Star Wars: The Bad Batch is the new Disney+ animated series spinning off from The Clone Wars where the title characters first appeared in season seven.
Trailer, most of which is in the premiere but includes at least one notable Star Wars character who isn’t.
Meet Clone Force 99 - Hunter the leader with enhanced senses and Rambo headband, Wrecker the Big Guy, Tech the, well, tech, Crosshair the sniper and Echo the cyborg regular clone. When the credits say this show stars Dee Bradley Baker it really means it, as he voices all of them and makes them all distinctive.
(Also for May the Fourth, a Simpsons short and wordless slow-TV tours of the Millennium Falcon, a First Order Star Destroyer and planets from the setting.)
1.01: Aftermath
The 75-minute premiere starts with the previous show’s logo burning away to reveal the new one, and then Tom Kane returning as the retro-serial-style narrator telling us where they are...
... on the day Order 66 is issued.
The war that these modified clone troopers were born to fight is about to end.
Though before we even get to the Bad Batch we also have a Rebels crossover, with a cameo by Caleb Dume, the future Kanan Jarrus, voiced by Freddie Prinze Jr. doing a reasonable job of sounding like a teenager, along with Archie Panjabi as his Jedi master.
This scene establishes that most of the Bad Batch aren’t affected by Order 66 - hey, 99 is 66 inverted - and that Hunter is good with kids.
Heading back to the clone army’s homeworld of Kamino, they find that the Republic has become the Empire, are evaluated by Moff Tarkin (Stephen Stanton continuing his voice performance from previous animated series) and meet a human girl (with a New Zealand accent, like theirs, and a tendency to mirror behaviour which reminded me of the kid in Jaws) called Omega (Michelle Ang) who warns Hunter to be careful and wants to come with them...
Tarkin sends them on a mission to mop up some insurgents who turn out to be mostly unarmed refugees protected by Saw Gerrera (Andrew Kishino, who originally voiced him in The Clone Wars) and Hunter makes the call to let them go. This lands the squad in the brig, while Crosshair, the only one to be affected by Order 66, is taken to have his programming boosted.
So now our heroes have to leave one of their own behind as they escape. So we have what looks to be a Space A-Team setup complete with Javert-style pursuing military authorities.
Aftermath (not connected to the Chuck Wendig Star Wars novel trilogy of the same name) sets the stage for the sixteen-episode season by putting the Bad Batch in an unseen moment in Star Wars history, a new area to explore with no ready-set ending looming. The show has the advantage of following years of The Clone Wars and other series so the look and sound are well established, the planetary environments look great in particular.
The squad themselves are mostly archetypes so far, so having a different character for them to play off will help.
Is it gameable? Sure. Maybe a mix of a regular Star Wars game and some military SF - I could see their exploits in the war working with 3:16 for example.
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