blogging andor: will the circle be unbroken?
season 2, episode 1. andor is back! one year has passed since the uprising on rix road, and tony gilroy has somehow doubled his budget.
Welcome back to ANDOR! In the last few weeks on this here blog I posited that ANDOR Season 1 might be the best TV season of all time. Having said that, there’s kind of a lot riding on Season 2, which will conclude the series. If Tony Gilroy & Co. don’t stick the landing, I do think it has a retroactive impact! But if the word on the street is true, and this season exceeds the first… Oh man. I don’t know if I am ready.
If the first scene is any indication, we’re eating good this spring. We find ourselves in an imperial hangar, where a woman inspects a new TIE fighter. She heads down the hallway and runs into—who else—our man Cass in a pilot’s uniform, chilling in the break room (It feels SO GOOD to see him again). She’s a new recruit to the rebellion, and is helping Cassian steal the plane. She’s also very nervous. By committing this act, she’s giving up her current life — everything it was and all the joy she managed to eke out under the imperial thumb. “I had fun here,” she tells Cassian, desperate to feel like she’s making the right decision. And then we get another ALL TIME speech from Cassian, right out the gate:
“This makes it worth it. This. Right now. Being here at the moment you step into the circle. Look at me. You made this decision long ago. The Empire cannot win. You'll never feel right unless you're doing what you can to stop them. You're coming home to yourself. You've become more than your fear. Let that protect you."
I am so happy Tony Gilroy is back.
And then Cassian steals the TIE fighter despite having absolutely no idea how to fly it, (hilariously) crashing it all over the hangar and nearly dying in a ravine before getting free. It’s surprising but not unwelcome to have this moment of near-slapstick sci-fi, in part because it looks so great. Andor somehow got a bigger budget this time? That doesn’t seem legal.
Bix, Brasso, Wilmon and B2EMO are living on an agricultural planet, helping to fix farm equipment and hooking up with the locals (Hell yeah brother). Bix is still suffering from PTSD, which we learn through a very unnerving and formally inventive dream sequence. But the driving action here is that an imperial ship shows up to conduct an audit — and Bix points out that none of them have Visas. An illegal immigration arc on the most fiery political show on TV? I’m here for it. We need this.
On the planet Chandrilla, Mon Mothma is going ahead with the plan to marry off her daughter to Davo Sculdun’s son (say that five times fast). Everybody’s showing up for what feels like extended festivities, including Luthen, which alarms Mon and Vel and naturally delights me. Under his cover as an antiquities dealer, he’s made some kind of arrangement with Sculdon, but he’s clearly at the party for fact-finding reasons. Stellan Skarsgård wins the episode in one line — he’s animatedly chatting up a young soldier with the Imperial Navy and hears he’s being relocated and asks, faux-innocent, “Where is everybody going?” Skarsgård’s hairpin turns from flowery local gossip to growly freedom fighter should be playing on a loop in a museum. It’s art.
There’s A LOT of flirting in this episode, including even possibly between Luthen’s assistant Kleya and Vel? Vel’s concerned about the two of them being seen talking to each other and Kleya says “we’re just two single women” in a way that has a real “just gal pals” kind of wry energy. Just tabbing that one for the future.
Cassian lands his TIE fighter on a jungle planet where he was supposed to meet a guy named Porko. Very curious to know what type of dude has that type of name, but Porko is MIA. Instead, Cass is captured by a group of starving, bickering young rebels. The first season of ANDOR was very adept at showing the fractious nature of far left coalitions, and here we get another symptom/fracture — confused and disorganized young people, interested in the cause in theory but incapable of really accomplishing anything on their own.
Finally, we circle up with Dedra and Partagaz again, and they’ve been selected for an Imperial task force led by Krennic, played by the great Ben Mendelsohn—reprising his role from Rogue One. This is the bleakest and most compelling section of the episode. We learn that the Empire has a dire need for more energy, and has tabbed a planet called Ghorman to be aggressively space-fracked.
It’s funny — last year I went to a talk from a guy from OpenAI, who had all kinds of bridges in Brooklyn to sell us about the wonderful future of AI. The only catch was a need for energy at an impossible scale, but he was confident we’d crack something like cold fusion to accomplish that. Last I checked, that hasn’t happened, and yet every fucking Google search is AI-powered now. I wonder where the energy is coming from.
Anyway, Ghorman. This is a planet with a powerful and wealthy populace, so there’s a potential for significant PR blowback: drilling would destabilize—and possibly destroy—the planet. Two space marketing executives present to the task force, explaining the ways that they’ve seeded anti-Ghorman sentiment into the general galactic population. This is of course chillingly reminiscent of the Third Reich and their anti-Jewish propaganda, and Zionist propaganda about Palestinians, and even the way RFK Jr. talks about people on the autism spectrum. It’s unnerving how much it resonates, and hopefully it makes us all think about the young rebel we met in the first scene, trying to square her past complacency with her decision now to act.
Dedra has a different idea, though. She pitches Krennic on finding a group of rebels dumb enough to be manipulated into doing the empire’s bidding on Ghorman. Hey, Cassian is with some of those guys right now! Uh oh!