So I just watched the first 3 Bad Batch season 3 episodes.
Despite being a cartoon aimed at kids, and despite having Dave Filoni’s name attached to it, there’s something about this show that sets it apart from the usual recent non-Andor live action Star Wars crap. Like… this show is actually written pretty competently, more often than not.
I’m so used to watching crap like the Mandalorian or whatever, where very little thought is put into plot mechanics or the logistics of how characters get from A to B. Characters often just appear wherever the plot needs them to be. Characters often conveniently forget previously established abilities. Characters often take actions that seem incoherent or questionable. Limitations are vague or undefined - characters often just “wing it” and everything works out, because the bad guys are impossibly stupid and the good guys are impossibly lucky.
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.
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.
