Star Wars: The Bad Batch Ended by Trading One War for Another
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Across three seasons, The Bad Batch laid out a vast swath of plot threads around the rise of the Empire era beyond its titular squad of renegade clones. From Rex’s resistance to the rise of the stormtrooper, from the dark arts of cloning to Project Necromancer, a lot remained on the table coming into its final episode. But it took until its very last scene to set the stage for its final message: not everyone gets to put aside the war in Star Wars.
It’s interesting then, given that The Bad Batch has taken a long and winding road over the back half of season three to get to this climactic assault on Mount Tantiss, that “The Cavalry Has Arrived” is largely a blunt end to so many of the season and the show’s dangling threads—and often remarkably violent in its bluntness.
What’s the real identity of the mysterious CX-assassins? Doesn’t matter, the Batch brutally puts them down over the course of various engagements as they plunge into, and eventually out of, Mount Tantiss. Will Hemlock’s real goals be revealed? Necromancer was all the leverage he had, it seems, and that means little when Hunter and Crosshair riddle him with blaster bolt holes to rescue Omega. What’s Rampart’s endgame, and what’s going to happen to Nala Se and the Kaminoan’s legacy of cloning knowledge? That’s a two-for-one package deal: quite literally, when Nala Se drops a primed thermal detonator to take out herself and the data, as well as a greedy Rampart hoping to swipe it for his own leverage in the Empire, in fire and flame. Even Tantiss itself doesn’t really escape this violence, from both the Zillo Beast’s rampage, having been released by Omega as a distraction, and in its final untimely end: a scrapheap visited upon by Govenor Tarkin himself, who immediately decides he’s had quite enough of all this and wants Tantiss’ funding to be funneled right into Project Stardust.
“The Cavalry Has Arrived” at the least saves its magnanimity for the Bad Batch’s end themselves. For as violent an episode as it is the Batch, while definitely put through the wringer over the course of its near-hour runtime, are left relatively unscathed by the violent ends meted out elsewhere. They, Omega, Emerie, and the other kids trapped by Necromancer survive in one piece—well, mostly; Crosshair loses a hand to one of the CX troops, but the show doesn’t really have time to dwell on the ramifications of that. Instead, as they return to Pabu and begin to figure out what’s next—Emerie and Echo are the only one to fly the proverbial coop, going to help the escaped clones find new lives—the answer is the freedom to make a live for themselves. “We’ve fought enough battles for one lifetime,” Hunter tells a pensive Omega, as the show begins to fade out on them, Wrecker, and Crosshair beginning to relax in the sun and shade. “Now we get to choose what we want to be.”
Star Wars rarely allows its heroes the reward of choosing when to put down their weapons and simply live their lives. That’s either because the fight never ends, years of cyclical storytelling across one relatively small period of time in the Skywalker saga giving way to perpetual conflict—where one generation trains the next to pick up where they left off, or is simply pulled in once more by its sheer gravity—or because that sometimes the only way for them to escape that forever conflict is the cold release of death itself. It’s a reward that is particularly touching when given to the Clones of the old Republic, beings bred for war and nothing else, grasping the spark of identity and wanting more for themselves beyond it. But that’s not actually where The Bad Batch ends, and while it’s a reward given to some of its heroes, it’s not one afforded to all.
Fading back in on an undisclosed number of years later—not long enough for the Galactic Civil War to have faded into the cold war rule of the New Republic, but long enough for Omega to have grown up into a young woman—Bad Batch’s epilogue is not as definitive an end as its handling of other plot threads in this finale, but still one rooted in the weight of all that violence in conflict. Sneaking to a ship hidden in Pabu’s seaside caverns, Omega is briefly stopped by an aged Hunter—before she can slip away to join the Rebel Alliance as a pilot. The two come to an understanding, as sad as it is: Hunter, Crosshair, and Wrecker, now growing old before their time as all Clone Troopers do, have done enough for the galaxy, and getting to watch Omega grow up in peace was their reward. Hers is to build on everything they taught her as she chooses to put aside that peace and do more in the conflict tearing the galaxy apart. The Batch earned its freedom to choose its own path, but so did Omega, and her choice is to carry on fighting—taking off with a parting salute, as all good soldiers do.
It’s an end that’s oddly bittersweet, that on one hand offers both hope that there are ways out of Star Wars’ cycles of conflict, only to offer with the other a reminder that those cycles span and consume generations of beings. Generations of families, even, the burdens of masters and siblings alike to pass on the things they’ve learned in one struggle to the next. That story is as much Star Wars as forever war is, one that allows it to close one chapter as it opens another. Whatever’s left in Omega’s tale remains to be seen—alongside the broader future of Lucasfilm’s animation slate itself, with no clear successor series, either as a spiritual continuation to Bad Batch or its own thing entirely, in the works quite yet. The consequence of her choice is yet unwritten, but Bad Batch’s own at the very least grants some of its heroes the reward of rest and reprieve from Star Wars’ unending cycle.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch is available to stream now on Disney+.
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