1x15 Return to Kamino (1)

[8.3/10] I’ve played a couple of Star Wars games recently where high ranking Imperials defect to join the good guys. And to be honest, it feels cheap. There’s a real opportunity when exploring a villain’s perspective. Why someone chooses to do evil, or at least do harm, is a rich vein to examine. These games squander that opportunity, with the (theoretically) bad guys simply seeing the Empire do one more bad thing and declaring, as Britta from Community once put it, “I don’t know why, but this is the last straw.”

But that’s why I love what The Bad Batch does with Crosshair here. He’s not just a generic amoral villain who fights for his love of evil. He has complex, believable motivations behind the choices that he makes, choices he hashes out with Hunter. I’ll cop to being a sucker for those kinds of philosophical conversations between old friends (hello fellow Star Trek crossover fans!), but they give depth to the major antagonist of this show’s stellar first season.

The rest of the Bad Batch is grappling with what to do now that there’s no more missions. Crosshair has found his, or at least, a new institution that gives him the clarity that comes with orders. The rest of the Bad Batch struggled with the fact that one of their own turned on them, trying to take their lives. But Crosshair is the one who feels abandoned and betrayed, as though his brothers turned their back not only on what they fought and stood for, but on him. And while the Bad Batch had loyalty to the Republic and remains wary of what the Empire is up to, Crosshair sees the power and potential in this new galactic force that could allow him and his brothers to do more in this new age.

In short, he has comprehensible reasons for how he feels about the Empire, his former comrades, and most importantly himself. He’s granted a believable inner life in all of this. More than anything, The Bad Batch makes him into a tragic figure, one who still has loyalty to his brothers, who wants to fight alongside them, but who’s been too enmeshed in all of this for too long to see things with the moral lens Hunter and the rest of the team do.

And then “Return to Kamino” drops the bomb. Crosshair had his inhibitor chip removed. Questions of how and when abound. But regardless, it makes his position and his thoughts that much stronger and more complicated, because they’re his own. Most of Crosshair’s actions to this point could be written off as a product of a control mechanism cranked up to eleven. But now he’s ostensibly free, and still wants to fight for the bad guys, albeit with his brothers at his side rather than at the other end of his blaster.

Oh yeah, and they also have to stave off a base full of stormtroopers, survive an assault from a bunch of battle droids, and find shelter as Admiral Rampart destroys the Kaminoan cloning facility. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, right?

There’s a sense of things coming fully circle to all of this. Not only is it a reunion for the Bad Batch as originally constituted (or at least after Echo joined the team), but it takes place in the same battle arena where Admiral Rampart tested their abilities in the first episode. The danger is enough for Crosshair and Hunter to stop targeting one another and take on the common threat, a sign that their camaraderie isn’t dead.
It’s strangely heartening (albeit a little puzzling) when Crosshair chooses to kill his stormtrooper team in order to give the rest of the Bad Batch a second chance to join him. It’s rousing when the group sets aside their differences to show a united front in this battle, much as they did in the series’s first episode. And its bittersweet when Hunter and Crosshair have a post-skirmish showdown, and Hunter shoots his friend, but on stun rather than kill.

Omega is sidelined for most of this. I imagine she’ll get more focus in the season finale. She proves useful not only in navigating the cloning facility, but in creating distractions and teaming up with good old AZI-3 to neutralize some stormtroopers on her own. In particular, we get another hint at her suffering some trauma in a cloning lab (much like the one in “Battle Scars”). She’s clearly upset when having to go back to Nala Se’s lab, even as she pushes through for the good of her team. The episode sets up things for her here, even if she isn’t as big a presence as in other installments.

But her influence is still felt, particularly in how she’s moved Hunter over the course of the season. Despite the better part of valor being to just run, despite the safest thing to do being to eliminate Crosshair after all the trouble he’s caused them, Hunter decides to save his villainous brother-in-arms instead. It’s a choice of understanding. Hunter plainly disagrees with Crosshair’s ideas, but he thinks the fellow clone can be saved, and deserves to be given the chance that he tried to give them. It’s a sense of altruism and understanding toward those who need help, even when it creates more danger, that Omega’s represented from the beginning, when she told Crosshair it wasn’t his fault.

Much of The Bad Batch has felt like a postscript to Star Wars: The Clone Wars so far. The show’s examined what someone bred for war does when the war is over. What side do you choose, what orders do you follow, when the body giving those orders has dramatically changed? There’s a desire among some of our heroes to go back to the way things were, or at least a wistfulness about the certainty of their role in the war ending.

The destruction of the Kamino cloning facility is a dramatic ending, creating a series of explosions and mortal threats for our heroes to survive. (Which they will -- my bet is on Omega leading them to safety via more tubes.) It’s a practical ending, as the industrial clone production has ended in favor of stormtroopers, and the Empire is holding the cloning technology. (Pickled Snokes, anyone?) But it’s also a symbolic ending, for the legions of clones birthed there, a last bastion of how things used to be rended to rubble. From here, there is no going back.

We’ve seen Hunter, Omega, and the rest decide that the way forward means helping people, even when it’s not easy. We’ve seen other clones like Rex, Cut, and Gregor struggle to make their way in the new world. And now we’ve seen Crosshair, fully liberated, choosing to side with the Empire. Showing that spectrum, making each clones choice understandable, makes for a deeper conflict, and a sort of evil more tragic and insidious than any run of the mill Imperial bad guy can muster.

Oh, so Hunter gets taken to Kamino by Crosshair as a trap for the rest of the batch. But Omega knows secret ways into Tipoca City, and the empire has different plans.

Really enjoyed this episode even though Crosshair's position doesn't make much sense. Batch loyalty is good to see - and the batch didn't exactly have a choice in leaving Crosshair behind. Maybe they could have, at some point, come for him... so Crosshair's right and wrong to feel abandoned. But his longing to be part of the batch again is in conflict with his opinion that his (and their) future lies with the empire - even if said empire just destroys the whole facility, not caring if Crosshair's still there.

Interesting that Crosshair got his chip out - back when he was injured at that jedi cruiser? So exactly does that work? I mean the Kaminoans were trying to amplify the grip the chip had on Crosshair in the beginning... so did that not work and Crosshair's strong "good soldiers follow orders" mentality was already so built into his own brain that it then worked without the chip? Or was it always his own belief and not the chip's effect?