By Ben Wright (@iamzavagno | www.xgeeks.co.uk)
This review is spoiler-free.
After last week’s excellent, dark episode of The Bad Batch, we have a major change of pace, not only as an episode but for the series as a whole. Fans of pod racing rejoice, it’s time for a race!
Wrecker, Tech and Omega travel with Cid to Safa Toma to act as muscle and pit crew for her newly acquired 12 Series Speeder and pilot Tay-0, to take part in ‘‘Riot Racing’. Ok, so it’s not quite as grand as Pod Racing or the Boonta Eve Classic, but the concept is pretty new for Star Wars animation, hence the mention of a change of pace! This was definitely a filler episode, at least in regard to the overarching main narrative, and critics could say it causes a little whiplash in contrast to the previous three, more story-focused, episodes. But it was still an enjoyable episode in isolation and I think that is how it should be viewed and experienced.
As for the overall story, it follows a familiar formula to Episode One’s Pod Race, especially in regard to the stakes of the race results. I thought Tay-0 was an amusing character, mainly sold through the performance of the wonderful Ben Schwartz, but I think anymore may have been too much. I can imagine as a prolonged character, he could become a little too grating for an audience. Ernie Hudson was another good casting decision as Grini Millegi and his character had a very interesting take on Cid, which we could see revisited further down the line. I also thought the other racer characters were pretty fun, especially the modified B1-Series Battle Droid – which I believe was a nice hommage to Episode 2: Attack of the Clones. Finally, I thought the final race song was a great choice and it had a real video game feel to it.
Overall, this was a fun and enjoyable episode of The Bad Batch and was an interesting change of pace for the show. I don’t mind these types of episodes filtered throughout the series as a whole, but I do feel that a more solid structure and focus on the main story needs to be at the core of this second season, especially given the criticism of ‘treading water’ with too many one-off episodes in the first season.
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