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Spoilers Bad Batch Season 3 - February 21st

Finally caught up. I'd heard the season was more serialized this time, so I was thinking of waiting until the end and bingeing it, but I changed my mind. Pretty good so far, but it's interesting how it's focused mostly on Omega and Crosshair instead of Hunter and Wrecker. I guess that's over now, though.

It took me a little while to figure out a) that the hound was named Batcher instead of Badger and b) why Omega called her Batcher.


With Omega having such a high M-count, I'm a little surprised we haven't seen signs of her having force powers.

They didn't say Omega's sample had a high M-count in itself, just that it could sustain the high M-count in the genetic material added to it, i.e. Palpatine's. Remember how we saw every vial get a couple of drops of blood added to it when it was rotated to the top. The midi-chlorians come from Palpatine's blood, and they're testing how well the clone blood can sustain having them added to it, like testing what variety of soil is best for growing plants.
 
That blood wasn't Palpatine's.
They explicitly said it came from the "specimens" plural, and that they're in the vault. When we saw the vault's contents it was a bunch of differently sized containers (and one so big it literally is the back wall). Whatever is in those things seems to still be alive, and are precious enough that Palpatine considers it THE most important project for the Empire, which also by definition makes it the most important thing to him. No way are these just Jedi bodies. Fortress Inquisitorious has a floor full of those with nowhere near the level of security of the vault on Wayland. There's something more to them.

Obviously the goal of this project is to facilitate his path to immortality (because that's always the goal of any Sith), but why would he settle for a mere duplicate body when he could engineer the most naturally force strong body in the galaxy?
We know he knows about the "Mortis gods"; beings so naturally tied to the force that their very actions affected the balance for the whole galaxy and visa-versa. We know he traded Nightsister secrets for Sith secrets with Talzin. We know Talzin was herself not a natural force sensitive and used a means to "steal" it from those that were. We know the Nightsisters also had an artefact that could copy/store a consciousness and imprint it upon a host.
We know that the Sith don't believe in the transcendent nature of the cosmic force; they are entranced by the physical plain alone because all they see beyond death is a gaping void of annihilating nothingness. So the only path to immortality they can conceive of must be of a tangible nature.
We also know about Project Harvester; Given that we never see an army of super-powerful Sith trained assassins a generation later, I think it's safe to assume he's been keeping the best "specimens" to himself and tossing the rejects back to the Inquisitorious.

A logical conclusion one might draw from all of this is that Sidious, and possibly all the Sith Lords before him have been gathering the highest M-count specimens from across the galaxy with the ultimate goal of recreating themselves as powerful Force Wielders like the Mortis gods of old.
It won't work of course but that's the Dark Side for you; if Maul's story is analogues to that of Sisyphus, then Palpatine is Tantalus. Indeed the similarity of the name Tantiss may not be a coincidence in this case.*

Anyway; not a lot to say about the episode this week beyond the obvious. It's a solid and much needed character piece to continue Crosshair's character growth from last season, and re-introduce him back into The Batch. Aside from being a little bit of breathing space; this also felt like a cost saving episode for whatever is to come next. Aside from AZ-3, it was just Dee and Michelle in the cast. Most of the assets (including the location) were either re-uses or redresses of what they already had on hand. Not a criticism by any means, just an observation that the later episodes might get a little "expensive" in production terms, as one might expect for a final season, even with the shorter episode order.
 
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"Why is there always a big monster?!"
Me: Because it's Star Wars, duh!

They still have a long way to go, but I'm deeply relieved that Hunter and Crosshair have begun the first steps of reconciliation and healing after everything that has happened since Crosshair's departure. Forcing them to fall back onto their training in order to survive helped a great deal in pushing them towards those steps. I love how neither hesitated to help the other once the worm attacked and worked together as a team to trap it back outside of the sensor perimeter.

Speaking of the worm, it was a lot of fun watching this episode the day after seeing Dune: Part Two. Some wonderful and accidental contrast!

Also, I loved Batcher's snarling at the worm after it was trapped. :D
 
I knew as a typed it something about a Tantiss/Tantalus connection felt familiar, and sure enough, look what I find in the author's notes for 'Heir to the Empire': -
GS8vAJx.jpg
 
I knew as a typed it something about a Tantiss/Tantalus connection felt familiar, and sure enough, look what I find in the author's notes for 'Heir to the Empire': -
GS8vAJx.jpg
Oh, duh. I should've thought of that (regardless of not reading that novel). I'm a huge Greek Mythology buff so I know all about Tantalus and his story.

Two episodes next week, Infiltration and Extraction
Huh, I wonder why we're getting two. Probably something like why we got three for the premiere.

People are spoiled by streaming these days it feels like. Kids these days don't what it's like to deal with a cliffhanger!

Now get off my lawn!
 
Oh, duh. I should've thought of that (regardless of not reading that novel). I'm a huge Greek Mythology buff so I know all about Tantalus and his story.
It's quite an appropriate analogy for the Sith (Sidious especially) though not for the reason Zahn supposed; but more for the whole "stuck in tartatus, surrounded by water but unable to drink" side of it.

As a side note, if I was writing the lore: I'd have the mountain named after some ancient Sith Lord, because "Darth Tantiss" does have a certain ring to it, no?
 
The last episode was pretty good, not a huge episode, but it did a good job of addressing the issues between Crosshair and the others, especially Hunter. I thought the snow worm was pretty cool.
 
I went from suspecting the rogue operative is a cloned version of Crosshair (even if that didn't make any sense beyond similar behavior) to a miraculously survived but reprogrammed Tech to feeling relieved that he was just a previously unseen clone. But his survival throws that relief right out the window. I imagine all three of those guesses are wrong, so I am curious to who he might actually be, even while I still hope it's no one we already know.

Loved seeing Wolfe again and his confrontation with Rex was riveting, even though we already knew the outcome (and Wolfe's eventual defection). That said, I found it a little hard to swallow that the troopers under Wolfe's command would simply go along with Wolfe letting the "traitors" escape. Yes, following orders is major theme in this episode but the lack of confusion on their part (beyond the solo and weak protest) didn't really land for me.

Probably scheduling/availability. I gather he's a regular in the upcoming season of Foundation (though as a different character than the one he played in the series premiere).
Maybe but the role was so small this time around that it probably wouldn't have been hard to schedule half a day at most for recording. Perhaps the size of the role was too small for Siddig to return.
 
Wolffe's return was very pleasant to see and a lot of fun. Two more fairly solid episodes in a row. So far Season 3 hasn't had an episode I've been bored with or disliked.
 
I went from suspecting the rogue operative is a cloned version of Crosshair (even if that didn't make any sense beyond similar behavior) to a miraculously survived but reprogrammed Tech to feeling relieved that he was just a previously unseen clone. But his survival throws that relief right out the window. I imagine all three of those guesses are wrong, so I am curious to who he might actually be, even while I still hope it's no one we already know.

Cody. I'll bet my shiny nickel that it's Cody. He has the skills, he'd be someone the team would know, he'd have a personal beef with Crosshair in particular, and he'd be woefully tragic. I absolutely thought about Tech first, as well. But the fact that Cody supposedly went AWOL after his S2 episode but somehow isn't a part of Rex's cell makes me think the good old commander has been done dirty by the Empire one last time.
 
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