Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 1, episode 10, “Common Ground,” avoided repeating a particularly dark storyline from Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Former Separatist Senator Avi Singh speaks out against the Galactic Empire on the once-Separatist capital world of Raxus and is taken into Imperial custody as a result. This is all too similar to the story of Mina Bonteri, a Separatist Senator from Onderon who was killed by Count Dooku’s agents when she threatened the Sith Order’s plans for the Clone Wars. Avi Singh is, ironically, rescued from a similar fate by a team of clone commandos, now working as mercenaries to survive as fugitives of the Empire.

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Mina Bonteri, first introduced in The Clone Wars episode “Heroes on Both Sides,” was a friend and mentor to Padmé Amidala, and their friendship continued even after Bonteri joined the Separatist movement and became an enemy of the Republic. Bonteri was unaware that the Separatist Alliance was secretly far more corrupt than the Republic and, like the Republic, controlled by Darth Sidious. Nevertheless, she and Padmé attempted to broker a peace initiative between the Republic and Separatists, and her proposal was approved by the Separatist Parliament on Raxus. Unfortunately, Count Dooku needed the Clone Wars to continue for his master to eventually convert the Republic into an autocracy, so his agents attacked Coruscant’s power grid, ending any chance of peace. Dooku also had Bonteri assassinated, staging her death to appear as the result of a Republic attack.

Bonteri’s threat to a Sith-controlled regime and subsequent assassination mirrors senator Singh’s arrest in The Bad Batch. The Separatists had lost the Clone Wars by this point and the Republic was now Star Wars‘ totalitarian Galactic Empire. Separatist assets were absorbed by the Empire, including their former capital planet of Raxus. Senator Singh was coerced by the Empire to publicly embrace the new regime, but he criticized them instead. Before he could be tortured (and presumably killed), the Bad Batch clones rescued him, saving him from a similar fate to Mina Bonteri. Though a former Separatist, Singh was demonstrably a good man who cared about his people more than anything else, not unlike Bonteri. In his gruesome fate being averted, The Bad Batch avoided a repeat of Bonteri’s particularly grim fate in The Clone Wars.

The political pageantry, coercion, and extrajudicial executions that the Empire perpetrates are common to totalitarian regimes in both real life and the Star Wars franchise. While the Separatists were essential to Sidious’ long-term coup, they remained useful to the Empire well after the Clone Wars, as they helped taint the image of the burgeoning Rebel Alliance, with many Imperials and Imperial citizens dismissing the Rebels as a resurgence of the Separatist movement. The Empire’s treatment of ideological Separatists became far grimmer in the years leading up to the original trilogy. As shown in Star Wars Rebels, Imperial military forces eschewed pretense and simply executed Separatists on sight, not attempting to hide their brutality.

The Separatists and the Republic were ultimately pawns of Darth Sidious, and though their ideologies were incompatible, their true enemy was the Galactic Empire. This commonality was highlighted in The Clone Wars, but only truly united Republic and Separatist loyalists in The Bad Batch, and Rebels, where the former combatants unite against Imperial forces. While the Separatist ideology was ultimately harmful to its citizens, senators like Mina Bonteri and Avi Singh believed it was the best way to protect their people, proving that the Clone Wars weren’t so black and white. Mina Bonteri’s story ended on a dark and tragic note in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, but Clone Force 99 helped Avi Singh avoid the same fate in Star Wars: The Bad Batch.

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David Miller
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David Miller is a staff writer for Screen Rant, indie comic writer, and life-long lover of all things Star Wars, Marvel, and DC. He was born and raised in New York and has a degree in English from Rider University. He relates to Peter Parker maybe a little too much.

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