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notlikearegularmom-blog · 6 months ago

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I love you, Star Wars. It’s ruining my life.

I resurrected my long-dormant Tumblr to write 2k words on my complicated feelings about the Bad Batch series finale, and I feel better now.

I love Star Wars. I love this show. Earlier in the season, I went shot-by-shot on how great this series is when it’s on its game.

Considered in a vacuum, that final episode is great. The sequence on Tantiss is tense and thrilling. The visuals, as always, are top tier. The epilogue hits the right emotional notes... and it all fell flat for me.

I think my harshest, but most concise, critique is this: The season went in circles on stuff that ended up being irrelevant and ran out of time to tee up the emotional payoff.

I’m aware I’m in the minority. If you loved this, I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong to love it. I’m glad people loved it; I wanted to love it. This show remains one of my favorite recent Star Wars things, and the fact that the ending didn’t land doesn’t change that.

I’m genuinely bummed that this didn’t work for me, but here’s why it didn’t.

The storytelling fails to get us where we need to be for that ending – and there are two main reasons for that:

Structural issues with the season-long plot arc that have downstream effects on characterization and themes.

An over-reliance on misdirection to create tension.

Big time spoilers ahead, obviously.

Structure

For the first two seasons, the show is episodic – you get these tight little two- or three-episode arcs but there’s never a season-long plot. For the final season, they set up a central story around the show’s mythology (Tantiss). All the action should lead to that end, even if we get some one-off episodes along the way. That’s something they hadn’t done before, and I was really looking forward to it. It’s ambitious to switch things up, and I like it when shows take risks.

Setting up the mytharc

The actual plot progression when we get there, though, is weird. No one loves a hunt for a MacGuffin more than I do – you often get some of your best character moments in those stories – but you have to eventually find the MacGuffin, or your audience starts to wonder where things are going.

It takes nine episodes to get to a significant plot reveal. That’s more than half a season of not giving the audience information – not teasing partial clues, just not giving. And the main thing the characters find is something the audience already knows (what’s an m-count), even if the characters don’t*. The big problem is that there are no breadcrumbs leading to the next part of the story, and I started to get concerned that it was because the central plot wasn’t going anywhere.

* I find that really hard to believe. In TPM, Qui-Gon tests Anakin’s m-count on his iPhone. There’s an app for that.

The story arc

Two-thirds of the way through the season, the arc laps itself and circles back to where we started.

It’s a decision that could make sense – the basic premise of the show is Omega daddy-daughter bonding with these guys while helping them do their missions.

You can’t entirely blow that up in the final season. You still need some episodes of exactly that, and that’s why she returns to them early in the action.

But once she gets taken to Tantiss (again) we basically just do the arc over — and we’ve already had mini versions of that exact arc in both seasons 1 and 2. We’ve been here before and it doesn’t really show us anything new – and, for it to work, it should.

This is all too bad because individual episodes are fantastic: 1 and 3, and 10 and 11 are all no notes amazing. Episodes 5-7 form a really effective short arc, and 9 has some of my favorite visual moments in the entire series in it.

But episodes often felt like they’d been written in isolation – excellent by themselves, but they don’t do the thing they need to do: introduce the next progression in the mytharc.

That isolation also seems to mess with some key characterization.

Character

Everyone feels a little inconsistent from episode to episode, but it’s especially noticeable with Crosshair because this is his season.

Episode 7 Crosshair and Episode 14 Crosshair feel like different guys, both of whom aren’t quite the same character as Episode 15 Crosshair.

In 14, Rampart says something to Crosshair like “people like us are only ever loyal to ourselves” and he responds, “I’ve changed.” But that’s never been his character’s central struggle. He’s incredibly loyal with deep values even when they’re badly misguided and THAT is his problem and has been for three seasons. He did war crimes out of a belief in something larger than himself. He’s a good candidate for the chip because he’s inherently loyal. They say that explicitly early on in the show.

And sure, maybe Rampart is projecting his own experience onto Crosshair – but then why does he accept that framing and respond like it’s true? And we get a foreshadowing moment like this tension is going to come to a head – but then these two are never in the same scene again and the question about Crosshair’s loyalty never comes back up.

Also in 14, there’s an exchange where he tells Wrecker that he ‘owes’ Omega for not leaving him behind on Tantiss and essentially that’s why he’s there.

