Star Wars: The Bad Batch returns with a baby Wookie in a new trailer

While Anakin Skywalker would probably hate the sandy beaches that greet viewers in the trailer for the second season of Star Wars: The Bad Batch, fans will love it. This ragtag team of Clone Troopers is up to their old tricks, and this time they have a laser bow and arrow.

But weapons aren’t the only exciting thing about the Bad Batch trailer. There’s also the return of Gungi, who we’ll go ahead and refer to as “Baby Chewie,” the Wookie padawan from The Clone Wars. Switching his lightsaber to kill, the young Wookie steals a pretty good preview of the upcoming animated Star Wars series.

The Bad Batch comes to Disney+ courtesy of Star Wars Jedi master Dave Filoni, the creative lead behind The Mandalorian and Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Filoni’s work kept Star Wars going in the dark period between the prequel and sequel trilogies, building a solid reputation for fun, rich, and complicated stories. These shows also helped bring new fans into the fold, building bridges between George Lucas’ prequels and the wider galaxy. The result has been pleasing Star Wars purists for the last 15 years.

We’ve been more mixed on The Bad Batch, though. In their season one finale recap, writer Jerrod Jones criticized the show’s reverence for the Star Wars mythos:

This finale is a mixed bag, a fitting representation of how wildly uneven the quality of this debut season has been. We’ve spoken before about the rhythms of Star Wars animation, how it gets hung up on Easter eggs and lore expansion and fan favorite cameos at the expense of the story it’s telling at any given point. In the case of The Bad Batch, by the time the final credits roll it’s clear that a planet received more closure this season than any of the show’s characters, yet at the same time it’s hard not to appreciate how reverential it all feels. You take the good with the bad.

The Bad Batch returns to Disney+ on January 4, 2023.