blogging andor: rebel with or without a cause
season 1, episode 6. "the eye."
the final image of this episode is a of a positively giddy luthen, celebrating in the back of his shop when he learns his heist was successful. interestingly, he learns about it because a man in his shop cracks a joke about it. huh! it turns out that’s really how it happens.
anyway, today’s episode of ANDOR is almost entirely that heist sequence. and it does everything you want a heist to do. we’ve got disguises. we’ve got people jumping off of things attached to wires. we’ve got astrological phenomena used to camouflage covert operations. and we’ve got things going wrong.
we’re on the ground in aldhani for the first 2/3rds of this episode. this is a technique that a lot of modern dramas with multiple plotlines—some of which also star ebon moss-bachrach and have been discussed at length on this blog—make liberal use of. you establish a rhythm of cutting around to different stories, and then, to emphasize a point, you break the rhythm for a week. it works. we are locked in.
we’re also meeting more of the bureaucrats at the garrison, not really to humanize them but to get us excited about seeing their comeuppance. the commandant overseeing the place is nervous about a visiting engineer — he’s pushing his family to be good hosts to secure his position within the power structure. he’s also getting too thick to wear his ceremonial belt — a little on the nose! but it echoes cassian’s frequent assessment of the empire: that they’re too lazy and smug to see the fist coming directly at their faces.
it turns out that the empire has big plans to further build out aldhani, which means further displacement of the native population. the commandant is cruel and dismissive of these people, and in a sort of bleak visual gag, he and his equally hateful and dismissive inferiors sip from their travel mugs in perfect synchronization. for a deadly serious episode with a lot of deaths, there’s actually A LOT of visual gags in this episode, including later a four armed doctor who instantly raises two hands when held at gunpoint, and then slowly, the other two. i guess the first ones are the dominant set.
like any good heist, to this point we have only been given a vague sense of it. now it’s really playing out. tamaryn, nemik, cassian and cousin are all dressed as guards and fall in to a procession moving the native dhanis into a viewing spot for “the eye” which is a kind of meteor shower/northern lights display that happens once a year. the guards are all excited to see it too, which is why nobody really clocks the new guys. gorn, their man on the inside, guides them closer to the front office. there’s another great visual gag here when the four fake guards fall into formation and tamaryn and cousin’s guns crash into each other. cassian is stonefaced about it. not even a hint of i told you so!
meanwhile vel and cinta — who by the way are a romantic item! fun! — swim to a guard post and plant a device that will jam radio communication. everybody reconnects as they take the commandant, his family, and the engineer hostage. the engineer grabs a gun and—i think nobly—tries to argue for the freedom of the commandant’s young son, but cinta shoots the engineer dead. so much for your new shopping center or whatever, the empire!
they leave most of the hostages upstairs with stone-cold cinta and head down to the vault where they take the guards by surprise, disarming them, and enlisting them to help load thousands of pounds of gold into a sort of interstellar traincar they’re going to launch up and out of there. this includes the commandant, who literally drops dead from the ten minutes of hard labor they make him do. again, on the nose, but appropriate.
unfortunately, some other guards get wise to what’s going on earlier than planned, and a shootout ensues. gorn and tamaryn both die, and then in the ensuing chaos as cassian steers them to escape, nemik is crushed between two huge piles of gold and paralyzed. once again, we’re really staying on this nose and not leaving! — the dreamer of the revolution is literally crushed by the physical manifestation of capitalism.
cassian makes a bold escape through the meteor shower, which by the way is a really dazzling and beautiful visual effect. a lot of disney TV looks like trash, but ANDOR never does. the god tony gilroy would not let that happen! they get nemik to a doctor, but he dies from his injuries. i was really shocked by this! i thought for sure a character as dynamic as nemik would survive to drop more bars on us. ANDOR is really not fucking around, and this is how you know.
and then something even more shocking happens. space cousin takes cassian aside and proposes they take the money and run. cassian, who until now has been pretty nihilistic about life under the empire, is shocked. he says, “what about your brother?” and space cousin tells him it was a lie. abruptly, cassian shoots him and kills him.
the way i remembered this scene from my first watch a few years ago, i actually thought cassian was forced to shoot him—that when cousin saw that cassian wouldn’t go along with his plan, he reached for his own gun. but he doesn’t! there is no immediate danger. cassian kills him in a fit of outrage on behalf of his teammates. in the moments after, he looks genuinely rattled in a way we haven’t seen before. did it take a lot of blunt symbolism to finally awaken cassian’s rebel spirit? maybe!
but he takes the pay luthen promised him from their score, buys a ship from the doctor, and leaves, but not before vel gives him nemik’s manifesto—his last request was that cassian take possession of it. will it ignite the spark we just saw flicker in cassian’s eyes? i mean, if you don’t already know, this entire show is technically a prequel to rogue one, a movie in which cassian andor is very much a seasoned and longtime freedom fighter, so yes, yes it will.