Raiders of the Lost Brick

Last night's Bad Batch started from a premise with a lot of potential but it never quite got off the ground. Written by Christopher Yost and directed by Nathaniel Villanueva, it also seemed like it had an especially low budget.

It's basically an Indiana Jones homage (some younger viewers might say it was an Avatar: The Last Airbender homage) and I really appreciated the attempt to have a score that at least tried to emulate the grandeur of John Williams. Of course, I wouldn't expect it to equal any of the great moments from Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I found myself thinking about some more tips the makers of The Bad Batch could've taken from that other Lucasfilm franchise.

Why does the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark work so well? It's hard to think back at this point, for many people, to seeing it for the first time. Even most people who haven't have probably at least heard something about the character. But a big part of the first sequence is being introduced to Indiana Jones. Who is this guy? What is he doing? Is he dangerous? What motivates him? In place of Dr. Jones, "Entombed", last night's Bad Batch, gives us Phee Genoa, voiced by Wanda Sykes.

She's not served well by the animation. Last night's episode reminded me of Tales of the Jedi with its slow, stiffly moving characters. Sykes is a funny comedienne, and she comes off as very natural when doing her stand-up, but she's one of those stand-ups whose talents somehow didn't lend themselves to making her a good actress. She sounds very wooden. Coupled with the stiff animation, altogether she's a pretty lifeless character, and placed at the centre, she sucks a lot of life out of the story.

There's not much mystery to her character, either. She's clearly established as a kind of generic tomb raider. The target of her tomb raiding in the episode, the "Heart of the Mountain", doesn't have a lot of lustre, literally and figuratively. We know it's something from before the time of the Republic, we know it's on a planet in an uncharted system. But why is it legendary? We find out it serves a function, but what do people believe it does? A legendary artefact ought to have legendary powers. The idol in Raiders of the Lost Ark was clearly a religious symbol, representative of a god. The sort of Incan trappings of the Idol and temple carry associations for the audience, mixing the known and the unknown.

"Entombed" mainly gives us a lot of simple geometric shapes.

Overall, this episode needed more.

The Bad Batch is available on Disney+.