Two idiots crawl through the mud, heads too low to see anything but the dirt in front of them. They’re looking for something, even though they know they won’t find it, and that searching for it will probably get them killed. (Think of it a bit like the parable of the blind men and the elephant—except with more gunfire and severed feet.) After some shouting, and then some more shooting, both our “heroes” flee back to where they came from, having learned nothing except that which they already, absolutely knew: They’re well and truly fucked.
It’s hard to view Cassian Andor’s time with the Maya Pei Neo-Republicans, which makes up a decent chunk of the second episode of Andor‘s second season, as anything but an allegory. There are plot points happening here—arguments, worries about food, attempts to manually turn a spaceship by hand so that one of the two opposing camps can have a bigger gun to point at the other one. But it’s all summer-camp shit: children play-acting in the forest, performing bigness, literally settling disputes with a game of space rock paper scissors while the predators close in around them. It’s an amusing allegory, certainly: The actors are giving big, fun performances, and Diego Luna gets to have a good time trying to keep this latest batch of idiots who suddenly have his character’s life in their hands alive long enough for him to effect his inevitable escape.
So, with one of the four legs of our storytelling table wobbling, where does that leave the other three? Delivering a much more satisfying dose of mounting pressure on all counts, thankfully. I’ll start with Bix and the farmers of Mina-Rau, since I gave them short shrift last episode: It’s Imperial audit time on the idyllic farm world, and everybody’s feeling the heat. One of the smarter ideas Andor likes to play with is that, in the moments before the boot drops and the bolts start flying, it’s basically impossible to discern between bad luck and bad intent: The Imperials (including a slimeball lieutenant who tries to basically D.E.N.N.I.S. System his way into dinner with Bix) might just be poking around at the farms because it’s been years since the last census; it’s just as likely they’re there because the notorious Rebel Cassian Andor has been holing up on Mina-Rau, and it’s time to snap the trap shut around his neck. The result is a lot of smiles being papered over a lot of bone-deep anxiety in a way that’s almost, but not quite, ready to explode. The only real deficit, for me, is that I’m simply less attached to Bix and Brasso than I am to some of our other characters (as much ast I enjoy Adria Arjona’s performance), and so it’s hard to get as invested when we cut back to those gorgeous wheat fields from time to time. (The less said about the relationship between tertiary character to a tertiary character Wilmon and the local farmer’s daughter, meanwhile, the better, especially since Andor is about to give me my full dose of ‘shipper fuel from a very different angle.)
That’s right, folks: The Galaxy’s nerdiest fascists are making a go of it! I bemoaned the lack of Kyle Soller’s Syril Karn in the season premiere. But when he popped up in this episode, clean-cut even by his own obsessive standards, I barely recognized him at first. (That is, until he started being Extremely Syril to a new recruit at the Bureau Of Standards; I’ve missed Soller’s gift for deranged, oddly proud intensity on his command of minutiae.) But Syril’s fresh look is nothing compared to the reveal that he and Meero are apparently cohabitating, which made me genuinely giddy to see. Syril and Dedra are, basically, a trap for sympathetic viewers like myself. They embody virtues that I’ve been trained to enjoy in protagonists of TV shows, things like perseverance, loyalty, and intelligence, and seeing these two twin-souled oddballs being shockingly tender with each other produces an instinctive response of affection and excitement (even if my brain can’t help but automatically file their monochromatic apartment as the Coruscant version of Shiv and Tom’s place from Succession, with all that that implies). But, of course, all that squee then has to also be filtered through the part of my brain that reminds me that the thing these two are devoting all that smart, unflagging loyalty to is a regime that wants to put the Galaxy in little boxes so nobody can protest when their planets get blown up/fracked to death—and that we’ve literally watched Dedra cheerfully torture one of our other characters into near-catatonia. Andor plays with its audience’s feelings like very little else on TV.
