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The Bad Batch Is About To Clean Up One of the Messiest Star Wars Canon Parts

The Bad Batch Is About To Clean Up One of the Messiest Star Wars Canon Parts
Image credit: Legion-Media

What part, you might ask? Well, more detail-obsessed among Star Wars fans have long asked, how exactly the clone army from the prequel trilogy was replaced by the stormtrooper forces from the original trilogy, to which it clearly was supposed to be a predecessor.

The arguments started since before the Disney decanonization of the original Expanded Universe, since the latter pretty clearly established that stormtroopers were normal humans (the concept of the Clone Wars did not exist beyond the name back then, and novel authors even thought that the clone army was supposed to fight against the Republic).

With Disney canon that could have been a non-issue, really.

Stormtroopers could just have remained clones to start with. Then, Episode VII established from the start that kidnapping and brainwashing people was so much simpler than vat-growing and raising clone troopers from zero, when you are not concerned with keeping your army secret.

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And other canon entries, like Bad Batch Season 1 included similar suggestions – stormtroopers were simply cheaper. But the question persists.

Mostly because stormtroopers, who already were memetically inept in the original trilogy (though more competent than your typical extras from 80s action movies), became complete clowns in most of the Disney canon, whether you talk of their original or the First Order version, so whenever you saw them on screen outside of, perhaps, Andor, you could not help but ask – how exactly the vastly more capable clone army got replaced with these dunces?

Bad Batch Season 2 is likely to provide a more detailed answer – if anything is likely to explain exactly how, when and why the Empire switched from clones to "normal" soldiers then it is this clone-centered series. There is even a hint about "why" in the Season 2 trailer.

There Commander Cody says, "Rumors are, more and more clones have been… questioning the order."

Which is well in line with the whole trend of excusing the clones for executing Order 66, which got underway in the closing seasons of The Clone Wars series. At this point the Empire might well decide that the army which was supposed to be totally loyal is not loyal enough and that the whole idea with inhibitor chips is not working out in the long term, and scrap the project. We're going to see soon enough.