Star Wars: The Bad Batch is quickly approaching, and though its been written off by some as a quasi-The Clone Wars season 8, it’s actually shaping up to be a very different show. The Disney+ series will certainly follow in the footsteps of The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels in its writing and animation style, but Dave Filoni’s new show is different in a few key ways. Hopefully, The Bad Batch will deliver a fresh Star Wars story for all kinds of fans to enjoy.

The Bad Batch, officially known as Clone Force 99, was introduced to the Star Wars canon in The Clone Wars season 7. The genetically-enhanced squad consists of Hunter, an expert tracker and leader of the group; Echo, a former Arc Trooper turned cyborg; Tech, the mechanical expert; Wrecker, the bruiser; and Crosshair, an elite gunman. Clone Force 99 didn’t get a ton of time to develop in The Clone Wars, leading some fans to doubt their ability to carry a whole show. Though the characters are indeed rather different than the leads of Rebels and Clone Wars, that may be for the best in a series that looks to be changing things up a bit.

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Star Wars: The Clone Wars was largely an anthology show. Sets of episodes, usually somewhere between one and four apiece, would tell independent stories from one corner of the war or another. These arcs jumped back and forth in time and included a huge number of characters. Though the later seasons of the show did focus on more linear storytelling, the anthology structure remained through the end of the final season.

Star Wars The Bad Batch Poster Characters

By contrast, The Bad Batch will stay with the same small group of characters throughout, promising a more focused narrative. In that way, the series may feel more similar to Star Wars Rebels, though it seems to be notably different from that show as well. There is no clear central conflict in The Bad Batch – no Clone Wars, and no Rebellion. And of course, as of yet at least, there are no Jedi. In a way, The Bad Batch seems to be combining the structures of its two predecessors, bringing the smaller cast of Rebels to the more fragmented story structure of The Clone Wars.

Whether or not the soldiers of Clone Force 99 are capable of leading a whole show on their own remains to be seen, of course, but the footage shown so far looks promising. Grand Moff Tarkin appears to be something of a primary villain, pursuing the Bad Batch across the galaxy to force them back into Imperial service. Other past Star Wars characters like Fennec Shand and Captain Rex are also confirmed to be returning, but it looks like the series will focus more on the overall state of the galaxy in the Empire’s early days than it will on any one particular character arc or storyline. That approach has been incredibly successful for The Mandalorian, and hopefully it can be somewhere near as effective in Star Wars: The Bad Batch.

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