The Bad Batch are back and are badder than ever! There’s only a little more than a month until the latest Star Wars spinoff premieres on Disney+, so only a day after dropping huge Obi-Wan Kenobi cast news, Lucasfilm dropped another bombshell: a full-length Bad Batch trailer. While we see the gang get up to all sorts of hijinks along with some fan-favorite characters like Admiral Tarkin and Fennec Shand, a new character could be the key to linking this series with the weirdest part of the sequel trilogy.
In the Bad Batch trailer, the group comes along a small child in a pristine hallway. He seems to know all the squad’s members by name, and later offers his assistance. It looks like this character will become a major player in the Batch’s mission. While next to nothing is known about this character, there’s a surprising amount of evidence he is none other than Palpatine himself.
Okay, so maybe not the Palpatine, but a Palpatine.
The hallway where this new character encounters the Bad Batch looks an awful lot like Kamino, the planet where Obi-Wan Kenobi discovered a clone factory in Attack of the Clones. Not only that, the character is given a name in the trailer’s closed captioning — Omega. Omega isn’t the kind of name you give a natural-born child. It’s the name you give to one in a long line of experimentations.
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Not only that, but Omega has a New Zealand accent, just like Boba and Jango Fett. While there’s no evidence of how clones pick up their speech patterns, this would add more evidence to the clone theory.
We know from the Rise of Skywalker novelization that Palpatine experimented with cloning himself for a long time. While he aimed to create a perfect replica of himself including his Force sensitivity, the results of the experiment were either perfect-looking clones who weren’t Force-sensitive (like Rey’s dad) or disfigured clones who were (like Snoke).
If Omega is in fact a Palpatine clone, he would be one of the non-Force-sensitive “perfect” clones who the Bad Batch will smuggle out of Kamino for some Rebellion mission. This means he wouldn’t suffer the same fate as other rejected clones and could live his life like a normal person.
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That makes it sound like he could very well be Rey’s dad, who settled in Jakku. However, due to clones’ fast aging process, the timeline wouldn’t line up — Palpatine created Rey’s dad after his demise on the second Death Star, meaning he was at most 11 years older than his own daughter thanks to age acceleration.
This is all wild speculation, as we don’t know much about Omega at all — not even their gender, as some have pointed out a resemblance to Satine. But the chance of fleshing out Palpatine’s long history with cloning could kill two birds with one stone. Not only would it explain how Sheev ended up with countless bodies on Exegol, it would also prove that an exact replica of him surrounded by the right mentors could make for a great hero.
The Bad Batch premieres on Disney+ May 4.
