Summary
Strong character work and exciting action elevate “The Return”. This feels like The Bad Batch at its peak with the added final season stakes for good measure.
With Echo temporarily rejoining Clone Force 99 and Crosshair having escaped Mount Tantiss with Omega in Episode 4, the original gang is almost back together in Episode 5 of Star Wars: The Bad Batch Season 3. Despite the absence of Tech and some lingering animosity and confusion within the group, there’s a pleasing tone to this episode reminiscent of earlier seasons, with the added stakes and overarching plot provided by a show gradually but inexorably approaching its end.
Getting the Gang Back Together
“The Return” has something that previous episodes of The Bad Batch — this season, anyway — have lacked. The cozy surrogate family dynamic is felt very strongly again here, and it’s not an accident. The first shot is of Omega waking up from a peaceful sleep, clutching a teddy to her chest; finally allowed to be a child once more. Hunter and Wrecker are having breakfast. Crosshair is outside training, which consists of shooting fruit out of AZI-3’s hands and sulking about his deteriorating accuracy average (he still has the shakes). It’s idyllic, which is not a word I’d have used to describe the first four episodes of this season.
If you were wondering about the title — as we were in our Episode 5 preview — then don’t. It’s Echo who returns, hoping to use Crosshair and Omega’s intel on Mount Tantiss to launch an operation against the facility. They have Nala Se’s datapad, but it’s heavily encrypted and without Tech — that still stings, doesn’t it? — the only way to bypass the encryption is to plug it into an Imperial terminal. Luckily, Crosshair knows of a remote, understaffed facility that they should be able to infiltrate without much fuss. Hunter wants Omega to stay behind with Wrecker for her safety, but she runs Clone Force 99 at this point, so everyone decides to go together instead.
The Imperial Outpost
The episode doesn’t identify the planet where the Imperial outpost is located, but it’s a frozen nowhere with zero signs of life, in or out of the facility. Things are still a bit tense between Hunter and Crosshair — who dons his old armor in a big crowd-pleasing moment — since it seems like the latter is hiding something about the facility’s nature. He said it was understaffed, not abandoned, and the high-frequency perimeter sensors designed to warn off local raiders didn’t come up either.
Those sensors are powered by the waning facility itself, so the only way to access the Imperial terminal is to redirect power from them back to the facility proper, which leaves it suddenly unguarded. While Echo and Omega handle the data transfer, Hunter and Crosshair have a macho heart-to-heart outside that almost leads to a fistfight until they’re interrupted by a giant wyrm that bursts from the ice, looking rather stressed.
Backup Plan
With the wyrm outside there’s no way to get back to the Marauder, so the only other option is to restore power to the perimeter sensors by manually rebooting the reserve energy grid located at the back of the complex. But before they can do that they need to lure the wyrm outside of the perimeter, or they’ll be stuck inside with it when the power comes back on.
This amounts to an effective set-piece wherein Hunter, Batcher, and Crosshair have to lead the wyrm away while Echo spots them from a nearby tower and Wrecker primes the backup generator, waiting for the right moment to reboot. It’s made more complex when Hunter falls through the ice and has to navigate to the perimeter from inside, guided by Crosshair, which is the bonding activity they both needed. It develops how you’d think it would, ending in a last-second dash back across the perimeter line, but it’s a very solidly put-together sequence that handles a lot of necessary character work for Hunter and Crosshair without them having to hash it out in dialogue.
With relationships mended, death-by-wyrm averted, and the data transfer complete, Echo and Rex are closer than ever to finding the coordinates of Mount Tantiss and launching an operation to free the captured clones.
The episode ends with Crosshair finally opening up to Hunter about why he joined the Empire in the first place, and what led to him coming back. He’s vague, but Hunter gets it. Both still have their regrets and have made their mistakes, but there’s hope for both of them yet. I think I feel a heroic self-sacrifice or two coming on, but we’ll have to save that for another episode
What did you think of Star Wars: The Bad Batch Season 3 Episode 5? Let us know in the comments.
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