Cornered (The Bad Batch - S01E04) - Animated Series

Discuss the latest Chapter! (Discussion)

"If your are alone you should come with us!" SPOILERS.

Pantora, no Unobtanium available here

Once again not all that much actually happens in the latest Bad Batch episode "Cornered". Sure, things do happen, but the overall plot is not advanced. It turns out the Bad Batch are running out of supplies and their ship is on the wanted list. Tech can scramble the ship's signature but he needs to be on a planet to do this and since the team needs supplies anyway they choose to go to Pantora (first seen in The Clone Wars, it's the home of Baron Papanoida). But the owner of the landing bay of course turns out to be a snitch and he contacts a bounty hunter, none other than Fennec Shand. The Kaminoans hired a bunch of bounty hunters to track down Omega for them. Hunter takes Omega and Echo, disguised as a droid, to one of the local shops to sell some hardware, so they can afford to resupply, but it turns out their military hardware is not really worth all that much to the trader, instead he wants the "droid", so Hunter "sells" Echo for a nice sum. Then Omega does what kids in entertainment love to do, she runs off, more precisely, she runs after an animal that snatched a clone trooper doll from her. Fennec Shand has arrived on the planet meanwhile (the episode says Pantora is a planet, but it's actually a moon) and is already tracking Omega, when she's isolated from Hunter she approaches Omega and pretends to offer her help in finding Hunter. Omega, the naive kid that she is, takes a liking to Fennec and even offers Fennec to join the Bad Batch, so she's no longer alone.

Fennec meets Omega

Hunter then finds out Omega is gone and goes looking for her. He eventually finds both Fennec and Omega and he immediately senses that something about Fennec may be dangerous, so he urges Omega to come to him. But of course a fight breaks out and of course Fennec manages to incapacitate Hunter. Omega has escaped into a maintenante tunnel, something Tech finds out since he's hacked into the surveillance system. So he tells Wrecker to go pick up Omega. But Fennec is also after Omega and the three finally meet in the tunnel. Wrecker is very eager to take down Fennec, but of course Fennec incapitates Wrecker in an instant instead, and she chases after Omega.

Wrecker turns out to be exceptionally bad at hand to hand combat

What follows is a prolonged chase scene, first on foot, then on speeders, with Omega first holding on to dear life on the top of a maintenance tower, rescued just in the nick of time by Fennec who wants Omega alive, then Omega is dangling from a speeder when she is rescued yet again just in the nick of time by Hunter who manages to catch her. Hunter then takes out Fennec's stolen speeder with some explosives and gets rid of her for now. Meanwhile Echo drops his droid disguise and he recruits the other droids in the shop to help Tech work on the ship, which needs to be put together again after disassembling parts of it so Tech could scramble the transmitter that sends out their signature. And with Wrecker out of the picture Tech can't do it alone. But Echo and his droids get the ship flightworthy again in time and the Bad Batch can escape Pantora. They decide they need to find out who's after Omega and who hired the bounty hunter. Something they should guess very easily though, since it could only be the Kaminoans. In the final scene Fennec approaches the owner of the docking bay who fears for his life, but instead she pays him and tells him to inform her should the Bad Batch ever return.

All in all "Cornered" is the weakest Bad Batch episode so far, in my opinion. I am no fan of the "kid runs off" trope just to create trouble. Yet this episode relied heavily on it. Kids doing dumb stuff may not be all too unrealistic, but it can get very annoying very quickly if it happens too often. So it's a slippery slope here and I hope the show will not rely too much on Omega getting into trouble by doing dumb stuff in the future. I also find it problematic how easy it was for Fennec to incapacitate both Hunter and Wrecker. These guys are the supposed absolute elite, special forces clones. The problem here is, whenever a series like "The Bad Batch" wants to show you how dangerous or awesome an enemy is, they will usually take down the hero with little effort. Which of course undermines the hero. This is something another franchise, Star Trek The Next Generation, also greatly suffered from. Worf was supposed to be the best fighter on the ship, which is why he was the security chief, a fearsome Klingon warrior. Yet whenever some antagonist managed to infiltrate the ship (a common occurrence) Worf usually got taken out in an instant, just to show the audience how super awesome the enemy is. Which in turn made Worf something of a joke. "The Bad Batch" should really avoid these tropes, in my opinion. It is not very believable when Hunter or Wrecker get knocked out so easily. Find other ways to show the audience how dangerous an enemy is.

The minor subplot with Echo pretending to be a droid was quite funny though, and the visuals, as always, are impressive. It's also nice when we get to see inhabited planets/moons in Star Wars instead of desert or jungle worlds the movies usually limit themselves to. The speeder chase scene was also entertaining. However, I hope The Bad Batch will get its plot moving very soon. That means: confronting and eventually rescuing Crosshair and finding out what the deal with Omega is and why the Kaminoans created her in the first place.