Star Wars Canon Is About to Explain One Pre-Rebellion Plot Hole
A post-Order 66 sanctuary is about to get fully explored.
Order 66 was easily one of Emperor Palpatine’s least efficient policies. Not only are we aware of countless Jedi survivors, but the Empire even managed to alienate the people who carried out Order 66, the Clone Army. And while the events of The Bad Batch’s three seasons managed to fill in much of the Imperial transition — and even explained the nitty-gritty logistical and economic reasons why Stormtroopers replaced Clones — it also showed that the origins of the Rebellion started with the same people who fought for the Republic.
Now, even though The Bad Batch has ended its run, Star Wars canon is going back to a very specific and pivotal moment in the franchise: The moment when the Batch found themselves a place to hide from the Empire on the planet of Pabu. It wasn’t the first official Rebel Base, but the next best thing.
Hunter in The Bad Batch Episode "Pabu."
Just announced by StarWars.com, the forthcoming novel Star Wars: Sanctuary, by Lamar Giles, will fully explore what happened to the Batch after arriving on the planet Pabu in Season 2. This is a time when Tech is still alive, and Crosshair has not yet rejoined the team. It seems that the premise of this book is poised to fill in a small gap that is not entirely covered by the show. In the episode titled “Pabu,” one of the settlements on the planet was hit with a large tsunami. But what happened after that? How did Pabu recover, and eventually become the place from which Omega, all grown-up, eventually left to become a pilot for the Rebel Alliance? Sanctuary will provide those answers and then some.
According to the description from Star Wars.com, the book will initially focus on Hunter’s relief that “it seems that his small family might have finally found a safe place to land, far from the increasingly vigilant eyes of the Empire... But their potential new island home is in desperate need of resources if there is any hope for the fledgling community to recover from a devastating sea wave.”
This incident, depicted in Season 2, will now lead the Batch on a series of Indiana Jones-esque missions in a desperate attempt to get enough funds to help rebuild the community on Pabu. Essentially, the book sounds like it will be part treasure-hunting and part lore-building. But it will also represent the first time this particular era of Star Wars has switched mediums from animated TV series to prose.
Does this mean that Lucasfilm is still invested in characters from The Bad Batch? In other franchises, a tie-in novel might not mean much, but with Star Wars, at least since 2014, everything that happens in the novels counts, which means any new revelations or connections to other aspects of the franchise will also be relevant to the larger Star Wars tapestry.
Everything leads to this: Omega as an adult in The Bad Batch finale.
Presumably, the surviving members of the Batch, and specifically Omega, are all alive by the time of The Mandalorian, which means that theoretically any of them could appear in Ahsoka in live-action or even in the upcoming film, The Mandalorian & Grogu. Clearly, Star Wars canon is about to build out the foundation of the Batch’s story even more than before, and in doing so, make the origins of the Rebellion a little more explicable.
The nature of adventure in The Bad Batch might be all about side quests and A-Team-style missions, but the sneaky impact that this group of characters has had on Star Wars more broadly is profound. They may not be the biggest deal in Star Wars canon, but the return of The Bad Batch could be a sign that the franchise will continue to take care of all corners of the galaxy, shedding light on events that previously only existed in shadow.
