'Andor' Recap, Episode 1-3: Rebels Regrouping

This post contains spoilers for the first three episodes of Andor Season Two, Which are now streaming on Disney+.

Many Andor Fans Weren'T Happy To Learn That Disney+ Intended to Release The Show's Second and Final Season in Weekly Three-Episode Chunks, AS If the Streamer Were Eager to be done with this outlier entry in the Star Wars Franchise as Quickly as possible. But because of the way Tony Gilroy Has Structured Each Season As a Quartet of Three-Hour Arcs, The Release Schedule Makes Sense, Giving Viewers a Chance to Gobble Up Each Segment of the Larger Story in One Go, Rather Than Wascheing The Whole Thing Out Many Months

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This has the side benefit of making the Whole Season Eligible for Emmy consideration, where Half of It would have Fallen Outside The Eligitivity Window If Each Episode was released Weekly. Each Subset of Episode Has Its Own Writer-Director Duo-These First Three Waren Written by Gilroy and Directed by Ariel Kleiman-and is separate from the Events of the Next One by Roughly a Year. So Rather Than Attamp To Discuss Individual Episode, We're Going to look at all Three of this Week's Installments – Which Take Place Four Years Before the Events of Both Rogue One and the original

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Movies – At Once. Because the stories are at this point fairly sprawling, we're alo going to break it down by subplot, Starting with our title character: Cassian It's a Mixed Bag for the Show's Chief Protagonist. AS WAS The Case in Season One, His Story Gets off to Slow Start. He spands a good chunk of these episodes sidelined on a mysteryus planet – Which is possibly revealed to be the four moon of yavin, aka the rebel base from

Star Wars – Mostly so that he can't interfere with events in Some of the other subplots, primarily the one with bix. But Cassian As a True Believer in the Rebellion is a Vastly More Interesting Version of the Character Than the One We Got For the Majority of the First Season. From the Opening Scene, where he convinces to Fellow Rebel That She's Doing the Right Thing by Risking Her Life So HE Can Steal a Fighter from An Imperial Base, he is confident, determined, and Unsendimental. His Extended Refusal of the call was among Season One's Least Compelling Arcs, But We Know From

How Effective Diego Luna is at Playing This Version of the Character. This Cassian Knows What He's Doing, And Why, and Doesn'T Stop to Question Any of It, For Good and For Ill. Editor's Picks And If the Yavin Material is Blatant Stalling, Much of it is entertaining stalling, offering some Welcome Dark Comedy to Leave some of the Heavier Material Elsewhere. (The Same is true of the syril stuff in the Third Episode, Which Cassian is Largely Abynt From.) We've Grown So Accustomed to Seeing How Masterfully Luthen Controls His Various Spy Cells, It's Easy To Forget That The Bigger The Rebellion Grows, The Harder It Gets To Maintainin That level of order. In The Swamp of Yavin, Cassian Finds Himself Among a Group Who Don't Real Realize Tho The Same Same As Him, and Who Are So Prone to Infighting that they possibly Split Off Into River Facts, Each Prepared to Kill the Other. It's amusing stuff, as is the galactic slapstick of cassian poigngling to work the ship in the opening sequence, when he'd been trained on a different kind. (Starting with

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Season One Final, The Disney+ Shows Have Done A Good Job of Demstrating Just How Scary A Single Ship Can Be, After Fans Had Spent Decades Getting Used To Many of Them Doing Battle At Once.)

Still, Despite The Better Overall Writing for the Character, Cassian Spends Much of this Arc feeling Besides the point. Dedra and Syril Some of this Arc's Most Intriguing Material Happens here, and that's Even Before The Imperial Power Couple of MEERO AND SYRIL KARN HAVE TO HOST SYRIL'S OVERBEARING MOTHER EEDY FOR AN Excruciating Dinner. (Eedy: Great Star Wars Character or Greatest

Character? The Lean Towards Greatest.) Related Content THOUGH DEDRA HAS HIT A Wall in Her Pursuit of the spymaster We Know to be Luthen, She's Still Held in High Esteem by Major Partagaz and Other Key Members of the Imperial Security Bureau. So She Gets a Crucial Assignment, Handed Down by None Other Than

