Star Wars the Bad Batch Season 1 Episode 3, Replacements has finally released on Disney+, and with it we were given a deep look into how the Empire begun to transition away from the Clone Troopers, moving into a hybrid of Clone and natural born squads, before they are eventually phased out for good. The episode was packed full of connections to the Star Wars films, books, comics and games, including an absolutely massive tie in to Rogue One, so let’s break them all down.
Did we just get Iden Versio Bad Batch … Bad Batch Iden versio would be awesome, but does the age match up to make it her ?!?!?
So the story begins on board the Bad Batch’s ship, the Havoc Marauder, where Echo notes that ever since escaping saleucami, several of their ship systems have been glitching because of the ship guard system there… Echo wants to begin repairing the ship, but tech tells him that figuring the true effectiveness of their inhibitor chips has to take priority.
Moments after this, their conversation is quickly cut off, as their ship is pulled right out of hyperspace, sending them hurling towards a nearby moon. This understandably terrified Omega, as she straps in, and Wrecker doesn’t make the situation any better… He’s definitely not used to having a kid around.
Eventually, they do manage to safely touch down, but one of their capacitors has blown, meaning they won’t be able to take off without replacing it… Trying to be helpful to the group, Omega goes rummaging through their items and eventually pulls out Crosshair’s weapon kit, which leads the group into a massive debate over whether or not his actions were influenced by the chip, which we of course know thanks to Fives and the Clone Conspiracy arc… that the chip is almost completely fault, but of course there is still a little of Crosshair still in there.
Following this, we cut back to Kamino where the Empire are conducting more experiments on crosshair.
Thankfully, we also discover that AZ survived his little encounter with the Clone Trooper from not too long ago, and seems to have made a full recovery, possibly having his programmed slightly changed to follow orders better. The Clone’s blaster was set to stun, but with droids, you never know what can go wrong with their circuits.
After completing a scan on Crosshair’s head, Vice Admiral Rampart, who was of course the man we saw in the hologram on Saleucami enters the room, and is commended by Tarkin for his rapid implementation of the chaincode system… The chaincode were of course a major piece on the Mandalorian, and we even got a look at Boba Fett’s, which canonized a lot of old backstory, including Jaster Mereel and being a foundling.
Following this, Tarkin asks Rampart about the status of Project War-Mantle, which is actually one of the projects that was being stored in the imperial Vault on Scarif, and one that Jyn Erso listed off while searching for the Death Star plans in the movie. And just to give you a refresher, the other top secret imperial projects stored at scariff, they included project Stardust, which contained the death star plans, then stellar sphere, mark omega.. Which I must say is now very suspiciously named, having this new context with the bad batch, then pax aurora, cluster prism and finally, black saber, which will probably be very relevant now with the Mandalorian season 3 coming soon, and might explain how Gideon got the saber.