Star Wars: The Bad Batch – Season 3 Episode 14 “Flash Strike” Recap & Review

“Flash Strike”

Star Wars: The Bad Batch Season 3, episode 14, picks up in hyperspace, en route to Tantiss. Hemlock learns that the Bad Batch are almost certainly following the science vessel. After he puts the base into lockdown, ships and auto turrets attack their ship.

Fighters shoot down the shuttle seconds after Wrecker, Crosshair, Hunter, and Admiral Rampart repel off and into the jungle. Echo proceeds towards the base, hidden in the science vessel, and steals a trooper’s uniform. He sneaks off the ship and into the base.

With the base on lockdown, Omega figures her squad is coming to get her. She opens up the panel and her room and climbs up the tiny elevator shaft. During her climb, she sees a captive Zillo Beast being tortured. A doctor begins taking samples, and the other kids try to stall her before she gets to Omega’s cell. Omega makes it back just in time.

The Batch and Rampart encounter a giant, blind beast in the thick of the jungle. Terrified, Rampart runs off alone and stumbles into a pair of troopers.

Echo accesses a data center and finds Omega’s file, but just then, Emerie enters. Echo tries to cover, but she recognizes him by his voice and missing hand. Emerie agrees to help break the children free, but Echo is bent on setting all of the clones free. When the children meet again, Omega tells them that she has a plan.

The Episode Review

“Flash Strike” serves as a true first half of the series finale of The Bad Batch. The tension is tight and despite the episode description mentioning “the odds,” chances look suspiciously good for a happy ending. There are essentially 3 separate plans in the works to make this escape happen, and they will certainly need to coalesce. Omega is definitely going to set free an angry Zillo Beast. It’s a beautiful callback to The Clone Wars.

The later episodes of this season feel increasingly bite-sized. That’s good for the sense of pacing, but bad in terms of having to wait. With the stakes this high, this close to the end of it all, the story has come together. It’s reminiscent of those portions of Dragon Ball Z where entire episodes would fail to cover one battle. Even without constant commercial breaks, the 20-minute runtimes effectively create a sense of rabid desire for more.

The episodes suffer, though, from the loss of momentum that could so easily have been saved by batching the episodes (pun-intended). In the days of binge-watching, this seems like a perfect opportunity for Disney to lean into what makes streaming releases unique.

Knocking out and stealing the uniform of a soldier while behind enemy lines is a classic if not overused move. Echo taking the hand of a robot to complete the disguise is a wonderfully original twist. The perfectly untimely presence of a monster in the Tantiss jungle is par for the course at this point, but it looked uniquely awkward. The blind beast looked like a feathered, giga-Chad tiger with features too blocky to be convincing.

Despite an awkward monster and a sparse step forward before the series finale, the end is definitely close enough to taste.