And so we come, unfortunately, to the first episode of Andor‘s second season that feels like it’s been genuinely compromised by its structure: the conflict between the show’s natural inclinations to luxuriate in tension and character and its need to sprint its way through a year of storytelling every three hours. This second miniature finale does many of the things that Andor does well, of course. It’s tense and beautifully acted, giving Faye Marsay as Vel, especially, a chance to tear into some of the show’s beautiful, brutal dialogue. (See also Diego Luna and Stellan Skarsgård, reunited for the first time in five episodes and portraying Cassian and Luthen’s rawest conflict to date.) So why, I ask myself as I watch the credits roll in the immediate aftermath of a distinctly forced-feeling moment of triumph, did it leave me feeling cold?
Chalk it up, maybe, to the binge model itself—which leaves the average viewer with nothing they’re more likely to compare an episode of Andor to than the (very good) episode that they just finished watching. But also, I think, it has something to do with the economy of character that’s been imposed on the series by its need to reset every three episodes. Andor really only has a handful of leads, two of whom have to survive the series, and the rest of whom it would presumably like to keep alive for at last part of the back half of this season. (All of whom, it’s worth noting, were introduced in the first season; the handful of new characters we’ve gotten since have been so thinly sketched as to be non-existent, day players in the ongoing Galactic soap opera.) Which leaves us with an episode that centers its highest stakes, paradoxically, on the characters we’re likely to care about the least.
Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy Luthen’s majordomo Kleya quite a bit, with Elizabeth Dulau giving a persistently interesting performance as a variant on Skarsgård’s smiling-with-knives vision of a professional spy. Watching Kleya navigate Davo Sculdun’s Senate Investiture gala, sweeping poor, hapless Lonni into her improvisations to sneak out the microphone she’d previously planted there, has its pleasures. Above all, it illustrates a wider point about how horribly fragile the Rebellion is in this moment, potentially scuppered by something as tiny as a screw refusing to turn. But it’s telling that every time the episode’s big climactic nail-biter moved back to Kleya, so that Dulau could grimace a little harder with some strawberry jam running down her hand—usually abandoning a far more engaging back-and-forth between Genevieve O’Reilly and Ben Mendelsohn to do so—I felt a little less mesmerized by the pacing. It dawned on me, watching the sequence, that Andor simply wasn’t willing to pull the trigger yet, apparently not viewing the halfway point of its final season as the moment to really let things explode.
The fact that the episode is contrasting these scenes with the adventures of the Ghorman auxiliary of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight certainly doesn’t help. Having been “disappointed” by Cassian’s unwillingness to tell the Ghorman Front to spend their lives on the project of mildly annoying the Empire, Luthen instead sends in Vel, whose true-believer credentials have been solid since back before the Aldhani raid. She does have a condition, though: being reunited with Cinta, her former lover, who we last saw (briefly) in the finale of last week’s block of episodes, spiriting Tay Kolma off to his rendezvous with a shallow grave on Chandrila. (There’s a suggestion there that the kill went wrong, or maybe something afterward; this Cinta is far more shaken than the one we saw at the end of season one.) And, again, the scenes between Marsay and Varada Sethu here are compelling enough, as the episode builds up one of its latent themes, one Luthen is ultimately forced to internalize: There are no nameless assets in a war like this. Every person in Axis’ contact list is doing something insanely brave at very long odds, and even those who, like Luthen, have committed to fighting for a sunrise they’ll never see, still need something, someone to fight for.
That’s the core of the throwdown that happens between Cass and his mentor/handler/surrogate father when—pissed that Luthen came sniffing around Bix, probing for weaknesses, while Andor was off-planet in the previous episode—our prettiest of rebels throws all operational protocol to the wind and confronts his boss at his antiques store. There’s a tendency to assume—because he’s played by Stellan Skarsgård and because he gives the nicest speeches—that Luthen is automatically correct in his belief that he could maximize the damage to the Empire if his agents would just stop being irritating, problem-having people with lives and lovers and fuck-ups each their own. But Andor refuses to give into that simplicity, because treating people like that is, well, how you end up running things like the Imperial Security Bureau. It’s a point the spymaster seems to relent on in the end, giving Cassian and Bix a mission they can succeed in together and one with a personal stake: killing torture technician Dr. Gorst before the Empire can franchise his brain-melting discoveries. (The fact that the episode runs through this catharsis in about a minute right at the end, while shooting it like a music video, is part and parcel of the pacing issues stretching this episode past the point of comfort. But it was a neat idea in theory.) It’s worth noting that, as with the first-season finale (and for all his command of the show’s beautiful lines), Skarsgård does his best acting here silently: You can see him soften, despite himself, in the face of Cassian’s humanity. It’s the highlight of the hour—so it’s a shame it arrives just 15 minutes in.
