Aggressive Negotiations

A pretty good episode of The Bad Batch last night courtesy of script editor Matt Michnovetz and supervising director Brad Rau (along with Nathaniel Villanueva). I don't quite understand why Jennifer Corbett is credited on the Wikipedia entry as head writer if Michnovitz is script editor. "Script editor" was the title traditionally given to the person understood to be the showrunner/head writer. That's certainly how it worked on Doctor Who for so many years. Script editors like Robert Holmes or Douglas Adams are considered the guiding voices of the series during their tenure. And whatever the other precise jobs a script editor has on a show, if they are, at the very least, editing every single script, I would say they must be the most consistent creative voice on a series and therefore the head writer. He's even credited as script editor on episodes Jennifer Corbett wrote. Maybe Corbett's function as head writer is more hands off, maybe she just gave everyone the general arc of the series in the broadest terms. Anyway, last night's episode was good.

The location was really nice. I loved the atmosphere, the yellow fog that creeps between Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen) and Cad Bane (Corey Burton) as they stand off. I love the idea of seeing a tarnished and grungy version of the normally pristine Kaminoan structures. The clones in jars, reminiscent of the Hammer horror-ish scenes from Rise of Skywalker, were nice too, and capped off splendidly by the disturbing sight of Fennec being briefly pinned by the naked corpse of some genetic abomination.

I was a bit disappointed by Cad Bane in the episode. It's funny, when Bane was first introduced on Clone Wars, I found him kind of irritating for how easily he was able to outmanoeuvre and fight off the Jedi. Now I'm irritated by how easily a human bounty hunter with an oddly big face is able to outmanoeuvre and fight off Cad Bane.

At least we know her face gets smaller when she becomes live action. You'd think they'd have just modelled her on a young Ming-Na Wen, there's plenty of footage of her.

I can't get used to Bane's smaller hat, either, but it does make him look taller. I also felt the Ennio Morricone-pastiche music was a little too broad. Brad Rau might as well have interrupted the episode to directly yell at us, "IT'S LIKE A SPAGHETTI WESTERN, GET IT?!"

I like the return of Todo-360, still voiced by Seth Green, whose codependence on Bane actually forms the emotional core of the episode, as much as it has one. I did feel for Omega (Michelle Ang) but she didn't have any particularly hard choices in the episode. It was nice seeing her reunion with Hunter (Dee Bradley Baker).

The Bad Batch is available on Disney+.