*Warning: the following article contains spoilers for episode ten of Star Wars: The Bad Batch – Season 2*
Continuing from last week’s episode, Retrieval shows The Bad Batch (Dee Bradley Baker) attempting to retrieve (hence the episode title) the Marauder after discovering that it has not left the planet they’re currently in. Again, this sounds like a filler episode, but it isn’t as bad or as pointless as some of Star Wars: The Bad Batch – Season 2‘s previous episodes.
Read: ‘Star Wars: The Bad Batch – Season 2’ Episode Nine Review: “The Crossing”
As they find the ship with the hyperdrive removed, they meet Benni Baro (Yuri Lowenthal), a teenager who works in an ipsium mine run with an iron fist by Mokko (Jonathan Lipow). Mokko exploits the children and teenagers of the mine by making them believe that food rations are limited and that the ones who contribute the most and work the hardest will get an entire bowl of soup instead of sharing with others.
Of course, this is false. Mokko keeps all the food to himself and the mine’s profits. The teens don’t know that, but Omega (Michelle Ang) will expose it to Benni, leading to a classic revolt that ends with Mokko falling down a pit full of lava. It’s clichéd, sure, but the episode still remains quite fun to watch. There’s not much to say about this one, other than the character dynamic is interesting enough, the villain is cartoonish but still brings a menacing presence to the proceedings, and the action is extremely fast-paced.
However, The Bad Batch – Season 2 is now showing its limitations with episodic storytelling. There are TV shows where you instantly know that the needle is moving from episode to episode, and others where they go strictly to episodic territory, where one thirty-minute or an hour-long episode tells a self-contained story. I do not expect X-Men ’97 to be anything else but episodic, since it’s a continuation of the 1990s animated show. Still, that series did have episode arcs that were split in multiple parts, though each one were self-contained.
The problem with Star Wars: The Bad Batch is how it presents itself as a linear series, going from point A to point B, and yet fills most of its seasons with episodic content that have nothing to do with the story at hand. The first two episodes, alongside its midseason arcs, have set up something that seems truly spectacular to showcase in an animated Star Wars show, particularly in a post-Clone Wars era.
However, The Bad Batch does nothing with its premise, and instead predominantly puts its titular characters on side quests that don’t necessarily focus on the fall of the Clones and the rise of the Empire. I want to see this, and not everything else that the show keeps thinking this is what audiences want! Spoiler alert: it’s not, and with six episodes left, it’s time for The Bad Batch – Season 2 to make its mark, and fast.
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The tenth episode of Star Wars: The Bad Batch – Seaosn 2 is now available to stream on Disney+.
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