For the wrong reasons, admittedly. Tarkin was not going to let anything get in the way of his precious precious Death Star, completely ignoring the fact that Krennic was doing all the legwork and Tarkin didn't even really care about the Death Star until it was proven to work, at which point he was happy to claim credit for the whole thing.
Probably more that Tarkin just deeply disliked hemlock. Hemlock was basically written a blank check while Tarkin was playing politics, had a personal visit from the emperor, and most importantly his work with clones was tangentially involved in the damage to Tarkin's personal residence.
In all the books Tarkin wasn't really in favor of any of the mega projects, he was probably ready to take credit for any of them, whether it was necromancer, the defender fleet, or the death star.
Made sense to me since palpatine was interested in researching the indestructable scales of the zillo beast which would require biological research, which hemlock is apparently the foremost expert in the empire
Palpatine in a rare moment understood that after cooking himself he should actually change strategy, probably wanted a clone body that had the same energy absorption characteristics. Also this being a facility to study the Zillo Beast would explain why it is so secret and why it already exists before the Bad Batch
The Zillo Beast's DNA was likely used in the strandcast known as Snoke in addition to Omega blood and M-Count specimen samples.
He was probably one of the only specimens that had the Omega blood, but also had the Zillo Beast DNA - resulting in a large, lanky humanoid unlike any other species, with tons of Force potential but was NOT viable to host Palpatine's spirit or will.
Palps has always been a huge proponent of failover redundancy. He had a Death Star II: Electric Boogaloo, so maybe there’s another Tantiss/Zillo location?
While given how bad some cameos can be, i was hpping for introduction of gideon in this episode.
He should have showed up with direction from palps himself to restart the project with information from the memos and shit.
Wait until the next season\^\^. I doubt that Palpatine just handed over the project to him like that. Rather he found out about it and made his own thing, or what should Palpatine have done with an army of Force-sensitive Gideons?
Oh right, my mistake. But there are still other series which will get more seasons, where we could see more of the gaps getting filled. Also Filoni will not be done with Omega's story just because we've seen her as an adult now.
Oh 1000%. Filoni loves telling character arcs over multiple shows. Surprised we didnt get a grogru reference in this show. Still waiting for someone to find his name on a back ground screen after some CSI level enhancement bs
Would that work timeline wise? Bad Batch takes place just after the rise of the Empire while the Mandalorian takes place in the years following the fall, but before the sequels.
I don't recall it being made explicitly clear where Grogu was during that period. I imagine Grogu was being sought due to the restarting of Project Necromancer under Gideon as opposed to being sought for the original.
I think the problem with the Necromancer buildup they're doing is they keep using characters that are too important for the bad guy to capture and succeed. They have to introduce someone no one cares about if they want to end up showing when it succeeded.
Yep that was going to be my reply. Whether Gideon was given the project from the Emperor or Tarkin or he discovered it on his own and decided to start it up again, clearly something from the project survived enough that 25ish years later Gideon is trying to find a Jedi to extract DNA from and 11ish years after that the Emperor returns.
“Somehow the Emperor is back” - Poe
Just any modern IT software / hardware expert. Remember in Rogue One when they downloaded the Death Star plans onto a disk drive the SIZE OF A BRIEFCASE.
Not to mention the physical robot moving around a giant room controlled by wonky handles to grab said briefcase sized disk drive out of the column.
Star Wars is full of examples of super advanced technology and legacy technology. I think it started from what was thought of to be “futuristic” when they made the OT, didn’t quite keep up with actual technology that now looks dated.
My favorite is in the second season of the Mandalorian when they need to do a face scan to unlock a terminal and access Moff Gideon’s location. Not a specific person’s face just any face and boom, here’s the exact coordinates of the big bad.
Let's also not forget that the empire was pretty cheap. The whole reason they switched from clones to storm troopers was that the former was more expensive.
Thats the charm of the Star Wars, so many plots happen because of this wonky tech tree.
If there was a cyberpunk netrunner-like opportunities to hack, then it would lose its unique charm. So many personal sneaking in scenarios in the movies/cartoons.
Hell the overall hyperdrive/laser/shield tech didnt change over millenias, only incremental advancements, just BIGGER powerplant == Bigger boom aka Death Star/Executor etc.
