Starring: Taylor Gray, Freddie Prinze, Jr., Vanessa Marshall, Tiya Sircar, Steven Blum, Dee Bradley Baker, Lars Mikkelsen, Stephen Stanton, Jim Cummings, Tom Baker.

Let’s take a moment to catch up on the crapfest our heroes were left in when Season 2 ended. Last time, Ezra was dabbling in Sith knowledge, Kanan was blinded by Darth Maul, and Ahsoka was ambiguously taken down by Darth Vader. Rebels ended about three years off from A New Hope, and Luke and Leia never talk about these guys. With the events of Rogue One and Yavin IV drawing closer, it’s starting to feel like this show is up against a ticking time bomb and it’s sinking into darker places.

Anyway, “Steps Into Shadows” features a Hondo appearance.

OK, it’s not that bad. Despite the annoying antics of Hondo, “Steps Into Shadows” continues Rebels descent into darkness as the rescue of Hondo and his Ugnaught buddy very quickly goes south. The Ugnaught informant is killed, and Ezra taps into very nasty dark side magic by making an Imperial kill his comrades, then himself. It works, but a noticeably older Ezra is definitely not acting like the cute kid that he was in Season 1.

Are we moving closer to Yavin? It’s certainly implied when Hondo reveals the location of some decommissioned Y-wings which would be useful to the fledgling Rebel fleet. (Remember, Y-wings were used during the Death Star attack, and a name is dropped later which suggests that’s where they’re headed.) Ezra’s given a field promotion and put in charge of scouting out these ships with the rest of the crew. Not joining them: Kanan, who’s spending his days meditating and figuring out how to live as a sightless Jedi. Oh, and he’s pissed when he learns that Ezra’s been playing with a Sith holocron.

From there, the episode turns into a giant lesson in humility, with contrasting results between Ezra and Kanan. Remember, “humility” is not a dirty word. We tend to think of it as making oneself lowly, but classically, it means to see things in perspective, as they really are. This is a lesson both Kanan and Ezra need to understand at this stage in the show. Despite successfully beating Maul even while blind last season, Kanan’s learned helplessness without his vision. Ezra has become brash, tapping into the dark side and acting on impulse for the sake of short-term success.

So Kanan meets a giant creature called a “Bendu,” a force user who’s neither Jedi nor Sith, but who’s learned to play the middle. He teaches Kanan to overcome his fear of Lothal’s spider-creatures by learning to “see” through the Force even when his eyes no longer work. The weakness of the episode is that this is all very predictably Star Wars–but it’s a kid’s show, so let’s cut some slack to the children who haven’t seen this kind of thing done in decades of comics and novels.

Ezra, in the meantime, has only learned to charge ahead and complete what he sees as immediate benefits, and who cares if a little dark side use gets you there? So when the crew gets to the Imperial scrapyard and discovers the Y-wings are being destroyed, he charges in and breaks orders to go liberate them, because the Rebellion needs them now. Unthinking, this all turns out to be an Imperial trap which Ezra has stupidly walked right into, causing a major loss to the crew of the Ghost which they won’t easily recover from.

Things do get righted by the end of the episode, with Kanan learning an easy lesson and Ezra learning a hard one. To the show’s credit, the final rescue sequence is amazingly well-done and ratchets up the tension even as we know that, this being a kid’s show, it’ll turn out alright. That said, a final line in the episode reminds us that Yavin draws ever closer, and the crew’s days may yet be numbered.

Additional observations:

• Hey, holy crap, Tom Baker was the Bendu. Did you know that? I didn’t know that.
• This episode features the long-awaited (re-)introduction of Grand Admiral Thrawn, beloved villain of the Expanded Universe. Disappointingly, we get very little of him in the episode, but where he does appear, he’s well-done and consistent with his original portrayal. Thankfully, there’s more Thrawn to come.
• “Bendu” is yet another reincorporation of an Expanded Universe reference. The name goes back to George Lucas’ original name for the Jedi order, and its use here as a “force-neutral” system is consistent with the EU.
• Rebels is still locked into the CGI limitation of only using three types of environments: rock, tech, and clouds. Can we please get some trees for once?
• “Acting out of anger offers quick results, but it’s a trap.” Hey, it’s a Yoda and an Ackbar reference all at once!
• We often joke about how the destruction of Death Star I was an act of terrorism, but seriously, Ezra’s behavior this week is not helping that stereotype.

Episode Rating: Four and a half Choppers out of five.