Episode spoilers. I had only 4 minor gripes with this episode, and 2 were about the same fight scene.
Good episode. Finally made some progress.
A technical gripe: early on, in the first exterior scene planetside, Ahsoka's close-ups are clearly on the Volume screens, and whatever happened, they didn't set the Volume's in-engine camera to the same parameters as the IRL camera, so it's 100% clear that she's standing in front of a flat screen, not a deep forest. Didn't crop up anywhere else (AFAIK), but it was very jarring for just a few shots.
Second gripe: Sabine, for fuck's sake, Ezra pioneered the idea of using a pistol and a lightsaber so hard he combined them into one weapon. You're a Mandalorian. Put a blaster in your off-hand, lock blades with Shin, and shoot her in the gut, or leg, or something. You can't parry blaster bolts if you're blocking lightsabers - Ezra showed you this. Come on.
Ray Stevenson, RIP, continues to be such a presence. His attempting to convert Sabine had just the right amounts of 'this is clearly the "I convince you to join me" speech' but also 'low key might be right'. Still surprised that she gave in, but I feel like the 'Fallen Jedi' are just that - Jedi. They're not proper dark-siders. If red/sith lightsaber colour in nuCanon is represented by how much you bleed your kyber crystal, then they're not all the way there - it's an orange-red blade.
His fighting style was very cool, I love the formality of it. He's very studied. A few of the extremely basic kendo positions were kinda obvious, but then they also never used the advantages of those positions.
My two other gripes are with that specific fight scene. It was very clear from the first few moves that Ray didn't seem to even want to bend his knees. He fights very much like Vader, which happened because of how restrictive the costume was (later made a canon reason re: his armour). But it also shows in the choreography of the fight, especially as it extended to a weird game of Keep-Away dancing around the orb platform.
It came down to the fact that you can tell it's choreographed. Which is never good - an extremely tight fight scene is one that never gives you a single reason to realise 'Ah, this is choreographed - not two people fighting with their lives on the line.' I get why Ahsoka wouldn't take any of the MANY openings Baylan leaves her during their fight. I DON'T get why Ahsoka, a famously dexterity/dodge-favouring combatant, had any trouble dealing with him with one saber in one hand. Not as spry now that she's not polygons, I suppose.
There's a specific spin where they're clashing and spinning around each other while Ahsoka tries to grab the orb. On the turn, Ray reaches out way early in the spin, not predicting Rosario's hand positioning, but pre-empting it in a very unsubtle way. With more rehearsals and workshopping, that grab would have either been deployed a fraction later and more subtly, or adjusted to be a slightly different type of grapple.
As it stands, the entire second half of their fight is very... Under-rehearsed, and while I can only guess, Ray's health clearly wasn't great, and I don't feel like any of these gripes detract from the quality of the episode altogether.
I'm not even all that bothered by de-aged Hayden Christiansen - it's a remarkably good job compared to the Mark Hamill de-age. He's just... Too wide. Literally. I pulled a screenshot into photoshop, grabbed a shot of RotS Hayden-Anakin in a very similar pose, and overlayed them. Present-day Hayden's face is maybe ~5% wider than RotS Hayden - likely just due to age, skin loosening over time, slight body fat changes over the course of a lived life, etc, not a problem in the slightest - except the de-ageing processes they've used don't seem to have accounted for that. Whatever they've done, it's got his eyes, his jawline, everything, widened by literally 5%, just enough that he looks like an uncanny version of himself. I think it'll look better in motion, ironically, than the mostly still reveal they gave us.
In order to resize Hayden's head for de-ageing without weird warping issues, they would have had to do a full CG model replacement that is then texture wrapped with a de-aged version of Hayden's face, just to get those proportions correct. And I'd honestly accept that - We can make it believable enough in She-Hulk, and it'd be less jarring to accept a CG-Anakin than it would another, albeit much better, uncanny valley de-aged deepfake.
His wider jaw DOES make him look like Clone Wars Chad General Anakin, which I do like, and I do very much like that Hayden is clearly playing Matt Lautner's Clone Wars Anakin, which is the best version, so I'm hoping they really bring some of that golden chemistry over from Clone Wars, but we'll see.
Not sure how the fuck Ahsoka made it into the World Between Worlds by tumbling off a cliff. Did she die? Is this a time-break? IDK. Keen tho.
Liked it overall, excited to see more.