Andor is quite the celestial spectacle.
The Tony Gilroy series concludes another brilliant 3-episode arc.
The Short Take:
Like the preceding trio of episodes, the fourth, fifth, and sixth installments of Andor methodically build a story towards a tense, high-stakes finish. This is a special series, and I’m so glad it’s a part of Star Wars.
[SPOILER WARNING: You are not a go for this mission until you’ve seen all six of the episodes of Andor that have been released so far.]
The Long Take:
To begin, a little behind-the-scenes preamble. As a Star Wars devotee, it has pained me to not have been been writing weekly reviews for Andor. But, in the Great Nerd Content Flood of Fall 2022, I have barely been able to tread water. Even though I had already committed to weekly breakdowns of She-Hulk and House of the Dragon, I had dreams of covering it all: Marvel, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and Lord of the Rings? Franchise heaven. But, dear reader, I could not. Something had to give. And, as my friend and colleague P.T. McNiff mercifully suggested, I could alleviate some of this burden by waiting until the next three-episode arc of Andor completed. (Amazon’s Rings of Power has also been a casualty of the Flood, but I’m still hoping to catch up on and write a season review once that concludes today.)
My neglect of episode-specific breakdowns is not AT ALL an indication of how much I enjoy Andor. I have loved every minute of this more grounded Star Wars series so far, and feel as though the arc created by episode 4-6 is just as compelling as that constructed by 1-3. Both sets of episodes have very similar pacing, with two episodes that set up the characters and raise the stakes, followed by a third explosive episode in which all the detailed development in the prior two pays off. Without Episode 5, “The Axe Forgets,” for example, we don’t learn about the motivations of all the members of the Aldhani heist crew and we don’t learn how ill-prepared they are for this mission, both of which heighten the tension and make us care more about the outcome of the heist.
The climax of this arc is even more impactful because the editing throughout Episode 6, “The Eye,” creates so much tension. Scenes cut back and forth — sometimes in quick succession — between the Dhanis singing and chanting, our Rebels enacting their plan, the Imperial officers who may at any time catch on to them, and the aurora borealis-colored shooting stars blasting through sky. This whole sequence stressed me out to no end, and I think the genius of the writing and the editing here is that Vel’s crew devised their plan around a massive celestial event that a.) happens once every three years and b.) holds cultural significance to the indigenous population of the planet. So built into story is this boiling point, this culmination for multiple stakeholders. A heist alone probably would have been fine enough, but I think the convergence of the heist with the Aldhani ritual in response to The Eye in the sky elevates the story to a whole other level. There’s a visceral urgency and a momentum that only cinematic storytelling can create.
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When I encounter montages or different scenes intercut together, I always try to think of the new meaning the juxtaposition uniquely creates. Based on the editing choices in Episode 6, I infer that the Dhanis are not merely placed in the story to amp up the tension. They are representatives of peoples and planets all over the Galaxy who have been colonized by the Empire. One of my favorite aspects of Andor so far, in fact, has been its efforts to establish the Galactic Empire as colonizers and view the franchise’s titular wars through a more real-world political lens. In Episode 6, we primarily experience this through the relationship between the Aldhanis or Dhanis and their imperial oppressor, Commandant Jayhold Beehaz.
Beehaz’s casual comments about the Aldhanis is pure paternalism from start to finish. Most notably, Beehaz actually has an extended monologue that reveals that he thinks of the Dhanis as less mature and less intelligent — as children. I include the full quote here because I think paraphrasing it softens the horror of what he’s saying: “They breed a sad combination of traits that make them particularly vulnerable to manipulation. On a practical level, they have great difficulty holding multiple ideas simultaneously. We’ve found the best way to steer them as we’d like is to offer alternatives. You put a number of options on the table, and they’re so wrapped up in choosing, they fail to notice you’ve given them nothing they thought they wanted at the start.” Beehaz describes a tactic I often use with my 3-year-old. Sometimes I’ll ask him something like, “Would you like to use the toilet upstairs or downstairs?” so he feels like he has a choice in the matter. But both choices are really ones that I want and he doesn’t. While I find that this is a means of survival as a parent, it seems absolutely abhorrent when applied to adults.
