Where does The Bad Batch land on the Star Wars timeline?

Star Wars: The Bad Batch’s second season has hit the ground running. It picks up right after its rookie year, but where does the series take place within the larger Star Wars Universe?

Star Wars: The Bad Batch is one of five animated Star Wars shows produced by Dave Filoni. A few are top tier entertainment, like Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels, whereas Star Wars Resistance was fun while falling somewhat short of expectations. Tales of the Jedi came out on Disney Plus between Season 1 and 2 of The Bad Batch, and thrilled fans with stories of Ahsoka and Count Dooku.

The Bad Batch slipped in a backdoor pilot in the final season of Clone Wars; a four-episode arc that introduced the team of clone rejects and ended with Echo joining the squad. A few Clone War veterans even manifest in The Bad Batch’s own show, such as Captain Rex, Saw Gerrera, and Cad Bane. And the best episode of Season 2, thus far, features a crucial comeback for Commander Cody.

There are also plausible precursory connections to Star Wars canon in The Bad Batch. The opener stealthily sneaks a Kanan Jarrus sighting in – the Star Wars Rebels jedi is shown here as a young padawan escaping the clones. Separately, Hera is presented as a girl in a later chapter. She grows to become a rebel commander pilot as well as Kanan’s love interest. One episode excitingly features Fennec Shand, decades before the events of The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett.

Given the defective clones’ origin story, this perceptively lines The Bad Batch up to succeed The Clone Wars, but there is a lot of Star Wars content that takes place around the fall of the Republic. The proper series starts by showing how the Bad Batch handles Order 66, which is also depicted toward the end of The Clone Wars series and the climax of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, leading all to overlap each other when analyzing continuity.

The anthology story from Tales of the Jedi, entitled “Practice Makes Perfects”, leads Ahsoka Tano right up to the enactment of Order 66. And the finale, “Resolve”, comes a little later with some of its timeline likely running parallel to earlier episodes of The Bad Batch. Now, in the midst of its second season, the series itself does not jump too much in time as the Season 2 plot continues soon after the first’s ending.

Where The Bad Batch takes place on the Star Wars timeline

Currently, this is how the Star Wars chronology roughly lines up:

• Tales of the Jedi – Life and Death, Justice, and Choices
• The Phantom Menace
• Tales of the Jedi – The Sith Lord
• Attack of the Clones
• The Clone Wars
• Tales of the Jedi – Practice Makes Perfect
• Revenge of the Sith
• Tales of the Jedi – Resolve
• The Bad Batch
• Solo
• Obi-Wan Kenobi
• Rebels
• Andor
• Rogue One
• A New Hope
• The Empire Strikes Back
• Return of the Jedi
• The Mandalorian
• The Book of Boba Fett
• Resistance (season 1)
• The Force Awakens
• The Last Jedi
• Resistance (season 2)
• The Rise of Skywalker

The Bad Batch is one of the few contemporary Star Wars shows that may run for several to many years. The other one being The Mandalorian, while The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Ahsoka’s futures are still to be determined. Andor has a set plan of two seasons and we also may get more Tales of the Jedi.

For now, we can enjoy The Bad Batch’s sophomore run and look forward to The Mandalorian’s third season.

What do you think of The Bad Batch Season 2? Do you want the show to contain more links with other Star Wars content? Let us know in the comments below.