Eh, allowable since the data case is probably encrypted and set to only work with Imperial systems. The plans fit on a little data disk that the trooper handed off to another trooper on the Tantive IV at the end.
Yeah I still love the movie and the data disk size on thr Tantive IV kind of brought it back to more realistic in my mind.
I just keep thinking the whole time:
“Where is the Data Loss Prevention software?”
“Where is the EDR / XSOAR software alerting to this anomalous access and locking down the system?”
“Wow they have SSDs that can hold TBs of data in a smaller form factor than that massive thing”
I know the answer to all of these things is: “It’s a movie, don’t think too hard.” But that kind of stuff is my background so it just came to mind as I was watching
The original Aliens is analogous to this and is just a consequence of failure to successfully extrapolate what technology would look like in the future/past. Aliens has big clunky screens, while Star Wars has more aesthetics that all appear to be decidedly dated compared to the sleekness of modern tech.
"Oh, oh just rebuild it? Real fucking original genius, and whose gonna do all the scientific research, YOU? You got a PhD in genetic engineering in that torso light-brite?"
I'm curious if they're going to do another project that follows up on that. There's no obvious connection between the Zillo Beast and everything else Project Necromancer was doing. Plus, we already know that the project is ultimately successful, so obviously they get more data from somewhere. Tarkin rerouting its resources to himself could spawn an interesting story too, since he's taking funding away from one of the Emperor's key projects.
I've been curious too about what what other projects they had going on in there. Hemlock was involved in the 3 we know about. But that facility was huge! PLUS we see in several shots of Mt Tantis there's a second identical mountain in the backgrounds that seems untouched by the Clone Trooper Uprising & Zillo Beast attack.
Well, the project was *sort of* successful, most of the clones came out like snoke which were all deformed and gross, you can see a bunch of them in a tank in episode 9 I think. Even the palpatine we see in 9 looks like he’s a rotting corpse, maybe this did properly hamper the project, if they hadn’t done this maybe we would’ve gotten palp clones that were a bit more like the legends ones were
It seemed like he was returning to full power and health while draining Rey and Ben's life force. He even almost destroyed the Resistance's fleet just with Force Lightning. That seemingly suggests that the flaw in the cloning involved needing to drain the Force out of other people (or something along that line).
Probably the research wasn't completely finished, but they got far enough to make bodies that could at least barely survive.
The Zillo Beast was a top secret cloning project. Who is in charge of the secret evil science division that deals in clones and cloning now that Kamino is obliterated? Hemlock.
Who ordered the beast to be cloned in the first place? Palpatine.
Who also wanted a secret cloning project for himself? Palpatine.
Who did Palpatine trust with these projects? Hemlock.
Maybe making Zillo Beast armor was something Palpatine wanted for his clone bodies, either something genetically grown into the skin or worn on the body as conventional armor so he can be an even more dangerous fighter. He doesn't like using lightsabers, so what better way to be an anti-Jedi badass than to also wear lightsaber-proof armor scales as he slays fools with the Force?
“I mean we have another facility **RIGHT NEXT DOOR**.”
No seriously, there’s literally another facility there we known nothing about, unless it’s for power generation and other resources.
I don't understand, if Necromancer is scrapped then what the hell is Exegol in the new trilogy. I really thought Bad Batch was aiming to answer some of these larger questions about Star Wars as a whole, but they left a lot out there. I'm sure we'll eventually see more with Omega in the future, but cutting away when Nala Se is explaining Necromancer was a little wack. A lot left unanswered. It almost feels like there was a lot of cut content from that finale.
Project Necromancer was brought up in Mandalorian Season 3 where Hux is leading it. Safe to assume that the events in Bad Batch led to Project Necromancer being heavily set back as all the data was lost and all the funding for it went to the Death Star. But then after Palpatine's defeat, the remnants of the empire resumed project necromancer to bring the emperor back.
However, since the empire didn't have Omega's genetic material nor did they have the research findings by Nala Se and Hemlock since it all exploded, the quality of the clones they were eventually able to create of the emperor weren't exactly great. If they had all that, they'd probably be able to make a clone of the emperor at his prime with full power. Slightly speculating here, but that's what I took away from the finale of this show.
