Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 3 trailer confirms the return of a fan-favorite Clone Wars villain after 11 years

Star Wars: The Bad Batch
(Image credit: Disney)

A new trailer for Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 3 is here, and it confirms the return of fan-favorite villain Asajj Ventress nearly 11 years after her final appearance in The Clone Wars.

The Bad Batch season 3, which is set to be the series' final season, will begin streaming via Disney+ on February 21 with a three episode premiere. The season will consist of 15 episodes in total, concluding on May 1. The series will once again focus on Clone Force 99, a group of former soldiers in the Republic army who make their own path as the Empire takes over the galaxy.

The new trailer, which you can see below, previews plenty of Clone Force 99's planet-hopping adventures, but it's the stinger at the end that'll catch the eyes of longtime Star Wars fans. Asajj Ventress appears at the end, wielding a yellow lightsaber and seeming ready to attack the show's protagonists.

Ventress was originally created for the 2003 2D animated Clone Wars series directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, and was later adapted into the 3D animated series which began in 2008. She quickly became a fan-favorite villain, eventually transforming to something of a hero before her final appearance in the season 5 finale of The Clone Wars. That was Ventress's last on-screen appearance, but she's shown up elsewhere in Star Wars canon - including the 2015 novel Dark Disciple, where she pretty definitively died.

"We love Asajj Ventress. She’s a character that we’ve been wanting to tell more stories about," supervising director and executive producer Brad Rau says on StarWars.com. He adds that "we don't want to spoil anything, but want fans to know that any new storytelling with Ventress will align with the events of Star Wars: Dark Disciple."

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Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.