Star Wars Andor S1E1: "Cassa"

This incredibly generous, incredibly long, maximally autistic blow-by-blow livewatch review was commissioned by @The Narrator .


My first piece of Star Wars media to review. And also the biggest commissioned review I've had to date. Appropriate, I guess, given what an absolute cultural juggernaut this franchise is. I'm not going to bother with a background here; if you're reading this, you know enough about Star Wars to understand what's going on in the story.

That said, my own personal history with Star Wars is...flat, honestly. I've never loved Star Wars. I've never disliked Star Wars. Overall, it interests me more as a cultural phenomenon than as a fictional universe, but I still have some appreciation for it as the latter. Anyway, let's talk about Andor.

Star Wars: Andor has been the talk of the town since it premiered in 2022. If the internet can be trusted - which it absolutely can't, but I have no other source of information for this - this series almost singlehandedly makes up for Disney's otherwise mid-at-best handling of the Star Wars franchise, it has the courage to be genuinely anti-fascist in a media environment where all too many creators are treading lightly, and it brings a grit and "realness" to Star Wars that it never quite had before.

I also know that it's apparently controversial for revealing that Imperial soldiers rape people sometimes. Which I always kind of assumed was happening offscreen, given the sort of regime the Galactic Empire is, but I guess it wasn't implicit to some people.

And also that it's an immediate prequel to the Rogue One movie. Which is in turn an immediate prequel to A New Hope. Which therefore mean that, yes, Andor is in fact the long-awaited sequel to Revenge of the Sith.

I think it's supposed to be about one of the characters from Rogue One, but while I distinctly recall enjoying that movie at the time of watching I have almost no recollection of what happened in it. I just remember the blind force user guy, the Tourette's robot, and Red Letter Media clapping when they saw it. So, that doesn't do much for me.

And...uh...I guess it also has something to do with how the Andorians ended up joining the United Federation of Planets? Just going by the title.

That's pretty much all that I know about it, though. This review is going to be almost completely blind. So, in we go to the first episode of the first season, "Cassa."


It was a dark and stormy night. A hooded, bearded man trudged across a skyway on the planet Morlana I.

The vibe is immediately different than you'd expect from a Star Wars series. More cyberpunk-noir-y. Though it pairs that grittier feeling with as much ambient goofiness as you'd expect from Wars. Like, as our protagonist trudges moodily through the oily downpour, he passes these...bubbles? With...mimes...in them?

I don't know if they're some weird kind of street performer, or prisoners being displayed for public humiliation, or what. They kinda bounce around excitedly in those gimp masks when someone passes nearby, though, so I think it's performance? The causeway of the bubble mimes. This planet truly has everything the heart desires.

Naturally, the building our man enters is a seedy bar/brothel. Seriously, after that opening shot would you have expected him to be going anywhere else? He's here looking for a specific woman who he thinks passed through recently. He tells the madam that it's his sister he's trying to find, but I get the impression the truth is much murkier than that. Anyway, the lady is evasive, and starts clamming up the instant she thinks he just isn't asking after a specific type he likes. Before that point, he manages to learn that a woman from the same planet as the woman he's looking for DID work here until recently, but she left without a word several months ago. If that's his sister, then too bad for both of them.

I can't really blame the madam. Odds are good that a guy asking those kinds of questions is a stalker ex or a drug dealer with debts owed to. It sucks, but that's how stuff is even in real life, let alone in grimy cyberpunk land.

Our protagonist leaves disappointed, but he doesn't leave alone. See, he made a mistake just now. He went into a bar. In Star Wars. Bars aren't for drinking at, in Star Wars, they're for finding people to fight to the death. The instant any character ever sets foot in a bar, one or more blaster-wielding thugs will become determined to murder them and them specifically for no apparent reason. In this case, it's a pair of flaccid-looking off duty company cops off duty.

This is a company town, apparently. And the corporate deputies are bored and violence-hungry enough to go to bars.

I'll give these two full points for genre reconciliation. For instance, they actually bother to follow the dejected man out of the bar before attacking him. And even go through the motions of trying to rob him first, before deciding that this is no fun after all and starting to beat him when he'd already raised his hands and welcomed them to his cash (or maybe he was ignoring the beating, and the trigger was them going for the other pocket, that had his gun in it). Their mistake, as it turns out. They're a couple of dumb grunts who just signed up for the Company's scab force last week or whatever, and he - we now learn - is an armed and very experienced combatant.

Soon, one thug is down and another is on his knees, at gunpoint, begging for mercy. A moment's examination reveals the downed one to actually be dead. It's not entirely clear how it happened. There were a few stray laser blasts going off, and a few hard head-knocks on all involved parties, but one way or another one of the company security bar bandits is dead. Apparently the two of them were close, because the survivor reacts in grief and fury when he realizes he has an ex-buddy.

...

The way the fight itself is filmed is also remarkably unglamorous by Star Wars standards. It isn't filmed like a typical Star Wars battle. It also isn't filmed like a scifi noir action scene, despite the aesthetics surrounding it being full of those genre signifiers. Nobody - not even the victorious hero - looks cool in it. There's no wit or snark, and there's no over-the-top brutality either.

The fact that one of the combatants died and nobody realized it until they checked the body a minute later just by itself makes the entire thing more "real" than almost any fight scene I've watched.

...