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In our own world history, the British Empire used a similarly condescending attitude to justify their global occupation. “Uncivilized” or “savage” natives supposedly needed the Empire to take care of them because they, just as Beehaz calls the Dhanis, are “a simple people.” Right before Vel’s crew hold him at gunpoint, Beehaz is in the middle of explaining to a fellow Imperial officer that the days of “passing skins” and “ritual nonsense” will soon be behind them, and that’s fine because “it’s not as if there’s much Aldhani civilization to even forget about in the first place.” Beehaz thinks that the Dhanis are too simple to achieve anything of a “great” or lasting civilization. That they are uncivilized and therefore easily wiped from existence. Beehaz also mentions that he’s placed “Comfort Units” with “cheap local beverages” along the route to distract the Dhanis from their pilgrimage to see the Eye; this reminded me of how many historians and public health scholars believe that U.S. frontiersmen and soldiers often used alcohol to subdue Native Americans. Beehaz’s “Comfort Units” may be marketed as aid, but his speech here reveals a much more sinister ulterior motive.
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“The Eye” does, however, very subtly show how Beehaz is wrong. The Dhanis haven’t, in fact, “choked down” what he’s offered in the past 12 years. When the Dhani leader first encounters Lieutenant Gorn, he says, “May The Eye stay open long enough to find some good within you.” This implies that it may be difficult for The Eye to find good within Gorn and the Empire he represents. Later on, the same leader asks Lieutenant Gorn to translate a message for Commandant Beehaz: “Tell him our ghosts have strong hands and long memories.” To me, this threatening comment indicates that the Dhanis have not blindly fallen prey to the Empire’s manipulation; they see it for what it is and resent it. Gorn purposefully mistranslates this to “May The Eye find the good in all of us,” presumably to keep the peace and not aggravate Beehaz right before Vel’s crew kick off their heist, but I noticed that the Dhani leader gives Gorn this irritated look like, “Hey, that’s not what I said.” He clearly is more aware and in the know than Beehaz or even we as the audience would foolishly believe.
Incidentally, the idea that part of the Rebellion can be a preservation of cultural practices that the Empire tries to erase re-contextualizes Luthen’s cover as a dealer of antiquities. By operating his shop for Coruscant’s wealthiest residents, one could argue that Luthen is participating in the Empire’s slow erasure of other cultures because he’s enabling the redistribution of artifacts. But being part of the system also makes him less suspicious. Or perhaps he’s able to use the Empire’s colonizing tastes against them while, hopefully, preserving a little bit of the history and culture where he can. Political philosopher Nemik eloquently articulates how this erasure extends to everyone else in the Galaxy as well. As he shows Andor some older tech that they plan to use, he says, “We’ve grown reliant on imperial tech, and we’ve made ourselves vulnerable. There’s a growing list of things we’ve known and forgotten. Things they’ve pushed us to forget. Things like freedom.” The series, to me, very clearly connects culture wars and military wars as all part of the same political quagmire.
In the context of the larger Star Wars franchise, I appreciated this zooming in on the subtler mechanics of imperialism; in Andor, the Empire doesn’t just manifest in very visible threats like the Death Star, Stormtroopers, or even those terrifying Tie Fighters that apparently fly much lower to the ground than I originally thought. It’s also in these less obvious systems of oppression. Star Wars is a war fought with soft power as much as it is with military coercion. In Episode 5, “The Axe Forgets,” Nemik explains that it’s really the less obvious mechanisms that make the Empire so powerful. In one of the most poignant lines of dialogue the series has had to date, he says, “So much going wrong, so much to say, and all of it happening so quickly. The pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it. And that is the real trick of the Imperial thought machine. It’s easier to hide behind 40 atrocities rather than a single incident.” The Empire setting up a viewing event for the Aldhanis in a spot they prefer so they can take away their sacred valley from them may not get the attention of the rest of the Galaxy, but these relatively smaller atrocities are happening all over.
