The Bad Batch S2 E4 Review: Faster
"The Bad Batch" was back with more action this week.
Well… some of the Batch. And, to be honest, there wasn’t a lot of action either. This episode was actually really boring.
The Star Wars animated series are no strangers to having random filler episodes (remember that R2-D2 arc from The "Clone Wars"?), but for a show that was missing five of its six main characters in the last episode, only showing three of them in the subsequent entry was a bold choice.
Hunter and Echo are “on a mission” in this episode (or so they say), so it’s just Wrecker, Tech and Omega rounding out the Batch. They accompany Cid to a dangerous planet to act as her security, but they discover that Cid is in on “riot racing” (which looks just like podracing, but with guns).
Cid runs into a confrontation with another manager, Millegi, whose racer is going up against Cid’s droid, TAY-0, who has the personality of C-3PO and the attitude of Chopper.
Before the race, TAY-0 and Tech are talking about the structure of the course and how TAY-0 thinks Tech is inferior to him JUST AS he gets hit by another racer.
Tech, who has been conveniently studying the course all episode, volunteers to race for Cid with Omega and Wrecker guiding him through the race. Of course, Tech wins, and Cid walks away with the money, but Millegi tells the three to watch their backs around Cid.
It’s not that this wasn’t an enjoyable episode of "The Bad Batch"; it was a cute plotline, and it was nice to see Tech shine, but how necessary was this?
Viewers didn’t see Crosshair for the first two episodes of the season, then, when he finally appears on-screen with one of the biggest characters from "The Clone Wars", it’s weird to have radio silence from him once again.
There wasn’t even one time where Hunter or Echo appeared on-screen for the entire episode, even just a cutaway of them on their mission. The consistency among the first four episodes is just wild.
The episode’s saving grace was a mysterious line that Millegi made about Cid, where he wonders if the “outcasts” she was hanging around with would stick around if they knew the “real Cid.”
In the time of the Empire, where the Batch was hunted so heavily after defecting, Cid is one of the only people who know their secret and any backstabbing would hurt the Batch significantly.
At that moment, the viewer realizes that they don’t know that much about Cid. She took the Batch in, and she runs a few illegal operations, but who is she really working for, and how good are her intentions?
This episode did do a great job of setting up a potentially darker storyline.
If this episode did a little more developing and less filling while the series is already four episodes in, it would’ve done these characters justice.
Rating: 2/5
Adrianna Gallucci is a first-year student majoring in journalism. To contact her, please email amg7989@psu.edu.
