THE BAD BATCH
BORN TO BE BAD
HAVING MADE THEIR DEBUT IN THE CLONE WARS, THE UNCONVENTIONAL SOLDIERS OF THE BAD BATCH ARE GETTING THEIR OWN SPIN-OFF SERIES. SFX GETS THE LOWDOWN ON THEIR MISSION
WORDS: RICHARD EDWARDS
© LUCASFILM/DISNEY
CONTRARY TO POPULAR belief, not all clones are created equal. Although the Clone Troopers all emerged from the same Petri dishes on Kamino, their DNA a photocopy of Jango Fett’s, The Clone Wars TV show revealed that they had radically different personalities – and a penchant for distinguishing themselves with extremely questionable hairstyle choices.
Some of Star Wars’ clones break the mould even further than mohawks and dye jobs, however. When the long-awaited final season of The Clone Wars debuted on Disney+ last year, we were introduced to an elite special unit of commandos unlike anything we’d seen before. Hunter, Crosshair, Wrecker and Tech – aka Clone Force 99 – were all born from the same primordial soup as their Clone brothers, but freak mutations had given them unique attributes that turned them into the ultimate fighting force.
HIT AND MISFIT
Known colloquially as the Bad Batch, they’ve now been given their own animated spin-off series, set against the backdrop of the Old Republic turning into the Empire.
“There’s a lot to go down at this particular juncture in the Star Wars mythology,” says Dee Bradley Baker, who has voiced every Clone Trooper since The Clone Wars began – and plays all of the eponymous Bad Batch. “It’s very exciting because it’s a transformational moment on a galactic scale, so there’s all kinds of things that can play out. It’s a Wild West kind of a situation where everyone’s got to take stock, everyone’s got to see where they stand, everyone’s got to see how this is going to go with whoever you were affiliated to before.
“That’s the grand picture,” he adds, “but the beautiful thing about Star Wars is that you also have personal stories, you have threedimensional characters that you connect with, and that you care about. It’s not just a grim, difficult, political and military timeline playing out, because you have these personal stories of people who are struggling through this. They’re not just looking to survive, but also how to play this right.”
While the Bad Batch didn’t hit TV screens until their four-episode Clone Wars arc streamed in 2020, they’ve existed a lot longer than that. In fact, George Lucas came up with the idea before he sold his Star Wars empire to Disney in 2012. “The characters of Clone Force 99 first came to be during the original run of The Clone Wars,” lead writer of The Bad Batch Jennifer Corbett tells SFX. “George Lucas wanted to do a Dirty Dozen-inspired story, but with Clones.”