Rogue One Villain Orson Krennic. Because We Know That Krennic's Job in this was Building The Death Star, We Can More Easily See Through His Talk of Achieving “Energy Independent” for the Empire, and the chilling Justifications He and the repres in the ministry of enlel offer for Why'll be able to to able to toe to. Gouge-line The Planet of Gorman For Material We Know is intended for the Death Star. When one of the minister Asks, “Hasn'T There Always Been Something Slightly Arrogant About the Ghor?” He is speaking for Every Instrument of Fascism Wh Has Understood that the Easiest Route to Getting to do Whatever You Want – No Matter How Horrible – is to invent a Reason for People to Blame Your Intended Victims. The Dinner, Meanwhile, Speaks to what an impressive Job Gilroy Did in Creating Syril.

Andor

Is a show about How Fascism Works – An unfortunatelo Topical Subject – and How it can be fought. And the Key to the latter is to demonstrate that Averal Schmucks like Syril Can Just AS Easily Sign on the Cause as Your True Monsters Like Krennic or Grand Moff Tankin. So syril has to feel plausibly ordinary and recognizable. He Has Ambition, and an overinflated Sense of self-importance, but Both Those traits are drivers by Eedy's Constant Nagging and Guilt-Tripping. And the Dinner Sequence, in addition to being very funny, Also Does a good Job of Both Humanizing Dedra and Showing How Ruthless She can be in All Aspects of Her Life, from Fomenting Trouble on a Planet The Empire Wants to Ruin, to Shutting up Her Boyfriend's Troublesome Mom. She Has Genuine Affection for Syril, Because Even People Who Eagerly serve The Goals of Evil Have Family they like as home to.

Adria Arjona, Center, AS Bix

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That Said, It Feels Free To Retraumatize Her in This Way – Even If's able to Fight Back and Kill Her Attacker – Since She's Reintduced as Severely Struggling with the aftermath of Being Tortured in Season One. It's a Tricky Needle to Thread Sometimes, in Finding Ways To Demstrate All The Ways The Empire is Horrible Withut It Playing As Gleeful Sadism On the Show's Part. The fact that there are a bunch of other female characters dealing with other kinds of conflicts help, but making bix in Perpetual Victim, at least to this point in the series, is a disservice to her.

Still, She at Least Gets to Save Herself, Rather Than Needing Cassian to Swoop in Too Late to Help Her, and too Late to Keep Brasso Alive. And Brasso Performs One Final Act of Heroism by Acting Like He's Not in League with Kellen, Thus Encouraging The Empire to Spare Kellen and his Family. Mon and LuthenYour Mileage Will Vary On How Much You Felt You Needed To Learn About Chandrilan Wedding Customs. There time Defintely Points for Me Where This Arch Began To Feel Like The Final Season of How I Met Your Motherwhich made the terrible choice of setting its Entirely At A to Destination Wedding That The Series Final was set to promptly undo. At The Same Time, as with the dinner with syril's mother, there's real value to reminding the audience that these people – Even a figure of relative Legend Like Mon Mothma – exist in What is meant to be a recognizable world, even if it's one with droids and hyperdrive and laser Swords. So Telling US More about Mon and Vel's Background, Letting Us See Even More of Her Complicated Family Life with Perrin, Learning More About Arranged Marriages Amag The Chandrilan Upper Classes, Has Value. Maybe Not Three episodes' Worth of Value, but the wedding sequence Also has the growing tension of a Drunken, Desperate Tay Becoming Such a Threat That Luthen Has To Arrange to HaVe Him Killed – Much to the in the Inhamay of Mon, Who Still Isn Praepad to pay the full cost of this Rebellion. After Luthen has set up tay's assassination – Using Cinta, Whom he Has Kept separate from vel for quite some time, to vel's intense resentment – mon's only way to deal with it is to get Hammered and begin dancing with reckless abandon at the reception

White Lotus ), but on a character level, it adds a lot for her to portray just how much this is spiritually ribs the future leader of the rebellion. AS Luthen Puts It To Her Earlier in the Third Hour, “People Fail. That's Our Curse.” Mon Mothma wants to be perfect and good, but she is destined to fail because she is a person, and because the nature of the role she's assuming makes uniqualified subsequent impossible. Trending Stories

In a universe that has r2d2 and c-3po-and event on show that iron has the adorably anxious b2emo-I don't think we can ask the disco ball droid, like syril's mother, belongs at the top of the