Because, wouldn’t you know it, we’ve drifted away from Ghorman again—almost like the predictability of that plot, and these characters, is a blind/bland spot that the eye is automatically inclined to slide off of. It’s hard to imagine how the big action beat of this episode is supposed to work as an effective climax: The audience knows that Partagaz and Meero are deliberately allowing the Imperial weapons heist to run without interference, so the only question becomes how the Ghorman Front members will screw it up for themselves. (Will someone bring a blaster even after the script very slowly spelled out that they aren’t supposed to bring blasters? Reader, I regret to inform you that they do.) It’s a classic example of a soundtrack and an editor working overtime to make something seem exciting when it genuinely isn’t—literally, the screw-turning on Coruscant is more exciting—and it all builds to a completely unsurprising twist. Behold: the second Andor block to end with the killing of the most minor character possible in the name of the Rebellion.
Again, Andor operates at a high enough baseline of quality that there are things to enjoy in this episode, even in connection to Cinta’s untimely but extremely predictable death. Marsay’s monologue tearing into the idiotic Ghormanite who fired the shot is chilling stuff, as Vel rubs his face in the dog shit he’s made of the mission. And the material at the gala is full of little pleasures: Watching the ISB dorks genuinely giddy to navigate a big fancy party is fun as hell, while the reveal that Director Krennic is also in attendance allows O’Reilly and Mendelsohn a chance to take turns politely chewing the scenery at each other. (“How pleasant to see you free of the witness stand,” she drily welcomes him.)
But I can’t help asking myself: Is this the story Andor would have tried to tell with its entire third season had the fates/Luna’s face been more forgiving, and had the show been able to run for five full seasons? The previous episodes of this block earned their places by working as enjoyable genre exercises, or by steering hard into the show’s deeper philosophical points. But it’s hard, from this vantage, to understand the decision to devote three whole episodes to the year that the Rebellion didn’t begin in earnest (and instead where everyone just kind of nudged in the vague direction of open conflict). Liberally employing time jumps puts a certain burden on a show’s storytellers. Why stop the fast-forward here? What makes these moments vital to depict? This episode was tense, occasionally funny, well-acted, and with a couple of stand-out moments. But vital? Not so much.
Stray observations
- • First note of the episode—RE: this version of the theme—was “Jazzandor!”
- • Luna and Skarsgård get a lot of sparring time here, with the first bout starting the episode as they argue about the value of letting the Ghormans launch what is almost certainly a suicide attack. “If it goes up in flames?” “It will burn very brightly.”
- • The show has rarely given Luna and Arjona room to breathe together, but their initial scene here—before Cassian finds out about Luthen’s visit—helps sell them. “I was very…very pretty.”
- • A nasty moment once things turn sour: Bix insisting “It happened!” and not grasping that she’s not the one Cass is starting to doubt.
- • “It’s tough squeezing a whole year of insincerity into three nights.” Whether this is a meta joke about the season’s structure or not, it’s one of a couple of good line reads from Alastair Mackenzie as Mon’s peace-making husband Perrin.
- • “You had to know she would tell me.” “I thought it would be interesting if she didn’t. But now you’ve both disappointed me.”
- • I’m tempted to just break off a standard section of the Strays every episode for an Anton Lesser appreciation moment. “Really? It’s an assignment. Calibrate your enthusiasm.” It’s barely a line on paper, but the most withering putdown you’ve ever heard when it’s coming from Partagaz’s mouth.
- • There’s weirdly little Syril in this episode; he mostly serves to narrate the heist to Dedra and Partagaz, who clearly don’t think he could handle the whole “and we’re doing all this so we can mine out the planet so brutally it collapses” part of the plan.
- • That’s Benjamin Bratt stepping in to take over the role of Bail Organa, previously played (as recently as Obi-Wan Kenobi) by Jimmy Smits. He’s mostly window dressing here.
- • I dig the floating photography droid, although it’s not as cool as last week’s disco-ball DJ bot.
- • The ISB continue to be the biggest dorks in the Empire. Just listen to Heert effuse about his fancy cocktail. “This is my third one!”
- • “Who wants to die for lawless ineptitude?” “Words do still have meaning.” “My rebel is your terrorist, something like that?” Mendelsohn is having a lot of fun here playing full smug fascist.
- • The guy who interrupts the heist—and indirectly gets Cinta killed—is the same guy who was giving Rylanz a hard time at the meeting back at the start of the week. I’m not sure what that represents, beyond the basic economics of not hiring two actors.
- • “Are you crying? Are you? Look at me. Look at me! There’s no place to hide, look at me. I’m not going to say ‘Remember this,’ because I don’t have to. This is on you now. This is like skin. You’re taking her everywhere you go for the rest of your useless life.”
- • “We should have killed Krennic while we were up there!”
- • Watching a second time, it really is an oddly paced hour. Cassian and Bix disappear for 20 full minutes while the gala/heist takes over, only to go full “Cool Guys Don’t Look At Explosions” in the closing minutes.
