Let me be completely honest with you, readers.
This week I’ve been workshopping a play about my family, an experience that has been exhausting. I watched this episode of The Bad Batch at 6 am just before I rewrote a lot of scenes about my sister and her health. You know, the relaxing work of a playwright, spending my time excavating painful personal stories in order to, I don’t know, show them to everyone. Why do we do this? If you figure it out, let me know.
In that context, the story of Benni Baro, a scamp being exploited in an Ipsium mine, didn’t quite find purchase in my dark heart this week, but it was Totally Okay Star Wars, where Omega continues to be very nice person learning about a universe where there are lots of not-terribly-nice people, beyond The Empire.
Star Wars, for many years, was defined by scarcity. There just wasn’t much of it, especially not much on screen. That’s changed quite a bit in the last few years, which means we’ll be getting all kinds of new stories, from the anti-Lucas spirit of Andor, to the completionist spirit of Tales of the Jedi, to the uncorked creativity of Star Wars Visions. That’s just plain exciting, wish-fulfillment and unexpected pleasures abound. The Bad Batch is a show in a tricky position, spirit-wise, and this episode underlined that for me.