We have reached the midseason point for The Bad Batch Season 3, and "Infiltration" and "Extraction" sure did feel like a midseason storyline. Not only did it bring back several familiar faces while tying in the first half of Season 3, but it also clearly laid out the rest of the show with Rex charging Hunter with a very specific mission:
Find out why Omega's blood is so special.
Personally, this was my least favorite entry so far in Season 3. However, that's not a negative thing. The Bad Batch has been incredibly solid in its final salvo right out of the gate. This is me basically going, "Hmm, this homemade milk chocolate isn't as rich as the homemade fudge." It's all still chocolate and delicious. I just preferred the other weeks over this one.
"Infiltration" and "Extraction" felt like very needed episodes that clearly set up the show's finale. It addressed things that needed to be discussed with Crosshair while building more mysteries with the shadow clone troopers. The callbacks with Riyo Chuchi and Avi Singh were amazing. It's always a great time to see Rex. However, it felt like chess pieces were forcibly pushed around on a board to set up the back half of the season. I thought the previous weeks found more organic ways of telling their story. This is a minor critique, though. The two episodes were stellar.
Watching George Lucas' final legacy with The Clone Wars come to a close has been such a delight. I adore the choice of Rex having his base of operations at the B'omarr monastery on Teth. This might seem random, but it's where one of the major battles from The Clone Wars theatrical film took place. That was Rex's first appearance in Star Wars. As The Bad Batch brings those stories to an end, it's a fantastic touch to give this nod to the beginning to where this story started. That's also where Asajj Ventress first arrived in the series, which is again a nice tie-in for her arrival later in the season.
These full-circle kinds of storytelling have been the biggest strength of this season. At the same time, so much groundwork is being laid down for other stories. We're seeing how Wolffe is primed to leave the Empire for where he is in Star Wars Rebels. The earliest seeds of the Rebel Alliances are planted in scenes between Chuchi and Singh. Separatists were known to make up a big chunk of the Rebellion. Fun fact: Cassian Andor was a Separatist and threw rocks at clone troopers as a kid. Then, of course, the big story ties in with The Mandalorian to explain the "Somehow, Palpatine returned" in The Rise of Skywalker. The Bad Batch is becoming one of the most vital throughlines, connecting the Republic time period to the rest of Star Wars.
While I would normally give each episode its own separate review, I chose not to because I wanted to emphasize this next point:
Why not make this one episode?
Live-action Star Wars TV has various episode lengths ranging from 25 minutes to even an hour. When animated series, like Star Wars Rebels and Star Wars Resistance, were still on television, it made sense for those shows to follow a 22-minute format as they had to follow the cable rules. However, since the move to Disney+, animated Star Wars series like The Clone Wars Season 7 and The Bad Batch still follow this pattern. Yes, the episode lengths have more variation, ranging from 22-30 minutes. Still, why not let "Infiltration" and "Extraction" be one long 53-minute episode as it was one ongoing story? It's jarring to have them split up this way, breaking up the momentum of the first episode. I'm sure the straightforward explanation has something to do with the budget because that's often the case. But with episodes like these two or a big spectacle event like the 4-episode of The Siege of Mandalore with The Clone Wars, let them be one long entry.
Again, I'm nitpicking because The Bad Batch continues to be excellent. It's built on the groundwork of The Clone Wars and excellently ties in with every era on on-screen Star Wars storytelling. "Infiltration" and "Extraction" both stunned once again, making for a worthy midseason special.