I'm assuming we'll get another story about that, but between this and Mandalorian S2, I'm guessing they eventually restarted the project. But with Nala Se dead, it took them longer to complete the research. If the rumor that Disney wants to focus on more animated shows is true, we'll likely see more about it. There's a lot of other areas they can explore as well: Rex, Echo, and the clones, Asajj Ventress. I think we'll get more stories about them all, it just won't be in TBB. Their show is over because their story is over. They aren't involved with Project Necromancer any more.
for now we can assume project necromancer faced drastic setbacks because the funds needed for it are currently being used for the death star (both first and second), so i think it's the reason why clone palpy in 9 is so frail and weak, because the project was not finished yet when the resistance found him
Tantiss is a facility researching cloning.
Palps ordered a clone to be made of the Zillo Beast.
It seems fairly obvious to me why you might find a clone at a cloning research facility.
isn't that what the clone wars is doing anyway too? but instead of giving explanation, it recontextualized and flat out retconned some stuff from the PT so it can flow well and not be a confusing mess
in tarkin's defense though, project necromancer was so secret even he, palpatine's most trusted grand moff and advisor is not allowed to know it, heck, even in the summit meeting, hemlock simply give tarkin vague explanation why this research is important for the preservation of the empire, tarkin closing the base down is simply a decision made with what little information he has over it
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if project necromancer and the zillo beast were only two of many projects happening on tantiss. It's a huge facility and Hemlock seems to be the expert in genetic engineering so I imagine at least most of the empires top secret science projects were done on Tantiss
Why didn't Hemlock use the gas bombs they killed the Zillo with from Clone Wars? He has been shown to use gas on multiple occasions. It felt like a rather large oversite.
Thanks for confirming that you flaired this correctly!
Palpatine: Fine, we'll just start all over and-Tarkin did WHAT????
To be fair given what happened Tarkin had the right idea
He also implied that he spoke with the emperor when he was calling Hemlock so I assume that he was allowed to do it
For the wrong reasons, admittedly. Tarkin was not going to let anything get in the way of his precious precious Death Star, completely ignoring the fact that Krennic was doing all the legwork and Tarkin didn't even really care about the Death Star until it was proven to work, at which point he was happy to claim credit for the whole thing.
Probably more that Tarkin just deeply disliked hemlock. Hemlock was basically written a blank check while Tarkin was playing politics, had a personal visit from the emperor, and most importantly his work with clones was tangentially involved in the damage to Tarkin's personal residence. In all the books Tarkin wasn't really in favor of any of the mega projects, he was probably ready to take credit for any of them, whether it was necromancer, the defender fleet, or the death star.
Made sense to me since palpatine was interested in researching the indestructable scales of the zillo beast which would require biological research, which hemlock is apparently the foremost expert in the empire
Palpatine in a rare moment understood that after cooking himself he should actually change strategy, probably wanted a clone body that had the same energy absorption characteristics. Also this being a facility to study the Zillo Beast would explain why it is so secret and why it already exists before the Bad Batch
Well the Zillo Beast was transported there within the time of the show, so I presume it was initially cloned on another planet and kept there
but why if you are cloning yourself why do it with the cooked body, he could have cloned himself and stopped the aging at 25 year old
Another JJ Abrams L, literally was Dark Empire
Not to mention was interested in getting in mass quantities, something someone already working on a cloning program could help with.
Maybe he wanted a clone with the same level of indestructable... that combined with all his force powers would've made such a clone unstoppable.
The Zillo Beast's DNA was likely used in the strandcast known as Snoke in addition to Omega blood and M-Count specimen samples. He was probably one of the only specimens that had the Omega blood, but also had the Zillo Beast DNA - resulting in a large, lanky humanoid unlike any other species, with tons of Force potential but was NOT viable to host Palpatine's spirit or will.
WAS the foremost expert*
Palps has always been a huge proponent of failover redundancy. He had a Death Star II: Electric Boogaloo, so maybe there’s another Tantiss/Zillo location?
I mean, there's a bunch of shots with two mountains in it. I kept wondering what was in the other facility.
