The Bad Batch follows a group of clone troopers who are not perfect copies of Jango Fett, but each are modified in a way to enhance a particular skill. It’s actually a very well done series. The stories are filled with plenty of action and suspense. The Bad Batch is often called into challenging operations where security is high, danger is everywhere, and the odds of success are low. Each time they are called into action, carrying the operation successfully requires special skills and strategy, like solving a set of cunning puzzles.

Season 1 of Bad Batch begins with the events of Revenge of the Sith from the perspective of the clones on Kamino. The Galactic Republic has been officially reorganized as the Galactic Empire, and the sudden regime change not only means that the Clone Wars are over, but that the rules and the galactic order have changed and a Galactic Civil War is about to begin. The Bad Batch revisits several characters and locales familiar to the original The Clone Wars series and the stories catch up with these old friends, showing how they are forced to adapt to living in a new era where the old authority they trusted is now a brutal totalitarian regime that seeks to control every citizen of the galaxy and depose regional governments. Liberty and self-determination is an uphill struggle to fight for.

Season 2 continues where the Empire is doing increasingly unethical, corrupt and downright evil things, which includes subjugating and murdering innocent people and doing dishonest things such as falsifying official reports to protect reputations. The previously loyal clone troopers who would readily follow any orders find that more and more of them will not follow the Empire’s orders because smart enough to recognize that this isn’t right. Those who choose the path of integrity; to do what is right rather than blindly do what they are told, often pay for their choices with their lives. They also discover that the Empire has no loyalty to them and is plotting to not only replace the clones with enlisted stormtroopers, but to phase out clones entirely by destroying the Kaminoan cloning facility and subsequently lying about it, and then abandon the clones to fend for themselves once they’ve been forcibly retired from service. They have no official representation in the Senate, but the senator from Pantora fights to advocate on their behalf.

Season 3 focuses on Project Necromancer. The Empire isn’t just a repressive regime; it’s also doing all sorts of wicked science experiments that most would consider either unnatural or an abomination. The show illustrates that the Imperial culture is cold, sterile, alienating and dehumanizing. However, in spite of this, humanity continues to prevail and assert itself under such stifling and punishing conditions.

Because this is a show about clone troopers fighting war operations, it is a predominantly male-dominated series. Hunter especially stands out not only as the leader of the Bad Batch, but steps up to the role as a father figure to young Omega. All of Omega’s brothers love her and will do anything to protect her. She’s just as loyal to them and will do anything to support them. I actually like Omega a lot. She is sweet but not saccharine. She is kind but not excessively idealistic or sentimental. She can show anger and sadness without being excessively melodramatic. She is intelligent and capable, and her victories come her resourcefulness and that her brothers trained her really well in multiple soldier skillsets. She relies on knowledge, skill and her intuition, not lazily-written instant gratification. In short, she’s a perfectly well-adjusted teenage girl. Although the show doesn’t have a regular Jedi character to follow, Omega thinks and acts like a Jedi. She’s highly intuitive, noticing things that others don’t, she’s exceptionally good at strategy, she’s very kind to animals, and she prefers to understand a problem and tries to resolve it in a non-violent manner before resorting to fighting. I felt that Disney had forgotten that.

There is a little bit of DEI, as while the series is overwhelmingly male, there are times when female characters (who weren’t already introduced in a prior series) are brought in a little too obviously to balance the sex ratio. Also, most pets and animals in the series are female too. As a biologically female tomboy myself, I’d like to say that there are only two good reasons why a woman would go into in an otherwise male-dominated profession: either she genuinely wants to be there and she takes her interest in that subject very seriously, or because a real male couldn’t be found to fill that position. If you’re dropping a woman in a spot she doesn’t belong in or artificially boosting her capabilities to make a social statement, you’re doing it wrong. For the most part, the Trandoshan intel broker, the bounty hunter, the pirate, the planetary governor, the Wookiee shaman, the crime family queen, the scientists, a few otherwise sexless droids with feminine voices and a few children I can completely understand. They’re well-written characters. On the other hand, the Imperial army now enlists female stormtroopers and female officers, and the with the armor on the female stormtroopers look indistinguishable from the male ones. I’d be more inclined to accept female soldiers in combat in a science fiction series if they wore powered armor, but stormtroopers just wear regular armor. The insurgents on Onderon also has females in combat armor, too, but they’re not as formally regimented.

Also, while humans across the galaxy come in all sorts of skin colors, including black, Indian and Maori, Imperial leadership is predominantly white males. The Empire still biases toward human beings and typically doesn’t hire aliens.