WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Bad Batch Episode 7, "Battle Scars," streaming now on Disney+.
Star Wars: The Bad Batch, Season 1, Episode 7, “Battle Scars” features another in what is becoming a regular line-up of creature cameos. The latest goes all the way back to the original Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, when monsters were rare, and the universe had just begun to be fleshed out. That gives it a few unique reasons to evoke nostalgia in older viewers.
The monster is a dianoga, otherwise known as the “trash compactor monster.” It lived in the original Death Star and tried to eat Luke just before A New Hope’s classic closing-walls peril. It was a product of a limited budget and some old-fashioned filmmaking, but help from an ancillary product turned it into something special.
The Bad Batch encounters the creature in a similar setting: on the junkheap planet of Bracca searching for a way to remove their inhibitor chips. The scene actually echoes a similar one from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring when the Watcher in the Water attacks at the door to the Mines of Moria. The original dianoga took some inspiration from Tolkien’s work as a tentacled creature, invisible from the surface, who can attack without warning and pull victims beneath the water. One of the dianoga stalks and attacks Wrecker in The Bad Batch episode, pulling him under in homage to Luke’s death roll with the first monster.
In A New Hope, the dianoga was a bit of smoke and mirrors. The movie’s budget was limited, and no one knew that a pop-culture juggernaut was about to be born. George Lucas could infer a much larger monster by using puppets for the creature’s eye and tendril. Mark Hamill sold the creature’s strength with his performance, and it added a fun wrinkle to the scene’s serial-inspired death trap. It was the first appearance of a living monster in the saga, and its hidden nature fired the imagination.
The full creature never appeared onscreen before The Bad Batch. Still, Star Wars was more than happy to fill in the blanks with less expensive ancillary products. Most notably, Kenner’s line of toys featured the dianoga as part of its Death Star Space Station playset in 1978. That made it the first “monster” (as opposed to a humanoid action figure) in the Kenner line, and therefore the first Star Wars monster to receive its own toy. It was small and green -- it had to fit in the set’s comparatively tiny trash compactor -- but the comparative lack of additional Star Wars content made it stand out. Unfortunately, the Death Star set wasn’t reproduced after the initial Kenner run. Today, the dianoga toy is considered a collector’s item.
The Bad Batch doesn’t have the same budgetary restrictions for obvious reasons, and with the Kenner toy a non-factor in the design, it could visualize the dianoga in properly epic terms. The monster that grabs Wrecker is many times larger than the creature inferred by the trash compactor and constitutes a much larger threat.
It’s also an indicator of the kind of world-building The Bad Batch intends to do by looking for existing monsters they can flesh out rather than constantly inventing new ones. The dianoga hasn’t appeared much in Star Wars, and yet its prominence as the series' first monster gives it a high standing among fans. Like the Rancor and Nexu -- both of which have made previous appearances in The Bad Batch -- it’s a way to bring younger viewers up to speed while reminding older ones about corners of the universe they may have forgotten. It’s a winning strategy that gives “Battle Scars” one of its better moments.
Created by Dave Filoni, Star Wars: The Bad Batch stars Dee Bradley Baker, Michelle Ang, Andrew Kishino and Ming-Na Wen. The new episodes air Fridays on Disney+.