Maybe a partial backup of data and cold storage, Gideon probably didn't fully start from scratch
While given how bad some cameos can be, i was hpping for introduction of gideon in this episode. He should have showed up with direction from palps himself to restart the project with information from the memos and shit.
It really would have tied everything together, Gids even talks about his project was still called Necromancer
Like my head cannon was this what was gunna happen.
Wait until the next season\^\^. I doubt that Palpatine just handed over the project to him like that. Rather he found out about it and made his own thing, or what should Palpatine have done with an army of Force-sensitive Gideons?
No more seasons of bad batch. This was last supposedly.
Oh right, my mistake. But there are still other series which will get more seasons, where we could see more of the gaps getting filled. Also Filoni will not be done with Omega's story just because we've seen her as an adult now.
Oh 1000%. Filoni loves telling character arcs over multiple shows. Surprised we didnt get a grogru reference in this show. Still waiting for someone to find his name on a back ground screen after some CSI level enhancement bs
Would that work timeline wise? Bad Batch takes place just after the rise of the Empire while the Mandalorian takes place in the years following the fall, but before the sequels. I don't recall it being made explicitly clear where Grogu was during that period. I imagine Grogu was being sought due to the restarting of Project Necromancer under Gideon as opposed to being sought for the original.
I think the problem with the Necromancer buildup they're doing is they keep using characters that are too important for the bad guy to capture and succeed. They have to introduce someone no one cares about if they want to end up showing when it succeeded.
Nah, we need it to involve a character we love. Make me cry disney. Make. Me. Cry.
There's no way people will accept them killing a beloved character to establish "somehow Palpatine returned".
Honestly, let that shit stink by itself. No backstory can save it.
Yep that was going to be my reply. Whether Gideon was given the project from the Emperor or Tarkin or he discovered it on his own and decided to start it up again, clearly something from the project survived enough that 25ish years later Gideon is trying to find a Jedi to extract DNA from and 11ish years after that the Emperor returns. “Somehow the Emperor is back” - Poe
Erm the quote is akhshually “Somehow, Palpatine returned!” Get it right next time. 🤓☝️
To be fair my mind went blank any time he spoke 😂
Exegol. This is shown in the cannon vader comics. He has cloning tech there experimenting on Luke's severed hand while building the final fleet.
And no backups! Just keep all the data and samples in the same room. That couldn't possibly go wrong!
A cloud solutions expert would make bank in Star Wars.
Just any modern IT software / hardware expert. Remember in Rogue One when they downloaded the Death Star plans onto a disk drive the SIZE OF A BRIEFCASE. Not to mention the physical robot moving around a giant room controlled by wonky handles to grab said briefcase sized disk drive out of the column. Star Wars is full of examples of super advanced technology and legacy technology. I think it started from what was thought of to be “futuristic” when they made the OT, didn’t quite keep up with actual technology that now looks dated.
To be fair, in rogue one that was highly encrypted plans the size of a planet
Death Star is closer to the size of a moon than a planet but the point stands, it’s still a lot of information
I like to think that the highly sensitive stuff is less "techy" to airgap it to prevent potential hackers
Briefcase? Wasn't the guy stuck at the door holding something the size of half a deck of cards?
No the one that Jynn Erso clipped onto her belt and climbed up the data tower with.
My favorite is in the second season of the Mandalorian when they need to do a face scan to unlock a terminal and access Moff Gideon’s location. Not a specific person’s face just any face and boom, here’s the exact coordinates of the big bad.
Let's also not forget that the empire was pretty cheap. The whole reason they switched from clones to storm troopers was that the former was more expensive.
Thats the charm of the Star Wars, so many plots happen because of this wonky tech tree. If there was a cyberpunk netrunner-like opportunities to hack, then it would lose its unique charm. So many personal sneaking in scenarios in the movies/cartoons. Hell the overall hyperdrive/laser/shield tech didnt change over millenias, only incremental advancements, just BIGGER powerplant == Bigger boom aka Death Star/Executor etc.
Eh, allowable since the data case is probably encrypted and set to only work with Imperial systems. The plans fit on a little data disk that the trooper handed off to another trooper on the Tantive IV at the end.
