Full Series The Bad Batch 3.09 - The Harbinger - Discussion Thread (Spoilers Allowed)

Ventress' original lightsabers were given to her by Dooku. Her old lightsabers were symbolic of her old path, the path of a Sith Assassin. How and why she would make the exact same one? Why would she want to? Dark Disciple had her make a new lightsaber, the one that was her own, the one that she designed herself. I really don't get the point of your snide comments.

Vos literally fell to the Dark Side and worked for Dooku. He should know, more than anyone, about questioning the purpose, and could offer very similar message.

 

I didn’t watch yet but I’m drinking the tears of dark disciple fans, seriously screw that book, I hope Dave Filoni, George Lucas, Kathleen Kennedy, and Supershadow got together and burned it in a pagan festival

 

Absolutely superb episode. The throwdown between Ventress and the Batch was brilliant; probably the best hand-to-hand combat scene in the entire franchise. I loved seeing where Ventress is right now, and Nika Futterman crushed it (as she always does). More great Wrecker moments, too.

And so many individual shots and frames would make for gorgeous paintings. The dramatic visual presentation is going from strength to strength.

 

I liked it. Loved seeing the episode and i dont give a rats ass if they ignored the book. Let some fans stay salty. Animation is the higher medium when it comes to canon.

Also Assajj Ventress confirmed to Hunter and Crosshair she is force sensitive. If to be a jedi she must leave the Bad Batch team behind. I like the comments she makes of having few More lives like a cat and refference to her supposed death.

 

George Lucas and Katie Lucas wrote it.

"She grew hair! That was something that we had planned to animate in the series. We had several episodes left with Ventress' arc, and when we sat down for the later seasons of The Clone Wars, [George Lucas] wrote this dynamic tale that involved both Quinlan Vos and Ventress. It was something that we were really excited about on the production team because we thought of all the characters developed for The Clone Wars, Ventress had become one of the most interesting.
"I thought since Ventress had moved away from being a Sith, and her shaved head really represented some kind of following and loyalty to that way that she would let it grow out... They did this beautiful piece of artwork... rendered beautifully and realistically for how she was going to appear in, I guess, Season 7 it would have been, of Clone Wars. This story is based on the scripts that we had written with George Lucas. Something happens between her and Quinlan Vos. So I'm super excited about this book.
"We had these great ideas for Asajj Ventress, and now they're going to come to life in a book. To me, the whole thing is just getting the story told."

So it's just Filoni pulling JJ Abrams on a smaller scale, like he did with Palpatine.

Rats ass (Disney) definitely doesn't care about George Lucas' stories and canon, that's for sure.

 

They do, they just dont care if it overules some books. They still refference canon events in shows. They respect and care for GL and his stories.

 

No, they don't. Dark Disciple is George Lucas' story. They don't respect it whatsoever, and this episode was quite evident of that. Disney has zero (0) respect for Lucas, and that much was evident since the beginning. You also can't seem to understand that it's not some book, but a part of The Clone Wars, based on the scripts written with George. This isn't something that some random hired author made up.

 

Thats on Dave Filoni and the Bad Batch animation team. Not Disney. And i am sure Filoni asked George. And its still a book. Like GL **** over all clone wars legends books.

 

Disney owns Lucasfilm. Kathleen Kennedy is in charge of Lucasfilm and reports to Disney and gets money from them for Lucasfilm to make Star Wars. Dave Filoni reports to Kathleen Kennedy. We are all adults here, this is all fairly obvious.

And Dave Filoni keeps ruining Lucas' work. Just like how he kept Ahsoka alive, even though Lucas wanted her dead. Just like how he made Jango and Boba Mandalorians, even though Lucas said they weren't. Just like how he resurrected Ventress, even though Lucas intended for Dark Disciple to be the conclusion of her character, and a meaningful one at that. Just like how those TCW S7 arcs were altered, instead of releasing them the way they were written with George and approved by him.

See my previous post and read: https://screenrant.com/star-wars-clone-wars-season-7-ventress-novel/
George came up with most of the stories for TCW and wrote outlines for them, including Dark Disciple. Katie Lucas is a screenwriter, meaning she wrote the SCRIPT. Just like Larence Kasdan wrote the script for ESB and ROTJ. He didn't come up with the story. He was a SCREENWRITER.

