The Bad Batch got a bit of a raw deal in their
Star Wars debut. Introduced at the beginning of the final episodes of
The Clone Wars, this team of unusually modified Clonetroopers felt like both a gratuitous spinoff setup and a stalling tactic to keep us from the Ahsoka story we all really wanted to see. Plus they basically came off like the Ninja Turtles as Clonetroopers: Leader Guy, Rowdy Party Dude, Brain, and Edgy Emo. This is arguably true of many, many super-teams.
The Clone Wars series ended, and Lucasfilm has positioned
The Bad Batch as a direct sequel. So much so that the beginning of the first episode features
The Atlantic
WandaVision Before
Within minutes of
WandaVision’s finale dropping on Disney+ this morning, my Twitter timeline began to fill with questions about what the ending meant. After a few hours, YouTubers started posting breakdowns of what viewers might have missed. New comments flooded subreddits about how the story serves the Marvel Cinematic Universe, adding to the cascade of online discussion that’s happened every weekend, like clockwork, around the show.
WandaVision, as a streaming series tied to a massive franchise that rolled out an episode a week, turned out to be the closest thing to appointment viewing that the overcrowded television landscape has had in a while. The show wasn’t just