Dedra Meero has let her hair down. Blonde and straight, it’s parted neatly, terminating below her shoulders with the ends terminating in a severe straight line across her back. It rests against a white blouse woven from what looks like silk (is it Ghorman?), tucked into smart, high-waisted pleated black trousers. She gazes out the window, listening to opera. She looks like Isabelle Huppert or Charlotte Rampling in an art film about sad European sex, perhaps involving sadism or fascism or a combination of both. Oh, and she lives with Syril Karn now, because they’re in love, or whatever passes for love among people like Dedra Meero and Syril Karn.
Well, I know I cheered! But we’ll return to this relationship, one of the most fascinating and troubling in Star Wars’ long history, in a bit. The best place to start properly is with the title character.
Cassian Andor’s continuing misadventures are a case study in how not to stage a Rebellion. The ragtag, starving bunch of Rebels who captured him, thinking he’s an Imperial test pilot for real instead of just as a cover, continue to war with one another. They shout taunts at each other from their respective positions on opposite sides of a mist-covered forest clearing, exchange insults and half-hearted gunfire, and generally act like undisciplined doofuses. As they once said on Succession, these are not serious people.
Certainly not compared to Andor. When the two groups realize their standoff can’t be resolved — one side has the ship but no pilot and no food, the other has the pilot and a little food but no ship — they solve it like adults: by playing an outer-space version of Rock Paper Scissors. Cassian takes advantage of this idiocy, grabbing a gun, blasting himself free of his restraints, and making a run for it. He might have gotten caught if not for help from an unlikely source: a big giant man-eating monster that stampedes into the clearing and starts gobbling people up.
The sequence leaves no doubt that Andor is a much rougher customer than these people. Yes, two of them got gunned down when a stupid argument got out of hand, but when push comes to shove they’re not killers. When Cassian frees himself, points a blaster at his guard, and says “Don’t move or I’ll kill you,” you believe him in a way you don’t believe any of the threats of his hotheaded captors. Indeed, in order to seize the TIE fighter and make his getaway, he straight-up kills one of the Rebels himself. For Cassian, the mission is everything.
BTW, the final shot of the episode reveals this all takes place on the temple-covered planet Yavin IV, home of the Rebel base during the attack on the first Death Star in the original Star Wars film. I generally don’t like these superhero comic book–style “oh my gosh, it was [familiar person or place] this whole time??” reveals, so I didn’t get the nostalgic charge I was probably supposed to get. But this is Tony Gilroy we’re talking about, and it’s not just there for the nostalgia pop. By showing that this stupid, lethal internecine squabble takes place mere miles away from where the fully united and organized Rebels will launch their greatest victory, Andor’s showing us that in-fighting can be brought under control, and dedicated revolutionaries can come together and win.
On Mina-Rau, Cassian’s friends Bix and Brasso have a lot to worry about. They still haven’t heard from Cassian, of course, and by the time he frees himself the visiting Imperials have shut off all communications to and from the planet while they conduct their inspections. On top of monitoring the harvest, they’re also looking for undocumented workers, and Bix and Brasso don’t have visas. (The Empire’s tactics are barely even a metaphor for the real world at this point.) Fortunately they’re being hid by Kellen (Ryan Pope), a farmer unwilling to hand over innocent people to fascist thugs, which is more than you can say for many major American universities.
But Kellen’s best efforts may not matter. One of the visiting imperials, Lieutenant Krole (Alex Waldmann), takes a shine to Bix and asks her out on a date. He takes her excuse that she’s married relatively graciously and departs, but the thing about being propositioned by armed agents of the state is that you’re not really free to say no, are you? It’s fascinating to watch a Star Wars show depict what it’s like for women to have to smile their way through interactions with the world’s wormiest men simply because they’re in some kind of position of power and can’t be told where to stick it.
On Chandrila, Mon Mothma is discovering much the same thing. On the outs with his wife and financially ruined by bad investments — and, he says, by Rebel activity — Tay, Mon’s longtime friend and a financier willing to help her cover up her disappearing cash, turns on her. He doesn’t say so directly, of course, but he threatens to rat her out to the Empire unless she and her unnamed associates cut him a bigger bribe. Unfortunately for Tay, this all happens under the watchful eye of the real Rebel leader, Luthen Rael; to paraphrase Darth Vader, Luthen is not as forgiving as Mon Mothma. But it’s clear that if Mon’s money doesn’t solve this problem soon, Luthen’s killers will.
