"Rule number two, build your exit on your way in."
"Gets to you, doesn't it? That's what a reckoning sounds like. You want it to stop, but it just keeps coming. It's when it stops, that's when you’ll really want to start to fret."
— Maarva
Cassian meets his buyer, a mysterious man named Luthen Rael. Luthen is more interested in Cassian than the Starpath Unit and attempts to recruit him to the nascent Rebellion. However, the deal is interrupted by the arrival of Mosk and Karn's men, who surround the warehouse. The Pre-Mor men have also cornered Maarva and Bix, and killed Timm. Luthen and Cassian escape on a speeder to Luthen's waiting ship, while Mosk and Karn's effort is deemed a failure.
Tropes:
- Bad Cop/Incompetent Cop: Mosk's corporate security squadron soon turns out to be not nearly as tough and competent as they think they are: they get lost, fail to keep in contact, and succeed only in pushing around an old woman and killing an unarmed man. Karn himself gets held at gunpoint by Cassian and Luthen and spills their exact numbers and composition to them the moment they threaten to shoot. The realization that they're utterly out of their depth lasts the entire episode.
- Bavarian Fire Drill: When Luthen asks Cassian how he got his hands on the box, Cassian answers that he just walked in like he belongs, then goes onto say that the Imperials have gotten so complacent that they can't imagine someone like him just entering their homes and taking their stuff.
- Bittersweet Ending: In any other Star Wars story, Cassian and Luthen's escape would end with the heroes celebrating, but nobody's doing much of that here. Bix has lost her boyfriend, whom she still loves even though he screwed over her friend and brought the cops onto the town; Maarva is left crying in her son's ransacked bedroom, not knowing if she'll ever see him again; Karn's ambitions just literally blew up in his face in the worst way possible and he's gotten several of his own men killed; and Cassian is getting uprooted from his home once again.
- Break the Haughty: Mosk and Karn's nerves and smug attitudes fail them throughout the episode, Karn in particular.
- Break Them by Talking: Maarva doesn't attack the two Pre-Mor cops holding her at gunpoint, she simply sits in her chair and calmly discusses the tolling bells outside, warning them that when the sound stops "you may want to fret". Sure enough, when the bells stop, the two cops run from her house to regroup with the rest of the team.
- Call-Forward: The climactic shootout of the episode involves Luthen (through his preparations) and Cassian overwhelming and throwing off the Pre-Mor men—to the extent that Mosk think's they're surrounded by enemies more than their two targets. This kind of thinking will be Cassian's rallying cry during the Scarif assault.Cassian: Make ten men feel like a hundred.
- Compromising Call: Cassian attempts to call his mother's droid, B2, to leave her a farewell message, right when the Pre-Mor men are searching her house for him. It doesn't get Maarva or B2 into any more trouble than they were already in, but it results in the Pre-Mor men figuring out where Cassian is and coming after him.
- Epic Fail: Not only did Karn fail to arrest Cassian, he got himself captured, their transport destroyed, and almost a dozen of his troops killed, all in an attempt to investigate the deaths of two Corpos his boss told him to ignore. It’s the end of his career, the end of his boss’s career, and the end of their company’s reputation with the Empire.
- Fakeout Escape: Karn's team see a speeder taking off and believe Cassian and Luthen are in it. They discover that it is empty and rigged with explosives, and the blast kills several of their men. While they're distracted and unable to regroup, their targets zoom away on another speeder.
- Foreshadowing: In his recruitment speech to Cassian, Luthen describes the Empire's oppression as "that voice telling you to stop, to go, to move". Cassian will encounter a particularly literal manifestation of this oppression later in the season.
- The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: Karn is waiting to ambush Cassian when he gets a *Click* Hello from Cassian, who's snuck up behind him. Things quickly go From Bad to Worse when the dropship is sabotaged and the speeder they think their targets are escaping in is actually booby-trapped.
- I Never Said It Was Poison: When Paak comes to warn Bix that someone's tipped off the cops and they've come for Cassian, she starts out to go help Cassian, and Timm stops her and tells her Cassian can look after himself. Bix points out that neither she or Paak had mentioned Cassian's name while he was in earshot, and realizes that the only way Timm could have leapt to the correct conclusion about who the cops are after is that he was the one who ratted Cassian out.
