Right now in Star Wars, if something evil is going on, odds are it’s all part of Emperor Palpatine’s master plan. The Bad Batch has been playing with this idea as it set up its Rise of the Empire-era world across its first two seasons, but season 3’s premiere made it even more explicit with the big boss showing up at Mount Tantiss… and a very tantalizing namedrop.
“Shadows of Tantiss”—the third episode of The Bad Batch’s three-part season 3 premiere—saw Omega and Crosshair’s plans to escape captivity on Weyland, and whatever mysterious blood tests the Empire was conducting on captured clones collide with a surprise visit to Mount Tantiss by none other than the Emperor himself. In two words, it was revealed that the series’ big bad Doctor Hemlock was working directly on something of monumental importance with Palpatine that he was checking the status of: Project Necromancer.
First mentioned chronologically decades after The Bad Batch in the post-Return of the Jedi setting of The Mandalorian, Project Necromancer has long been assumed to be Palpatine’s grand plan to cheat death and make his return by the time of The Rise of Skywalker, something we’ve seen retroactively layered into almost every corner of Star Wars since the movie came out. But Bad Batch doesn’t just mark the earliest chronological citation of the plan—wanting to remind us that this was meant to have been Palpatine’s goal from the earliest days of his Empire—it makes the first explicit time we’re actually getting a picture of what it entailed, as Hemlock obsesses over finding a viable cloned subject with a high enough “M-Count” (clearly an unsubtle nod to Midicholorians for Star Wars fans, but a thing that is suitably mysterious enough to most people in the world of The Bad Batch itself) to be ideal for Necromancer’s needs.
“I like to say that Mount Tantiss is a character in season 3,” Bad Batch writer and executive producer Jennifer Corbett recently told io9. First introduced at the climax of season 1, and a crucial location from Star Wars’ old Expanded Universe as a hub for both mysterious cloning experiments and Palpatine’s legacy after Return of the Jedi, Tantiss has long been a part of the show’s plans. “We knew well into season 1 that that location was going to be a part of [The Bad Batch], when we ended season one with Nala Se being brought to Mount Tantiss. We’ve been teasing it a lot through season 2, but season 3… we get into it. Things will be explained.”
Although Omega and Crosshair (alongside their new best friend Batcher the lurca hound) successfully escaped Weyland during the premiere—or more specifically were allowed to escape—it’s clear that Bad Batch isn’t done with Mount Tantiss, Project Necromancer, and what’s going on there for the rest of this season. With the shocking reveal that Omega, whose regular blood tests had been surreptitiously destroyed by Nala Se during her captivity, has a viable M-Count for Necromancer, it’s clear that even with it currently in the rearview mirror for now, all eyes will be on Mount Tantiss as Bad Batch draws closer to its endgame.
“We definitely get into it,” supervising director and fellow executive producer Brad Rau added. “As we get into the back end of the season and everything, including what we’re talking about now, escalates in, hopefully, a way that everybody enjoys.”
Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 3 is streaming now on Disney+.
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