Last night's new Bad Batch, "Common Ground", had a nice concept but the execution was rather thin. It's the second episode from former Game of Thrones writing assistant Gursimran Sandhu.
And the Guest Star of the Week is a Game of Thrones alum, Alexander Siddig, better known as Doctor Bashir on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Sadly, he doesn't have any particularly interesting dialogue as the former Separatist senator Avi Singh.
The Batch (Dee Bradley Baker) go to Raxus Secundus, the former Separatist capital, to rescue Singh from the Empire. The world appeared on episodes of The Clone Wars where I remember it being a little more interesting. The senate chamber was clearly modelled on British parliament and you could sense subtle signs of ideological differences in the makeup and costumes of the people Amidala and Ahsoka dealt with. Singh appears to be an Indian or Pakistani general imported to the Star Wars universe, but that would have been okay if he'd had some interesting dialogue. Maybe something for him to react to, some specific act of oppression perpetrated by the Empire beyond a curfew. A curfew hardly seems enough for Singh to have sacrificed a position from which he may have done some good mitigating the policies of the Empire.
In terms of visuals, we see some beautiful forests and nicely gothic structures (probably cg models reused from Clone Wars) but the crowd scenes show a disappointingly bland assemblage of familiar Star Wars species.
I suppose it would be expensive and time consuming to make a crowd shot with a genuinely distinct culture but it was disappointing for the Separatist home world all the same.
Meanwhile, Omega (Michelle Ang) shows she's remarkably good at dejarik and Cid (Rhea Perlman) exploits her talent. Which, like most of the episode, was almost interesting.
The Bad Batch is available on Disney+.
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