But my dude has been openly established as loving Omega even more fiercely than the others, all the more for being late to it, since like a third of the way into the season. Putting us back in a place where he’s pretending that he doesn’t care as much about her as he does ignores like nine episodes of character growth.

This was the point where I started wondering if they’d written the final two episodes first, and then backfilled the rest of the season.

In 15, he’s willing to throw his own life away for everyone else, and that’s much more in line with the rest of his arc. But...

This would be a really affecting line, but it kind of comes out of nowhere. I think it’s a moment to create tension: if their team as an idea – and the thing the whole show is centered around – is dead, maybe they’re also individually going to die? Probably, because they end this scene with a visibly injured Wrecker saying ‘we all know the risks.’ But up to this point we’ve gotten nothing about how Crosshair felt about Tech – or even more broadly about their team being irrevocably changed by their experiences. He literally never talks about it, even in scenes where it would have made sense to talk about it.

(This would have been the perfect time to tee this up.)

He avoided talking about it so thoroughly that I thought we’d get a watershed emotional moment at some point, like late in the third act of the season. Add 45 seconds of meaningful dialogue to Episode 12 (it’s barely 20 minutes and the shortest of the season, so there was definitely time), then this all falls into place and that Episode 15 line lands perfectly.

(This is the scene, right here. It’s even nicely framed for it.)

And I’m just not sure how to feel about the fact that they resolved Crosshair’s PTSD arc by... removing the outward symptom of his trauma.

Misdirection

They spent a lot of time on misdirection in order to create tension, like a whole lot. So much so that there’s not enough time spent laying the groundwork for the ending we get.

These are the main teases:

Omega is probably Force-sensitive, and that will have big implications.

I love Ventress but there’s no reason for her to be here. The problems and questions she introduces don’t end up being relevant. ‘Can you grow to your full potential without giving up the people you love?’ But Omega doesn’t end up faced with that hard choice.

No one ends up facing hard choices – like, have we earned our rest now or do we keep fighting? That’s a really compelling question — but the characters never have that conversation on screen. The choice just sort of happens to them in the space of like 10 seconds, right at the end. They’re not even active participants in it.

No one is safe; everyone might die.

Not a bad choice at all for a final season. But we go from ‘you’ll never grow with these guys holding you back’ at the midpoint to ‘you have to live because she needs you’ in the finale with no stops in between. It feels like Episode 15 is the conclusion of a different season than the one we’d been watching — and I think I would have really liked that season.

CX-2 is someone significant.

Even if a reveal is a non-reveal, you should still, uh, reveal it.

The other guys, though, look badass and are cool af, and we should have gotten more than seven minutes from their first introduction to them dying en masse in the dark (in a sequence where it was hard to keep track of who was who).

If it doesn’t matter who CX-2 is, what were these guys being held back for?

There are a bunch of smaller moments as well that seem to be leading the story in a direction, never to be addressed again. You know that saying about how if you introduce a gun in the first act of a play, it needs to go off by the third?

That one’s a literal gun, which is funny — but there are several plot elements that just appear and then disappear.

Focus

In the final season of something, you really feel that ticking clock. Where and how the story spends its time feels more urgent, and I thought the choices here were odd.

We get a few side plots and character cameos that feel like filler, which is probably to be expected. But I think the best example of what I’m talking about is this:

The comedy villain from season one gets nearly 35 minutes of screen time down the stretch, while Wrecker, a main character whose fate we care deeply about, gets maybe half that.

And, sure, Rampart’s death was satisfying because that guy is the worst. But I honestly don’t know why they brought him back and chose to spend so much time on him.

Justice for Wrecker, in general. He gets nothing to do. Echo has more impact on the plot (and possibly more dialogue), and he’s only in a third of the episodes.

And to be clear, I would be fine spending time on things like past characters if the story had really hit the other beats along the way, but what we get feels unfocused.

Is the main theme of the season redemption? Loyalty? Self-determination? Letting go of who you thought you were supposed to be? Ultimately, it’s none of those things because it tries, at different times, in different episodes, to be all of them — sometimes in contradictory ways.

And with that…

I’m being really hard on something I love here, but... I wouldn’t give this much thought to something mid. I care because it’s really good, even if, ultimately, I feel like the execution could have been better.

(I went with The Tortured Poets Department for the musical joke in the title, because it’s topical — but Never Let Me Down Again was sitting right there.)

#starwars #i love you it's ruining my life #the bad batch #reaction #tv review

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