Fans of Star Wars' animated productions, rejoice. Why? Well, thanks to a new leak, we have a clearer idea of when The Bad Batch will return to our screens.
We already knew that The Bad Batch season 2 was on the way, with Disney confirming as much in 2021. But according to a leaked page of the upcoming issue of Star Wars Insider magazine (as posted to Reddit ), new episodes of The Clone Wars spin-off will arrive on Disney Plus in Spring 2022.
That’s sometime between March and June, for our readers in the Southern Hemisphere, and means it won't be long before we're reunited with Hunter and company.
Disney hasn’t yet officially confirmed the release window. However, given that season 1 kicked off on May 4 (aka Star Wars Day) last year, we’d wager that new episodes are likely to appear on, or at least around, the same date in 2022.
Incidentally, May 4 also falls on a Wednesday this year. With Marvel TV shows including Loki , What If…? and Hawkeye premiering midweek in recent times on Disney's streaming platform, we wouldn't be surprised if The Bad Batch season 2 follows suit.
The first season of The Bad Batch was welcomed by Star Wars devotees. It maintained The Clone Wars' popular animation style and explored, in more detail, the rise of the Empire following the events of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.
As for what ground season 2 will cover, we expect to see the world around the show’s main characters Hunter, Tech, Wrecker, Echo and Crosshair changing in light of season 1’s dramatic finale (check out our hub for a more detailed, spoiler-filled rundown).
Further plot details are scarce at this stage, but we do know Dee Bradley Baker and Michelle Ang will be reprising their roles as the Clones and Omega, respectively.
Our main – and, really, only – criticism of The Bad Batch’s debut outing was its struggle to justify its existence , a consequence of the show’s reliance on characters who were otherwise supporting cast members in original episodes of The Clone Wars.
But, with 16 episodes now under the belt of the titular task force, we’re heading into season 2 with a greater understanding of who these characters are – and their role in the wider Star Wars universe – which should make for some even more engrossing television.
It’s Star Wars season, baby
2022 is bringing plenty more Star Wars content to Disney Plus, too.
While new episodes of The Book of Boba Fett continue to drop weekly, fans of a galaxy far, far away will also be treated to Obi-Wan Kenobi and Rogue One prequel Andor at some point later in the year.
With no concrete release dates set for either as yet, it's entirely possible that Disney and Lucasfilm may decide to release Obi-Wan or Andor around Star Wars Day. After all, fans are becoming increasingly frustrated over a lack of news on both shows, so it would be in Disney's best interests to reveal more soon.
Even so, it’s more likely that they’ll arrive after the Spring 2022 window set for The Bad Batch season 2. Regardless of which project does launch first, though, Disney Plus-subscribing Star Wars fans have plenty to look forward to in the not-so-distant future.
How to watch Ozark season 4, part 1: first seven episodes now available
Ozark season 4 has arrived on TV screens all over the world and it's ready to binge in full – well, at least Part 1. Those first seven episodes are available on Netflix wherever you are. Here are all the details on how to watch Ozark season 4 as this superb show enters its final run.
Ozark season 4 will be the final season of the hit TV show. This super-sized last run consists of 14 episodes split into two parts of seven. The first seven – Ozark season 4 part 1 – streams exclusively on Netflix from today. Ozark season 4 part 2 will drop later in 2022.
If you've not seen the show before, then where have you been? It's one of the very best on Netflix. Ozark is available to watch in 4K HDR (you'll need the Netflix Premium subscription) and follows the story of the seemingly regular Byrde family who find themselves hurriedly relocating from their big city life in Chicago to the backwater country of the Ozarks at the tip of the US South – and all in the space of the first few moments of episode 1.
Headed by dad Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) and mom Wendy Byrde (Laura Linney), the family seek a quiet and safe life while navigating their way through a fiendishly treacherous existence caught between local Missouri criminals, international drug cartels and the eyes of the US law agencies.
How's that for as few spoilers as possible? Here's how and when to watch Ozark season 4 on Netflix wherever you are.
How to watch Ozark season 4 online
How to watch Ozark season 4 and everything on Netflix from anywhere
Ozark season 4 is a Netflix original and will be available to watch on the service in all of the 190 countries where Netflix is available.
Netflix libraries are not the same in all regions, though, and when travelling abroad you may find that your favorite show is not available because the service will match-up with what's on offer in your current location rather than what you normally get a home. You can get around this by using a good VPN.
A VPN is a handy piece of software which changes your IP address to match any location you choose and make streaming services like Netflix provide you with whatever TV shows and films you need.
You can use a VPN to watch your favourite Netflix shows from anywhere
Ozark season 4, part 1 release times
Ozark season 4, part 1 dropped on Netflix on Friday, January 21. All seven episodes arrived for streaming at exactly the same moment and that meant it was available at different times depending on your time zone. Here is how Netflix timed it:
What’s on the James Webb Space Telescope’s ‘to do’ list?
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is about to reach its new home.
The most advanced space observatory ever constructed, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will reach Earth's second Lagrange point (L2) at 2:00PM EST on Monday, January 24, 2022. It’s a special place in space a million miles behind Earth from where it can keep the Sun, Earth and Moon behind it as it looks deep into the cosmos like never before.
