WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Bad Batch Season 1, Episode 8, “Reunion,” now streaming on Disney+.
Good ideas can be hard to come by, so they rarely get discarded, even when the project they’re intended for moves on. Star Wars: The Bad Batch has never shied away from making use of good ideas that haven’t been explored lately, and as the informal successor to Star Wars: The Clone Wars, it’s found new ways to incorporate older ideas that still have potential. In the latest example, Season 1, Episode 8, “Reunion,” includes a terrific idea from The Clone Wars that couldn’t quite find a way to the screen until now.
The final season of The Clone Wars contained a number of planned arcs, not all of which panned out. The show’s initial cancellation left a lot of narrative loose ends in its wake, and while the Bad Batch ultimately went on to their own series, another arc wasn’t so lucky. At Star Wars Celebration Orlando, 2017, Dave Filoni revealed a planned storyline, in which Cad Bane taught Boba Fett how to be a bounty hunter. Most fans never saw it – it never went beyond the mock-up stage – but the brief scene of a blaster fight between the two characters received huge applause, and the concept was just too strong for The Bad Batch to ignore.
The unused Clone Wars sequence depicts a showdown between Bane and Fett for control of the Krayt’s Claw bounty hunters. In it, Bossk and the other team members stand down and let the pair confront each other directly. Both blasters strike home, knocking both men off their feet. The clip ends with a shot of Fett’s helmet, now with its signature dent as seen in the original Star Wars trilogy. Bane’s fate is left unknown.
The Bad Batch borrows heavily from this scene during the climax to “Reunion,” when Hunter faces Cad Bane in a very similar duel. It’s clear in comparison that the scene drew from the unused Clone Wars sequence, starting with the combatants themselves. Hunter is a clone, just like Boba Fett, and as Cad Bane explains before the showdown, he’s killed enough clones to know how to do it properly. As with Boba, Hunter’s armor saves him from a killing shot, allowing him to pursue the bounty hunter, who has now abducted Omega.
More than the circumstances themselves, it’s the framing of the scenes that gives their connection away. Dave Filoni draws heavily from the Westerns of Sergio Leone in his Star Wars projects, and that influence shines through in an overt homage to Leone’s climactic showdowns here. In particular, the sequence evokes The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which ends in a similarly oval-shaped dueling ground. It also relies on extreme framing, with wide shots depicting the entire scene intercut with close-ups and forced perspective images. Rapid editing cuts further heighten the tension, and even the music echoes Ennio Morricone’s orchestral cues from Leone’s work.
The showdown also allows viewers to gauge the comparative skills of both Cad Bane and Hunter, since Boba Fett gave as good as he got and Hunter did not. It’s unclear what the implications for that may be, but Bane’s success here suggests that Hunter may be far from the fastest draw when it comes to the galaxy’s underworld. In any case, it’s a sign of the lingering influence of Leone and his ilk, not only on Filoni, but on George Lucas as well, who drew from the same traditions when he created Star Wars in the first place. Showdowns in Star Wars usually involve lightsabers, with the Jedi and Sith serving as the franchise’s de facto gunslingers. Having missed a chance to present the concept in more traditional terms with The Clone Wars, Filoni wasn’t going to waste a second opportunity with The Bad Batch.
Created by Dave Filoni, Star Wars: The Bad Batch stars Dee Bradley Baker, Andrew Kishino and Ming-Na Wen. New episodes premiere Fridays on Disney+.
About The Author
