**SPOILERS For The Bad Batch Season 1 Finale Below**
When the first season of Star Wars: The Bad Batch ended with Episode 16 (“Kamino Lost”) on August 13, 2021, it raised a number of questions about clone troopers in the Star Wars universe.
For example, now that we know Crosshair’s (Dee Bradley Baker) inhibitor chip was removed quite some time ago — and yet, his loyalty to the Galactic Empire seems stronger than ever — the question of exactly how much free will clone troopers actually have is top of mind for many Star Wars fans.
The rest of Clone Force 99 — Hunter, Wrecker, Tech, Echo, and even female first-generation Jango Fett clone Omega (Michelle Ang) — are all inherently opposed to Imperial rule in a post-Order 66 world, but we still don’t know for sure if this has something to do with their intentionally “defective” engineering in Nala Se’s lab or not.
The answers to questions like this are likely to be addressed in the upcoming second season of The Bad Batch, but the Season 1 finale did finally clear up a lingering Mandalorian mystery that you may not have thought about since the last time we saw Dr. Pershing (Omid Abtahi) — albeit in hologram form — in The Mandalorian Season 2, Episode 4 (“Chapter 12: The Siege”).
The trio, plus, unfortunately for everyone, The Mythrol (Horatio Sanz), set off on a quest to destroy a supposedly defunct Imperial base that was, to the best of Karga’s knowledge, operating with a skeleton crew. This, of course, was not actually the case and chaos ensued, as it often does for Djarin and his companions.
In Pershing’s transmission, he is wearing a distinctive uniform that bears the same logo the Kaminoan scientists used in their cloning laboratories — now we know how this uniform survived, even though Kamino was destroyed. As one article noted:
…She [Nala Se] is forcibly escorted to an Imperial facility, where she will work with the Empire in ensuring the knowledge of cloning is not lost to the Empire. This deliberately sets up The Mandalorian, which revealed Imperial Clone Technicians such as Dr. Pershing still used Kaminoan logos; Pershing wore the same uniform as the scientists in the facility Nala Se is sent to. Everything is connected in Star Wars, and a subtle mystery from The Mandalorian has been partly explained.
While we will, of course, have to wait until The Mandalorian Season 3 premieres to get more answers about exactly how everything is connected between The Bad Batch and the Mando saga, but it’s clear that Bad Batch creator Dave Filoni — and presumably Mandalorian showrunner Jon Favreau, as well — are well on their way to explaining some of the biggest mysteries within the Star Wars franchise.
What do you think about the unexpected connections between Star Wars: The Clone Wars spinoff The Bad Batch and The Mandalorian?
Favreau and Filoni return in December 2021 with their first Mandalorian spinoff, The Book of Boba Fett, starring Temuera Morrison as the iconic bounty hunter and Ming-Na Wen as Fennec Shand.
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Credit: Lucasfilm