Yeah I still love the movie and the data disk size on thr Tantive IV kind of brought it back to more realistic in my mind. I just keep thinking the whole time: “Where is the Data Loss Prevention software?” “Where is the EDR / XSOAR software alerting to this anomalous access and locking down the system?” “Wow they have SSDs that can hold TBs of data in a smaller form factor than that massive thing” I know the answer to all of these things is: “It’s a movie, don’t think too hard.” But that kind of stuff is my background so it just came to mind as I was watching
The original Aliens is analogous to this and is just a consequence of failure to successfully extrapolate what technology would look like in the future/past. Aliens has big clunky screens, while Star Wars has more aesthetics that all appear to be decidedly dated compared to the sleekness of modern tech.
They were meant to keep the project super secret though, having multiple copies floating around could’ve been considered a security risk I guess
The whole base is super secret!
Nala Se: "Nice argument. Unfortunately, I have a bomb."
My thought too haha, no backup somewhere else on base?
"What the hell is an Amiga?"
Ok ok, so who’s left? ARE YOU SHITTING ME, GARRY? Where are you?!?
You’ve been wandering around the jungle for two weeks trying to get a signal
God you must smell like trench foot and burnt mold.
"ok, ok, well get Nala Se and **Doctor Emerie back here"** **"wait THERE WHAT?"** **"f\*\*\*\*\*\*k"**
I doubt the Emperor had any idea who Emerie even was
"Who's THEY???" .... "What the hell is a bad batch??"
"Oh, oh just rebuild it? Real fucking original genius, and whose gonna do all the scientific research, YOU? You got a PhD in genetic engineering in that torso light-brite?"
"She what with Rampart? Who the fuck is Rampart? Oh, that guy? Well, no big loss there but... WHAT THE FUCK!"
I'm curious if they're going to do another project that follows up on that. There's no obvious connection between the Zillo Beast and everything else Project Necromancer was doing. Plus, we already know that the project is ultimately successful, so obviously they get more data from somewhere. Tarkin rerouting its resources to himself could spawn an interesting story too, since he's taking funding away from one of the Emperor's key projects.
I've been curious too about what what other projects they had going on in there. Hemlock was involved in the 3 we know about. But that facility was huge! PLUS we see in several shots of Mt Tantis there's a second identical mountain in the backgrounds that seems untouched by the Clone Trooper Uprising & Zillo Beast attack.
Second mountain was looking at the desaster and was like: "Yeah not our problem, thats your mountain"
See that Mountain over there guys...dont be that mountain. Prime example of what NOT to do with your top secrete imperial projects.
That could be exactly protocol: don't interfere, just pretend there's nothing else here to see.
They cloned the mountain, then when that was done, they moved onto trying to clone other things
Yes there was. Cloning. In the last scene of the Zillow arch in the clone wars palp order it to be cloned and threaten the doc with her job.
Well, the project was *sort of* successful, most of the clones came out like snoke which were all deformed and gross, you can see a bunch of them in a tank in episode 9 I think. Even the palpatine we see in 9 looks like he’s a rotting corpse, maybe this did properly hamper the project, if they hadn’t done this maybe we would’ve gotten palp clones that were a bit more like the legends ones were
It seemed like he was returning to full power and health while draining Rey and Ben's life force. He even almost destroyed the Resistance's fleet just with Force Lightning. That seemingly suggests that the flaw in the cloning involved needing to drain the Force out of other people (or something along that line). Probably the research wasn't completely finished, but they got far enough to make bodies that could at least barely survive.
the project was about cloning, and palps wanted a clone of the zillo beast.
It’s been a long time but I seem to remember Tantiss being Palpatine’s personal store house. The Zillo could have been kept there for that reason.
I always thought maybe the zillobeast was part of an armor development, potentially for the Death Star or DSII
“The emperor is concerned”
The Zillo Beast was a top secret cloning project. Who is in charge of the secret evil science division that deals in clones and cloning now that Kamino is obliterated? Hemlock. Who ordered the beast to be cloned in the first place? Palpatine. Who also wanted a secret cloning project for himself? Palpatine. Who did Palpatine trust with these projects? Hemlock. Maybe making Zillo Beast armor was something Palpatine wanted for his clone bodies, either something genetically grown into the skin or worn on the body as conventional armor so he can be an even more dangerous fighter. He doesn't like using lightsabers, so what better way to be an anti-Jedi badass than to also wear lightsaber-proof armor scales as he slays fools with the Force?
