But I Low-key Know Where This Is Going - Tumblr Posts

It took me four episodes of The Bad Batch to put it into words one of the big reasons why I feel so disconnected from the show (other than All The Other Stuff, you know), which is because the show itself is disconnected from its own setting. I’ve talked a lot about how it’s taking the story away from other characters that should be getting their own story set on their own character–most notably what they did to Kanan’s story, but even more so egregiously with the “reg” clones themselves–that by making the regular clones low-key antagonists in the background, stripped of their individuality and how that was one of the major points of The Clone Wars, leaves a bad taste because it’s both disconnected from the show it’s trying so hard to say it’s a continuation of, and because it’s flattening the clones’ story.  All for the sake of these new characters. But it’s more than that, it’s disconnected from its own setting in that this could also have been a story about how the Empire is affecting the galaxy.  The setting is immediately post-Revenge of the Sith, which is an incredibly fertile area to play with, given the immediate rise of the Empire.  But The Bad Batch isn’t really doing much with it.  There are bits and pieces of it, there’s the brief scene of how people are cheering the end of the war, there’s the brief mentions of the new chain code thing, the exchanging your money for Imperial credits, etc. But they’re not part of the story in any foundational way.  This story is set in the dawn of the Empire, but it’s not doing anything major with the galactic upheaval of that, instead it’s about The Bad Batch being on the run for their own reasons, it’s about protecting Omega, and these aren’t bad elements, but they’re not strong enough to get me invested in the story in the way something like TCW or Rebels did. Because those shows were designed around the galactic circumstances that were necessary to the premise, Rebels had to be in the Empire era because it was about the Rebellion and the Empire, The Clone Wars had to be in the final days of the Republic, because it was about that specific war and showing how the galaxy was ground down by it. Smaller, more intimate stories absolutely have their place.  But when you bill yourself as being the successor/continuation of TCW, when you are bringing in all these familiar characters and mentions of worldbuilding, to connect it to the bigger epic stories of Star Wars, unless you’re bringing your A-game, it feels disconnected.  It’s not bad, but it’s nowhere near what it could have been.