poopfart

Ahsoka was doomed as soon as she walked into the prison, a lose lose situation where no one action or inaction was going to save her from being expelled and trialed. There are several scenes throughout The Wrong Jedi Arc that support this.

Tarkin

Evidence Tampering

Though many may not remember, there is actual evidence that Ahsoka did not kill Letta Turmond. Before Letta is hoisted up, Ahsoka has her hand on her shoulder, and when Letta starts being choked, Ahsoka flinches back in shock; Letta is dying before Ahsoka raises her hands. The Corrie on the camera shuts the screen off- which, sus, but we can talk about that another time- as Ahsoka looks back on the camera for either help or to try and see the assailant.

When Tarkin goes into Ahsoka's cell, he shows a shortened clip of Ahsoka “killing” Letta. However, it must be noted that the angle of this clip is clearer than that of the clone's camera. If Tarkin played the full encounter, then the senators would have been able to see Ahsoka jumping back and her shocked expression when Letta was strangled in front of her. Tarkin is intentionally not showing the full clip here and likely at the trial.

Also, sidenote that, "Curiously," as Tarkin puts it, Letta Turmond was in a cell without audio, and no one noticed until after she was dead. The Admiral would like us to believe that the Coruscant Guard, currently holding a woman who killed their brothers, weren't watching her like a hawk and didn't notice that they couldn't hear anything coming from her cell? Fox and his men went back to the monitor room, and Ahsoka and Letta were actively being watched by one of them; am I to think he didn't notice that he couldn't hear them talking?

Sexual Harassment

Tarkin crowds Ahsoka's space, forcing her against the wall while Ahsoka tries to explain her side of the story. He gets in close on her face, and Ahsoka is noticeably uncomfortable, probably due to trauma from prior experiences. Tarkin's actions would have been a stereotypical over-the-top interrogation if he hadn't grabbed her face seconds later, intentionally forcing her to purse her lips and smiling when she yanked her face out of his grasp.

If Tarkin were truly committed to bringing justice, he'd have sat down and talked to Ahsoka with the respect she tried to show him in that moment. He'd compare her version of events to everything that's happened and note inconsistencies. For example, Ahsoka and Anakin are the ones who arrested Letta. If Ahsoka was the mastermind, why didn't she go to Letta's home and kill her after the bombing, making it look like an accident or suicide? Why did Letta Turmond ask to speak to Ahsoka if she was scared that Ahsoka would kill her? Why did she refuse to speak to Ahsoka unless Fox left them alone? He doesn't do this; the interaction barely lasts a few minutes, and he uses most of it to invade Ahsoka's personal space.

Tarkin's actions show Ahsoka and the audience that any "investigation" done would be heavily biased against her. Whether or not Ahsoka stays in her cell has no bearing on how Tarkin acts as he's already proven that he's willing to abuse his power over her.

Isolation

Tarkin orders Fox to not let Ahsoka have visitors. Isolating her gives him the ability to make up his story and let himself be heard first, planting seeds of doubt into anything Ahsoka might say in her defense. It also allows him to assault her, maybe even try something worse. While Ahsoka would protect herself, her resistance would become “evidence” towards her guilt as Tarkin could just make up a story about her attacking him unprompted.

With no visitors, this also means that Ahsoka is not allowed any legal counsel. Meaning that her defense would be less prepared than Tarkin's prosecution.

Falsifying Evidence

Tarkin calls the Council after Ahsoka's escape, says, and I quote:

“After further investigation, it can be little doubt that the clone officers murdered in the escape were killed by none other than Ahsoka Tano herself. She used a Jedi Mind Trick to convince the clone to open the door and proceeded to cut him down along with five other clones along the way.”

I love you storyboard super danny...

There is a LOT of giving up going on around here! 🤨

"There are only two episodes to go." "There's not enough time to get Tech back." "We aren't going to find out who CX-2 is this late in the show."

Whoa! Just whoa.

Put on the brakes, peeps! There's so much of the full-circle storytelling technique going on in this series that there is NO reason to be giving up yet. There are a few parallels happening that are giving me hope that I want to share with you. I hope they help with your anxiety over what's coming in the next couple of weeks the way they have helped me with mine:

"The Cavalry Has Arrived" is the title of the final episode and also the very first words uttered by a Batcher in The Clone Wars. They came to the rescue then, and they are doing it now.

In that Clone Wars story arc, the Batch teamed up with Rex and other clones on a mission to infiltrate an enemy installation. They're doing that again. We know the Batch is on their way to Tantiss and we know from trailers that Rex will be there too.

They went into their Clone Wars mission with a specific task to accomplish, and in the course of that mission discovered that someone presumed dead was alive and being made to aid the enemy. It was Echo in The Clone Wars, and it could easily be Tech now.

