We still have more than a month to wait for the third season of Star Wars Rebels to begin. But after the second season finished so strong with Kanan, Ezra, and Ahsoka battling Maul, and even Vader himself, I’m really looking forward to it.

With Ezra clearly having grown up a bit, it’s obvious that the story will pick up at least a year into the future. It’s not really clear yet what happened to Ahsoka at the end of the season 2 finale. There’s been some speculation that she might return in some form ( according to reports from Star Wars HQ and The Stupendous Wave ); I’d love to see that, as Ahsoka’s character and storyline are among my favorite parts of both Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels. Like a lot of Star Wars fans, I long to see more, better storytelling around Anakin Skywalker’s travels as a young Jedi and as Vader long before the events of A New Hope. As we saw in the last season of The Clone Wars, has master-padawan relationship with Ahsoka is a great device to learn more about his character.

Here are a few tidbits I noticed in the trailer.

Early-Design Scout Walker

We see a few glimpses of an AT-ST Scout Walker. But it’s not exactly the same design as the ones that were in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. This one is reminiscent of one of Joe Johnston’s early designs. Now, this is nothing new for Star Wars Rebels, as we’ve seen these early-design scout walkers since the first few episodes. But it’s great to see early designs like this, and we’ve seen others, like Ezra’s cadet helmet, which clearly was inspired by one of Ralph McQuarrie’s early designs for the Snowtrooper armor. I remember these from The Empire Strikes Back Sketchbook, which I had back when it was new in the mid-1980s, and is still findable now.

Y-Wing Fighters

This is hard to miss, but it looks like we might get to see a bit of backstory around how the rebels came to rely on these fighters that complemented the rebels’ fleet of X-Wing fighters in A New Hope. Not unlike in season 2 when we saw the first B-Wing fighters. Here’s hoping they fire up the ion cannons!

Unknown Spacecraft, Possibly Dash Rendar’s Outrider

We just get a quick glimpse of Ezra piloting this small craft, and a few other quick peeks. It looks Corellian, and it looks an awful lot like Dash Rendar’s YT-2400 light freighter “Outrider” from Shadows of the Empire. It seems that this might be a flashback, as Ezra appears to be younger, still with his bushy haircut. Maybe this isn’t the Outrider, maybe it’s just a stock YT-2400. Whether we see Dash Rendar or not remains to be seen, but if we do, I’d wager that Dave Filoni and crew would do something interesting with the character.

Sabine Has an Owl Marking on Her Armor

I don’t recall seeing this before. On her left shoulder, Sabine is sporting a white owl, which we have to assume she painted herself. We’ve seen this owl before, most recently right around when Ahsoka had to fight Vader at the end of season 2. Maybe this is some sort of tribute to Ahsoka, hopefully there will be a bit more to it than that.

More Confident and Capable Ezra

Obviously Ezra has grown up a bit. He’s taller, with shorter hair and a few scars on his face. More interestingly, though, he’s clearly a lot more confident and capable with his lightsaber and the force. Ezra’s journey is the central story of Star Wars Rebels, and it continues to hold my interest, I think, because we get to see how a young jedi makes his way without any formal academy or even teaching, he’s learning as he’s fighting, and so many things around him demand that he sometimes walk in the gray area between the light and dark sides of the force. I was disappointed that Star Wars: The Clone Wars ended when it did, mostly because I felt that the show had really begun to flesh out a more interesting, satisfying version of Anakin than any of the actual films did. Especially with the unfinished Crisis on Utapau story, which I’m still hoping gets fully animated eventually. But if we don’t get to see more of Anakin, young Ezra Bridger here is shaping up to be an interesting young rogue jedi character in his own right.

Star Wars Rebels Season Three premieres September 24th at 8:30 pm ET/PT.