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Senator Mon Mothma notices, though. In Episode 4 we hear her implore her husband not to throw dinner parties with people who oppose her — namely Ars Dengor and Sly Moore, both top level advisors to Palpatine. She caustically jokes that perhaps her husband should invite some Ghorman guests because his “fun friends just cut off their shipping lanes yesterday,” and implies that many will starve as a result. In Episode 6, the news of the Aldhani robbery breaks while Mothma is mid-argument in the Senate. The bill she proposes is in defense of the very same Ghormans, who have suffered “coarse and blatant domination” when all they’ve done is “request their basic rights.” Those who have seen the animated series, Rebels, may recognize the Ghormans from the Ghorman Massacre, the more visible atrocity that will ultimately prompt Mothma to leave the Senate and officially join the Rebel Alliance. Also, if we’re darting over to speculation corner a bit, a survivor of the Ghorman Massacre joins Saw Guerrera’s Partisans and appears in Rogue One, so there’s a remote chance that this reference to them leads us to Saw. Could we see early connections between Mon Mothma, the more extremist freedom fighter, and the roles both of them will play in the formation of the Rebel Alliance? As soon as next week maybe?
And that brings us to the most important question coming out of this Aldhani heist arc: what will Cassian Andor do now? In Episode 4, he lists several factions to Luthen, saying, “Alliance, Sep, Guerilla, Partisan Front. One of them,” as if they were all functionally the same. He calls them useless. Does he feel any differently now? Will he join any of them?
A lot happened at the very end here, and I can’t say with any certainty how Cassian might be feeling or what his next move is. The fact that he shoots Skeen so quickly once he hears his double-cross offer makes me think that he’s started to care about the cause more; that he is repulsed by the idea that Skeen would want to take advantage of Vel and make all the deaths of Gorn, Taramyn, Nemik, and maybe Cinta (if she didn’t escape and hide away successfully) in vain. But then his panicked request for just his cut and his return of Luthen’s sky kyber back to Vel says that he doesn’t want anything to do with this. He seems spooked, like this got too messy and he just wants out. Perhaps he gets frightened by his own selfless moral decision making and wants to flee before it gets any “worse”? Then again, he agrees to take Nemik’s manifesto with him.
Even if it’s ambiguous right now, this seems like a pivotal moment that will set Andor on a different path. I assume that no matter where he ends up next episode, he’s going to crack open that book and finally allow Nemik’s message to “sink in.” In the meantime, we can let these three glorious episodes of Star Wars television sink in too.
Some unrelated afterthoughts:
A quick shoutout to Dedra Meero and the ISB/bureaucracy of the Empire. I’ve always been a Star Wars fan heavily biased towards the light side and the Jedi specifically. I have very few Imperial officer collectibles, for instance. But these episodes made me care about Dedra and her ambitions. I think it’s because I’m a sucker for detectives and she seems like a really good one — perhaps the only good one in the entire Empire. I’m looking forward to having complicated feelings about her soon. Syrril Carn understandably did not make it into Episode 6, but a while back The Ringer-Verse speculated that he would cross paths with Dedra, perhaps through the uncle we hear about in Episode 4. I think that makes sense.
Image Credit: Collider
This is a nitpick, but I’m ever so slightly disappointed that we didn’t get more intricate heist scenes. At the end of the day their strategy relied on a hostage hold-up with Beehaz and his family, more like a bank robbery than a cat burglar B & E. Maybe all of the kinks were worked out during their prep time in Episode 5? But then I remind myself that something more Ocean’s 11-esque would detract from the political and emotional stakes of the mission. We’re not here to romanticize anything, after all.
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I’m pulling for Vel and Cinta. Cinta calling Vel out for stalling because she was nervous was great and told me so much about their relationship. I think because Vel says, “Tell me you’re going to be all right” to her, there has to be some kind of meaningful reunion later. We may have to wait a while, or maybe Cinta gets captured and they have to save her. But I’m putting hopes for those two out into the universe now.