Disney owns Lucasfilm. And I don't think you know if he asked George or not. I doubt that. Given how much he directly went against his wishes and contradicted them. And again, it's not just a book. And again, GL could do that, because he literally created Star Wars to begin with, and those were third party stories written by someone else, and he was clear that they were not his Star Wars and he was not beholden to them. Filoni has no right to do that.

 

Conspiracy theory? Hardly. Just them being arrogant and disrespectful.
From Bob Iger's book, you tell me what it is:

Spoiler

As it turned out, Disney and Lucasfilm didn’t follow Lucas’ lead for the new movies, a decision Lucas discovered when Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy and Star Wars: The Force Awakens writers J.J. Abrams and Michael Arndt met to discuss the new trilogy, and specifically the 2015 installment.

“George immediately got upset as they began to describe the plot and it dawned on him that we weren’t using one of the stories he submitted during the negotiations,” Iger writes. “George knew we weren’t contractually bound to anything, but he thought that our buying the story treatments was a tacit promise that we’d follow them, and he was disappointed that his story was being discarded. I’d been so careful since our first conversation not to mislead him in any way, and I didn’t think I had now, but I could have handled it better.”

The CEO added: “George felt betrayed, and while this whole process would never have been easy for him, we’d gotten off to an unnecessarily rocky start.”

Things didn’t improve when Lucas saw the finished movie. Following a private screening, Iger recalls, Lucas “didn’t hide his disappointment. ‘There’s nothing new,’ he said. In each of the films in the original trilogy, it was important to him to present new worlds, new stories, new characters, and new technologies. In this one, he said, ‘There weren’t enough visual or technical leaps forward.’ He wasn’t wrong, but he also wasn’t appreciating the pressure we were under to give ardent fans a film that felt quintessentially Star Wars.”

And a reminder how Disney started their reign:
October 30, 2012: Ms. Kennedy will serve as executive producer on new Star Wars feature films, with George Lucas serving as creative consultant.
Mar 11, 2013: Disney Cancels Clone Wars on Cartoon Network, Postpones Star Wars: Detours
April 4, 2013: Disney Shuts Down LucasArts Just 154 Days After Acquiring It, cancels Star Wars 1313 And Star Wars: First Assault
November 23, 2015: Early on, Lucas served as a creative consultant on next month’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but Disney chose not to use his ideas for the movie and the creator stepped back from J.J. Abrams’ film. A week after the first trailer debuted in November 2014, Lucas revealed that he had not even watched it.
December, 2015: "They looked at the stories and they said, 'We want to make something for the fans,'" Lucas said. "I said, 'All I want to do is tell a story'… They decided they didn’t want to use those [my] stories, they decided they were going to do their own thing. They weren’t that keen to have me involved anyway — if I get in there, I'm just going to cause trouble, because they're not going to do what I want them to do. And I don't have the control to do that anymore. All I would do is muck everything up. And so I said, 'OK, I will go my way, and I'll let them go their way.' I sold [my kids] to the white slavers that take these things and, and…"

 

So yes conspiracy Theory. They made different Sequel Trilogy then he wanted no secret there.

 

Where exactly is the conspiracy? But I don't expect a reasonable retort anyway. Whatever.

 

It seems pretty clear, to me, at least that Ventress's parting works were the harbinger for what comes next - Pabu getting smashed.

 

Coming into this thread after looking over the Lit thread for the Bad Batch is quite the fascinating dichotomy.

Force Nexus is 100% correct: Dark Disciple is not "some book," it was adapted from scripts written for TCW's seventh season before it was cancelled and resurrected (ironic!)

After watching the episode, it's clear that the show doesn't know how to justify why they used Ventress at all. Is it because a legitimate Jedi would be trusted by the Batch? Why would that trust go both ways, clones tend to open fire on Jedi these days. Just two years ago the Kenobi TV show confirmed a plethora of Jedi have survived Order 66 and were active a few years after this season. Quinlan Vos would have been a very worthy character to feature here, I think.

This episode was very formulaic: they've used this same formula (Batch encounters an untrustworthy ally, they team up to fight a giant monster) in 3x02, 3x05, 3x08, and now 3x09. That's just this season, there's probably examples from the previous seasons that I'm forgetting.

