This seems to be the Bad Batch’s last hurrah, and I wish I could say it ended with a bang in more ways than one. The siege of Anaxes is in dire straits as the Republic is losing nearly every front. Echo, recently liberated from the Matrix–I mean the Separatist mainframes–poses a plan to infiltrate a server room on Admiral Trench’s flagship and feed him false intel to turn the tide of the assault. However, Echo’s involvement casts doubt on the operation given his time spent as an unwilling pawn of the Separatists. This proves to be a moot point as, by the end of the episode, we can consider the theory of him being a Separatist mole thoroughly Jossed.

There a few points at which Echo’s seemingly oblique tactics put his comrades on edge, but that’s about it. Neither Watt Tambor nor Admiral Trench gives any indication they’re still capable of pulling his strings, which is…disappointing. It might’ve been a chance for some actual stakes in this episode. Otherwise, the Republic doesn’t face much legitimate peril and when they do it’s short-lived or not taken seriously.

For example, when leading an assault on the Separatist base, Master Windu stops in his tracks to negotiate with the battle-droids…Yes, you heard that right. MACE WINDU tries to NEGOTIATE…with ROBOTS. The writers do know who Mace Windu is, right?

Do they even know what battle-droids are? We know by this point in the Clone Wars that the Separatists have taken their armies off shared servers to preclude another incident like the one seen in The Phantom Menace. Their droids now operate independently, but that doesn’t equate to free-will. Or at least, I hope the CIS wouldn’t be that stupid, but with writing like this I wouldn’t put it past them.

Not helping is the fact that the CIS’s leader, Admiral Trench, is an absolute nitwit. First, he contacts Skako to request their algorithm’s advice for a counter-attack, despite knowing their operation has been compromised and that Echo has escaped. After this, he doesn’t act the slightest bit suspicious that he’s then advised to commit nearly all his troops fighting on the planet to this one engagement. He’s fed the feeble rationale that the Republic will place all their faith in their Jedi leaders and won’t retaliate in the other fronts, and he buys it without question.

This is, of course, Echo’s plan to gather all the droid armies in one place and short them out with a single carrier signal. The overwhelming force you’d expect to be converging on the Republic’s position is just an anti-climactic allotment of B-1 squads, which all easily succumb to the pulse. When this succeeds, Trench merely chuckles and says to his droid advisor:

“A wise leader does not rely completely on things such as “algorithms” *click-click*…” Despite the fact you clearly have up to this point, but go on… “My personal strategy for victory is through total annihilation!”

His response is to clear the board with a scorched-earth policy, detonating a bomb that will wipe out at least half of Anaxes. Brilliant! Along with half the assets that made Anaxes such a tempting military target in the first place! Granted, they’ve got nothing to lose now except letting the shipyards fall back into Republic hands, but I still doubt handing Count Dooku a half-scorched moth-ball will reflect well on Trench’s reputation for “strategic genius”.

After discovering his ploy, Anakin forces the deactivation codes out of Trench and the day is saved. All that’s left to do is escape from the flagship, wherein the Bad Batch employ their trademark logic-defying acts of derring-do.

This scene would be more impressive if it didn’t take place after the main conflict is already resolved. As it stands, this episode just doesn’t carry much tension.

The highlight of this outing comes at the end in a touching scene where Clone Force 99 accepts Echo into their band of misfits and Captain Rex bids him a fond farewell. Otherwise, there just isn’t much to say here. The only thing I was really thinking about was how fake and stiff the battles feel when huge armies can stand right in front of each other and still not land a hit.

It’s been this way for most of the show’s run. I guess we can’t really expect them to duplicate the grand, visceral feeling of battles from the movies or the 2003 cartoon, but these spectacles are the major draw for fans of Star Wars. Why are they drawing out the show for so long if they still can’t deliver better than this? Perhaps it’s just from being part of the episodes slated for production before the series’ cancellation. With any luck, the series will show some improvement in its production value once the newly produced episodes are aired.

I’m still cautiously optimistic, if nothing else because we’ll be reuniting with a fan-favorite character soon…

Overall: 6/10