User Reviews

Crosshair's betrayal in season one was a masterclass writing decision by Dave Filoni and his team. Now reuniting him with the Batch is another one of them. His character arc symbolizes one of the best anti-heroes ever written.

We return to the outpost Crosshair shot the imperial officer in the last season. The relation between him and Hunter is shattered as you could have expected after Crosshair's betrayal. But when a big monster threatens the batch they have to work together to survive. This brings them closer together.

Echo returns, too while just for this episode I suppose, but it was great to see him again. The season unfolds brilliantly upon our eyes and I cannot imagine what a great finale we will get. Next week, double feature. What could you possibly want more?

A pull in the right direction.

This one is more so just a reintegration for Crosshair to adjust to life with his "brothers" again. I was surprised to see them all on good terms so quick, but it also means we'll have the entire team back together again for future episodes, of which I am happy.

More than anything, I hope this actually fleshes out the Bad Batch more and not just Omega and Crosshair, both of whom I've grown to like, but yeah, please do something more deep with the title character please!

It was nice being back at the outpost for this specific arc. Very appropriate way to explain and show Crosshair's turn back to the right side. The actual action scenes weren't anything to write home about, but they weren't bad. I'm just glad to have my team back together and I'm actually looking forward to the rest of the series for the first time in awhile.

Good episode!

I swear some of the shots in this episode looks like the old Ralph McQuarrie paintings, It is truly breathtaking at times how good it looks. Lucasfilm truly understands animation, and i truly believe it's one of the best story-telling mediums for Star Wars.

Episode itself was laden with great dramatic dynamics between the leads, especially Hunter and Crosshair. Crosshair steals every scene he's in as always, he's both a tragic character and one of hope.

The writing of the episode was great as well, Jennifer Corbett and the rest of the writing team has done a phenomenal job on this season so far. Hopefully Lucasfilm agrees and lets these writers lead more shows going forward.

Can't wait to see where the season goes next!

It was pretty decent and definitely an improvement over EP4. I liked some of the character building and revisiting the snow base was really cool and I honestly found some of the Crosshair stuff kinda emotional. I definitely felt like the character building whilst nothing great did it's job and made the episode engaging enough. I do have a few issues one being the fact that this is yet ANOTHER monster fighting episode, I also didn't feel that much tension from the actual battle it's self despite it being decent. Overall a pretty decent episode that hopefully sets up some great stuff! 6.5/10 I am interested to see more.

This episode *finally* brings it back to good relationship conflicts and exploring those. Seeing Clone Force 99 begin to let go of their grudges and accept their brother back is some great cinema.

However

These big emotional moments are less good when you aren't constantly building up to and exploring them. I noticed this problem in the show Ahsoka too, where Filoni and his writing team has some great ideas for these emotional moments but fail to explore them much at all beyond the payoffs, and payoffs generally need buildup, and the more the better. We should've gotten more exploration of the Clone Force 99 relationship from Crosshair's POV in jail so we could have some buildup to the idea that Crosshair saved Omega where Hunter couldn't and holds that over him.

Another less than stellar part of this episode is the generic monster of the week thing. TCW was good at providing simple but unique plot backdrops to emotional arcs, such as the 2nd invasion of Geonosis providing a fun and engaging backdrop to the emotional arc of exploring the differences between how Anakin and other Jedi cope with the loss of people they love. The Bad Batch team has overdone the abandoned-Imperial-base-has-a-monster thing and making self aware jokes about it doesn't change that it's an issue. The plots feel threadbare and don't provide synergy to the emotional arcs like TCW did. I'm fine with varying ratios of plot:character, but these episodes don't do either to a high standard nor balance them to a high standard.

I'm not looking forward to new episodes because this plot problem and the lack of care to constantly work on setup makes the story feel drawn out more often than not. Yes there are some points where they do do this (Omega copying Crosshair), but as often they do not. I enjoyed watching this episode, but more and more this Star Wars era feels like quantity over quality and it's getting exhausting.

Now that Crosshair has rejoined the bad batch, of course Hunter is distrusting of him and throughout the episode they're constantly arguing with each other. Hunter has some stupid quips about how Crosshair was just "following orders" when Crosshair told them that all the local raiders were dead because he dealt with them. And of course Omega is trying to mediate them.

The plot of this episode only happens because Echo shows up. He meets up with everyone on Pabu (that island planet from that complete filler episode) and wants intel on Tantiss from Omega and Crosshair in order for them to find the facility and free all the imprisoned clones but they need an imperial terminal to access the data on Nala Se's data pad that Omega stole so Crosshair tells them about that outpost on the snow planet he was at in season 2. Hunter tells Omega and Wrecker to stay on Pabu while the rest of them go to the outpost but of course Omega says no and they simply let her come. Even Crosshair says that while she has potential, she's still just a kid and she shouldn't really be going. But that doesn't matter since the bad batch members are all required to bend the knee to Omega no matter how stupid or wrong she can be. They go to the outpost, we get some good moments of Crosshair remembering the place and even seeing the fallen clones' helmets on the ground, picking them up, and putting them on a crate, almost as if to show that he is mourning their deaths and that he believed that they were his brothers despite being regs. But then we need some action in every episode so the issue this time is that they need full power to the bunker but the outdoor sensors are drawing a lot of power so they redirect it all. This in turn allows for some giant, armored worm creature to be able to attack the bad batch but after Hunter and Crosshair have to work together to save each other and lead the worm off the perimeter, they turn back on the sensors and all is well. Now that I'm typing this, it's come to me that this is almost exactly like episode 2, where Hunter and Wrecker have to go to an old imperial facility to connect to a terminal for intel and along the way they have to fight off a giant monster. Props to the writing team for making another lame monster of the week to pair along with another dull mission. Oh and by the way, Crosshair and Hunter made amends by Crosshair saying he thought he knew what he was getting into with the empire but he did bad things and made his mistakes. But my question is, did he remove his chip or not? He's clearly not influenced by the chip anymore but for anyone who remembers (I wouldn't blame you if you don't), at the end of season 1 imperial Crosshair reveals to the bad batch that he removed his chip, despite the fact that we saw the empire strengthening his chip and the show just leaves that information as a cliff hanger for him. And here now at season 3 episode 5 we still have no answer to the cliff hanger. So again, did he actually remove his chip or has it just malfunctioned now?

The only redeeming qualities of this episode were Crosshair remembering his time at the outpost and sort of honoring the dead clones and the fact that we got to see Echo. I would way rather watch Echo and Rex with their group of "rebel" clones trying to free other clones than whatever lame missions the bad batch are going on. It's obvious that the bad batch have nothing to do now other than go free the clones on Tantiss and that's likely going to be their final mission because what else do they even have to do? The empire isn't really after them except Hemlock and even then it seems like he just wants Omega. Cid's not after them either, and heck, they don't even need to do their old missions of the week to get money since now they just leech off of the people of Pabu. The bad batch are just there to help Echo and Rex and occasionally have a problem of their own. Put them out of their misery already...