Having Echo join The Bad Batch was a nice way to tie up his arc.
Agreed! When they teased a different ending than the reels, I thought were just going to have him die or something after all that effort to get him back!
From a story POV, one wonders where this fits in the chronology. I mean she has a bike, a whole new outfit and gear so it's been a few days or weeks since she left the temple, which means this probably takes place between seasons 5 & 6. Which means the next seven episodes ought to take place over the course of a year or so.
One assumes she sold all her fancy Jedi gear and old headdress to get herself set-up, indeed she's wearing what looks like a mechanic's coveralls so she may have traded pretty everything including the clothes on her back at whatever place she bought that lemon of a T-85.
Oh! Ahsoka's new jumpsuit/flightsuit, whatever she's wearing it's great. This part of her story is an awkward transition to 'regular joe' life... and she's got clothes to match!
While I would agree time has passed, I find it very interesting the way they chose to open the story: Ahsoka is speeding away from Topside, heading down into the transit shafts of Coruscant... and away from the more familiar to us area of the surface and the Jedi Temple. Maybe she'd been preparing to leave the Topside area of Coruscant and head to the lower levels and live a low key life during this time. The opening suggests to me it's like... "when we last left Ahsoka, she had left the Jedi temple..." etc implied continuity... and symbolizing Ahsoka's lost status. She's not an elite, clean-air breather anymore!
Is there really an entire year left between 7x05 and 7x12? That seems like a lot of time to blast through. The Bad Batch events must have taken at least a week or so... as always in Star Wars the timeline is a lot of guesswork.
While I loved The Bad Batch and all the great new stuff in it,
Gone With a Trace was totally refreshing and exciting - as a huge fan of Coruscant and Level 1313 in particular, I was thrilled with the visuals we got. Scenes soaked in Blade-Runner style neon hues, it was excellent. The laundromat, diner at the end on the river area(!) and all the street scenes we saw during the droid chase were spectacular. Let's hope someday The Mouse figures out how to do Coruscant in a live action show.
Nixing Nyx for two sisters, Trace and Rafa Martez, I thought they were terrific. The rough-around-the-edges archetype is great for Ahsoka, because they represent the grey-Jedi lifestyle she's about to embrace. The character models looked great, too. I'm guessing Rafa (or both) will initially turn on Ahsoka when they find out she was a Jedi.
There is some criticism out there about this episode that it's boring and filler, etc. This is what we need to see - this is the end of The Clone Wars series. Things are winding down and they should be exploring Ahsoka's next moves like this. Next episode will be more exciting - they'll likely be captured, and then next one or two will be escaping and then defeating the bad guys - that's the 4-part TCW formula, anyway, we'll see how it pans out this time.
One last awesome treat - the music at the end at the diner sounds a lot like if Pet Shop Boys had a band in the SW Universe. Very John Hughes.