The Clone Wars arc was four episodes long. Reports are saying that the final episode will be roughly triple the length of a single episode like "Aftermath" was to begin the series. That means that we have as much content still ahead of us to end the series as the entire Anaxes/Skako Minor/Echo rescue arc in The Clone Wars. They made a LOT happen in that story arc, and it looks like that's how much time we have coming up. A lot can still happen.

They got attached. Hank too got attached.

Before today, he thought of the revolution as an overall positive event - something worth celebrating, or something he celebrated, at least. For him it symbolised change, a beginning of something better. It was only now that the true scale of the tragedy caught up with him, making him aware of how many android lives it actually cost. Only now it clicked with him how many of them were still mourned, and how, of all people, it was mostly kids who truly missed them.

Throughout December, he saw the memorials with old broken smartphones lined up in tight rows and columns, each for one killed android whose life was meaningful enough for someone to honour it with flowers and candles. And back then, he could never understand why were those flowers so crappy-looking and messy, mostly artificial or folded out of paper as origami. He used to wonder if it was another part of a symbolism - "artificial flowers for artificial people". Now it was obvious that the reason for that was much simpler: it was mostly kids who brought them. Most of them had no means to bring real flowers, so they folded them out of paper.

Daniel: "Hello!"

Emma: "You're my bestie! We'll always be together!"

The thing is, Emma probably didn't even know anything about her father's plans to replace Daniel, and it is really possible that if she had a chance to get to know about it before Daniel, she'd be the one throwing a tantrum, potentially preventing anything that happened instead. Aside from just Emma, it was repeatedly mentioned throughout the game that kids actually love androids. For example there's this dialogue at the station that Markus can overhear:

Little girl, visibly upset, hugging herself: "Are we really going to get rid of Mandy?"

(Probably mother): "Grandma says it leaves her nothing to do, sweetie."

Little girl: "But she's so cool!"

Mother: "I know, honey."

Not only kids think they're cool, android-only band Here4You is even hitting the charts as one of the most popular among youngsters, whereas adults find them really creepy and soulless. Another overhead dialogue from the same chapter:

"I heard that android boyband is going to win sone music prize"

"You mean Here4You? God, they're so creepy.

"My kids don't listen to anything else."

From adult's POV this attachment is interpreted as just another form of phone/internet/social-media/[insert anything else young people are accused of liking too much]-addiction, because most of them are too angry at CyberLife to comprehend that their kids may actually like androids for who they are as people in their lives, for being their safe space of a kind, and not because they're just addicted to that fancy toys to play with (although there probably are some kids who'd see them exactly this way. There always are.)

It was truly a misfortune that Daniel got so overwhelmed by the news that he instantly became fatalistic instead of pausing to really think about it first, to maybe consider that this decision may not have been a collective one, and there's still a chance -- maybe a small one, but still the one worth looking into -- to cancel it by talking, asking Emma about if she knows (because she probably didn't) instead of instantly going for the gun to take revenge on everyone as equally guilty. Instead of asking, he instantly assumed the worst – that Emma's opinion in the matter will be the same as her father's, and that was his main mistake. Daniel must have had really good relationships with the whole family including the father who as it turned out didn't think of him as a person, but rather a replaceable object – something Daniel never expected or even considered before, which, by the way, only further implies just how much he was actually loved for this information to be this unexpected and this world-shattering. He never saw it coming AT ALL (and in a generally anti-android society it really is telling) so this unexpected truth basically overwritten everything he ever knew about his life and world as a whole, making him feel like a fool for not seeing it earlier.

In this sense he's really similar to Connor when he realised that CyberLife never loved him, that he in fact is NOT special, not an exception from the rule, and was only used as an expendable object. There really is a parallel here. Except for Connor this knowledge didn't came with an anger, but with guilt for his previous actions (and, you know, Connor was actually right about it while Daniel could have potentially made a mistake in interpreting it the way he did)

So "Daniel never saw it coming because he was only surrounded by love" is one theory, but now I wanna consider a different one, being –

He was never going to be replaced on the first place,

Philips family is just insanely rich and John decided that he can afford to buy one more android, because why not? The one they have is great, and their enormous apartment with giant gold statues of Buddha and big-ass pool area would benefit from another pair of hands. It's possible that this decision wasn't even planned, but just an impulsive purchase done by someone who's so rich that spending nearly 10K is not a big deal.

And in this case, maybe Daniel's suspicion accumulated over a period time of him hearing how other androids are talked about outside of Philip's family and always thinking "For me it's different – they actually love me for who I am and will never replace like that. They're not like those other people, they're different, I'm different." And then him seeing that purchase was just...the last straw that was needed for him to apply all those previous already existing suspicions to his own situation and finally consider that they might actually apply to him, resulting in him drawing those depressing conclusions that if true would mean that his whole life has been a lie that he was just too stupid to be able to see through.