With so many new Star Wars shows being announced last week, it was almost inevitable that audiences would see some revival of The Clone Wars TV show. One of the most popular Star Wars shows in recent memory, The Clone Wars featured an animated look back on the prequel trilogy and filled in some of the gaps between the films. It was an extremely popular show that was revived multiple times and has become, to many, the definitive version for that period of the Star Wars canon. So it wasn’t a huge shock when Disney announced it would be returning to that style and timeline with Star Wars: The Bad Batch.
In The Clone Wars TV show, The Bad Batch was a group of clone soldiers that, for whatever reason, weren’t quite like their identical clone brothers. Each of them had some sort of specific genetic variation that made them distinct from other clones and gave them unique skills on the battlefield. They showed up in a few episodes of The Clone Wars and were one of the few sets of characters from the show who didn’t already have their fates sealed by some other piece of Star Wars media, making them prime candidates for a revival show.
Unlike a lot of announcements, Disney actually released a trailer for this one. The teaser shows that The Bad Batch will indeed be in the same style as The Clone Wars, but interestingly, the show actually does seem to be a sequel series, exploring what The Bad Batch got up to as the Republic transitions into becoming the Galactic Empire. This is a period of time that the original show often hinted at and foreshadowed, but never got around to exploring properly. That could make this a very interesting look at what it was like to be on the ground during the transition period.
Other than that the show seems to be what audiences would expect from The Clone Wars. There’s memorable Star Wars enemies, comedic moments, lots of action set pieces. It would seem that the Seperatist droid army is still around in some capacity so there may be some conflict between the Empire and the droids, something that is often glossed over in the films and TV shows. Either way, audiences will find out for themselves when the show finally hits Disney+.
