Star Wars: The Bad Batch is another animated Star Wars tv show whose final episode was released to Disney+ last week. The show continues the story of a specialised group of clone troopers introduced in the older show, The Clone Wars, and how they adapt and survive in an ever-changing galaxy.

Being so closely modelled off The Clone Wars, The Bad Batch was able to essentially evolve into the eighth season of the previous show. The team behind The Clone Wars learnt from any mistakes made in making that show to create a new show which had the potential to top The Clone Wars' strongest seasons. Did they succeed in creating a show better than anything else seen in Star Wars?

Well for starters, the animation quality was incredible, and that was certainly something better than anything else seen; it even surpassed the superb quality of The Clone Wars' seventh season. The animation of particular natural elements such as water and plants was cleverly produced that it seemed realistic but remained in the confines of the precedent made by The Clone Wars.

Additionally, the voice work of Dee Bradley Baker was phenomenal. For those who aren't aware, Baker voiced all of the clones seen in the show, as is appropriate. However, Baker somehow added a unique personality to every character whilst still making them sound similar. Baker's incredible work has been seen in The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels, but I think that this is some of his best work. All you need to do is watch a single trailer for the show and then you'll know what I'm talking about.

A common theme in most Star Wars tv shows is for the first season to develop all the characters within their own world, before expanding the show and connecting it with other Star Wars media in later seasons. This was certainly not the case with The Bad Batch. The series immediately started connecting the show with everything else in Star Wars with multiple cameos appearing in the first ten minutes of the first episode. In fact, in every episode, there was at least one cameo appearance. Some Star Wars fans did not enjoy this, but I personally loved seeing the 'cameo of the week'. This actually benefitted the show greatly as it didn't need to waste time on establishing characters or settings and could focus more on developing the story and the characters.

The music was exceptional, as I have come to expect from Kevin Kiner, and the tensions in each episode were high-grade. The series as a whole felt like a singular planned out story rather than a bunch of individual episodes or arcs like in Rebels or The Clone Wars. So why then, after saying all this good stuff, did I give it an eight out of ten, unlike The Clone Wars which received a nine out of ten?

The main culprit is that the strongest episodes of the series weren't as strong as the strongest in other series. But in saying this, it did have more of these strong episodes and its weak episodes weren't as bad as The Clone Wars'. So why didn't The Bad Batch get as high a rating? I think it was just because I generally didn't enjoy the show as much, and I can't quite say why. 

Review by Tristan Carr

Last edited: 20/09/2021