Star Wars Andor S1E10: "One Way Out"

Alright, I'm back from my trip and at least a third of the way recovered from exhaustion, jetlag, and other consequences of traveling alone with a three-year-old. It's time to start making up for lost time, and I plan to do that by watching and writing about a lot of Andor in the next couple of weeks. Which, like...there are much worse things to have to do, you know?

Where we left off, Cassian Andor was languishing in an Imperial gulag. He'd had little success convincing his fellow inmates to attempt escape with him, not wanting to jeopardize their eventual releases. But then - through a series of events and inferences that I unfortunately can't quite parse - they discovered that their sentences are all lies and they're going to be worked to death no matter when the courts said they were supposed to be freed. With that revelation, Cassa's fellow slaves - including, significantly, crew kapo Kino - have a change of priorities and decide to throw in with Cassa's escape plan. As for what the plan is, well...all we know so far is that Cassa has been doing some kind of sabotage in one of the work floor bathrooms, but presumably we'll find out what he's thinking in this episode.

Elsewhere in the galaxy, Cassa's ex-girlfriend Bix has been arrested and tortured, which kinda sucks. And Luthen and Mon are starting a new set of hijinks to build up their rebel alliance, which kinda rules.

So, let's jump into the series' tenth episode, "One Way Out."


We start off just minutes after the last episode ended, with the inmate doctor who passed on the information to Cassa and Kino leaving their floor. Cassa - who, as I've noted, is very, very good at puzzling out these sorts of things - has made some further inferences during those minutes. For instance, for the Galactic Empire to consider the disappearing of so many random people to be worth the PR hit, they must have both great need of this mysterious assembly work and a desire to keep that work a secret. Cassa can't think of another reason other than secrecy for them to be so insistent on not letting any of these convicts ever return home.

So, in short: they're being used for a secret construction project.

In short, and with the benefit of franchise context: they're building components for the death stars.

It hasn't been spelled out yet, but come on, it's just too perfect of a fit.

...

Now, granted, I'm still not entirely sure why they'd be using convict labor for this in a world where flash-cloning and labor droids are both mass producible. I guess captured slaves are faster and cheaper than either of the above, but again, the political costs of doing this to random people in vacation hotspots rather than, eg, specifically peripheral ethnic groups that nobody cares about still strains my suspension of disbelief. If secrecy is the main issue, it seems like synth workers really are your best bet. Hell, just reprogram the shitzillion battle droids that must have been left sitting around after the CIS surrendered; probably much cheaper than building new robots from scratch, and certainly attracts less public interest than this mass convicting-and-killing program.

But, these relatively minor worldbuilding issues aside, I really like what this adds to Cassian's character arc.

We already know that his story will end in the Rogue One movie, with him sacrificing his life to enable the death star's destruction. Him having endured this enslavement on Narkina V retroactively turns that final act of his into a cathartic personal vengeance. The death star is now his white whale. The embodiment of everything the Galactic Empire has done to him and forced him to shape his identity around, with the Narkina episodes being a microcosm of its role in his life overall. The death star is the parasite that's fattened itself off of all that pain and immiseration, and once Cassa learns about it he's going to stop at nothing kill that fucking thing if it's the last thing he does.

"Andor" just keeps making the rest of Star Wars better by existing. Rogue One hits a lot harder now.

...

Anyway, going by Cassa's inferences, the project they're working on is something the upper echelons of the government probably really care about. Which means that after an incident like yesterday's, they're almost certainly going to reinforce the security. Kino's knowledge about the number and positioning of the guards, accumulated over his years of semi-privileged servitude, will be useless after that happens. So, going by their understanding of the planet's location and accessibility, they need to escape within the next day.

Kino isn't thrilled about having to stage the breakout this soon, with this little planning, but Cassa manages to shift him on it. Not only is security going to be beefier after tomorrow, but so will the warden's mental state. The prison administrators have got to be panicking right now (their heavihanded execution of an entire work floor the other night definitely smells like panic to Cassa), and panic makes you clumsy. And, really, if they don't escape now, they're all going to be worked to death soon enough anyway, so compared to that isn't a violent death during a failed escape preferable? At least then they'll have denied their abusers the benefit of any more of their labor.

That still isn't quite enough to convince him entirely, but when Cassa tells everyone else in their shift crew what they've learned that night Kino allows himself to be forced onboard. Backing Cassa up, and telling all the others that they're never going to be freed, so they might as well go out with a bang.

Luckily, the other inmates take this with measured silence instead of immediately panicking and drawing the probable attention of the guards. When Kino says that they're going to plan, and wait for the right moment, everyone seems to roll with it.

After a brief intermission of Dierdre and her cronies managing to pull one over on one of the factions that Luthen is trying to court and gaining intel about their plans without tipping them off (I think I'm going to have to talk about this subplot at length once it comes to a head, because individually these scenes don't really give me enough to tell what's going on or what it's significance is yet), we begin Cassa's group's next shift. Kino barks the same orders as he always does. They get the same loudspeaker command prompts from the guards. They move through their mechanical, mannequin-like morning routine. The only difference is the look of steely resolve peering through the usual masks of exhausted apathy on all of their faces.

They start work. Screw together death star widgets for however many hours. Waiting for...whatever it is Cassa has planned with his bathroom tinkering, I suppose.

