You must trust in others or success is impossible.
After escaping Pons Ora in a cargo shuttle, the D-Squad heads for the Jedi Cruiser they saw in orbit, but upon landing discover that the ship seems to be devoid of personnel. After the ship jumps to hyperspace, they discover otherwise: it's packed to the rafters with Abafar's highly volatile rhydonium fuel. An encounter with a few surviving Republic droids reveals that the Separatists hijacked the ship and plan to ram it into the Republic strategy conference at Carida.
It's up to D-Squad to stop the Separatists' plot before it's too late.
Tropes:
- Assassination Attempt: The Separatists try to kill high ranking generals and Jedi with a Ventor-class Star Destroyer loaded with lots of rhydonium at Carida's Republic strategy conference, such as Tarkin and Anakin, though it thankfully fails.
- Bait-and-Switch: After arriving aboard a seemingly empty cruiser, Gascon and company rightfully assume something is off, but then dismiss it when they see the bridge and its crew of clones. And then that's when they discover they're holograms and get jumped by the Separatists.
- Call-Back: R2 is once again blown up in a spaceship, though unlike last time, Anakin's not taking any chances, given what he went through with R3.
- Disney Death: R2 gets blown up when he prematurely detonates the rhydonium on the hijacked cruiser so it won't destroy the space station the conference is held on. He gets badly damaged, but his body and memory core are still intact, and he's fully repaired by the end.
- Due to the Dead: Gascon eulogizes BZ after he gets Thrown Out the Airlock with the Buzz Droids.Gascon: When this D-Squad started our mission, I had doubts. Grave doubts that we would ever survive, let alone succeed. But we worked together. We didn't give up hope. We showed courage in the face of death. It shocks me to say this, but we make an excellent team. Now we've lost one of our members...BZ. But we must remember. BZ sacrificed himself for us. That's what a good soldier does sometimes. The only way to honor that sacrifice is to stop this ship and prevent the Separatists from taking any more Republic lives. Are you with me?
- Foregone Conclusion: Anakin, Obi-Wan, Neyo, and Tarkin are among the people present at the conference and you know they're not going to die. Neither is R2, for that matter.
- Forgotten Fallen Friend: Despite the way the previous episode ended, the D-Squad seems to have forgotten all about Gregor, with no mention made of him or what he did that results in a somewhat jarring tone-shift if watching the two episodes back-to-back.
- Heroic Sacrifice:
- BZ blows himself and a massive amount of buzz droids off the ship while it's in hyperspace, getting disintegrated.
- R2 stays onboard the cruiser to stop the detonation, and ends up setting the detonator off early. Of course, he is intact enough to get fully repaired.
- Hope Spot: On arriving on the cruiser, Gascon and company believe that their mission is over, with the former even going so far as to say that he intends on getting a one-on-one meeting with the ship's captain and that he'll arrange for a welcome-home feast in their honor. Then they go up to the bridge and he begins talking to a clone officer, going so far as to hand him the encryption module...and that's when he discovers it's a hologram, and the others get attacked by battle droids.
- Made of Iron: R2 survives what is basically the Star Wars equivalent of a nuclear bomb going off at point-blank range.
- Noodle Incident: Exactly how the Separatists captured a Venator-class Star Destroyer intact is left unknown.
- Oh, Crap!:
- D-Squad has this when they realize that the Star Destroyer is under the control of the Separatists.
- Colonel Gascon, when he discovers that the Jedi Cruiser is full of rhydonium, meaning that the ship is a flying bomb.
- The Super Tactical Droid in charge of the bomb operation has a more subdued one when, after he tells R2 that the detonator can't be switched off, R2 simply accelerates the sequence so the ship will blow too early.
- P.O.V. Cam: The moment of the cruiser exploding is seen through the first-person perspective of a clone trooper on the station's bridge.
- Shout-Out: During their attempt to stop D-Squad from escaping the Venator-class Star Destroyer, a B1-Security Battle Droid tells another to stop or it'll blow up the rhydonium, similar to General Ourumov.
- Special Edition Title: Just like the other episodes of the D-Squad arc, the intertitle at the beginning is pale blue instead of yellow.
- Stuff Blowing Up: The explosion of the hijacked cruiser is very colourful and rather visually appealing.
- Tempting Fate: Anakin claims that strategy conferences are boring. The conference gets bombed about thirty seconds later.
- This Is Gonna Suck: At the end of the episode, Gascon admits that the droids make a good team, that he was proud to lead them, and would be happy to do so again anytime, anywhere. WAC then reveals that he'll get plenty of chances, since they've all been assigned to the same platoon together for the rest of the war. To say Gascon's smile after this is strained is an understatement.
- Thrown Out the Airlock: BZ spaces himself with a huge amount of buzz droids while the ship is in hyperspace to save the others.
- The X of Y: "Point of No Return".
- Too Dumb to Live: Averted by the B1-Security Droids during their chase of D-Squad. When one fires a shot at them to prevent their escape, another warns that same Battle Droid that it'll hit the rhydonium.B1-Security Droid: Careful, you'll hit the rhydonium.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: The encryption module was the whole point of D-Squad's original mission, but after numerous moments where it changed hands or seemed in danger of being lost, it disappears from the plot thanks to needing to focus on stopping the cruiser from crashing into the Republic conference. While Gascon presumbably delivers it to the Jedi offscreen, it is never revealed if it gets used, or what the coded message it was meant for contained. Although it is possible the big, hidden mission in question was, in fact, the bomb-cruiser plot.
