George Lucas’s Star Wars stories were told from the perspective of the adolescent. The original trilogy is about a boy growing into a man. The prequel trilogy is about the shadow side of that same path. Lucas’s sensibility was in line with the films released at the time: E.T., The Goonies, Labyrinth, The Neverending Story. These are stories where the parents are floating in the background, just out of frame, often clueless, sometimes absent. Children, not their parents, are the heroes.
It could be that those stories were popular because the writers and directors of the late 70s and early 80s were Baby Boomers. Their youth culture was counter-culture, a rejection of their square parents. Rebellion was their generation’s verb. (It also produced, maybe, a breaking free from marriages altogether, and an early 80s divorce boom.)
Times they are a’changing. Watching “The Crossing,” I became acutely aware of a re-balancing in these cultural storytelling forces. The Bad Batch, like The Mandalorian (and Avatar: The Way of Water and Ant-Man and The Last of Us), is a story about parenting from the perspective of parents. The focus is not on the journey of the child into adulthood, but of the caretaker struggling with their own competence and values.
The result of this change in focus is subtle but real. For example, Omega is not the lead character in this series. You could be mistaken for thinking she is, given her prominence on the poster and centrality to the show’s themes, but The Batch are the leads. They’re the ones who have to grow and change in order to become better protectors of this child. Her growth is not going to be the result of stubbornness or spunk, but by the good or bad influence of the clones who have taken her in.
That’s true of The Mandalorian, a show that makes all the parents in my life feel very seen as they struggle to feed a youngster, or hand over a shiny bauble that they want to play with. Mando has a space-pram, for the love of Kenobi.
Speaking of Kenobi, I think there’s a distinction to be made between stories that feature mentors and stories that feature parents. Star Wars has always been filled with mentors. Those relationships strike me as serving a different function. I don’t think Clone Force 99 is mentoring Omega so much as parenting her, in the same way that Ben Kenobi didn’t parent Luke so much as mentor him.
“The Crossing” makes that distinction plain. If the Batch were mentoring Omega, they would be teaching her to hone her talents and skills. Instead, we’re watching them try to manage her feelings, comfort her, and even home-school her. These Clones are her Dads. One wonders if eventually, Hunter will admit that his reluctance to join in the cause of Rebellion is mostly to keep Omega from harm. Her safety is his top priority, his real mission.
In “The Crossing,” the adventure itself is pretty standard fare: the Batch is on a planet looking for a precious ore, their ship is stolen, things go wrong, and they have perils to navigate. But it’s an adventure that isolates the Batch so they can deal with their adopted daughter. The true terrain they’re traversing is emotional.
Tech’s bedside manner leaves a lot to be desired with Omega, his literalness failing to reassure her after Echo’s left the team. This leads to both Wrecker and Hunter encouraging Omega to move forward, and admonishing Tech for his lack of care.
The result is a moment where the Omega confronts Tech about why he doesn’t respond to the loss of their “home” and the breaking up of the family with more emotion. The writing beautifully and gently acknowledges Tech’s neurodivergence, while giving him room to respond and think about his own way of seeing the world. I’m not a parent myself, but to my eyes, this seems like the best kind of parenting: both Omega and Tech grow from the teaching.
We’re seeing a generation of storytellers put the focus not on growing up, but being a grown up. I’m curious how those stories will resolve and what heroic victory looks like in this context. The hero’s journey we’ve grown over-accustomed to is about personal transcendence: even saving the galaxy is a pathway to individual growth. Parenthood has no such template for victory, it’s a life-long battle. What will these stories decide looks like a Parental Guidance Victorious?
To my mind, this way of viewing The Bad Batch relieves any tension about the side-mission heavy structure. Parenting is all side-mission, or, maybe more accurately, there are no side-missions for parents. Any parent will tell you that just making sure everyone has a snack and a nap and gets into the car seat can be a victory. What does that look like in the metaphorical world of Space Fantasy? Maybe a seemingly mundane mission where Omega winds up trusting her family more than she did the day before?
Perhaps the finale of The Bad Batch will be a very long conversation between Hunter and Tech about why they want to discourage Omega from taking a gap year in the Outer Rim Territories. Or buying Omega her very first spaceship for her sixteenth clone-birthday? Or the Star Wars equivalent of Father(s) of the Bride?
Or Omega blowing up something up with her Clone-Dads looking on, arms around each other: “We taught her to fire photon torpedoes! That’s our daughter!”