Star Wars Andor S1E1: "Cassa" (continued)
We now return to Morlana I, though not the same part of it as the cyberpunk murderbar brothel & grill establishment that Cassa had his altercation at. This is the central security office for the corporation that seems to own most of this star system. It looks about the way you'd expect.
The civilian shuttles flying in fighter-like formation overhead is a nice touch. Almost like they're cosplaying as imperial TIE fighters. Sort of visually telegraphing the association between the company and the empire for an audience that remembers the TIE trio formations. Which, hehe, turns out to basically be totemic for a character we're about to meet.
That said, the scale of the construction here and implied scope of the organization based in it does raise some questions in the scene that's about to start.
We're introduced to what I imagine will be the main antagonists of the first half of the first season or so. Neither of them are named yet, unless I missed something, but they've got enough personality to be immediately recognizable as Executive Director Dickface Von EpsteinIsle and Junior Director Douchenozzle.
As the head of the entire corporation's security apparatus, Dickface - who, like all Galactic Empire elites who aren't aliens or force users, has a British accent - needs to be told about an incident as shocking as the murder of two of their grunts last night. His underling Douchenozzle, who's on the verge of throwing his back out fishing for a promotion, spent all night typing it out in perfect detail and having it ready to show to Dickface. Hilariously, before he even says anything about the content of the report itself, Dickface asks Douchenozzle why he's altered his company uniform, and the latter embarrassedly dances around the obvious fact that he had it altered to look less corporate and more military.
In fact, Douchenozzle is also standing up with this overly stiff, almost leaned-back posture that's almost like a cartoon parody of a military stance. Which contrasts very, very visibly with Dickface's slouching, languid movements and slow, thoughtful way of speech. Literally everything about Douchenozzle says "couldn't cut it as a military officer, so now he's LARPing as one in some shitty corporate police force." Dickface, meanwhile, just looks like he wants to fall asleep with a light adrenochrome buzz and a belly full of money every night.
...
The detail of this exchange that tickles my "scifi writers have no sense of scale" nerves is the fact that Dickface - the head of the entire company's security department - apparently knew one of the dead guards himself. Which...I don't know. It's been at least heavily implied that this company, if not outright ruling multiple planets on paper, at least has significant de facto control over significant population and industrial sections of those planets. Given that this company also seems responsible for laying down the law where it's own assets are concerned, that's got to be a lot of security guards. Even assuming a maximum of payroll cost-cutting, it's go to be tens of thousands at the very least. The odds of the head of the entire department knowing so much as the last name of any individual low-level grunt are so astronomically small as to be essentially nonexistent.
Definitely feels like the writers carrying some background assumptions from modern day Earth corporations and not considering the scale of the organization they're actually writing about. As these sorts of issues in scifi writing go, this is a very minor, very forgiveable example. It still did jump out at me, though.
...
Anyway, Dickface knew one of the two dead guys in person. He also knows from personal experience that the man was a dumb thug who got himself busted down to street-level legbreaking duties after screwing up a more important job in security middle management. Dickface kind of half-expected the moron to get himself killed long before now, and he can only assume that the man's drinking companion was of a similar sort. When Dickface asks about leads, Douchenozzle reiterates that their main suspect is a mysterious, dark-haired man who they followed out of the murderbar. A murderbar where on-duty security personnel are not supposed to go anywhere near. And one at which, apparently, the two men were consuming alcohol that Dickface casually describes as "much too expensive" for his own low-level employees to afford.
Based on these factors, Dickface draws the incredibly genre-savvy conclusion that the two chose to throw themselves at what those in the biz call a "rare calamity." And makes the even more genre-savvy determination that they should do absolutely nothing about this at all. Star Wars protagonists are not worth the trouble of launching manhunts for if you can help it, and this one appears to have been minding his own business before the two morons decided to make themselves his problem.
Genuinely amazing.
In light of his 100% correct suspicions, Dickface decrees that these two men died in an accident. An accident somewhere much further away from the touristy part of the city than they actually were found in, of course, wouldn't want to make visitors skittish. Don't make it too dramatic or heroic, we don't want people paying attention, just have it be some mundane thing that makes the victims look blameless but also unexceptional. Honestly, it's a better legacy than either of them probably deserve; Dickface is only giving them this postmortem courtesy because he's about to go to a big meeting with the shareholders himself and doesn't want anything that makes him look bad to have just happened. Especially anything that might make the Galactic Empire feel compelled to send stormtroopers of its own to help with security and get in the company's way, which they'll do if the shareholders get sufficiently spooked.
