Star Wars: The Bad Batch ran for three seasons and 47 episodes on Disney+, from May 4, 2021 to May 1, 2024. It is a spin-off of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, created by Dave Filoni, and it carries a 6.7/10 critical score. That number is fair. The show is often good and rarely great, and its best ideas arrive late.
Trailer, via Star Wars.
Clone Force 99 and Order 66
The premise is the strongest thing The Bad Batch has. Clone Force 99 is a squad of clone troopers with genetic mutations. Most of them resist Order 66, the command that ends the Clone Wars by forcing clones to execute the Jedi and obey Emperor Palpatine.
So the show follows deserters in the early days of the Galactic Empire. They become mercenaries on the run. They are joined by Omega, a young female clone of Jango Fett.
That is a real story, not a victory lap. The clones were built to obey. A few of them cannot, and the Empire has no use for them anymore.
Dee Bradley Baker and Michelle Ang
Dee Bradley Baker voices the Bad Batch and most of the other clones, as he did in The Clone Wars. He replaced Temuera Morrison, who played the clones and Jango Fett in the prequel films. Michelle Ang voices Omega.
Ang was cast in part because her New Zealand accent matches Morrison’s. She has said she was grateful to embrace that side of her identity, since as a person of Chinese and Malaysian descent she does not look like “what the world thinks of when they think New Zealander.”
Baker and Ang recorded the first episode together. Then Ang had to travel home to New Zealand, and the COVID-19 pandemic kept her from returning. She recorded much of her dialogue remotely over video calls. The two recorded the series finale in person, which they called an emotional experience for themselves and the crew.
What the Empire Does With Its Clones
The Bad Batch also tells the story of the clones who stayed. Some begin to question Order 66. The Empire phases out the clone army in favor of conscripted Stormtroopers. Imperial cloning resources get redirected to “Project Necromancer,” a secret project to clone Palpatine that helps explain his return from death in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019).
That last thread is the show’s biggest swing, and it mostly works. It turns a trilogy of films that never earned its own resurrection plot into something with a paper trail.
- Season 1: 16 episodes, May 4 to August 13, 2021
- Season 2: 16 episodes, January 4 to March 29, 2023
- Season 3: 15 episodes, February 21 to May 1, 2024
| The Bad Batch | The Clone Wars | |
|---|---|---|
| Format | Spin-off series | Parent series |
| Created by | Dave Filoni | Dave Filoni |
| Lead voice | Dee Bradley Baker | Dee Bradley Baker |
| Setting | Early Galactic Empire | The Clone Wars |
| Clones resist Order 66 | Yes | No |
The comparison matters because The Bad Batch inherits The Clone Wars’ whole cast and its whole method. It also inherits the problem. The Clone Wars had years to build its characters. The Bad Batch has 47 episodes and spends a lot of them on side missions.
Emerie Karr and the Second Season
Season 2 introduces Emerie Karr, an adult female clone. Keisha Castle-Hughes voices her. Castle-Hughes was not told at first that Emerie is a clone, but she suspected the character was related to Omega after producers asked her to use her natural New Zealand accent. She had previously played Queen Apailana in a brief non-speaking role in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005).
That is the kind of detail the show is good at. It treats the clone army as a system with paperwork, and it treats the people inside that system as people.
The show was announced in July 2020, after the final season of The Clone Wars introduced the Bad Batch. The idea came from Star Wars creator George Lucas. Lucasfilm Animation produced it, with Jennifer Corbett as head writer and Brad Rau as supervising director. Filoni, Corbett and Rau were executive producers with Athena Yvette Portillo.
Where the Show Actually Lands
The animation and the voice acting carry this series. Baker does more distinct clones than any one performer should be able to, and Ang gives Omega a stubbornness that keeps the group from turning into a lecture about fatherhood.
The weakness is structure. The Bad Batch is a road show, and road shows stall. The series wants to be about a family on the run, but it keeps stopping to explain the Empire. Some of those stops pay off. Project Necromancer pays off. Other episodes are filler with a helmet on.
The final season is the best of the three, partly because it stops pretending the show is open-ended. Fifteen episodes is a short runway, and the show uses it.
This is a 6.7/10. It is a good show with a great premise, and the gap between those two things never closes. The clones are the most interesting people in Star Wars, and The Bad Batch knows it. It just takes too long to say so.
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