The Clone Wars - S7E1: The Bad Batch
THE CLONE WARSThe premiere episode of the new season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars throws its viewers right into the action. That is, a battle for Anaxes, a planet which might as well be any other planet in the galaxy. All one needs to know is that the droids are fighting the clones, per usual, but as of now, the clones are losing – at least on Anaxes.
Season seven of the frequently profound animated show is “new” instead of new because two of its four-episode arcs, The Bad Batch and The Siege of Mandalore, are actually completed versions of episodes that were works-in-progress of a purported cancelled season in 2015. Therefore this final season of The Clone Wars does not so much break new ground but tie up old loose ends.
The narrative digressions may not take the show to new heights, in the animation and music departments, new and better ground is certainly broken: character animations are smoother, action scenes are crisper and the colors pop more than they did before. There’s also more room for sweeping camera movements that are something like the animated equivalent of a Martin Scorsese dolly in. Kevin Kiner’s music is appropriately thumping, with only a touch of John Williams. The freshest Star Wars score next to Ludwig Goransson’s for The Mandalorian.
Anyway, back to Anaxes. Captain Rex– voiced with poise and dignity, just like all of the other clones, by Dee Bradley Baker – informs Mace Windu and Anakin Skywalker that he believes he knows why the Republic is losing. The enemy, he posits, must have crucial inside information to be able to so effectively predict clone attacks. What must be done? A behind-enemy-lines covert mission, of course. What else?
The wrench that is thrown in Rex’s plan is the addition of an elite team of clone troopers, the titular Bad Batch, to the mix. These troopers are, to say the least, different. They were born with mutations that make them stronger in certain areas than the average trooper but also excluded from the “regs”, as the members of the Bad Batch call other clones.
It’s not exactly a revolutionary story and the four members of the Bad Batch are each pretty stereotypical archetypes of military characters: one’s tech-savvy, one’s a sniper, one wants to smash things. Fortunately, their cartoonish nature is balanced out by the enjoyable banter between Rex, Commander Cody and the Bad Batch.
This episode has, of course, the requisite action set pieces and, oddly, a few moments of weirdly placed comedic beats. It doesn’t add up to much more than a satisfactory return to the small-scale stories that made The Clone Wars great, and it doesn’t feel like the beginning of a 12-episode final season.