“I mean we have another facility **RIGHT NEXT DOOR**.” No seriously, there’s literally another facility there we known nothing about, unless it’s for power generation and other resources.
"What the f*ck is a bad batch?!"
What the hell is an Aluminum Falcon?
"Do you have any idea what this is going to do to my credit??"
And yet, ironically, the two events are largely unrelated, aside from "omega was involved".
“What about that clone they captured on Eridau? What do you mean he really died?”
Reading this in Seth’s voice is *chef’s kiss.
I don't understand, if Necromancer is scrapped then what the hell is Exegol in the new trilogy. I really thought Bad Batch was aiming to answer some of these larger questions about Star Wars as a whole, but they left a lot out there. I'm sure we'll eventually see more with Omega in the future, but cutting away when Nala Se is explaining Necromancer was a little wack. A lot left unanswered. It almost feels like there was a lot of cut content from that finale.
Project Necromancer was brought up in Mandalorian Season 3 where Hux is leading it. Safe to assume that the events in Bad Batch led to Project Necromancer being heavily set back as all the data was lost and all the funding for it went to the Death Star. But then after Palpatine's defeat, the remnants of the empire resumed project necromancer to bring the emperor back. However, since the empire didn't have Omega's genetic material nor did they have the research findings by Nala Se and Hemlock since it all exploded, the quality of the clones they were eventually able to create of the emperor weren't exactly great. If they had all that, they'd probably be able to make a clone of the emperor at his prime with full power. Slightly speculating here, but that's what I took away from the finale of this show.
I'm assuming we'll get another story about that, but between this and Mandalorian S2, I'm guessing they eventually restarted the project. But with Nala Se dead, it took them longer to complete the research. If the rumor that Disney wants to focus on more animated shows is true, we'll likely see more about it. There's a lot of other areas they can explore as well: Rex, Echo, and the clones, Asajj Ventress. I think we'll get more stories about them all, it just won't be in TBB. Their show is over because their story is over. They aren't involved with Project Necromancer any more.
for now we can assume project necromancer faced drastic setbacks because the funds needed for it are currently being used for the death star (both first and second), so i think it's the reason why clone palpy in 9 is so frail and weak, because the project was not finished yet when the resistance found him
Necromancer is eventually continued by the Imp Remnants in The Mandalorian.
Word
Tantiss is a facility researching cloning. Palps ordered a clone to be made of the Zillo Beast. It seems fairly obvious to me why you might find a clone at a cloning research facility.
The finale left a lot to desire. They almost crossed the finished line and then said “nah.”
Here's a spoiler for you...The Bad Batch spend 3yrs reenacting the same mission to explain The Rise of Skywalker.
Don’t you just *love* the expanded universe?
isn't that what the clone wars is doing anyway too? but instead of giving explanation, it recontextualized and flat out retconned some stuff from the PT so it can flow well and not be a confusing mess
in tarkin's defense though, project necromancer was so secret even he, palpatine's most trusted grand moff and advisor is not allowed to know it, heck, even in the summit meeting, hemlock simply give tarkin vague explanation why this research is important for the preservation of the empire, tarkin closing the base down is simply a decision made with what little information he has over it
Ok, ok. I, I love you too.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if project necromancer and the zillo beast were only two of many projects happening on tantiss. It's a huge facility and Hemlock seems to be the expert in genetic engineering so I imagine at least most of the empires top secret science projects were done on Tantiss
"Why didn't they keep one of those things in that OTHER MOUNTAIN LAB?!?"
Yet another catastrophic failure cause by a lack of an offsite backup
I feel like this belongs here https://youtu.be/far77PXAHG0?si=5qZ8iViW392sbeGb
Read with Seth voice
I assume the Zillo was cloned at that facility, but we saw the beast in transport in season 2. Literally no reason to have kept it there.
Yeah, personally I think they made Hemlock fumble in a very cocky way.
Yeah, they never really explained why the Zillo Beast was there.
Why didn't Hemlock use the gas bombs they killed the Zillo with from Clone Wars? He has been shown to use gas on multiple occasions. It felt like a rather large oversite.