The Bad Batch is a series made up of peaks and valleys. When it’s good, it’s excellent, but when it’s bad it’s mundane and derivative. After the high point of the first three episodes the fourth nosedived into filler and a largely flimsy story, losing the momentum of the premiere. Now the show is starting to climb back up again, with an entry that’s much more exciting and actually gives something to the series.

The main plot is a pretty standard Star Wars side quest, with the Batch needing to find a working Imperial terminal where they can download information from Nala Se’s datatpad without having to break the encryption. Crosshair believes he knows a place, somewhere he once served with the Empire: the base on Barton-4 first seen in the season two episode ‘The Outpost’.

This is an important location for Crosshair, as it’s effectively where he turned against the Empire, killing his commanding officer Lieutenant Nolan after he refused to save the life of a clone named Mayday.

It’s Crosshair who’s the centre of this week’s story, as he tries to find his place again in the Batch after abandoning them to fight with the Empire. It’s clear he was always doing what he thought was right, and in a way he was. They are soldiers, and there allegiance was to the Republic which lawfully transitioned into the Empire.

There’s clearly tension between the members of the group now, especially between Crosshair and Hunter. There’s also a suggestion that Crosshair has done things we’ve never seen on screen, and aren’t likely to given how far Star Wars animation generally goes with dark themes. Then there’s the fact that Crosshair was always something of an outsider within the group, even way back in The Clone Wars.

The action in this episode is good, too, with the team fighting off a giant worm-like creature that lives underground, immediately inspiring comparisons with the sandworms in Dune: Part Two. It’s not just generic action, though, as we get to see Hunter and Crosshair putting aside their disagreements to work together, and finding the relationship that made them such a formidable team in the war.

This is really the main point of the episode, as it doesn’t add much to the overall storyline of the season, but rather focuses on building up the main characters. It’s also good to see the Batch back together now Echo has rejoined them, though he could return to Rex later.

In all it’s an entertaining episode that gives Crosshair some much-needed character development after being neglected in past seasons, and has some good action scenes that show off the best of Star Wars animation.

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