Soft lip touches aside, Meero is still irritated, as usual: She knows she’s going to get stuck managing the totalitarian suppression of Ghorman (such a pain!), which is both a surface-level demotion and a distraction from her obsession with Rebel organizer Axis (who we in the audience know, of course, as Luthen Rael). I highlight her scene establishing all this, meanwhile, mostly as a reminder that Anton Lesser is giving a great performance as her boss, Imperial Security Bureau head Major Partagaz: There’s genuine paternalism and warmth to the way he treats his protégé as they have a brief pre-work confab, which in no way undermines the basic “Imperial bureaucrat” fact that he’ll throw her to the wolves the moment he thinks he needs to. (“Next time, catch them first, then make them famous,” he advises her about Axis, Lesser balancing between acid and humor with one of the episode’s best lines.)
As for Axis himself, well, he’s got that ol’ “murder annoying loose ends” urge suddenly flaring up. See, the nuptials at the Mothma estate on Chandrila are getting fouled up by some petulant behavior from banker Tay Kolma, who you might recall was approached by Mon Mothma last season to help hide her efforts to fund the Rebellion. Tay, as it turns out, is feeling a little unappreciated—his liberal ideals having had their strength tested against his financial desires and been found decidedly wanting—and so he’s looking for some kind of payoff to make his “risk” worth it. Luthen is clearly of the opinion that said payment should come in the form of something brisk and fatal, but Mon is determined to keep her ally in check: She’s certain she can find a “number” that will make this all alright.
If I had to rate the plotlines of this episode—something the structure practically encourages—I’m inclined to put the Chandrila material at the top of the pile. Barring those brief moments with Syril and Dedra, the wedding is where all the most interesting acting is happening, deep layers of subtext and slow-burn navigation as all the players speak on multiple levels. Seeing Stellan Skarsgård flip the switch and reveal the pirate lurking beneath Luthen’s foppish exterior is always a fun trick, but Genevieve O’Reilly, especially, is doing some absolutely gorgeous work here as Mon. The most transfixing moment of the whole episode has nothing to do with big space lizards or tense conversations with the Space Gestapo; instead, it’s the long, still shot of Mon Mothma realizing that Tay is going to be A Problem and desperately running the math to see whether she can keep him both quiet and alive. It’s in these moments that Andor is most doing what I want it to: calculating the exact costs of being both good, and effective, in a world that doesn’t want you to be either.
If this recap, then, feels a little meandering, a little disconnected from itself, I can do nothing more than point you back toward the source material with a slightly embarrassed shrug. We have here four parts of four stories that only barely touch each other, all of which need to serve as both ongoing onboarding for this second season and a middle chapter for the miniature trilogy that is this “block.” Many of the individual moments are riveting, the performances almost uniformly excellent. (Again, it gets a little broad out in the jungle, but that’s clearly by design.) I have no doubt that what comes next will make good use of all the tension that’s being stored up here. But in this exact moment, caught in the seconds right before things pop off, it can’t help but feel like we’re wandering in the dark a bit, hoping to find greatness—and hopefully not just another severed foot.
Stray observations
- • “Ghorman is a gift. Take it. Then win it.” The ways this show finds to express love between characters who would be murderously offended by the suggestion they’re doing so remains fascinating.
- • Luthen’s assistant Kleya heads back to Coruscant to monitor comms; the show thinks it matters—and I liked seeing the antiques shop set again—so I figured I’d log it for posterity.
- • Alastair Mackenzie gets to have fun here as Mon’s husband Perrin, first doing the “petulant spouse” bit and then giving a good, if hedonistic, speech to the married couple. (He also pokes his thumb at Chandrilan traditions, clearly irritating shady business guy/father of the groom Davo Sculdun, who might as well be wearing a Make Chandrila Great Again hat.)
- • God, Syril’s little snap when the recruit he just told to look over his shoulder does so. I’ve missed this obnoxious fussbudget. “There is a future here, for those who dare.”
- • Syril and Dedra are prepping for some social engagement they clearly want to avoid. I have to assume it’s dinner of some sort with Syril’s incredibly overbearing mom. Can’t wait!
- • It’s a gag you can see coming from a mile away, but the reveal that The Dipshit Rebels are genuinely playing rock paper scissors (or whatever they call it) did get a laugh out of me.
- • The whole “Rebels who don’t know how to be Rebels” bit can be boiled down perfectly to the moment where one of the Maya Pei guys tells Andor to get on his feet, and then another immediately walks over and smacks him down for doing so.