Then what?
Webb is not due to start science operations until later this year, probably around May or June 2022 when the 18 gold-covered beryllium segments of its iconic 21.5-foot/6.5-meter mirror have been aligned and its optical system calibrated.
Specializing in detecting the oldest light in the Universe–the infrared part of the spectrum–we know Webb will photograph the first galaxies, explore the mysteries of the origins of the Universe and directly image exoplanets, but what’s actually on its official to-do list?
From a long-list of over 1,100 projects from 44 countries, here are some of the most intriguing projects already allotted time–8,760 hours in total–on Cycle 1 , Webb’s first year of planned observations.
Look for the ‘cosmic dawn’
The first and biggest project in Webb’s first year will be COSMOS-Webb, a program to map the earliest galaxies in the universe – the so-called ‘cosmic dawn.
This is likely to produce data used by scientists for decades. Its NIRCam instrument will point at the same reference area of the night sky as previously imaged by Hubble, but this time should reveal half-a-million as-yet-unseen galaxies in the near-infrared as well as 32,000 galaxies in the mid-infrared.
“Because we’re covering such a large area, we can look at large-scale structures at the dawn of galaxy formation,” said Caitlin Casey, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and co-leader of the COSMOS-Webb program. “We will also look for some of the rarest galaxies that existed early on, as well as map the large-scale dark matter distribution of galaxies out to very early times.”
COSMOS-Webb is part of the Webb Treasury program, which are datasets that are considered to be so important that they will be made publicly available in perpetuity.
See if the TRAPPIST-1 System contains an Earth 2.0
Webb will soon make the first detailed near-infrared study of the atmosphere of a habitable-zone planet.
About 41 light years from Earth, in the constellation of Aquarius, TRAPPIST-1 is a small red dwarf star with seven Earth-sized planets around it – the most we know of so far. Three exoplanets were found around TRAPPIST-1 in 2016 by the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile, then more by NASA’s now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope.
Now it’s Webb’s turn to tell us something we don’t know about these possibly Earth-like planets – in particular TRAPPIST-1c, which is thought to be rocky and Venus-like.
In Webb’s first year it will produce data for Hot Take on a Cool World: Does Trappist-1c Have an Atmosphere? and Probing the Terrestrial Planet TRAPPIST-1c for the Presence of an Atmosphere .
Another project, Atmospheric reconnaissance of the TRAPPIST-1 planets , will confirm if the planets have atmospheres.
Unravel the mysteries of star formation
How do stars and star clusters form? You might think astronomers should know that by now, but much of the universe is obscured by gas and dust.
Cue Webb, which will be able to see through all that thanks to its infrared sensitivity. So in another of the Webb Treasury studies, an international research team will survey the stars, star clusters, and dust that lie within 19 nearby galaxies.
It’s called the PHANGS (Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS) Survey and it brings together over 100 international experts to study star formation from beginning to end.
“Webb will reveal star formation at its very earliest stages, right when gas collapses to form stars and heats up the surrounding dust,” said Janice Lee, Gemini Observatory chief scientist at the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona.
It should create revolutionary data and spur major scientific advances, according to the scientists.
Reveal the moons of Uranus
Save for a brief flyby in 1986 by NASA’s Voyager 2 probe, the seventh planet from the Sun is virtually unexplored, and its 27 moons even less so.
That's where The Moons of Uranus: A NIRSpec Investigation of Their Origins, Organic Constituents, and Possible Ocean World Activity comes in, a project that will use 21 hours of Webb’s time to study Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon.
These four largest moons will be examined for traces of ammonia, organic molecules, carbon dioxide ice, and water to see if they do, as theorized by some, host underground oceans.
It’s hoped that the dataset might be used to help plan future spacecraft missions to explore Uranus and its moons, such as this exciting new flagship mission currently being discussed by NASA.
Weigh a supermassive black hole
Astronomers have found a supermassive hole weighing about 40 million times as much as our Sun in a nearby spiral galaxy called NGC 4151.
In an effort to work out exactly how a supermassive hole (which are present in all galaxies) ‘feeds’ and affects the surrounding galaxy, a team led by the University of Memphis wants to use Webb to determine its mass.
In AGN Feeding and Feedback in NGC 4151 Webb will be used to measure the motions of stars in the galaxy’s core, since the faster nearby stars will move the heavier the black hole must be because its gravitational influence is increased.
How Webb will make its discoveries
To understand why Webb is unique and how it will make its discoveries, it helps to know exactly what scientific instruments are on board:
MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument): a camera and a spectrograph that sees light in the mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Primarily for better-than-Hubble wide-field astrophotography images.
NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera): to detect light from the earliest stars and galaxies. It has a coronagraph so it can block a star’s light, which helps in the search for planets orbiting nearby stars.
NIRISS (Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph): for ‘first light’ detection of the first stars, and for detecting exoplanets as they cross their star.
NIRSpec (Near InfraRed Spectrograph): a spectrometer to disperse light from an object into a spectrum. This instrument can observe 100 objects simultaneously.