- Interesting Situation Duel: How about a shootout in an abandoned factory while huge chain rollers are collapsing on top of you?
- The Kindnapper: In a flashback, Maarva is shown to have stunned Cassian as a boy and taken him off his planet, fearing that he'd be killed when the Republic found out his people had killed one of their officers. It's implied that Cassian might not be completely okay with this, given that years later he keeps running off in search of his sister, who was left behind on Kenari to an uncertain fate.
- Molotov Truck: Cassian and Luthen manage to make their way to a garage containing two speeders — a larger model with an enclosed cockpit, and a smaller, faster bike-style craft. At Cassian's suggestion, Luthen loads his remaining explosives into the larger one, which they set off down the street. The Corpos disable it with blaster fire, and step towards it to inspect the crash, allowing Luthen to detonate the explosives and send them flying as he makes his escape with Cassian on the other vehicle.
- Mythology Gag: When Luthen is walking into town with his Badass Longcoat billowing, holding a collapsible walking stick, he looks a lot like a Jedi. His calm stoic manner doesn't hurt either.
- Not What I Signed Up For: There is a subtext continued from the previous episode where Karn is uncomfortable with the imperial attitudes of the other members of the squad, reveling in the chance to swing their authority around. As things go south he sees first-hand the consequences of hostility against an angry community, and after several squad casualties with Cassian making a clean escape he is left shaken by the experience.
- Police Brutality: The Pre-Mor cops threaten Maarva and Bee, beat up Bix and cuff her to a pipe, and one of them shoots Timm when he tries to save her.
- Precision F-Strike: Mosk averts Pardon My Klingon when he mutters, "Shit. We're under siege."
- Psychological Combat: The town's civilians take to this by ringing their bells during Pre-Mor's presence, then stopping. The goal is to throw Pre-Mor off their focus and intimidate them, which Cassian and Luthien use to their advantage while making their escape.
- Rage Against the Reflection: On seeing his reflection (apparently for the first time) in an instrument panel, Kassa smashes it in a blind rage.
- Red Alert: The townspeople start banging metal objects to alert everyone the police are in town, but then they keep banging them as psychological warfare.
- Rule #1: Luthen offers Andor two useful rules for survival while they're trying to escape the Pre-Mor squad at the factory. Rule #1 is "Never carry anything you don't control", and rule #2 is "Build your exit on your way in."
- Skewed Priorities: Luthen is willing to buy the Starpath Unit but is more interested in recruiting the kind of man who could walk into an Imperial base and steal it. He repeatedly tells off Cassian for trying to run back and fetch it when they should be escaping.
- Swiss-Cheese Security: Luthen wants to know how Cassian got his hands on the Starpath Unit.Cassian: You just walk in like you belong.
Luthen: It takes more than that, doesn't it?
Cassian: What—to steal from the Empire? What do you need? A uniform, some dirty hands, and an Imperial toolkit. They're so proud of themselves, they don't even care. They're so fat and satisfied, they can't imagine it.
Luthen: Can't imagine what?
Cassian: That someone like me would ever get inside their house. Walk their floors, spit in their food, take their gear. - Thousand-Yard Stare: Karn is staring lifelessly after the op to arrest Cassian has gone straight to hell. Mosk can't snap him out of it and just drags him along on their retreat.
- Title Drop: From Maarva to the two guarding her as the town's warning bells ring louder:Maarva Gets to you, doesn't it? That's what a reckoning sounds like. You want it to stop, but it just keeps coming. It's when it stops, that's when you'll really want to start to fret.
- Trigger-Happy: An unarmed Timm is gunned down when he charges towards the Corpos who have roughed up his girlfriend, and Karn opens fire on several Jawas after breaking into their home (fortunately he misses).
- Vehicular Sabotage: Unbeknownst to the fleeing pilot, Pre-Mor's transport ship is tied to a large piece of equipment that is firmly tethered to the ground, and when he attempts to take off, the ship ends up swinging and explosively crashing into a tower.
- Villainous Breakdown: Karn grows increasingly terrified as the episode goes on and the situation spirals out of control for his team. By the end of the episode when most of his men are down and Andor has escaped, he can't even speak, looking utterly shell-shocked.