What follows is a brilliant bit of nonverbal communication (and nonverbal storytelling, for that matter). The surviving thug and Badass McBeardy exchange a solemn look, and then the thug starts babbling alibis. Stories to tell the authorities, about accidents, friendly barroom brawls that got out of hand, etc. McBeardy waits and lets the man talk, seeming to consider each possible story seriously. Giving him as much of a chance as possible to come up with a story that will pass muster and allow both of them to walk free.

None of the versions that the survivor invents strike him as good enough, though. And his own silence makes it clear that he can't come up with anything better himself. The survivor's face gives way to abject terror and despair as he realizes this as well. It is with both visible regret and visceral brutality that he shoots the survivor in the head and flees the scene, hopefully before anyone can connect him to it. Plausible, given the opacity of the weather and the relative silence of laser pistols. Given that the next thing we see is his ship leaving the planet, it can be inferred that he was more successful in this than he was in locating his maybe-sister.

There's almost certainly some deliberate themes being seeded in this scene. If I had to guess, those themes would be, to put this as articulately as possible, "something something runaway processes that trap their own enablers in inevitable death, something something caught in the machine of a murderous social technology, something something." Anyway, it's amazing how much nuance this sequence managed with just body language, voice tones, and context clues.

Also, this may or may not be related to the above, but the design of the bar table in the brothel itself caught my eye.

It looks like a maze of high-rise buildings. Almost like a fractal miniaturization of the labyrinthine cityscape outside. It might just be a cool piece of psychedelic set design, or it could have been selected to reinforce the idea of the rot extending up and down as far as the eye can see with no escape from the murder-trap.

To be fair, this analysis is all based in my preknowledge that this is set during the Galactic Empire era of the Wars timeline, and that Andor is a series that gets overtly political. These biases might be making me overthink things. We'll see.

Cut to another planet! A grey, washed-out looking city on the nearby world of Ferrix. A little red cuckcube is roving through some abandoned looking outskirts, navigating the piles of debris and tasing the wild boars that occasionally try to pee on it.

It lacks the divinely inspired structural perfection of the not-yet-invented BB-8 Adultery Orb, but still a marvellous piece of engineering for its era. Cuckcube wriggled so that cuckball could roll. And yes, in case any of you nerds were about to remind me, the OG trilogy's gumball machine is also kinda cool I guess or whatever.

Cuckcube finds its way into a used spaceship dealership, where it discovers McBeardy asleep on the floor of the ship he flew yesterday, still nursing the cuts and bruises he got from the thugs.

Cuckcube is apparently a family asset, and wants him to know that everyone else wants to know where the fuck he went the other day. McBeardy, now named as the titular Cassa (short for Cassian), quickly spins some alibis and tells the droid to repeat them to anyone who asks, even if it knows they aren't true. The droid has trouble complying, as it's old and glitchy and lying takes up more processing power than telling the truth, but it complies. Also, this one can actually talk! How come they can't all do that?

Anyway, this interaction ends up setting the template for the whole middle segment of the episode. Cassa goes through his day deflecting questions about where he went yesterday, wheedling and bribing his friends and family to lie in accordance with his alibi, begging favors from people he already owes money to in order to cover up his recent misadventure, and trying to pawn things off and subtly threaten people with blackmail to try and fund his own disappearance.

The set designs and filming locations for these scenes are all amazing, by the way. Really, really looks and feels like an ancient city that's undergone a modern renewal and then subsequently fallen into disrepair and poverty again. The "modern" trappings in this case are retro-futurist Star Wars ones, but it still gets the idea across. It all feels real. And messy and complicated in a real way. Seriously, there are some parts of this sequence where I actually forgot I was watching a Star Wars thing until an alien casually wandered through the crowd.

Through these segments, Cassa manages to both impress the audience with his wit, courage, and sheer nerve, and also make us understand exactly why his community has started to really get sick of him. His need to cover for yesterday's planet-hopping disaster seems to just be the latest and largest escalation in a longstanding pattern of reckless behaviour and handing out checks he knows he can't cash.

This might all be a consequence of him devoting his life to looking for his sister and needing to direct all his limited resources to those ends. That would definitely be the more sympathetic explanation for how he ended up digging this socially bankrupt hole for himself. Speaking of sympathetic, we also learn that he WAS telling the truth about his sister, thanks to a series of flashback scenes staggered through the episode. Apparently, Cassa and his sister were born into a Mesolithic society on the planet Kenari.

Probably one of those "longtime descendants of shipwreckees regressed to hunter-gatherer tribes" situations that seem to litter the Galaxy Far Far Away. Seriously, these are almost as common as murderbars.

We see preteen brother and slightly younger sister interacting, but no sign of parents or other obvious family. Either they were orphans at this point, or else their parents were elsewhere at the time of this incident. The incident in question being the flaming wreck of a large spaceship careening out of the sky and crash landing off in the jungle not far from the village.

Going by the timeline, with Cassa's apparent age in the present time and me inferring that he's one of the people who I think I vaguely recall dying at the end of Rogue One, I *think* this ship is meant to be a casualty of the Clone Wars.

The tribe rallies to go check out the wreck and see if there are any more surviving shipwreckees to welcome into their new lives of hunting and gathering. Presumably, this event will result in Cassa and his sister leaving their planet and (eventually) being separated, but the hows and whys will have to come later in the episode.


Splitting it here.