Sometimes even the smallest doubt can shake the greatest belief.
Anakin and Ahsoka are abruptly called back to the Jedi Temple from the fighting on Cato Neimoidia because someone bombed the Jedi Temple hangar, and the Jedi Council want investigators who definitely couldn't have been involved.
Tropes:
- Captain Crash: Chronologically, the Eta-2-Actis Jedi fighters appear in this episode for the first time in the Star Wars canon. Anakin manages to crash his within the first five minutes.
- Call-Forward:
- Anakin's starfighter gets attacked by Buzz Droids, forcing Ahsoka to come to his rescue, mirroring how he will chronologically have an identical situation with Obi-Wan in Revenge of the Sith, albeit with the roles reversed.
- For bonus points, R2 tangles with a Buzz Droid, as he did in the theatrical movie. Rather than bust out his head-mounted spark projector and kill it with Shock and Awe, he instead opts to crush it with the Eta-2's retracting fins.
- Continuity Nod: When Ahsoka refuses to entertain the possibility that a Jedi could be behind the bombing, Anakin brings up Count Dooku and Pong Krell as examples of fallen Jedi who had violently turned against their former allies.
- Effortless Amazonian Lift: After Anakin is knocked out while piloting his starfighter and R2 has to make a crash-landing on a too-short cliff, Ahsoka leaps over to his fighter, hoists him from it, and jumps back to the cliff moments after the starfighter goes barreling off. This is especially impressive considering that she could barely lift him back in "Jedi Crash".
- Foregone Conclusion: R2-D2 is still in Anakin's crashed fighter when it careens over a cliff edge, plummets thousands of feet, and explodes. It shouldn't be any surprise at all when he's revealed to have escaped in time.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus:
- Paying attention when Anakin's ship gets hit with Buzz Droids will reveal that a substantial number of them either latched onto the ventral side or maneuvered there while the others went topside, explaining exactly why his ship promptly breaks down after he thinks he's gotten rid of the problem.
- As Anakin brings Jackar's wife into interrogation, you see another Jedi walking down the hall. Barriss Offee.
- Futureshadowing: At multiple points in the episode, Ahsoka expresses doubt at the possibility of a Jedi being so far gone as to attack the Jedi Temple, only for Anakin to assure her that it's perfectly possible. Come Revenge of the Sith, Anakin's first act as Darth Vader is to do exactly that.
- Grievous Harm with a Body: Letta creates an opening to escape by grabbing a random passerby and throwing them at Ahsoka, knocking both to the ground.
- I Never Said It Was Poison: When ensnaring Letta with her own words, Anakin points out that no one said to her that Jackar was dead — and he's right. What Ahsoka said was, "Someone made Jackar the bomb." Unless you were tipped off that the nanodroids were in Jackar's bloodstream, that phrase would ordinarily mean that someone created a bomb for Jackar.
- Interspecies Romance: Letta, a human, was married to Jackar, an Abyssin
. Although, given what she did to him, it's unclear whether she really loved him or not. - Jedi Mind Trick: Anakin uses one (or is strongly implied to use one) to force Letta to finally tell the truth about her involvement in the bombing.
- Mundane Utility:
- When he gets jumped by a Buzz Droid bent on sawing his head off, R2 exploits the retractable fins on the Eta-2 to simply squish it flat.
- Anakin uses the Force to fling the Buzz Droids attacking his ship away from it. He fails to account for the ones on the bottom of the ship, which nearly gets him killed.
- Nanomachines: The bombing of the Jedi Temple hangar was committed using highly volatile nanodroids.
- Nonchalant Dodge: This backfires on Anakin at the beginning when a droid fighter fires a missile at them. While Ahsoka rolls her starfighter away, Anakin just tips his wing to let the missile fly past... which gets his starfighter covered by the missile's payload of buzz droids.
- Not Enough to Bury: All that's left of Jackar is his hand.
- Oh, Crap!: Ahsoka has this when she realizes that the bottom of Anakin's fighter is completely covered in Buzz Droids. In turn, one of the Buzz Droids has this when it realizes R2's strategy to get rid of them involves crashing the ship.
- Screams Like a Little Girl: A random Buzz Droid freaks out in the millisecond before R2 deliberately crashes Anakin's fighter into the ground.
- Shout-Out:
- The episode's title is a reference to Alfred Hitchcock's movie of the same title from 1936.
- Russo-ISC, the crime scene analysis droid is one to Horatio Caine from CSI: Miami. The droid's habit of flipping up and down his goggles are a parody of Caine's memetic habit of constantly putting on his Cool Shades whenever delivering a one-liner at the end of each episode's opening scene. ISC is CSI spelled backwards, while "Russo" is presumably a nod to Caine's actor, David Caruso.
- Tempting Fate: Anakin dodges an oncoming missile and declares that he's fine. Five seconds after that, a swarm of Buzz Droids latch onto his ship, tear it apart from the inside and knock him unconscious.
- Why Am I Ticking?: Post-explosion example. Jackar had millions of the aforementioned nanodroids in his bloodstream and had no idea.
