The Bad Batch’s biggest mystery could redefine a crucial Star Wars concept
Who is Omega? The Bad Batch showrunners have promised us an answer.
Just how many people in the Star Wars galaxy are clones of other people? Considering there’s a seven-season long series called The Clone Wars and an entire movie called Attack of the Clones, you’d think the answer to that question would be a lot.
But it’s not.
Sure, there are millions of clones in the current Star Wars canon, but they are overwhelmingly cloned from the same person: Jango Fett. As far as other famous clones in the (non-Legends) Star Wars canon, the list is pretty short. Boba Fett is also a clone of Jango Fett, Palpatine made some clones of himself, and now... there’s another: Omega in The Bad Batch.
Other than Boba Fett in Attack of the Clones and The Clone Wars, we haven’t actually seen a little kid who is a clone of someone else until Omega showed up in The Bad Batch. Like all members of the Clone Army, she was “born” on Kamino, but the series seems to want us to think that Omega is not a clone of Jango Fett.
So, who is she a clone of? This is the big Star Wars canon mystery that The Bad Batch is poised to answer, and by the time we do find out, it could change quite a bit about the rest of the saga.
The Bad Batch: Who is Omega?
What if we’ve never heard of who Omega was cloned from?
Voiced by actress Michelle Ang, Omega is a special clone, who decides to adopt Clone Force 99 as her chosen family. For kids watching the series, Omega is clearly the audience surrogate, a pseudo-space orphan with a heart of gold.
“I know people are going to wonder about her,” head writer Jennifer Corbett tells Inverse about Omega, “but really the core of this story is this new family unit and how they're now in this rapidly changing galaxy.”
To be clear, when directly asked if audiences will learn who Omega is a clone of, Corbett basically gave a qualified yes: “Who Omega is and how her backstory is relevant to the series is something that we definitely explore.”
But what does that mean? Again, assuming Omega is not a clone of Jango Fett, the idea that she’s a clone of someone else is a huge game-changer in the canon. Sure, in The Mandalorian we met Dr. Pershing, who is 100 percent involved in cloning operations for the Empire. But right now, it’s unclear what or who he was cloning exactly. In terms of onscreen canon, Omega could provide a huge link between the Empire’s cloning activities before the Rebellion, and what became of those resources post-Return of the Jedi.
Operating under the assumption that Omega is cloned from someone other than Jango Fett, what could be the big secret? Here are the most likely options:
Is Omega a Count Dooku clone?
This guy like invented the Clone Army, remember?
In terms of people who were hanging around on Kamino a lot in the early years of the cloning facility, Count Dooku sticks out.
He worked with Jango Fett and the Kaminoans to make the Clone Army happen. Could an early experiment have also resulted in a Dooku clone? Like Boba Fett, it seems that Omega doesn’t have rapid growth acceleration, and her age seems to be close to Boba’s age in this timeframe, too. Did Dooku ask for a clone? If so, does that mean Omega has latent Jedi and Sith powers?
Is Omega a Palpatine clone?
Somehow I returned.
Because somehow Palpatine returned, anything that has even a whiff of being connected to his return from the dead is on the table until Star Wars canon tells us it's not.
Although the cloning backstories of The Mandalorian still don’t make sense, it feels reasonable to assume that Palpatine wanted Grogu’s midichlorians to figure out all of his pathways to powers that “some might consider to be ... unnatural.” How could Omega fit into this? Well, if Omega was a test-clone of Palpatine, the Kaminoans might have just been ordered to see if a clone body of a young Sheev Palpatine would even work.
Would this then make Omega related to Rey? Well, maybe. If Omega is a clone of Palpatine, then that would make her the “sister” of Palpatine’s clone son, who was Rey’s father. So, if Omega is a Palpatine clone, then, best case scenario, she’s Rey’s aunt.
Is Omega an Obi-Wan Kenobi clone?
Quick! Get a lock of his hair!
Well, hello there!
Guess who else was on Kamino a short time before the events of The Bad Batch? Yep! Obi-Wan Kenobi visited Kamino in Attack of the Clones, roughly 4 to 5 years before what we see in The Bad Batch. Could the Kaminoans have grabbed a lock of Obi-Wan’s hot Jedi mullet at that time? Could they have then made a clone, who about five years later looks like Omega? It’s a bit of a stretch, but the idea that there are Obi-Wan clones floating around is a very old fan theory.
If Omega is Obi-Wan’s clone “daughter,” then suddenly, The Bad Batch is could be acting as a prequel to the upcoming series, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Assuming Omega’s growth was sped up a little bit, and she’s 10 years old now, then when the Obi-Wan series hits, she could possibly be a teenager.
Is Omega being set up to be a clone of Obi-Wan or some other famous Star Wars character? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s possible that a huge revelation about Omega’s backstory won’t actually involve a legacy character or a huge canon connection. Instead, perhaps Omega’s DNA comes from a new character, who in the context of The Bad Batch could be a huge deal. (Essentially, because Boba Fett is Jango’s son whoever is Omega’s DNA-donor is kind of like her parent?)
In this way, the person who is Omega’s parent could become a new significant player in the overall Star Wars story. Instead of pointing back to something we already knew about, Omega’s clone-parent could end up creating new mythology and new situations we’ve never heard about.
Considering all the strange stuff we’ve seen in the Star Wars saga in the past few years, there’s nothing to convince us that there’s one all-powerful storyline controlling everything. This isn’t to say the plot twists of Star Wars are a bunch of simple tricks and nonsense, but whatever Omega’s secret is, it will 100 percent send a tremor through the Force.
The Bad Batch airs new episodes on Fridays.
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