Star Wars Resistance set the stage for The Bad Batch finale

Spoiler alert: Star Wars: The Bad Batch had a happy ending where no one died, Hunter, Wrecker, and Crosshair grew old on Pabu, and Omega lived to be an adult who left to fight with the Rebel Alliance.

You mean to tell me that the exact same team at Lucasfilm Animation who did Star Wars Resistance, which also ended with everyone surviving, gave The Bad Batch a Resistance-style happy ending?

Insert Shocked Pikachu Face here.

In hindsight, as a huge fan of Star Wars Resistance, I feel incredibly silly that I did not see how similar The Bad Batch was to Resistance. Of course a happy ending was always on the table, because, through Resistance, this team proved they could tell a high stakes story that was incredibly gripping without someone dying in the name of redemption in the finale.

The two have far more similarities than I previously realized. Both series focus on a niche group of people, the clones and the people of the Colossus, responding to fascist governments invading to dictate their future. The Empire ripped away the clones' home on Kamino. They stripped the clones' rights and saw them as nothing more than pawns. The First Order invaded the Colossus, forcing them to flee their home of Castilon. They saw the fuel ship only as a pawn to invade the galaxy. The First Order tried to strip away the rights of the aliens on board the ship in eerily scary Holocaust-inspired imagery by sticking the aliens in shipping containers to send them off to "work" camps. A lot like how the clones were shipped off to Mount Tantiss to be experimented on.

Crosshair and Tam Ryvora share similar storylines, too. One joins the Empire, and the other joins the First Order after feeling slighted by their family units. Both realize the error of their ways and fight back for redemption, especially during the finales of their respective shows. Their families refuse to leave them behind despite the danger, ensuring they're saved.

Unlike what more previous Star Wars will tell you, redemption does not have to equal death. We've seen these stories of redemption explored a lot in Star Wars animation. Agent Kallus is the big one from Star Wars Rebels. However, at the time of Resistance's release, having a hero join the baddies only to return to the light side was relatively new.

Tam's story isn't perfect because it suffers from a lack of time. Resistance got caught in a weird period where it was finished before The Rise of Skywalker was even written while Disney XD shows were being shuttered for the launch of Disney+. This means the storylines got rushed. Tam redeems very late in Season 2 and doesn't have a chance for much atonement with only a few episodes left. However, she did not dip into the low valleys that Crosshair did. She witnessed war crimes but did not commit war crimes like Crosshair did. She didn't have as much to make up for.

I do think the Lucasfilm Animation creators learned lessons from Tam that they applied to Crosshair. This is the same team that worked on both shows, after all. One of the big criticisms from Resistance fans (other than wanting a Season 3, which I still want) was how little time Tam had to redeem herself. The most important part of a redemption arc is the atonement. She essentially had the finale episodes to squeeze it in. The Bad Batch made the incredibly smart choice to start Crosshair's turn in Season 2, allowing him all of Season 3 to explore atonement for himself. Tam's story walked so Crosshair's could sprint to the finish.

Bonus fun fact: Asajj Ventress was supposed to return in Resistance. The idea was scrapped instead for the character of Mika Grey. Ventress would return in Season 3 of The Bad Batch.

Resistance broke the mold for the Star Wars TV we have today. Prior to its release, the two previous Star Wars series, The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels, were purposely trying to change canon. The Clone Wars tells the story of the titular war it is named after; Rebels is the story of the beginning of the Rebel Alliance from the view of one rebel cell. Both explained how and why these events took place, showed a more nuanced exploration of why Anakin Skywalker fell to the Dark Side, when Mon Mothma officially created the Rebel Alliance, etc. The entire function of these two shows were to change the canon.

However, Resistance broke this mold, functioning at the time more like a Star Wars novel on screen. It really fell more in line with something like Lost Stars or Master and Apprentice, both by Claudia Gray. Star Wars Resistance is a character study. It is an exploration of world-building. It dives into what happens to a group of people during peacetime when fascism invades their home. It is not trying to change canon. That is not its function. It was the first to tell this kind of story under the Disney canon, where it is character and world-building focused, not plot-focused.

It broke this mold for Andor, whose first season shares the exact same plot as Resistance. Seriously, Resistance is just Andor for kids. It broke the mold for Obi-Wan Kenobi, a character study about a Jedi dealing with his own trauma and grief by saving a little girl. Like Resistance, it's not trying to change canon other than it makes more sense why Leia named her son "Ben." When it comes to happy endings like how The Bad Batch and Season 3 of The Mandalorian ended, Resistance did it first, showing you can tell compelling, harrowing stories without killing off main characters in the final episode.

I would say that The Bad Batch falls more in line with its counterparts of The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels. Its entire function was to explain in canon what happened to the clones and how they stopped Emperor Palpatine from making a successful Force sensitive clone in The Rise of Skywalker (more on that here).

But when it comes to the character work and how the series finished with a happy ending, it's clear that this crew pulled from their groundwork in Star Wars Resistance. Which, as a Resistance fan, I really love a lot.