After a six-year hiatus and an open-ended conclusion, Star Wars:The Clone Warsis finally back and has a new home on Disney+ for its seventh and final season. Rather than the whole season getting released at once like the previous season, called The Lost Missions, which was dropped on Netflix in 2014, Clone Wars is doing weekly releases starting with The Bad Batch, the first episode in a new arc.

The clone soldier Captain Rex (Dee Bradley Baker) reports that the Separatists enemies are predicting their tactics. He announces to his Jedi General that hes infiltrating a Separatist base to investigate the situation. He doesnt tell his Jedi General one thing though: he has a theory that the Separatists are procuring their information from a surviving clone brother by the name of Echo, who supposedly perished back in The Citadel. Along with Commander Cody, he enlists the assistance of a four-crew team of clones with desirable mutations, clones that didnt come out with standardized physicality and possess abilities deemed useful on the battlefield. The team includes the leader Hunter, the brawny Wrecker, the nerdy bespectacled Tech, and the strong-and-silent type Crosshair.

Created by Dave Filoni and inspired by the 2003 proto-canon Genndy Tartakovsky hand-drawn Clone Wars, the prequel era-setClone Wars was initially quite distinctive in the Star Wars animated realm for its grit. The series had a rocky start back in 2008, but gained a slow and steady fanbase as quality rose. Releasing a series of anthologized arcs taking place within the same war, Clone Wars took advantage of the television format to unravel the idiosyncrasies of familiar characters like Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Yoda while expanding on background characters like the clones and fleshing out a grimy space fantasy world trapped in ceaseless war and politics that were left untouched by the movies.

When compared to the previousClone Wars episodes, which was the finale at the time, this season 7 premiere is a big technical step up. The CGI-renderings are slicker and more polished on a technical level, the show has grown significantly. In the days where Clone Wars wasnt expecting a revival, fans who watched the quasi-rendered version back in Unfinished Tales: Clone Wars panel at the 2015 Star Wars Celebration (which are online) know most of the beats of this final product, but fortunately, there is noticeable evolution in the script, especially in Rexs emotional odyssey for autonomous thinking highlighted by the new element of him burrowing his personal theoryand his sorrow as well. Rexs secretiveness about his theory about Echos survival underlines his long-term burgeoning independence from his military and birth conditioning.

Baker, once again, does the heavy-duty of voicing all the clones, accentuating each with personality and individual existence despite their identical appearance and voices. The Clone storylines were always the strongest when any clone character dealt with the existentialism of being bred into expendability, whether theyre conscious of it or not, and this premiere doubles down on that. As for the Bad Batch themselves, they pop as if they exist in their own spin-off universe somewhere, needing more fleshing-out as of now.

This first episode of an arc offers little more than some pulpy action, a slickly staged action sequence, and an enticing cliffhanger. The Bad Batch is not a spectacular comeback, all things considered, but its good to be back in the world. The clones, as well as Bakers vocal performance, anchor this episode. But so far, they deserve moreand I look forward to it.

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Star Wars The Clone Wars The Bad Batch Review - /FILM