- Sabine: Still a bounty hunter, I see.
Ketsu: Tell me you don't miss it.
Sabine and Ezra are sent on a mission to retrieve a droid with sensitive information, only to run into a bounty hunter and former friend of Sabine's.
Tropes in this episode:
- Action Bomb: Sabine tricks the shuttle droid into driving his highly explosive ship into the Imperial cruiser.
- Are These Wires Important?: When Chopper is blown out the airlock, he takes the opportunity to land on Ketsu's ship and sabotage the weapons array, which he accomplishes by grabbing whatever he can get his claws on and tearing it out.
- The Cameo:
- R2-D2 shows up at the end to receive the courier.
- An RX-Series pilot droid (the droid model of RX-24, the Starspeeder 3000 pilot from the original Star Tours ride) is back again, having first appeared on the show in "Droids in Distress".
- Comically Missing the Point: Sabine asks Ezra for “a moment”, at the end. After a few awkward seconds, he realizes she meant for her and Ketsu.
- Conflict Killer: The Imperials twice force Sabine and Ketsu to join forces.
- Continuity Nod:
- When Chopper meets R2-D2 again at Havoc Outpost, they have an exchange of irritated beeps. The last time R2 showed up, in "Droids in Distress", he and Chopper got into a few fights.
- When Ezra mentions how he's surprised Sabine and Ketsu are suddenly getting along given they nearly shot each other, Hera mentions that when the Ghost crew first met him (back in the Pilot) he was stealing from them.
- Ketsu now works for Black Sun, first featured in The Clone Wars.
- A Day in the Limelight: One for Sabine, providing some backstory for her.
- Enemy Mine: Sabine and Ketsu have to work together against the Imperials while also fighting each other for the droid.
- Escort Mission: Hera naturally gives Sabine the lead on this rather than Ezra given the stealthy nature of the mission.
- Evil vs. Evil: A Black Sun member versus Imperial stormtroopers. In other terms, space mafia against space Nazis.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: At the beginning of the scene where Sabine and Ezra are trying to find the courier, an Aqualish passenger dressed like a backpacker can be seen among the disembarking passengers.
- Generic Graffiti: The first sign of Ketsu's presence is a tag she left on a wall, which Sabine takes notice of.
- The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: The Rebels, Ketsu, and The Empire.
- Heel–Face Turn: Though she doesn't turn all the way to the rebels, Ketsu nevertheless gives up the bounty on the droid to help Sabine, despite earlier not caring if she lived or died.
- Hidden in Plain Sight: The intel is hidden in a boxy, low-mobility power droid, as no one would expect it to house something valuable. Sabine and Ezra are there for hours until they realize this, and only because Ezra accidentally sat on it thinking it was just cargo.
- Hostage For Macguffin: Ketsu offers Chopper back in exchange for the courier droid.
- Human Shield: Ketsu uses a stormtrooper as one while fighting a squad of them.
- Info Dump: Most of the dialogue between Sabine and Ketsu is exposition about Sabine's past.
- Kirk Summation: Sabine delivers a compelling one when Talking the Monster to Death.
- Meaningful Background Event: During the scene early on where Sabine and Ezra are approaching various disembarking passengers and saying the code phrase, trying to find the courier, EG-86, the actual courier, can be seen sitting among the offloaded cargo in the background.
- Nothing Personal: Ketsu says this word-for-word regarding her attack on Sabine.
- Oh, Crap!:
- Chopper, when Ketsu tractor-beams him. He puts his manipulator arms over his "eyes" as he's being pulled in.
- The poor shuttle droid, after Sabine reactivates him in the middle of his ship being seized and about to explode.
- Out of Focus: Hera only appears at the beginning and end while Ezra quite literally falls out of the main plot-line a third of the way through.
- Shout-Out: The Imperial commander calls the droid shuttle captain "bold but foolish", not unlike another bold (and bald) but foolish captain.
- Showdown at High Noon: Twice, when Ketsu and Sabine first confront each other, then again on the docking ramp. Both are interrupted by the Imperials.
- Space Western: This episode has much more of this vibe than usual, what with the main characters being a bounty hunter and former bounty hunter, the use of Showdown at High Noon, and the lack of Force-use.
- Talking the Monster to Death: When Ketsu has Chopper, instead of attacking her former friend, Sabine chooses to appeal to Ketsu’s better nature. It works.
- Tempting Fate: After hijacking the shuttle, Sabine quips that she made an easy getaway from Ketsu. Naturally, Ketsu shows up right then.
- Thrown Out the Airlock: Chopper gets sucked into space when Ketsu shoots out the shuttle hatch.
- Too Dumb to Live: The stolen imperial shuttle shows signs of a potentially unstable reactor, yet the light cruiser's captain orders his ship in closer and pulls in the shuttle with a tractor beam. He's lucky the ensuing explosion didn't end his entire crew.
- True Companions: Ketsu and Sabine used to be this, Ketsu even referring to her as "little sister". By the end of the episode they've managed to repair their relationship somewhat.
- Trust Password: The courier will respond to the code phrase "It's a long way to Alderaan." Played for Laughs as we get a Failure Montage of Sabine and Ezra trying it on every passenger they can find, while completely overlooking the actual courier, an unassuming power droid.
- We Used to Be Friends: Sabine and Ketsu’s dynamic of this forms the drama for most of the episode.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: While Sabine is protective of Chopper and the power droid, she doesn't think twice about engineering the death of the innocent shuttle captain droid as a diversion.
- You Wouldn't Shoot Me: Played with. Sabine's exact words to Ketsu are "I don't believe you can do it", and later, more firmly, "You can't do it". Ketsu assumes that this is what Sabine means, but Sabine is actually being literal: Ketsu physically cannot shoot her, because Chopper has just sabotaged her weapons array.
