Andor has never touched on the Force before. (For all that I occasionally find it amusing to remind myself that the ultimate antagonist its various characters are rebelling against, in such grounded fashion, is literally an evil space wizard who deep-fried his own head by shooting magic lightning at a laser sword.) The concept of a cosmic destiny guiding sentient life along its Midichlorian rails sits ill at ease with the show’s basic ethos that history is made by people who choose to act; and I’m not sure how useful it is to suggest Cassian has somehow always been heading for the place we all know he’s going to end up. There are more interesting ways to take this odd little interlude, though, which dovetails with the show’s questions about who its main character is: that Cassian Andor isn’t a chosen one, but a “one” who’s got a desperate yearning to choose, a man who will not cede his decisions to anyone, for good or ill, stupid or smart. Certainly, he seems inclined to follow his own instincts when Wilmon shows up with an offer of that job from Luthen, one that comes with a tasty extra jolt of vengeance alongside its obvious impact on the war effort: putting a blaster bolt straight through Dedra Meero’s head.
Cass doesn’t know it, but he’s on a hell of a time crunch with this job: Dedra, now formally installed on Ghorman, has just been handed the orders she’s been prepping for for years. Or, to put it in the wonderfully British words of Anton Lesser’s Major Partagaz: “It’s bad luck Ghorman.” Total military lockdown and mass deportations are the order of the day, followed by a calcite extraction process that’s likely to collapse the entire planet, all commencing in just 48 hours. A few years from now, of course, the Empire blowing up planets will seem slightly less like front-page news. But it’s a testament to Denise Gough’s acting that she’s able to convey that even a diehard like Dedra is unnerved by the scale of the atrocity that’s about to unfold on the silly little planet, with the spiders and the silk and the funny little hats. Dedra’s palpable desperation when she tries to get Syril to stop asking questions, do what he’s told, and get ready to get the hell out of Dodge is especially skin-crawling; watch the way her hands claw up in revulsion and frustration when she tries the old “Just shut up” kiss, only to freak them both out even more. Part of what makes these two characters fascinating is that, despite operating at different levels of information and delusion, they both believe, fundamentally, that the Empire is good, that the order it buys is worth the freedom and blood that it spends (and the way it spends the latter, disproportionately, from those it deems acceptable to sacrifice). It feels inevitable that the unrealities of that position are, at least for Syril, about to come into relief as sharp as a planet cracking in two.
Meanwhile, the noose is tightening everywhere, even in the cars and homes of Imperial senators. Andor plays a sometimes perilous game with its willingness to deploy obvious signifiers of modern life in its depictions of the steadily worsening security state of the Empire, threatening to cross the line from satire into outright parody. (See, for instance, the way its journalists speak very deliberately in the cadences of 24-hour news anchors, reporting the state spin on “terrorist activities.” It’s effective but also just a tad distracting.) Touches like the ubiquitous security scanners that Mon Mothma is forced to walk through now to get into the Senate do a more deft job of illustrating the parallels, even as the series doubles down on its basic contempt for leveraging ever-weaker democratic tools to try to combat an authoritarian state. (All Mon can offer the Ghorman senator, who clearly knows the writing is on the wall—even if nobody knows how bad things are about to get—is “a petition”; Genevieve O’Reilly makes sure we know how pathetic she knows the offer is.) It’s chilling stuff, even if it’s partially blunted by the fact that this is something like the fifth “Mon Mothma looks stoically worried about the rise of fascism” scene we’ve gotten so far this season.
This is, after all, the third time Andor has had to reset the status quo in as many weeks, efforts that feel especially notable when they come in the form of one of the season’s shortest episodes to date. These reintroduction episodes carry a certain thrill to them—new places, new scenarios, new looks at Syril’s oddball hair and fashion choices. But they also force both the show, and the viewer, to do a lot of overhead that most TV shows avoid by, y’know, not drastically jumping forward in time every three episodes. Most of this stuff can be inferred, of course. It’s not hard, given last week, to figure out why Vel has turned her back on Luthen, and is now completely committed to the more structured and disciplined Rebel military faction on Yavin. But it is work. The relationship between Cassian and Bix, especially, is incredibly important to what the show is trying to do, and keeping huge swathes of it in the realm of inferences can sometimes make it feel like we’re only getting disconnected sketches of these characters rather than a full portrait. The show’s first season often had an episodic tinge to it, following Cass from Ferrix to Aldhani to Narkina 5, meeting a new cast of characters each time. But it never felt like it was leaving quite so much material in the gaps.
