As an action-heavy episode, though, “Unfinished Business” fulfills the promise of the Clone Wars in a fun and straightforward way. This is a classic adventure story, told a little more seriously than other parts of the show. It lands somewhere in the middle when it comes to the wildly swinging tone of The Clone Wars overall. Republic bomber starships dive toward the assembly plant in beautiful and deadly trajectories. Clones compete to see who can take out the most droids, and the sniper’s clever technology is a highlight. The villain laughs (not as much of a supervillain cackle as it could have been) and moves exactly like the spider his alien species is modeled after.
The Bad Batch themselves continue to be the silliest part of these episodes. I’m thoroughly tired of Wrecker’s childish enthusiasm for blowing things up, although he certainly seems to have been embraced in the wider fandom.
Instead of Echo’s potential betrayal becoming a larger plot point, the ticking clock is an actual ticking bomb, which gives the latter half of the episode a sense of urgency strangely disconnected from the emotional arc of the characters. Again, this is par for the course for The Clone Wars, so I’m of two minds on whether to just give it a pass.
Echo and Rex continue to be the heart of the episode. Rex’s tender gestures when Echo is wounded provided lots of pathos. Free from the Separatist machine, Echo now looks ashen, his head studded with metal access ports. It’s very cool, and I almost wish he had kept some of his more obvious cyborg parts. It’s pretty hard to hide the missing forearm, so that stays too. I love a little bit of body horror in my Star Wars.
At first, Dee Bradley Baker differentiates Echo’s voice from that of the other clones by making him sound flat and mechanical, but the effect quickly goes away. I wish it had stayed. As always, it’s impressive that Baker can make what is essentially the same voice sound like so many different characters. (Even if, as my Blaster Canon co-host Saf points out, his New Zealander accent isn’t convincing.)
