The Bad Batch Spoiler Recap: War-Mantle
Despite the abrupt shift back into adventure-of-the-week storytelling in last week’s episode, today’s episode of The Bad Batch, “War-Mantle” got things right back on course with a truly wonderful episode that managed to not only advance the plot but finally, finally grant some insight into who the Batch are as people, and how their disparate personalities work - or don’t - in a group setting.
The episode opens, not with the Batch, but instead with a man being chased through the wilderness. Who he is and who he’s running from soon become overwhelmingly apparent. The man is a clone, an unmasked reg, and his pursuers are what appear to be clones as well, if the armour is any indication. Eagle-eyed viewers, however, might have noticed that there’s something a little different about the armored troopers hunting down their former comrade.
Or rather, something a little different - though not unfamiliar - about their armour, perhaps?
Just before he is apprehended, the fleeing clone manages to set off a distress beacon, and it is at this point the plot catched back up with the Batch. They receive a call from Rex, who tells them his friend is in trouble on the planet Daro, but he’s too tied up with something to help. Once again, we have someone asking the Bad Batch for help, telling them they’re the literal only ones who can help. And once again, it’s a house divided.
The scene where they debate whether or not to help Rex was, in my opinion, one of the episode’s best. It gave some long-overdue screentime to everyone’s individual personalities, and showcased how in some respects, they mix about as well as oil and water.
When Tech points out that the call came from an uninhabited world, and Hunter begins to speculate what a clone trooper could be doing on Daro, Echo finally loses it and asks why it matters. Perhaps driven by Hunter’s use of the word “reg” in reference to Rex’s extraction request, he finally asks Hunter whether the details of the issue matter. Intel or no intel, Echo says, Rex asked them for help which means it must be urgent. This is not the first time we’ve seen Echo chafe under the way the Batch do things and it won’t be the last, since it happens again in this same episode.
Meanwhile, the others of the Batch chime in as well, with Tech pointing out that they’re currently on a mission for Cid and failure to complete it means they won’t get paid, and therefore won’t have the funds to survive. This not only confirms the suspected reasons why they continued working for Cid when they had no more debt to pay off. It also gives a pretty succinct picture of who Tech is, for better or worse. They have their mission, their instructions, and to him the logic of survival supersedes the need to help someone just because Rex asked.
Omega is, once again, the only one Hunter will actually listen to and not argue with, and as it’s been all season, her choice is the deciding factor. And Wrecker? Sweet Wrecker, he just agrees with everyone. They’ve all got good points, he reasons.
In not saying anything at all, we see this continued trend of Hunter trying to prioritize his squad over everyone and everything else, even as the world they’re struggling to survive in crumbles around them. It’s a noble thing, to want to keep your family safe. I’m not here to say it isn’t. But Hunter isn’t a farmer on the frontier, or a factory worker on Corellia. He’s a clone trooper. An enhanced one. He’s the leader of the Bad Batch, and somehow the idea of perhaps having an obligation to the galaxy at large - not whatever government is in charge today, but to the citizens themselves - has not yet occurred to him.
It reminds me of a line from the movie Ever After. Like Hunter, Prince Henry is a reluctant leader (with beautiful hair, but I digress) who is told a few times that he was “born to privilege, and with that comes specific obligations”, and it is up to Henry to determine what those obligations are. Hunter is in the same position. By virtue of his enhanced skills and his combat prowess, he is in a far better position to do something about the suffering around the galaxy than the average person is.
Omega sees this. Clearly. It’s why she’s always the one to insist they help others who ask them for it. Because she knows that people call them when they have nowhere else to turn. Because those people have faith that when all else has failed, the Bad Batch can give them just that sliver of hope. This has been Hunter’s struggle all season, coming to terms with where his obligations lie. The rest of the group, whether we agree with them or not, are firm in their positions. But Hunter isn’t there yet, and it’s frustrating to watch someone who is fundamentally a good man have to be told to do the right thing time and time again.
But Prince Henry got there in the end. I hope Hunter will too.
