So I just watched the first 3 Bad Batch season 3 episodes.
But the Bad Batch is often written like an actual story with actual thought put into plot mechanics. There’s often proper set ups and pay-offs, characters know their limitations, and thought is often put into the logistics of the action scenes.
Scary how even basic fundamental aspects of storytelling can lift a series, get the viewer interested and engaged. This has been something I think has improved a lot on Bad Batch, as Filoni’s involvement has diminished (as he concentrates on live action content) and Jennifer Corbett, Matt Michnovetz and Brad Rau have come to the fore.
I won’t really spoil anything, but there’s an episode where a character has to escape from an Imperial facility. Sounds really cliché, right? We’ve seen this 1,000 times. I’m sure they just easily bonk some Stormtroopers on the head and walk out the front door, right? Well, no. In fact, a lot of time is spent setting up how well guarded and secure this facility is. They spend an entire episode just showing daily life in the facility. It really does seem pretty impossible to escape - it’s portrayed as a realistically secure facility with sentries, bio-scans and force fields limiting access to different areas of the facility. When the escape finally happens, the protagonists exploit a feature of the facility that was set up well beforehand and actually makes sense, and they also have help from someone with higher security clearance. It’s like the writers actually thought hard about this, and tried to come up with a way for the protagonists to escape without necessarily making Imperial security look completely ridiculous. (They should have just put on a trench-coat and a fake mustache and waltzed out the front door, like in the Kenobi show.)
I mean, the show isn’t even that good. It’s like a 6.5 out of 10, mostly. It’s certainly no Andor. It still suffers a bit from pointless filler episodes. But I’m just pleasantly surprised to see actual competent writing in Star Wars these days.
I’ll be back for more of this season. It was a solid start to the season, good set up, and thankfully this:
no bringing back Tech from the end of last season. I really hope more characters in Star Wars stay dead when killed off.
I think it’ll be interesting to see a “must watch episodes guide” to this series after it ends; without the filler and aimless episodes in season 1 and early season 2. Or a strong stripped-down fan edit of the series.