The new season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars is finally here! Releasing on February 21, 2020, the first episode, “The Bad Batch,” is all about a new group of clones called…the Bad Batch. There's still appearances by fan favorites from the show, but this new story mostly focuses on new characters. The Bad Batch is a group of battle-hardened clone troopers.
No spoilers here, but it's a little odd that this first episode of the new season doesn't focus on Ahsoka, or Anakin, or even Obi-Wan. Instead, we get another one of those episodes that focuses almost completely on the clone troopers. I get it. It's called the Clone Wars, after all. Despite not seeing much of our main heroes, “The Bad Batch” is still pretty great.
Some folks may already know this story, anyway. It was shown (in an admittedly rough form) at the Star Wars Celebration about five years ago, and episodes have popped up online in the years since. But what we've got on Disney+ is much higher quality that the stuff people saw back in 2015. The animation is much sharper and cleaner.
With interesting names like Crosshair, the Bad Batch is begging to be made into action figures. Hopefully, we'll have some cool new Clone Wars figures before all of this is over and done with. And without spoiling too much, I'll add that the new season seems pretty dark. The Clone Wars has always been one of those TV shows that turned surprisingly dark at times, and it seemed to get a bit grimmer with each new season. So, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that this final season (if it really is “final”) will take viewers down a darker path.
Wherever this new season takes us, my expectations are high. After all, Dave Filoni (the creator of the series) is probably riding high after the success of The Mandalorian, another Disney+ show on which Filoni served as executive producer and even directed a couple episodes.
You can catch the first episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 7 now on Disney+. Episode Two releases next week, on February 28th, with subsequent episodes airing weekly.