The Bad Batch Brings Us One Of Its Best Episodes Yet
Spoilers for "The Bad Batch" Season 2, Episode 12: "The Outpost" to follow.
Once more, the Bad Batch (voiced by Dee Bradley Baker) takes a breather from the continuing narrative and this episode focuses solely on their former member, Crosshair. Crosshair watches on Coruscant as more clones are shipped off into forced retirement and the new Stormtroopers take over. Then, he's assigned to Lieutenant Nolan (Crispin Freeman) to head to a distant outpost to pick up crates of equipment "vital" to the Empire. On the planet Barton-4, they find a snowy wasteland defended by three clones led by one named Mayday. They've been on the planet defending the cargo for more than a year without reinforcements and insurgents have continued attacking them, consistently whittling down their numbers.
When another attack breaks out and the insurgents make off with two crates of important Imperial goods, Nolan assigns Mayday and Crosshair to personally recover them. The mission is a partial success. They take out the insurgents, but an avalanche makes it impossible to retrieve the crates. With Mayday mortally wounded, Crosshair risks everything to get him back to base. Unfortunately, Lieutenant Nolan views this as a failure of their mission and allows Mayday to die right then and there without medical attention.
Crosshair reaches a breaking point and kills his commanding officer before passing out from exposure. When he wakes up — presumably on Mount Tantiss — the story threads start coming together to suggest what's going to happen next.
Crosshair's disgust
So far, every episode with Crosshair in the second season of "The Bad Batch" has given him more and more reasons to distrust and even outright hate the Empire. The clones are being treated like second-class citizens, he's not being treated with the respect he deserves, and he discovers time and time again that he's completely expendable.
This episode pushes that to the brink.
Lieutenant Nolan isn't as outright evil as, say, Pong Krell (from the infamous Umbara arc of "The Clone Wars"), but his evil is that of entitlement and bureaucracy. He's just the future of the Empire and he doesn't care about anyone in his command, clone or enlisted trooper. When he orders Mayday and Crosshair to complete the mission on their own, it feels like a punitive and arbitrary suicide mission and evokes Denethor in "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" sending Faramir to his death by ordering him to take Osgiliath back all by himself. It's petty and feels awful to watch, thinking about what it might feel like for the clones in that situation.
When Crosshair makes his decision to shoot Nolan, it feels very earned. But what does this mean for a clone trooper who was adamant that "good soldiers follow orders" even without his inhibitor chip? This marks a fascinating turn for Crosshair and it will be exciting to see where it ends up. It might even be heartbreaking, too.
Landmine tropes
One of my favorite moments in this episode came in the form of a pretty common war movie trope: the "I stepped on a landmine and can't move" situation. It brought Mayday and Crosshair together and felt like a very classic movie moment. We've seen it in everything from "Kelly's Heroes" to "The Monuments Men" and it is part and parcel of the genre we're watching.
You've seen it a hundred times before and it never seems to get old. An unwitting soldier (or sometimes a civilian) steps on a landmine and it clicks. They realize they've stepped on a landmine and those around them are forced to disarm it at great personal risk. There's usually a moment where they think they have it ready for our would-be victim to step off of it, but leave the room or the area for fear they're going to explode anyway.
It plays out beat for beat exactly like we've seen it a hundred times, but for Crosshair, this is such a great character moment. It forces him to evaluate his mortality and get attached to Mayday, making him remember the family he used to find with the rest of the Bad Batch.
Will this lead him to rejoin them? The future is uncertain, but they're certainly sowing the seeds with moments like this.
Details to watch out for
There are a few things to keep an eye out for when it comes to this episode. The first and most prominent are the new looks for the Stormtroopers. These look like the very early Ralph McQuarrie Stormtrooper designs from the days before "A New Hope" came out. It's fascinating that the clones on Barton-4 are guarding crates of this armor, too. The Empire has been planning on this switch, at least covertly, for at least that long, which makes one wonder exactly how far ahead Palpatine manipulates things.
As we look at the surface of Barton-4, we're treated to a much more sophisticated snowy landscape than we've seen in the previous iterations of animation coming from Lucasfilm. Think back to episodes like "Trespass", taking place on the moon of Orto Plutonia, and look at what they've accomplished here in this episode. It's impressive how far these shows have come. They were art before, but now they're a masterpiece in every frame. The work of Joel Aron and his team doing this is unsurpassed.
There might be a reference in the clone named Veetch. It's a similar spelling and the same pronunciation as Tom Veitch, who was a longtime contributor to the "Star Wars" mythos, going all the way back to the 1991 "Star Wars: Dark Empire" comic books and the original "Tales of the Jedi."
There are a lot of classic war movie tropes in this episode to watch out for, too. There are situations that hearken to everything from "Lawrence of Arabia" to "The Dirty Dozen." There's a deep sense of injustice in this episode and it permeates every aspect of the storytelling.
Visually, there are even touchstones to John Carpenter's "The Thing," given the remote, icy outpost.
The last thing to call out here in the episode is a line Mayday has to Lieutenant Nolan. "In my experience, respect is something to be earned," which is something the clones tell Ahsoka in "The Clone Wars" and is a common thing among them, regardless of where they came from. It's also interesting to watch Crosshair's reaction to this exchange. The gears are continuing to turn for the last holdout of the Bad Batch, and it's thanks to moments like this.
Coda
On one hand, this season of "The Bad Batch" has felt a little all over the place. On the other hand, with the end of this episode, it's very clear there was a grand design in place and this is all heading toward one explosive finale and the stakes for the team and for the galaxy couldn't be higher.
It feels apparent that they're gearing up for another conflict between Crosshair and the rest of the Bad Batch. It's implied that the folks at Mount Tantiss we saw in the last episode want to capture Omega to convince Nala Se to do their bidding. With Crosshair in their clutches, who better to send after the Bad Batch to get Omega in their own hands? It feels like a really elegant setup, where the unstoppable force of Crosshair will once again meet the immovable object of the Bad Batch. And I can't wait to see it.
This episode might be the best of the season so far in terms of music, storytelling, emotion, and writing. And I really hope the fact that "The Mandalorian" is attracting a lot of attention doesn't overshadow it too much.
New episodes of "The Bad Batch" air on Wednesdays on Disney+.