Star Wars: The Bad Batch – Season 3 Episode 12 “Juggernaut” Recap & Review

“Juggernaut”

Star Wars: The Bad Batch, season 3, episode 12 opens on Hemlock’s base on Tantiss. The clone assassin delivers Omega to Hemlock so Emerie can resume testing Omega’s blood. Hunter, Wrecker, Crosshair, and Batcher reunite on Pabu. As a last resort, Crosshair leads the team to an Imperial work camp to ask Admiral Rampart about the location of Hemlock’s base. Phee the pirate helps them get to the work camp on Erebus.

Hunter, Wrecker, and Crosshair hatch a plan to intercept Admiral Rampart en route from the work mine back to his prison cell. The plan works, but Rampart leverages his knowledge to demand they get him off-planet before sharing what he knows.

Hunter drives the giant, tank-like transport through a crazy chase while fighting off the Empire. Crosshair shoots Rampart with a stun round. Phee arrives in her ship, and the Batch hop on before letting the tank drive off a cliff.

Rampart regains consciousness on Phee’s ship. Rampart explains that no one knows the location of Tantiss, which is part of the Empire’s plan to keep it hidden.

Hemlock explains to Omega that M-counts cannot be replicated through the cloning process. He takes her to where the other three children are kept and explains that they are all crucial pieces to solving the puzzle of creating clones with replicable M-count.

The Episode Review

“Juggernaut” creeps The Bad Batch forward and lets an inkling of a clear explanation start to trickle down. The episodic adventure, while formulaic and a little too convenient, pulls off a fun action sequence. The shortest run time both helped and hurt this chapter.

It’s nice to watch an episode and feel like not a moment is wasted. However, the pacing of everything on Tantiss is just different from the episodic adventures. The pace of action to re-introduce a character, the planet he’s on, and then show the entire process of busting him out? Cutting between the two plot lines felt oddly segmented. Perhaps the final season didn’t need so many episodes. Maybe they could have been longer and fewer.

Hemlock deciding to take a more “honest” approach with Omega was slick. It calls to attention the awful contradiction within her, and within Star Wars itself. Omega has grown so much through this show, but she’s still a child! Seeing how tiny she is next to Hemlock, and listening to him talk about this experiment is chilling.

The shroud of mystery around Emperor Palpatine’s cloning experiments borders on tedium. It’s inherently interesting and complex. The absolutely subatomic bits of information that come out about the process though, is so maddening that it’s silly.

The tank chase scene felt a lot like the desert tank sequence in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. There was real dramatic tension as the two tanks shot each other on the narrow bridge. Some brutal rag doll effects were visible when one stormtrooper got crushed by the rock wall, and when Rampart was thrown onto Phee’s ship.

While it didn’t reach the heights the show is capable of, this was a solid episode. Let’s hope the final episodes reveal more.