While the Batch is travelling to Daro, over on Kamino, things are in a bit of an upheaval. Rampart orders Crosshair to ensure that every viable clone be mobilized once the latter informs him that their ominous sounding “operation” is ahead of schedule. Meanwhile, Nala Se is in the process of evacuating the young clone cadets to continue training “elsewhere”, and the whole preceding scene with Crosshair and Rampart made me so uncomfortable I thought I was about to witness a ship full of children explode. Thankfully that doesn’t happen. Instead we learn that the Empire has canceled the Kaminoans contract, and Lama Su is worried. Worried enough to tell Nala Se to round up all essential personnel for an evacuation. When Nala Se is caught, Lama Su tries to throw her under the bus (under the transport?) only to have his attempts fail when Rampart offers her a job, and leaves Lama Su alone with two armed soldiers. We don’t hear the blaster bolts fire, but it’s safe to assume we won’t be seeing Lama Su again. Not alive anyway.
On Daro, things start to go wrong almost immediately. Hunter sends Omega and Wrecker back to the ship to act as backup while he, Echo and Tech go looking for the missing trooper. Though the planet is supposedly uninhabited, they quickly find a hidden Imperial base whose signature is masked by the mountain it’s built in. Hunter is ready to leave and call Rex to tell him they’re wildly outnumbered, when Echo - again - has enough of this.
He angrily tells Hunter that going in virtually blind and with no reinforcements was exactly what happened when they rescued him from Skako Minor, and if they hadn’t taken that chance, he would still be there, hooked up to a machine, and he’s unwilling to resign a fellow trooper to the same fate.
In a season that has twice challenged Echo’s personhood over and above the question of clone personhood, it was very gratifying to see him finally begin to process the hurt and trauma he’s been through. I know there’s always the chance that he and Rex discussed it offscreen, but in a visual medium, if you’re not planning on showing an event, you need to at least hint that it happened in some way. What this tells me is that it hasn’t happened yet, but perhaps Echo is finally on his way to healing.
Emboldened by Echo’s outburst, they sneak into the facility and tap into the system to track where Rex’s friend, CC-5567 is being held. Tech notes that the system shows around 50 clone trooper designations on premises, and over a thousand soldiers with TK designations. None of them recognize that particular designation. But we do.
That’s right. The era of the Clone Trooper is at an end, ushering in a new era of Stormtroopers, something they realize once they bust out CC-5567, who people with better memories than me will already have recognized as Gregor. With the audience breathing easy as to Gregor’s fate, since he’ll later appear in Rebels, the Batch begin their breakout attempt, discovering along the way that the troopers that are trying to stop them aren’t actually clones, but simply recruits from all across the galaxy. Gregor tells them he was charged with their training, but couldn’t take it anymore and ran.
They are in over their heads as Tech’s attempt to lead troopers away from their position triggers a security alarm because old clone codes are no good anymore. They get a call out to Wrecker and Omega for backup, and the two of them fly to the facility to get everyone out of there. It takes a couple of tries, as they are now being pursued by airborne fighters as well, but at last they get everyone onboard.
Almost.
At the last moment, Hunter loses his grip on the ramp and falls to the wilderness below. When they try to return for him, he orders them to leave because if they come back the chances of any of them escaping are slim to none. The Marauder jumps to hyperspace and Hunter is left on Daro.
In the final moments of the episode, the plot and the stakes converge at last for the beginnings of a long-awaited confrontation. Hunter sits alone in his cell until he is joined by a new arrival: Crosshair. The onetime brothers stare each other down, with Crosshair observing that while he’d wanted the whole squad, Hunter will do.
This episode was what I wanted from The Bad Batch all season. They are a group of fighters in an impossible position and with no fixed role in the galaxy. I had hoped they’d grapple with the question of what it means to be special when you’re not actually all that special anymore, at least not in the grand scheme. The plot, through cameos from Cut, Rex, Saw Gerrera, the Martez sisters and even to an extent Fennec Shand, seems to be leading them towards the moment where they need to make a choice and pick a side.
In terms of galaxy-wide conflict, there is still a lot of ground left to cover, but if the final two episodes take a note from “War-Mantle” and choose to focus on the more intimate character story, I believe that despite the turbulent, bumpy ride the team behind the Bad Batch can bring things in for a smooth landing.
What did you think? Did you recognize Gregor from just his number? Did you see the blowup between the Batch coming? Are you excited (scared) to see what Crosshair has in store? Join us for Bad Bitches on the Bad Batch, our biweekly livestream to dive in! And for more Star Wars discussion, don’t forget to subscribe to “Space Waffles”, our Star Wars focused podcast!
The Bad Batch is streaming now on Disney+ with new episodes every Friday.
