The period after the fabled Clone Wars will be explored in the next Star Wars animated series coming from Lucasfilm and streamer Disney+, Star Wars: The Bad Batch.
The series will be spinning out of the first story arc from The Clone Wars‘s most recent, and also final, season on Disney+. The title refers to a group of Clone Troopers who were defective but who still had military value for the Republic in their ongoing with the Separatists.
As per Lucasfilm’s press release –
The series follows the elite and experimental clones of the Bad Batch (first introduced in The Clone Wars) as they find their way in a rapidly changing galaxy in the immediate aftermath of the Clone War. Members of Bad Batch — a unique squad of clones who vary genetically from their brothers in the Clone Army — each possess a singular exceptional skill, which makes them extraordinarily effective soldiers and a formidable crew. In the post-Clone War era, they will take on daring mercenary missions as they struggle to stay afloat and find new purpose.
Honestly, I wasn’t really thrilled with the three episode story arc that introduced the Bad Batch. Given that The Clone Wars had only a limited number of episodes to wrap up its numerous storylines and it felt like a waste to use three of those episodes introducing a new group of characters whom we weren’t going to be seeing again. TUrns out that Lucasfilm had other plans.
But I have to admit that the setting of the show on the Star Wars timeline is an intriguing one. Nothing else has been set in the decade immediately following the last of the prequel films Revenge Of The Sith and Palpatine taking control of the Republic and declaring himself Emperor. So the series will have about ten years of time before it bumps up against the live action film Solo: A Star Wars Story. And there is plenty of fertile storytelling grounds in that timeframe to cover. In Solo we saw that several criminal organizations had begun their rise to a place of prominent power, so that is one potential area for the show to explore.
