster series finale (which aired May 1).

This season was marred by the biggest ongoing flaw of the show: Nobody involved in making it ever seemed particularly interested in the Bad Batch itself or what role this group had to play in a story of any real significance to the overall narrative of the Star Wars Galaxy.

Let’s take on the second problem first: It’s becoming an online maxim that continuity is the death of creativity, which would seem like a distinctly post-Marvel Cinematic Universe take on popular culture had it not actually been around in the comics world for quite a lot longer than that. Chalk it up to the wider segment of audiences just wanting something new, I guess, or maybe the darker take that contemporary social media has hollowed out attention spans and people don’t want to engage with their media as anything other than background noise. Whatever you believe, the era of interconnected stories and long-term payoffs is seemingly dead in broader American culture … for good or for ill.

There are benefits to eschewing continuity, of course. Giving stories room to breathe is important, and allowing voices to add their own approach without fearing discontinuity only helps stories in the long run. But there’s also the fact that some of these franchises principally survive on the fact that a larger story gives them context, and stuff like Star Wars and the MCU continue to appeal to audiences because the umbrella of the franchise exists.

The Bad Batch is ultimately a three-season story to nowhere special. The first season ends with the destruction of Kamino, an event that we could’ve inferred from other stories. Season two, the best of the bunch, ended on a character-based cliffhanger where the only developed member of the squad dies; The third and final season ends with … the shuttering of a science facility we barely explored and the supposed ending of a project about which we got exactly zero new information and that we know re-opens anyway on Exegol at some point in the 30 canonical years following this show.

I know, I know. That’s nerd shit, but what normal people are even watching a show like this?

Project Necromancer aside, the actual biggest question for three seasons of this show was what would become of the Bad Batch itself, along with all of their Clone brothers. One of the gaping holes in overall continuity from the Prequel Trilogy to the Original Trilogy is the disappearance of one million war-stricken Temuera Morrisons from the galactic population (and Imperial Corps.) We knew from Star Wars: Rebels that Clone Commander Rex and a few of his closest friends survived and became Rebels, but that’s a very small fraction of their old army. Was there a genocide? A rebellion? What role did the Batch play in all of this?

It turns out the Batch did exactly fuck-all and, throughout the series, consistently resist the call to help the other Clones even when their backs are against the wall. In fact, in the third season, they bumble around and ruin Rex’s ongoing mission to bring surviving Clones together. It’s ridiculous and insulting — especially when the finale simply hand-waves the broader question, stating that most of them relocate to a planet we never hear from again to live in quiet retirement.

If it wasn’t going to provide a dramatic or compelling answer to that ongoing question, what was the point of this story?

Perhaps the most frustrating bit of the show totally ignoring its role as part of a wider franchise is the fate of Omega, the Force-sensitive female clone upon whose shoulders the entire show rested for three years. The writers loved Omega, so much so that they never bothered to characterize the rest of her brothers, and just gave her all of the main action throughout most of the show. In the third season, they finally reveal what makes her special — it isn’t her biological sex because it turns out she’s not the only such female — and that is an amount of latent Force sensitivity. Now, we all could’ve assumed this from the previous seasons, but they finally confirm it here …

… and then do nothing with it! Absolutely nothing! It’s a total waste of time. The writers even brought Asajj Ventress back from the dead for some reason just to have her shrug off Omega’s Force sensitivity. Anticlimax after anticlimax.

Ultimately, the show ends on an epilogue where an aged Hunter says goodbye to an adult Omega, who has decided to become a pilot for the Rebellion. It’s not specified if she’s running off to join the Rebellion after Luke destroyed the Death Star or before, but the fact of the matter is we have multiple named Rebel pilots in continuity already. Luke himself, Wedge, Evaan Verlaine (named after me!), Poe Dameron’s parents, etc. The Rebellion is full of significant airmen. Omega isn’t one of those and never will be one of those. She’s just another soldier.

