In Dark Rendezvous—pretending we didn’t have the rest of Star Wars canon—do you think there was ANY chance that Dooku would’ve taken Yoda’s offer to return to the temple as a forgiven Jedi if Anakin and Obi-Wan didn’t show up to crash the party?
DAVID! :D You're back and reading my favorite book!!!!! Great to see you! What a fun question! I think Dooku absolutely 100% did consider taking it and likely would have, which is why he has such a huge emotional crash out to Anakin and Obi-Wan showing up. I think it also well explains how he behaves afterward, him basically closing his eyes and covering his ears and walking straight into Sidious's obvious murderous endgame like:
Because his reaction to Obi-Wan and Anakin showing up isn't "ah, expected trap is revealed by my established foes - just as I suspected." He is genuinely very, very upset. The motherfucker let himself at least picture Yoda's offer, if not feel very real relief and hope about accepting it. His crashout is on the level of a person who is embarrassed, because he let himself really believe the offer for a moment, and then feels all the more stupid and ashamed and enraged by the "realization" that it was a fake out and he was the one fool enough to believe it could be possible. So therefore, we get him crying profusely sweating from uh, *checks the text* the eyes, the sloppy-ass lightsaber work, throwing an old lady out a window, throwing HIMSELF out a window, and eventually dropping a bomb on his own location. It's... not an amazing moment for our guy, who otherwise deals with Obi-Wan and Anakin popping up on screen elsewhere rather handily. But there's something very different about his emotional state in that encounter.
Yoda also thinks he had Dooku convinced, or almost convinced:
Further tellingly, the sequel to Dark Rendezvous, Labyrinth of Evil includes one of Dooku's very last scenes in the book and in the entire saga, since RotS picks up where the last pages of LoE end. Dooku is STILL thinking about Yoda's offer, again, longingly, but telling himself it couldn't happen even as late in the game as walking onto the stage of his own death scene.
