A thrilling Andor races toward Rogue One

What follows is, on the whole, an episode of Andor built in Cassian Andor’s own image: light on philosophical musings and heavy on thrills, as Cass races the ISB to see who can get to a desperate Kleya first. It’s an episode of visceral pleasures, whether that’s watching Ben Mendelsohn absolutely devour the scenery, stalking around Dedra Meero’s cell as Orson Krennic and threatening her successor Heert with a spot on the “ever-lengthening ISB death march,” or just enjoying the easy camaraderie between Cass, Melshie, and K-2SO as space poker night turns into an impromptu rescue operation. (And if you, like me, desperately want Tony Gilroy & co. to publish a “Comically Awkward Dorks Of The Imperial Bureaucracy” calendar, holy shit is this a good episode for that.) Last week, I wondered what it would look like as Andor took on more of Rogue One‘s action-adventure tone, as the gap between the two stories closed, and this was really pretty much what I was expecting: an episode lighter on speeches and moral ambiguity and heavier on quips and action. It’s an immensely satisfying hour of television, even if I can’t help but be a little sad that it doesn’t have slightly more heft.

We open in the immediate aftermath of the last episode, as Heert (Jacob James Beswick, who gives good flop sweat throughout as one of the unlikely central figures of Andor‘s penultimate outing) tries to figure out why the biggest bullies in the Empire are suddenly breathing down his neck over some dead Rebel spy. That most especially means Director Orson Krennic, with Mendelsohn getting to unleash the ham on every unfortunate subordinate slowing down his efforts to plug the leak of the Death Star’s existence. (This is, notably, the first time the name has ever appeared in this show, as Denise Gough mutters it at Mendelsohn’s demand. And the overt goofiness of it, against the more grounded backdrop, somehow contributes to the implied menace rather than lessening it.) Like K-2SO, Krennic is a character who doesn’t entirely fit into Andor: He’s larger than life and showy, a working-class monster in an Empire filled with bloodless aristocrats, rampaging through scenes with malicious glee. Watching him tear into Dedra, telling her, “If you’re not a Rebel spy, you’ve missed your calling” and drilling his goddamn index finger into the top of her head it’s an infusion of alien energy into the series. Which is to say, it’s simultaneously innervating and a bit uncomfortable. (Or it’s just uncomfortable for Dedra, who, it turns out, has been pack-ratting information that could help her hunt down Axis from any source available—including documents about the biggest and most deadly secret in the galaxy. Krennic’s question about her blend of “passionate competency” and “mindless decisions” hits closer to home than she’d like.)

Elsewhere, Kleya is making desperation moves, digging an ancient radio out of the Coruscant safe house’s walls and using it to transmit periodic encoded messages to those few remaining agents in a position to hear them. Her signal inevitably sends both sides running: Heert and his lackeys, after they figure out that the “three-person team” that killed Luthen is just one very angry, very determined woman, and Cassian, who hesitates zero seconds to break up both his card game and whatever détente he’s struck with General Draven to jack a ship and head for Coruscant. There’s a tension here, briefly touched on, between the Yavin administration’s need for order and the way it never could have existed without a wide array of very bloody and disorderly acts that Luthen represents. At the same time, when Cassian finally gets to the old safe house, he and Kleya fall back into a familiar argument: Who’s going to Yavin? That is, who gets to (or has to) survive this whole long, awful, and often morally draining fight? Who’s forced to live with what they’ve done and what they’ve lost? Cassian, as always, is the voice of living to fight, and thrive, another day. But Kleya is a tough sell: She and Luthen both internalized, long ago, that Yavin has never been a place for people like them.

But honestly, a lot of this stuff is mostly operating in subtext. This is Andor in pure pleasures mode, and that means that there’s lots of Alan Tudyk making snide little droid comments, lots of sequences of Imperial nerds snorting about security hacks and clever transmission schemes, and less actual meaning than maybe any episode of this show has ever offered. And this, I need to be clear, is not a complaint: This is an insanely entertaining hour of television, and when it suddenly cut to black—right at the height of some tension it made me feel with leg-jittering enthusiasm—I whispered to myself, “Well, that’s an A episode of TV.” We’re sitting in the gap between Andor killing one of its biggest characters and whatever it has cooked up for its series finale: We can have a little candy, even if it comes with Imperial kill teams and dudes getting backhanded off bridges. I’ll need more depth for the finale, of course, or else it’s going to feel like this whole series ran out of ideas to build to after Ghorman exploded. But Andor is a show that operates on multiple levels, and having it focus so purely on one of them for its next-to-last episode isn’t the worst thing in the galaxy.

Stray observations

• • Heert may not be half as smart as Dedra, but he knows the first rule of a big public fuck-up: “This is Supervisor Meero’s security package. I want that underlined.”
• • “Is that why I’m here? For the murder of an ISB clerk? Has my reputation slid so precipitously?”
• • Alexander Owen is very charming as the hospital security guy trying to impress the ISB brass. (Can you tell I miss Syril?)
• • Andor, as always, loves process, luxuriating in the pieces of Kleya’s dusty radio clicking together.
• • Partagaz seems utterly defeated by the scale of ISB’s screwup. He does get an interesting scene with Krennic—and a first name, Leo!—where they seem more human with each other. “Save the sermon for Palpatine!” “Indeed.”
• • “What if it’s a trap?” “If it’s a trap, it changes nothing.”
• • A nice touch: Dedra stands to attention and tightens her collar when she hears footsteps approaching her cell…only to sit back down when she sees it’s Heert, looking to scrape her for some advice.
• • Dedra Meero is a fascist, an asshole, and, on some occasions, a bit of an idiot. Watching her think through how to track a Rebel is still damn good fun, though. This is a show that loves to watch people think.
• • Wilmon is impressively unimpressed with Draven’s bluster. “You can run him down all you want. But the truth is, none of this would be here without Luthen. None of this.”
• • The little head shake Heert’s assistant gives to the tech dork getting too enthused about Luthen’s technical tricks is the sort of stuff that makes me write too much about how the show depicts the vast majority of Empire functionaries as bizarrely endearing nerds.
• • I should take a second and acknowledge how nice the “acting” for K-2SO’s physicality is here. His discomfort at being left behind in the ship is both funny and genuine.
• • “It would be you, wouldn’t it?”
• • There’s a working-class vibe that runs through Andor‘s depiction of Imperial soldiers, none of whom seem to be clones. The guy with his feet up in the shuttle is a good example.
• • I’ll admit, it’s been a few years since I’ve seen Rogue One, so it’s a little hard for me to parse how impactful Kleya’s info will end up being. I think it’s why Jyn will end up getting freed from prison at the start of the movie?