2x04 Faster

[6.2/10] Well, maybe I was a little hasty with this “The Bad Batch has matured into a show that's not necessarily for kids” business. This is a stock standard sort of episode, with beats so standardized that, god help me, the franchise detritus that is Star Wars: Droids did pretty much the same sort of thing. If you want to see the good guys striving to win a race and fending off the skullduggery of a local crime boss, you could always watch 1985’s “A Race to the Finish” from that show instead. (Or don’t, it’s not great.)

Which is all to say, “Faster” feels pretty generic. I like the idea of doing an episode that lets underutilized characters like Cid and Tech get to be more in focus, but there’s not much depth here. They’re just stuck in a pretty standard podrace-esque situation, where they have to win lest bad things happen to the people they care about.

There’s only a few things to recommend this one. The first and most obvious is Ben Schwartz as TAY-0 the racing droid. Schwartz is something of a cheat code. His cocky, third person-utilizing robot should be annoying. But something about Schwartz’s delivery makes the cocksure racer droid a winning presence in this one, even as he scoffs and gripes at our heroes.

The other is that it deepens the Bad Batch’s, and particularly Omega’s relationship with Cid. I like that, for all that Cid seems to use Clone Force 99 like her own personal goon squad and not much more, Omega in particular goes out of her way to protect Cid when an old rival crime boss threatens to take her down, with some real skin in the game to boot. The crime boss’s (Ernie Hudson!) warning that Cid won’t return that loyalty (which seems like foreshadowing, or at least good setup for when Cid probably turns on The Bad Batch only to make up for it down the line), seems portentous as hell. Cid’s been a little one-note so far, so I like the fact that this crusty, underhanded contact for the underworld seems genuinely touched at being looked after like this.

The other thing to recommend it is that, as uninteresting and generic as the episode is, it’s soundly constructed. The show sets up the dangerous “left tunnel” on the racing course so that when Tech utilizes it, there’s stakes. It establishes his belief that there’s a better strategy to win than the one that TAY-0 employs, so when Tech himself goes more for speed and defense than offense, you understand why. And it sets up the crunch move of the bad guys tripping up TAY-0 so that when Tech evades it and wins, it shows his cleverness. “Fast” isn’t the most novel installment of the series, but it is one that plays fair, which I can appreciate.

At best, though, “Fast” reaches the level of “solid but unspectacular.” The enemies are stock standard. The racing setup is tired and feels more like fodder for a video game than a pure story. Even the character beats are predictable. It’s not bad, but it’s easy to tune out when everything about this seems overfamiliar and unimaginative.

Still, it’s a good reminder that for all its mature themes, sometimes The Bad Batch is still for the kiddies. And it’s fine if they get a low-stakes, mostly for fun racing episode now and again, as much as it was for the poor kids stuck with what counted as a Star Wars cartoon in 1985.