Relationship troubles abound on Chandrila, actually. Mon’s husband Perrin sharply accuses her of having an affair with Tay. (He’s wrong, but up until the moment Tay shakes her down, it seems as though Mon wouldn’t mind if their business arrangement turned into something more.) During his big toast to his child-bride daughter and her husband-to-be, he advises the kids that the galaxy will crap on their heads every day, so the most important thing is to find “pleasure, gaiety, amusement…joy! Joy! Joy!” No wonder his marriage to Mon isn’t working: When confronted with the crappiness of the galaxy, she’s chosen the opposite of amusement as a remedy.
Meanwhile, we learn Mon’s rebel cousin Vel and her rebel girlfriend Cinta have broken up, with Luthen squirreling the woman away in some unrelated mission. (I hope this doesn’t mean we’ve seen the last of them as a couple, since the Star Wars Universe isn’t nearly queer enough even with them in it.) Luthen’s assistant Kleya won’t be sticking around for the wedding, though. She’s off home to Coruscant, in an attempt to use Luthen’s powerful communication hub to both get in touch with Cassian and find out what’s going on beneath the blockade of Mina-Rau.
Elsewhere on Coruscant, Dedra Meero complains to her boss, Major Partagaz, that she doesn’t want the top-secret Ghorman genocide gig she was given by Director Krennic last episode. It’s not that she has any moral qualms, mind you, just that she’d rather continue working on her pet project: finding out the identity of “Axis,” the Rebel super-agent she (and nearly she alone) believes is at the center of anti-Empire activity all across the galaxy. Lucky for Luthen Rael, though unluckily for the people of Ghorman, Partagaz encourages her to embrace the new assignment, not that she has any choice in the matter. It may have to be disguised as a demotion, but “Ghorman is a gift,” he says. Keep in mind he’s talking about killing an entire planet and everyone on it.
So she returns home to her live-in boyfriend — I still can’t believe I’m saying this — Syril Karn. Turns out all you need to do to successfully win over the Imperial intelligence officer with whom you’ve formed a psychosexual obsession is to track her halfway across the galaxy and physically drag her to safety in the middle of a riot. He’s even turned his job in a cubicle farm into something to be proud of. Hear that, male loneliness epidemic victims? There’s hope for you yet!
But there’s one thing even the surprisingly brave Syril and the unflappable Dedra find frightening, so much so they don’t even name it. But reading between the lines, it’s pretty clear. They’ve pushed the fateful encounter back as far as they can, but they can’t avoid it any longer. They’re going to have to have dinner with..dun dun dunnnnnn…Syril’s emotionally abusive mother! She is the most terrifying person in the galaxy who doesn’t use the honorific “Darth,” to be fair.
The second of three episodes released simultaneously as this season’s opening “chapter,” this episode doesn’t pack the wallop of its predecessor. That’s understandable: The thrill of being the first new episode of Andor in two years is something you can really only capture once, even if you’re debuting three of them at a time. Since the first episode already gave us the “where are they now” for almost all of these characters, there isn’t that same rush of new information to contend with either.
For the most part, anyway. Dedra and Syril forming a romantic relationship is a genuine shock. Dedra running her thumb tenderly around Syril’s mouth because her baby’s afraid of his mom is an even bigger shock. I genuinely didn’t think she had it in her! But fascists are human too, which makes this scene even creepier. Watching a genocidal space Nazi comfort the man who loves her is like watching a Black Lodge entity pretend to be human on Twin Peaks. It’s uncanny, and it only gets more so the closer to human they get.
There are a lot of little details like that in this episode, even if it’s not throwing the haymakers of the premiere. The little parable of Yavin IV. Mon Mothma’s tears when she realizes her would-be lover is blackmailing her and threatening the Rebellion. The way the uptick in religious traditionalism on Chandrila reflects the wider authoritarian tilt of the galaxy. The live-wire stuff about undocumented workers on Mina-Rau. The primary task of this episode is to advance all the players down the field a few more yards, and it does. But even when it doesn’t seem as if Andor is doing much else, it’s still hard at work in the shadows.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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