This article contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 2, episode 3 and Star Wars: Darth Vader #30.Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 2, episode 3 hints the Clone Wars didn't actually end in Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the SIth. Mentioned in the first Star Wars film back in 1977, the Clone Wars were long seen as one of the most intriguing ideas in the franchise's history. Novelist Timothy Zahn couldn't resist hinting at them in his celebrated "Thrawn trilogy," a series of books published in 1991 that effectively launched the classic Expanded Universe. But it wasn't until George Lucas' prequel trilogy that the truth about the Clone Wars was revealed.
This was, of course, entirely intentional. Lucas had always told writers to avoid dealing with the galaxy's immediate history, largely because he knew that was a story he'd be tempted to tell himself sooner or later. George Lucas' vision of the Clone Wars ultimately came to inform far more than just the prequels, of course, spinning off into two animated series - one of which ran for seven seasons. Attentive viewers were confused, though, simply because the conflict Lucas created didn't quite match up with the name. He'd come up with a single galaxy-spanning war, and yet the name "Clone Wars" implied multiple wars - or, at least, multiple different phases, so distinctive they were best treated as separate events in their own right.
Separatist Worlds Retained Access To Droid Technology
This makes Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 2, episode 3 particularly important. The episode reveals not every Separatist world simply surrendered to the newborn Empire after Darth Vader slaughtered the Separatist leadership in Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith; there were some holdouts, such as the Outer Rim world of Desix. Tawni Ames, the governor of Desix, successfully reactivated an army of Battle Droids. The result was inevitable; the Empire could not brook any resistance to its regime, and clamped down hard. There is no reason to assume this was an isolated example.
The clear implication is that the Clone Wars didn't actually end in Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith at all. Instead, they entered a new phase - one in which an over-mighty Empire used its clone army to crush resistance on any would-be independent systems. These independent systems presumably managed to override the Separatists' master controls, meaning the droid armies weren't successfully deactivated after all.
The Clone Wars Entered A New Phase In Revenge Of The Sith
This interpretation of the Clone Wars is ed by Star Wars: Darth Vader #30, by Greg Pak and Luke Ross, which reveals Darth Vader fought prequel era Battle Droids. That issue saw Darth Vader's armies reveal they had retrieved damaged Battle Droids from countless battlefields, searching their databases for information about the Sith Lord's combat strategies. It's reasonable to assume Palpatine used the dying embers of conflict to justify the Empire's creeping militarization, as the Empire moved from maintaining a clone army to recruiting stormtroopers from across the galaxy.
Most of the Separatists truly believed in their cause. But they were being played from the start, used by the Sith as a tool in the most egregious power grab in the history of the galaxy. Palpatine had engineered the Clone Wars as the perfect Jedi trap, and they continued to serve his purposes even after Order 66. Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 2, episode 3 shows the Clone Wars continuing to serve his agenda, even after the prequel trilogy.
New episodes of Star Wars: The Bad Batch release on Wednesdays on Disney+
