Honest Thoughts On 'The Bad Batch: Rampage'
Well folks, Friday is upon us again and for Star Wars fans, it means a new episode of The Bad Batch to watch and digest. This week, the episode (aptly named Rampage), sees Clone Force 99 try to rescue a slave in exchange for some intel.
In Last weeks episode saw Fennec Shand turn up looking to capture Omega. For those of you unfamiliar with Shand, she is a Bounty Hunter and it looks like someone has hired her to specifically go after Omega, but we still don't know exactly who gave the orders. There's a high chance it may be the Kaminoan's looking to get her back.
Rampage sees the team looking for information on Shand to try and understand who she is and why she's after Omega. This leads Echo to suggest visiting an old Jedi ally named Cid (voiced by the great Rhea Pearlman), who tasks them with helping free a child by the name of Muchi, captured by slavers. Cid agrees to pay the team for the rescue mission as well as provide them with the information they are looking for, leading the team to accept the offer.
It turns out the child's captors are the Zygerrian slavers, whom you may remember from The Clone Wars, in which they capture Ahsoka. Their appearance in TCW, wasn't well received by everyone, with a lot of fans finding the arc a little boring with no real danger element. However, in Rampage they seem to be a lot more menacing, even managing to capture the team.
This allows an opportunity for Omega to try and play rescuer, which was a nice reversal considering she has predominantly played the role of "damsel in distress" throughout earlier episodes.
The team are bound in handcuffs, with shock collars installed to keep them in check whenever they try to struggle or for pure entertainment for the slavers.
Sadly, Omega is captured herself when attempting her rescue, but not before she opens a crate containing something big and angry - an adolescent Rancor.
Rancors have shown up various times throughout the entire Star Wars franchise and fans know it's not exactly something you want to go head to head with as it will not end well. Whilst the Rancor goes on a rampage (see what I did there), we learn the episodes plot twist - the child enslaved with the team is not Muchi as the they first believed, the young Rancor is in fact Muchi causing them to question what they've got themselves into.
Cut back to Cid and we see the character discussing the rescue of Muchi with a figure via hologram. The figure's face is kept out of view, so it's not clear who it is, but they seem to have been the one who tasked Cid with the rescue in the first place. Whilst we don't see the figures face, the voice should be pretty recognisable.
When we go back to the Bad Batch, having freed themselves and the slaves during the commotion, they are engaged in battle with the slavers. The tables seem to turn in the slavers favour with the addition of a Brezak (a big flying lizard used for travel) who is mighty strong and able to do some damage to the Rancor. Thanks to Hunter though, he is able to knock this specific slaver's team leader off the lizard's back, allowing the Rancor to go against it in a fair fight, causing it to flee.
With the slavers defeated, the team help the innocent slaves escape and begin their return back to Cid with package in tow.
The episode then moves back to Cid and delivers it's second big twist by bringing back a character from Return of the Jedi and mentioning another famous Star War character.
It turns out Cid was hired by Bib Fortuna, on behalf of Jabba the Hutt. Bib,you may remember, is the character from RotJ who brings Luke Skywalker before the mighty Jabba in order to retrieve Han Solo's carbonite containment and Chewbacca.
You may also remember Luke is famously dropped into an underground cave to fight against a Rancor. The Rancor to feature in this episode is not the same one as the one from RotJ though, as that particular Rancor has been confirmed to be a female named Pateesa. Still, it's likely the young Rancor will be used for the same reason as the other one. Could this mean Jabba may turn up at some point throughout the series?
The episode is not all action, there are some very poignant moments, especially near the beginning were we see Omega is given her own communicator to stay in touch with the team (makes sense really after the last episode). It's mentioned this belonged to Crosshair, one of the original members of the team who would go on to turn against them in episode one. This seems to cement Omega firmly as part of the team now.
Overall, in my humble opinion, it was a good episode and watching Wrecker get exhausted trying Personally, I've found the last couple of episodes to be a bit stale, with the arc of Omega always getting herself into trouble becoming bit repetitive, so this made a nice change. Hopefully, we will get more episodes of this calibre as the show progresses and maybe even see some more background characters from the film series show up.
Don't just take my word for it though, The Bad Batch: Rampage is now streaming on Disney+.
Until next time!