How Star Wars: The Bad Batch Is Paving The Way For The Rise Of Skywalker
Spoilers for "Star Wars: The Bad Batch" season 3 premiere, episodes 1-3 "Confined," "Paths Unknown," and "Shadows of Tantiss," follow.
With the three-episode third season premiere of "Star Wars: The Bad Batch," the creative team behind the show is doubling down on its connections to the rest of the "Star Wars" saga and connecting directly into the ninth installment of the Skywalker story.
In these episodes, we finally learn why the Empire so desperately needs the Omega — a female clone of Jango Fett — and it's not just to keep her Kaminoan handlers working effectively. There's a darker, more sinister reason for it and it threads effectively through the storyline of "The Mandalorian" and terminates in the revelations we get about the survival of Darth Sidious in "The Rise of Skywalker."
A lot of it comes down to two things: an M-count and something called Project Necromancer.
M-Counts
There's a mysterious thing the Empire is looking for as they examine tests from all of the clones they can get their hands on. It's an M-Count. What's an M-Count? They play coy about it, either to keep them top-secret in the universe or because the term we know better is controversial in the real world. Regardless of the reason, the M-Counts they're referring to are midi-chlorians.
What are midi-chlorians? They're microscopic life forms that reside in all living cells. Qui-Gon Jinn once told Anakin Skywalker that they can continually speak to you, telling you the will of the more mysterious Force. Anakin had an unusually high concentration of midi-chlorians, well over twenty-thousand. This was by far the highest the Jedi had seen, and was what made Anakin so special to the balance of the Force.
So why would anyone care about the M-Counts of the clones? Well, when they make clones, it seems as though there is a drop in M-Count between the host donor and the clone. So they desperately search for a clone that hasn't had that M-count degradation.
That's where Omega comes in.
There's a reason she senses things and is so intuitive. Not only did her midi-chlorian count not degrade, but there's a chance she even increased her midi-chlorian count. That makes her the most valuable clone in the galaxy to Dr. Hemlock and the Empire for their nefarious science project.
Project Necromancer
When Darth Sidious arrives on Tantiss in the third part of the premiere, Dr. Hemlock shows him the fruits of the project they dubbed "Necromancer." The Emperor then informs Hemlock that the research he is doing is of the utmost importance to the continuing survival of the Empire. Being able to replicate a person with their midi-chlorian count intact would pave the way for all of the experiments that Beaumont Kin (Dominic Monaghan) talks about in "The Rise of Skywalker."
"Cloning. Dark science. Secrets only the Sith knew," he tells the rebel assembly when they wonder about Palpatine's return. But knowing what we know about Rey's father, Dathan, and how he was a Palpatine clone that didn't inherit his Force abilities, these experiments would need to start happening in this part of the timeline in order to create a Palpatine clone old enough to sire Rey sometime after the war. Unless growth acceleration — like the kind used on the clone army — is involved.
Gideon's plan
It seems that Dr. Pershing's research in "The Mandalorian" and the need for Grogu's blood aimed to take the research of Project Necromancer a step further. With Moff Gideon's plan to breed the Force into his own clones, it is implied that he wanted to take the M-count from Grogu and clone that into a different vessel. The ending of the third season of "The Mandalorian" was ambiguous as to whether or not Dr. Pershing was successful, but that opens the door to more Clone Wars in the future, as well as the program that created Snoke. Since the Kaminoans mastered growth acceleration, the events surrounding Snoke's genesis really could happen at any time.
It's great to see that "Star Wars" is marching in a uniform direction toward the events of "The Rise of Skywalker," and adding "The Bad Batch" further into that mix ties all of the continuity together in a satisfying way.
Episodes of the final season of "Star Wars: The Bad Batch" premiere on Wednesdays on Disney+.