When Does 'The Bad Batch' Take Place In The 'Star Wars' Timeline?

If Disney+'s new animated Star Wars show The Bad Batch has caught your interest, you might be wondering when exactly it takes place in the official Star Wars timeline. Between Republics, Empires, First Orders, ABYs, BBYs, it can all be a little hard to parse, especially if you haven't been keeping up with all the other shows out there hard at work expanding this universe. But there's good news and good news: The good news is we're here for you, and the other good news is it's actually pretty easy to figure out when the events of The Bad Batch happen relative to all the rest. It all starts with one very famous phrase.

If you watched Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the animated series that takes place between Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (and then catches up with the end of Sith in its later seasons), you've met the titular Bad Batch, Clone Force 99, who have appeared as a unit a few times over the course of the series. Hunter, Tech, Crosshair, Wrecker, and Echo are clones who have been extensively genetically modified, giving them strength and smarts that makes them different from your average trooper. The Bad Batch was conceived from an idea that George Lucas had of making a Dirty Dozen story in the Star Wars universe, but featuring clones instead of regular humans.

After a few appearances in The Clone Wars, Clone Force 99 finally gets their own outing in The Bad Batch, which begins on a crucial day for the galaxy. While carrying out their fighting orders on the planet Kaller, all the clone troopers get the command to "Execute Order 66." If you've seen Revenge of the Sith, you know exactly where this is going. Automatically, every clone trooper near a Jedi knight turns on them, nearly wiping out every Jedi from the galaxy aside from a few who managed to escape. Clone Force 99, however, sense that something shifty is going on, and allow a Jedi padawan, Caleb Dume (a name that should be familiar to anyone who watched Star Wars Rebels), to escape into the wilderness. Apparently, their heavily genetically modified bodies and minds aren't as susceptible to taking commands as every other clone trooper out there, allowing them to rebel against the behavioral protocols embedded in their brains.

The fact that The Bad Batch starts with Order 66 means that it takes place synchronous with the end of The Clone Wars, and right at the end of Revenge of the Sith, around the year 19 BBY (that's Before the Battle of Yavin, the battle at the end of A New Hope in which the Rebels were victorious against the Empire). This sets The Bad Batch firmly between the end of the prequel trilogy and the beginning of the original movie trilogy, in the period of dark years where the Empire was at peak strength and the Rebels were a collection of refugees fleeing the Sith's clone soldiers.