I do believe that resurrecting Ventress was always the plan. Anyone who is dancing on Dark Disciple's grave should probably step back and reevaluate: Resistance nearly brought back Ventress and that character evolved into Mika Grey, as Filoni has confirmed. I wish they had gone with that, because when Resistance was coming out we had far less resurrections. Now in 2024 the fandom discourse is overcharged with the lack of meaningful death in these stories. Dark Disciple is not being ejected from Canon or anything, and it's part of TCW, so why are people bragging about the canon hierarchy? What is this tribalism?

I hope that things ramp up next episode with the Empire going to Pabu or else the Batch being forced once again to fight clones or conscripts--those episodes tend to be less formulaic, more imaginative than the giant monster episodes. I think back fondly to the Ryloth two-parter from season 1, or the two-parter just from a couple weeks ago with Rex and Wolffe. Let's see more of that, please.

 

Well, this definitely didn't answer if DD has been overruled or not, I hope not. Filoni trampling over his own storyline would be silly, and I always liked that book.

Anyways, it was a good episode. I love having Ventress back, and Omega possibly being trained in the future is a neat idea. But I'm so tired of giant monsters at this point, it's been like every episode.

 

I’m gonna say it… Omega leaves to train with Ventress by the end of the series and that’s the next series. I hope not because I really don’t want just another dark times series. But that’s what this felt like it was setting up.

Anyway good episode. Hopefully they’ll explain a little more how Ventress is still alive later but they probably won’t get into that much. Maybe the next series will. Maybe her species can regenerate like the Doctor.

 

I always suspected they would do another dark times era show that bridge both Bad Batch and Rebels. One is about clones fate and is about beginning of a Rebellion, next dark times show be about surviving Jedi and what is their destenies.

This episode gives hints and forshadowing of Omega as Ventress's Apprentice and that Pabo will soon get wrecked by The Empire. And love that we see more good side to Ventress. People talk about her force chicken but forget she was a darksider and will always struggle with that. She also connected with an animal like Ezra in Rebels.

 

Knowing a little bit about the work that goes into developing a novel, it's entirely possible that Ventress dying in the novel was the author's invention - or her editor who wanted a 'bigger punch' to end the novel with. Villains more often escape to fight another day in kids animation than in adult novels, so maybe it was Dark Disciple, and not Bad Batch that ignored George and Katie's story. Story treatments are fairly short - a page or two - and can't hit every story beat of a well developed novel that is 300+ pages.

I haven't read Dark Disciple so her return doesn't bother me as much as it would if I had, but I understand the frustration that the super fans have when the events in the novels they care about so deeply are discarded for the mainstream popularity of the casual fan.

I'm happy to see the best stories possible told. The author of Dark Disciple must have felt that killing Ventress was the strongest choice for the story. The writers of the TBB don't want their hands tied by events invented for another medium.

 

It’s just so booooooooooring.

 

No. She died. That was the original intention for the arc that would have been animated. Plenty of characters died in TCW, I don't know what is your definition for "kids animation", but it was no different from George's Star Wars movies, and it was intended as such. She wasn't a villain ever since TCW S3 when Dooku betrayed her, she was an anti-hero, and she ended up redeeming herself through a selfless sacrifice.

Also all the scripts were written for all 8 episodes of the arc, and the story reels were also made, and all of that was sent to Christie Golden, who adapted it into a novel.

 

What telling stories of Jedi between Bad Batch and Rebels. Explain why there's plenty of Jedi still around, seeing the Path made. Seeing old Characters like Oppo Rancisis. Not to mention we can get one more time to see Darth Vader, Inqusitors and Maul. And i bet people here said the The Bad Batch concept was boring too

 

So I guess Ventress is kinda like Puss in Boots now? Nine lives and all that? Kinda goofy but at least it left Dark Disciple still more or less intact (whatever that's worth unless they actually intend on finishing it).

I wasn't a big fan of the obligatory third act monster, but hey, at least it reminded me of the Sleeper from DD, so at least that's some justification for tying it to Ventress. I don't remember seasons 1 or 2 having quite this many random creature setpieces, they seem something of an 'empty calorie' as action scenes go, letting the Bad Batch get into a scrape with zero risk of discovery by the Empire or hard choices in killing people.