This is a good segue from how the show does a disservice to continuity as well as its own interior storytelling. The ultimate message of The Bad Batch — a show about genetically engineered Clones, each with their own superpower and role to play on the team — is that these are “just soldiers,” who want to retire and run away from their pasts as a new war rages around them. You can tell Omega running off to be just another pilot really spoke to the message the writers wanted to capture, which is that mediocrity and insignificance are actually the spice of life!

Weeks later, I’m still struggling to wrap my head around it. The premise of the show is a classic Saturday-morning serial construction, set in a time period where the characters could go anywhere and do anything, with an overarching mission (saving Clones) to provide inherent, ongoing drama. And they just sit around doing nothing for three seasons.

The final episode is perhaps the worst offender of this bizarre and unbalanced approach to the story. Omega leads her own little rebellion on Mount Tantiss, rescuing child prisoners essentially by herself. Keep in mind: This is the second time she’s broken out of the military facility on her own this season. Meanwhile, Echo, who is barely even part of the Bad Batch, provides her direct support by infiltrating the base in classic Star Wars fashion. And what of Hunter, Wrecker and Crosshair? The three of them are ostensibly the co-stars of this show despite doing nothing all season, and it’s nothing they do here, too, getting immediately captured while bumbling around trying to help Omega.

Frankly, it’s a little insulting because this has been an entire season of our heroes being too stupid to live. How were they ever effective soldiers during the Clone Wars?

After Hunter, Wrecker and Crosshair are captured, the writers introduce the rest of the Clone X Troopers — brainwashed Clones that mirror the Bad Batch in weaponry and skills. It’s bizarre that these new foes weren’t the enemies for an entire season. Their designs are inherently toy-etic, just like the Batch, but none of them have names or personalities to make them intriguing purchases. It’s the Knights of Ren stuff all over again but somehow even worse. At least Kylo Ren’s posse had a guy named Trudgen who used a bludgeon.

Obviously, the Batch dispatches these opponents with relative ease. We’ll never see them again.

As I mentioned, the denouement of the show once all that Tantiss business concludes is that the Batch are going to simply retire on their island nation; yeah, the one they led the Empire to just a few episodes ago … like a bunch of morons. The rest of the Clones go off and live in retirement while fascism continues to choke life out of the Galaxy. Good for them, I guess.

What an absolute waste of time.

Consumer Report

I bought a couple figures on May the 4th at a good discount: Hera Syndulla and Morgan Elsbeth from Ahsoka and another Endor Rebel Trooper. My newest Phase 1 Clone Trooper arrived a few weeks earlier than anticipated, too. I’m a big fan of the new Clones they’ve been putting out with removable helmets and different deco. I wish I’d had a shot at the plain, white Phase 2 Clone and sort of wish I’d gotten multiple Appos when they came out last winter; I have one, and that’s arguably enough, but I just love the blue 501st color scheme.

I also grabbed Kieron Gillen and Greg Pak’s Marvel Star Wars omnibus, which I’ve been waiting over half a decade to own in a deluxe hardcover format. I’d like to give it a good sit-down in the next month or so, as it’s been that long since I read it, but it remains a high watermark in the last decade of Marvel Star Wars comics.

There are a few more big Marvel releases this summer — including my even longer-awaited Tales of the Jedi omnibus. That’s a day-one purchase for me.

Shopping List

Frankly, I’m not buying anything else from The Bad Batch. Yeah, I’d love a Bounty Hunter Ventress figure, but I kind of suspect she’ll show up elsewhere and get a figure accordingly. One of my five Black Series shelves is dedicated to The Bad Batch and Solo: A Star Wars Story simply by nature of their place in the timeline — I’ve structured my collections to run in roughly timeline order — and when I look at that shelf now … yeesh. I’m a Solo defender, but this really feels like the worst overall segment of my collection.

Then again, I stopped at few rural Walmarts this weekend in hopes of finding a Hunter figure from the second season of The Bad Batch (again, the best season of this show). So I’m probably full of shit.