Since the rise of the Empire, Crosshair (Dee Bradley Baker) hasn’t had a reason to be loyal to them — it’s just taken a while for him to accept it. He’s seen them antagonize his brothers in Clone Force 99, alienate his allies and friends and destroy his home of Kamino, yet he still follows their orders due to an extremely flawed adherence to the creed “good soldiers follow orders.”
Despite being a highly-skilled sniper, Crosshair has seen himself get repeatedly overlooked and underutilized. He started this season off with a demotion, as after he killed members of the squad he led last season, the Empire decided he couldn’t be trusted and has since been given worse and worse missions.
This episode, Crosshair is assigned to his worst mission yet. Assigned to “the outpost” on an isolated snow-covered world like Hoth, he is to help Commander Mayday (also voiced by Baker) and two of the facility’s remaining clone troopers guard cargo whose contents they are not privy to from raiders. A big reason why the facility is vulnerable to the raiders is that the Empire refuses to send fresh supplies and men to the facility, allowing it to dwindle until there are virtually no clones left.
Mayday is an interesting character. Like Crosshair, he too followed orders, but fully accepts the reality that the Empire does not have his best interests in mind. Yet he still grinds on.
The facility gets attacked, which picks off the last two regular clone troopers, as bandits make off with two containers of cargo. The imperial lieutenant who just arrived with Crosshair superseded Mayday’s authority and refuses to commit any of his newly-recruited stormtroopers to the mission. Despite being vastly outnumbered, Crosshair and Mayday make it work, but the two end up getting caught in an avalanche. Crosshair refuses to leave Mayday for dead and gets him to the facility, in which he dies before the lieutenant’s eyes. The smug imperial mocks him, which causes Crosshair to snap, killing him.
This was a long way coming for Crosshair; he basically needed an imperial officer to spell out to him that he doesn’t value his life and that he sees him as nothing more than a piece of equipment, or a slave. Crosshair was sent on this mission to die, but I fear that his turn comes as too little, too late. We end the episode with him in the hands of imperial cloners — what’s next for him may be grim, but I have no doubts that if he manages to get a signal out to the Bad Batch, they’d come to rescue him.
This was a very above-average episode of “The Bad Batch.” While this show doesn’t have a great overall, cohesive story, it has some of the best worldbuilding in “Star Wars” and this episode is another example of that. At the beginning, we see clones unceremoniously given news of their forced retirement and in Mayday’s crew, we see the sad, final days of some of the clones who remained loyal to the Empire.
Where the show goes from here I’m not sure, but I do think it’ll be interesting.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch” Season 2: Episode 12 “The Outpost” gets an 8/10
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