‘Star Wars: Bad Batch’ EPs on Keeping Cameos to a Minimum: “We Always Want to Play with All the Action Figures”

There’s no stopping the Star Wars universe. With a nearly nonstop presence on Disney+, there’s seemingly no limit on the number of stories to be told and characters to be created. And once those characters are part of the Star Wars mythos, they really can pop up in any part of the galaxy. That’s definitely the case with the currently-airing Star Wars: The Bad Batch, an animated series focusing on a squad of genetically manipulated clone troopers on a mission to halt the rise of the Empire. Following the Bad Batch team’s appearance at the Television Critics Association 2023 winter tour, Decider grabbed a few minutes with showrunners Jennifer Corbett and Brad Rau and chatted about the ins and outs of playing in the Star Wars sandbox.

When it comes to using legacy characters, or connecting Star Wars: The Bad Batch to other series or films in the franchise, both Corbett and Rau emphasized that the connection between guest appearance and story has to be natural. “A great example of that is Commander Cody [in the Season 2 episode, “The Solitary Clone”],” said Crobett. “In that episode, we really wanted to pair Crosshair with somebody that he respects, and it’s really just Cody, and the Bad Batch — end of list, for him. So that was one of the instances where [executive producer] Dave [Filoni] mentioned Cody and everything just seemed to line up from there.”

Commander Cody’s return to the Star Wars spotlight is but the latest example of a character crossover. The bounty hunter Cad Bane debuted in the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars and then appeared in live-action in last year’s The Book of Boba Fett. And before that, The Bad Batch got to bring a live-action character — The Mandalorian’s Fennec Shand — to animation. These connections, it turns out, come from Dave Filoni himself.

“It’ll be when we sit with Dave Filoni and we’re talking about the next grouping of episodes and ideas and things we’d like to explore,” said Corbett. “A lot of times he’ll listen to that and if we say, ‘We really need a bounty hunter to be after Omega,’ and he offered up Fennec Shand.” Of course Corbett and Rau had no idea who Fennec Shand was at the time, as this planning session came before Ming-Na Wen debuted the character in The Mandalorian Season 1.”He allowed us to come to the offices and watch an early cut of that [Mandalorian episode] so we could understand who this character is and write her in.”

This does mean that Corbett and Rau watch every new Star Wars series through a different lens than their fellow fans. For example, a new episode of Andor could be viewed by the Bad Batch writers as a catalogue of new action figures for them to play with. “We always want to play with all the action figures,” said Rau. “But it all comes down to the story. It has to make sense for X character to show up here. We got to make sure that the narrative flows in the right direction.”

The Bad Batch creatives have to exercise patience, though, so as to not crowd every episode with extraneous references. “There have been times where we’ve had to pull ourselves back [from including legacy characters] or Dave has pulled us back,” admitted Rau. But sometimes, instead of bringing a character in as an integral part of an episode, the show can get away with a little namedrop — as heard in the same episode that brought Commander Cody back. “There’s an example in this latest episode, the Separatist leader, Tawni Ames, incredible character, and she talks about Mina Bonteri. [That’s] a name dropped from the [animated series] Clone Wars, but it made sense.”

Corbett clarified, though, that even seemingly innocuous name drops can’t be gratuitous. The writers have to ask themselves, “Are we saying this because it’ll get fans excited, or are we saying this because it’s important to the story?” It’s always gotta be the latter.

New episodes of Star Wars: The Bad Batch Season 2 premiere on Disney+ on Wednesdays.