Unsurprisingly, the episode tightens up once the table’s been set, as Cassian returns to Ghorman with a sniper rifle in his suitcase and murder on his mind. A reunion with the clerk he met on his previous visit illustrates how good this show always is when it comes to these layered, potentially fraught interactions: the tension of recognition, the coded language, the genuine question of how much Cass remembers about their previous encounter. Andor is a show with a lot on its mind, but it’s also a show about a spy (/soldier/thief/assassin/etc.) navigating the Star Wars universe, and it’s frequently at its most compelling when it drills in to these individual moments.
I’ll be honest: I’m equal parts excited and concerned about this particular block. The Force healer material is worrisome, both because Andor‘s lack of reliance on the Jedi/Force/mystical elements of this setting has always been one of its strengths and because it’s another swerve in Bix’s character that she didn’t especially need. (I’d argue that, because she was the member of our core ensemble who got the least focus in season one, Bix is also the one who’s felt most jerked around by the time jumps—and this is not helped by the way she’s positioned primarily as an adjunct character to Cassian’s narrative.) On the other hand, the potential to see the Ghorman situation finally explode, to watch the various plot threads of this season finally start slamming into each other, is irresistible. Andor has kept its title character on the fringes of the action for six whole episodes at this point. It’s thrilling to know that we’re about to get some very concrete evidence of who Cassian Andor really is.
Stray observations
- • I’ve noticed this before but didn’t remembered to jot it down in the strays: Each time jump is marked by the sound of the Ferrix anvil-bell tolling.
- • Wilmon appears to have realigned with Luthen after his time with Saw’s forces. I’m starting to wonder if that big speech was the end of Forest Whitaker’s contribution to the show.
- • The backdrop of the episode (and the justification for the latest security crackdowns) is a recent firebombing on a naval terminal on Ghorman, which Wil implies he helped orchestrate. (Although plenty of people seem to believe it’s simply an Imperial false flag.)
- • Syril’s clearly a little less charmed by all the heightened security scrutiny after a year of living on Ghorman; his belief that he can bring the reasonable voices in the Front together with the “reasonable voices” in the Empire is probably going to get some people killed. I do dig his weird little seatbelt tie though.
- • A few episodes back, I hit on a theory that Dedra serves as the show’s stand-in for the Empire as a whole—cold, merciless, incredibly effective, and with a weird certainty that it’s all for your own good—and it gets reinforced here, with Wil’s frustrated “She keeps winning!” (Cassian, of course, is the Rebellion, which can’t seem to pin down what it wants to be from day to day.)
- • Dedra is chafing under the addition of a “crisis specialist” whose job appears to be managing cannon fodder for the upcoming fighting that’s almost certain to break out. The show is telegraphing that Ghorman has been sent young and inexperienced soldiers on purpose—presumably to make their deaths all the more worthy of atrocious reprisals.
- • Anton Lesser appreciation moment:”Let the image of professional ascendance settle your nerves.”
- • “How can I help?” “Turn back the clock. Send everybody home.”
- • I skipped over the meeting of the Ghorman Front in the recap proper, mostly because I don’t find the subtitled yelling by largely clichéd characters especially interesting. (It was neat to see the hotel clerk in the mix though.) I was amused to see that Thierry Godard’s pissed-off peasant guy, who helped contribute to Cinta’s death, is now a member, suggesting armed revolution sometimes adopts a “take a penny, leave a penny” approach to recruitment.
- • “Maybe you’re the place he needs to be” is a nice sentiment from the Force healer—played with calm conviction by Josie Walker—but, uh…probably not, huh?
- • For half a second, when those horns first kicked in in the scene between Cass and Bix, I thought the soundtrack was going to really go there and break into “The Force Suite.”
- • Diego Luna doesn’t get to have a ton of fun this episode, but Cassian clearly gets a kick out of screwing with Wilmon, big brother-style, when they leave for Ghorman.
- • I can’t tell if it’s a feature or a bug of the episode that I have genuinely no idea what Cassian is doing for the Rebel army on Yavin. He’s apparently very good at it though!
- • “Ferrix.” “Stone and sky.”
