blogging andor: ring them bells

season 1, episode 2: pockets are fomenting in "that would be me"

last time on ANDOR, we recognized the strands of bad luck and ill temper that were fated to ensnare our guy cassian. today, they tighten up.

our principal characters are making moves. cassian recovers his mint-condition doodad that he plans to sell to vix’s mysterious buyer as vix’s mysterious buyer (stellan skarsgård, probably the reigning sci-fi MVP of the decade right now) makes his way into town on public transportation.

that scene on the space bus, where skarsgård endures smalltalk from an affable stranger, is more god-tier tony gilroy shit. in casual conversation, we get an acute sense of what imperial rule is like for an everyday merchant — it’s a nuisance, and he laughs off the bleak necessity of breaking rules to get around it.

last night i was at an event for the dover chamber and i ran into an old leadership seacoast classmate. we talked about a few things in the education world, where she works, and she shared that she’d recently been told that in grant writing, she should avoid words like “transition” even to indicate, you know, a shift between ideas or points of focus, because the application would be flagged by AI and automatically rejected. we started kicking around some very anodyne terms that we could use for things like DE&I training instead — naturally, i won’t reproduce them here. but there are some good ideas out there. keep yr ear to the ground.

but anyway, back to the scene in ANDOR we were talking about! another thing that’s great about it is that it looks almost exactly like this:

the action of this episode kicks off with an APB out to the galaxy that the empire is looking for a guy who meets cassian’s description. we meet cassian’s adoptive mother, marva (fiona shaw, fucking transcendent) who immediately knows our boy did something stupid.

vix’s jealous boyfriend stalks her at a bar where she meets with cassian. jealous bf misinterprets a minor gesture—cassian gratefully putting his hand on vix’s hand because she called in a favor—and immediately calls the feds and reports him. later that evening, vix comes over to hook up, and jealous boyfriend is immediately flooded with regret. let me make something clear: snitches get absolutely no redemption on this blog. we hate this guy forever. i am not even going to look up his character’s name.

side note, but for probably the third or fourth time, i googled the actress with the geometric hair who plays the space sex worker who saw cassian before he killed the guards because i TRULY CAN’T BELIEVE that’s not annie murphy from schitt’s creek. are we SURE that’s not her?

this episode is really about two important things. 1, it’s about widening our sense of ferrix as a rough and tumble place where anything is possible. “if you can’t find it here, it’s not worth finding.” but it’s also a place where all that scrappy authenticity and resourcefulness is threatened. in a flashback and some exposition later, we learn that cassian’s home planet was the site of a mining disaster. the kids grew up there alone after their parents all died. ferrix is an industrial town, too.

and 2., most importantly, it’s about syril karn finding his work bestie!!!

linus mosk, the dwight schrute to syril’s michael scott, arrives full of fascist bluster, and it is a hilarious delight to watch syril’s face as this eager bastard tells him everything he wants to hear. the misplaced confidence in these two is equally hysterical and horrifying — syril takes a humiliating stab at rallying his troops on their way to ferrix to find cassian, but linus dubs his speech “very inspiring.” syril is going to fail upwards at terrible speed, and everybody’s going to suffer for it.

good thing this is science fiction and not real life!