Animated Series · Series
Star Wars: The Bad Batch
A squad of defective clones goes rogue in the first days of the Empire.
Availability changes by country and by week, so this searches JustWatch rather than guessing.
Can you skip Star Wars: The Bad Batch?
Yes, on a first watch. It is self-contained, and nothing in the main Star Wars story depends on it. Come back to it later if you want more. In chronological order, reaching it takes about 6h 58m of essential viewing across 4 titles. Show only the Star Wars essentials.
Skippable, and it needs The Clone Wars to mean anything. It picks up in the hours after Order 66 with a squad introduced in that show's final season, and its entire emotional premise is that the clone army you spent seven seasons with is being decommissioned.
That premise is the best thing about it. The Empire does not need clones any more, so the series is about a workforce being made redundant: troopers who were bred for a war that has ended, discovering that the Republic they served has become something else and that they are an expense. The episodes dealing with what happens to ordinary clones once the fighting stops are genuinely melancholy.
The show around that is formulaic for long stretches. Three seasons of a ship, a crew and a job per week, with a child to protect and a bounty hunter in pursuit, and the middle season in particular marks time. The animation is the best the franchise has produced for television.
The third season sharpens considerably and ties into the wider story in ways that matter for later material about cloning. Watch it if The Clone Wars landed for you and you want its coda; skip it otherwise.
Star Wars guides
Where it sits in the Star Wars order
- Release order
- #17 of 28
- Chronological order
- #8 of 28
- Released
- 4 May 2021
- In-universe era
- Fall of the Jedi
What to watch next
In release order
In chronological order