Then, we hop over to Ferrix. Some of Mom's friends and neighbors are concerned about her recent behavior. Presumably, she's planning her suicide attack to try and get Bix free. Sinta watches. And then we're on to Coruscant.

...

Not gonna lie, I do wish this show would have fewer cuts between longer, more substantial scenes. A lot of these scenes are too short to even communicate anything on their own, and spacing them out over an episode's runtime just makes it easier to forget the setup details before they can pay off.

...

Mon Mothma and Bank Dude are having their meeting with Gul'dan. I thought they'd have to fly off to Dreanor for that, but nope, apparently he was willing to come to her house on Coruscant.

The way she talked about this guy before had me imagining a piratical type just barely affecting high society refinement, but nope! Gul'Dan may or may not have been born an aristocratic fop, but in either case he plays the role of one to the hilt while prattling on in legally safe ambiguity about all the money he launders for even richer assholes doing even shadier things. Really insufferable. He also (truthfully or otherwise) tells her that he's had dealings with her husband, to which she reacts with unsurprised disgust.

He seems to have a nuanced relationship with the regime, in the way that criminals of his like often do with authoritarian governments. The Empire's control over aboveboard finance forces anyone with something to hide to come to people like him. And, since he has so many wealthy, powerful patrons, he's generally comfortable with the knowledge that prosecuting him would be more trouble than it's worth for the Empire, even though everyone knows he's a crook. That said, if allowing him to continue operating ever became even *slightly* more trouble than the alternative, he'd be dead within the day. It's an uncomfortable symbiosis of corruption. One that's made him extremely successful, but ever-haunted by the possibility that his usefulness as a release-valve for frustrated elites might end. With Palpatine steering the empire away from corporatism and toward absolute military dictatorship of late, these fears of his are growing stronger.

Or at least, that's how he presents himself in this conversation. He may be making himself seem less happy with the current direction of things than he actually is in order to appeal to Mon Mothma. But, if it's a lie, it's a perfectly convincing lie.

He tries to maneuver Mon Mothma into owing him a favor. She's having none of it, and refuses to pay him in anything other than cash. But, unfortunately, he's firm. He has enough money to not need more, and - he reveals - she has something he wants that money can't ever buy. Specifically, aristocratic legitimacy. He wants to bring his 14 year old son to Coruscant and introduce him to her 13 year old daughter.

It's clarified in the following discussion that Gul'Dan is actually from the same planet (or at least...the same interplanetary ethnic/cultural group? I'm not actually sure) as Mon Mothma's family. Arranged marriages are, as we know, very much a thing among their noble class, with Mon Mothma's own less-than-happy marital situation being an example of such. And, for all that he's acting the part of nobleman (and is richer than most noblemen, whether generationally or self-made), Gul'Dan is ultimately lowborn. If his son married her daughter, he'd have finally made it in.

When she reacts the way you'd expect, he clarifies that he's not asking for anything binding. Just an introduction. He just wants to bring his son over and introduce the two of them. However, he knows as well as she does that it doesn't have to be a written (or even spoken) contract in order for the rest of high society to see what's happening and make inferences. Inferences that, if they turn out to be wrong, would reflect poorly on the house of Mothma. And, of course, there's how her husband would weigh in. And her daughter herself as well, who seems generally more aligned with her father than with her mother. Even if Mon Mothma isn't officially doing an arranged marriage by agreeing to this, she might well be creating a set of social pressures that will make her daughter feel compelled. Just as Mon Mothma, herself, was once compelled.

As Gul'Dan himself puts it, in a sentence that's basically an admission of what he's trying to do here, for people like themselves decisions are often made by circumstances.

Presumably, she brought her daughter to Coruscant in part to get her away from the culture that would subject her to this fate.

Mon Mothma asks Gul'Dan if there's anything else he'd consider accepting instead. He answers in the negative. She has him removed from the premises. However, he remains confident that despite her insistence to the contrary, she IS considering his offer, and he may indeed still be hearing back from her.

He's probably not wrong.

Both Gul'Dan and Mon Mothma's actors manage to show a lot of subtleties at the end of this scene. For all that he retains his unflappable demeanor, you can still see the burning resentment in Gul'Dan as a noble rejects his admission into their social class for (presumably) the millionth time. He's not proud of what he is, or of what he's become in his quest for status. Every failure to gain that coveted affirmation is a stinging reminder of what he hates about himself. Like I said, he covers it really well, but you can still see it simmering through around the edges. Props to the actor, seriously.

Likewise, the parting expression on Mon Mothma's face...she never explicitly says any of the things I talked about a few paragraphs ago, about her concerns for her daughter. It's all just in her expression, and in her tone of voice. Props to the actress.

Meanwhile, over in Luthen's Antique Store of Wonders and Terrorism, Leia informs Luthen that they've received a request for another face-to-face meeting from one of the partisan groups he's been courting. Possibly the same one that Dierdre is running an op on, possibly someone else.

Something about the timing bothers Leia, but Luthen insists that if it's a trap then they're already fucked anyway, because the party who would potentially be betraying them here has enough dirt on Luthen to get him arrested anyway.

Well, unless it is the group that Dierdre is running the op on. Then it would be a trap, but not a betrayal, heh.

As Luthen prepares for another base-building expedition, we return to the Narkina V(-a?) facility, and presumably begin the prisonbreak plot.


I think this is a good splitting point.