It was a Dark and Stormy Night . . .

What a big nothing sandwich. Last night's Bad Batch finale reminded me of the last few episodes of Clone Wars--it had a weak script covered up by expensive animation and decent direction. To be fair, though, director Saul Ruiz created more tension than the last few episodes of Clone Wars had and Jennifer Corbett's script for the Bad Batch finale was much emptier than those fairly lifeless Clone Wars teleplays.

It was a two part finale--last week's nice part one by Matt Michnovetz ended with a cliffhanger--the Kamino city had been destroyed, Crosshair (Dee Bradley Baker) was knocked out, and the Batch were in the middle of escaping the destruction. Corbett, seemingly terrified of making decisions or perhaps totally insecure about writing characters, gives us an entire episode of the Batch . . . escaping Kamino in which nothing changes. If you skipped this final episode, it completely wouldn't matter. Even the end scene, where the Kamino scientist shows up at an Imperial base, was already something we were told was going to happen in a previous episode. It looks like she meets a new Imperial character but all that character basically does is say, "Welcome to the base." If she shows up next season or on The Mandalorian, you would have missed nothing significant by skipping this episode.

Crosshair does wake up and they do have a discussion but everyone stays in exactly the same position they were in in the previous episode. Crosshair doesn't offer any arguments about why it was better to stick with the Empire, and the Batch and Omega (Michelle Ang) have nothing to say about why it's important to fight the Empire. Every exchange is variations on, "You should go with us!" "No, you're wrong!"

Even the revelation that Omega had been around to watch the Batch's birth was mentioned in a previous episode. It sounds like Omega doesn't have the accelerated aging the other clones have so if she shows up in one of the live action shows she should be around the same age as Han Solo. Michelle Ang is 37 so that's close enough.

It's funny how people keep saying Omega's an unmodified clone of Jango Fett. I'm pretty sure Jango Fett was male.

I did like the sea monster attacking the underwater tunnel. Again, though, since no-one died and no actions were taken based on any especially dramatic dialogue, you don't need to see this scene to follow the story going forward. It's weird, it's like they assumed no-one was going to watch this finale.

I want to see season two but I sure hope Jennifer Corbett hands the reins over completely to Matt Michnovetz. It's likely she'll get all the accolades for this season, though, like Dave Filoni now seems to get all the credit for Clone Wars. Maybe the best case scenario would be for her to be "too big" for Bad Batch season two, the way Dave Filoni was apparently too big to direct any episodes of this show he supposedly created.

The Bad Batch is available on Disney+