Star Wars: The Bad Batch episode 5 continues the biggest joke about the Star Wars franchise's ever-expanding universe w- and that's not a good thing. Star Wars is best known as a blockbuster film franchise, but in truth it's always been bigger than that. The first tie-in novel, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, was published as far back as 1978; over the decades the franchise developed a phenomenal Expanded Universe that embraced everything from games to novels, from comics to handbooks.
The Expanded Universe included some tremendous stories, with highlights including the likes of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy and Matthew Stover's Mace Windu novel Shatterpoint. But it also developed something of a reputation for being derivative, with pretty much everything seen in the films receiving an official origin story. If a character appeared in the background of a scene for just one moment, they'd get their own name, background, and usually a story explaining how they got there. At times it got pretty ridiculous, and it had the unfortunate effect of making the galaxy feel shrunken rather than immersive. In the end, Disney erased the Expanded Universe from canon when they acquired Lucasfilm back in 2012, dubbing these old side-stories "Legends" so they could start over again.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch episode 5, unfortunately, shows Lucasfilm is repeating the mistakes of the past in their new canon. The episode sees the Bad Batch rescue a baby rancor named Muchi, who's been stolen by Zygerian slavers. The Bad Batch succeed in their mission - just about - and in the end there's a "reveal" that the rancor is destined to be taken to the palace of Jabba the Hutt. There's even a brief encounter with Bib Fortuna, Jabba's majordomo in Return of the Jedi, who's come to collect her. Although it's not explicitly stated, this episode feels like an origin story for the rancor Luke Skywalker will ultimately confront and kill in Jabba's palace. If so, it contradicts Chuck Wendig's "Aftermath" trilogy, which named that rancor Pateesa, but Disney does seem fond of retconning that particular Star Wars story.
The final scenes of The Bad Batch episode 5 are frankly disappointing. The old Expanded Universe ultimately grew too restrictive because of its insistence everything be connected, with every random character only a few degrees of separation from Luke and Anakin Skywalker; when Disney erased this old continuity, they opened up an entire galaxy's worth of possibilities, but now they're repeating the same mistakes. No doubt they intended this to be a cool Easter egg, but it's supposed to be a big galaxy, meaning not everything needs to be connected. Nobody watched Return of the Jedi and wanted to know the rancor's backstory, after all.
It doesn't help that Star Wars: The Bad Batch currently seems to be depending more on its connections than it does upon character development. So far, we've had a new origin for Kanan Jarrus, a feud with Fennec Shand from The Mandalorian, and now an unnecessary nod to Return of the Jedi. All this gives the impression Lucasfilm isn't especially confident in the show itself, and consequently they're trying to persuade viewers the series matters by focusing on its relationship to the wider canon. Unfortunately, this seems to be at the detriment of character arcs, with - so far - only Omega actually undergoing any real character journey. Lucasfilm would be wise to stop worrying so much about how Star Wars: The Bad Batch fits into the lore, and instead simply focus on the heroes themselves.