Douchenozzle can hardly believe what his boss is telling him. He tries to argue, says that he can crack this case, that the lives of men under his authority cannot be cast away so lightly, but Dickface shuts him down with irritation bordering on abject contempt. The scene ends with Dickface walking out of the office to prepare for his shareholder meeting cruise, and Douchenozzle glaring at the door behind him and clearly planning to ignore orders and make a proper investigation.
There's a really brilliant irony in this scene. Dickface is like, the archetypal corporate villain. Openly and derisively acknowledging how little he pays his low level employees ("ordering drinks too expensive for them"), to say nothing of his complete disregard for their lives. He all but openly acknowledges that his hiring practices enable thuggish bullies to join the force and be given the authority to terrorize the general public, and that his stinginess outright encourages them to supplement their meagre incomes with extortion and theft, but then washes his hands of the inevitable consequences. Like, perfectly hateable cyberpunk villain material, with his charming self-awareness only making him more indefensible even as it also makes him more watchable.
And yet, he's definitively not the antagonist of this story. For the precise reason that he gives so little of a shit. The villain being set up here, the dangerous antagonist to Cassa, is Douchenozzle. He gets to be the bad guy because he cares about doing what's right.
I'm not saying that Douchenozzle necessarily has a genuine commitment to justice or compassion for the men under his command. He most likely doesn't (even if he tells himself that he does). His characterization in this scene says that he's much more motivated by a desire for personal aggrandizement (his career interests are definitely at cross purposes with his boss' here, however much Dickface tried to convince him otherwise) and to play out his stupid military hero fantasies. But still. The fact that it's him being willing to go through the motions of caring that makes him the baddy.
Well, sort of. The underlying system is what creates the antagonism between Douchenozzle and Cassa, even if it doesn't create the antagonist himself. And that system, insomuch as it can have a human representation, is embodied by Dickface. But he's invisible from the ground level, by design.
Cut back to Ferrix, and Cassa's ongoing bad day. The worst parts of which come in a one-two punch of a debt collector showing up on his own initiative, and Cassa having to face an irate used spaceship dealer who wants to know WTF he did with that junker of his last night. The former is the funniest scene of this episode, if nothing else. The (human) loanshark approaches Cassa while the latter is dashing around from annoyed benefactor to annoyed benefactor, and uses a hulking alien brute hireling to intimidate Cassa and hem him in.
Cassa defuses the situation by asking the big amphibian dude how much he's paying paid for this thugging. To which the creature replies that this human just tossed him some pocket change to stand next to him and look intimidating. And that "don't answer questions about what you have and haven't been paid to do" was also not part of their agreement.
So, in the end, the loanshark is down some pocket change with nothing to show for it. Lol. Kind of a repeated motif of bad things happening when you aren't willing to shell out for proper enforcers.
The other scene doesn't go quite as well for Cassa. His friend who works for the used ship dealership catches him replacing the ship's ID transponder with a new one from storage. Cassa insists that he's doing this as a favor to his friend for letting him fly yesterday, replacing a faulty part without even being asked. The friend, predictably, doesn't buy it. And tells Cassa in no uncertain terms that he can't risk his job by letting Cassa borrow the merchandise anymore. In fact, after catching him doing this incredibly shady thing right after an incredibly shady flight that he came back from with incredibly shady injuries, he's not letting Cassa into the vehicle lot at all. Get the fuck out right now, friendship over.
It's hard not to take the other guy's side. However noble Cassian's goals might(?) be.
Also, the pigs that tried to pee on cuckcube are apparently his trained watchdogs. Whether or not he trained them to pee on robots too or if that's a cultural practice they developed on their own, I suspect, will be left to the audience's imagination. Anyway, he has guard pigs, and that's kinda cool. Another thing that makes me like him.
We quickly learn that pigmaster was very much right to get rid of Cassa after this incident. The episode briefly returns to Morlana I again, and shows Lieutenant Douchenozzle determining that the perp did in fact vanish right in the same area where an unscheduled, unsanctioned private spacecraft took off that night.
He's commanding his own underlings to do whatever they can to identify that ship and its course, and then - when they manage to determine that it went to the neighbouring planet Ferrix - demands that they put out a warrant for a dark-haired Kenari human male. The company's control over Ferrix is tenuous. It's officially their property, but the locals there are a rowdy bunch, and historically the company has given them freedom to manage their own ramshackle affairs provided the line keeps going up enough. Douchenozzle doesn't care. He wants to be an Imperial officer, damnit, and the rest of the star system is going to humor him whether it wants to or not!
It probably goes without saying, but every single person working in the comms department absolutely despises him.
Like, they full on warn each other when they see him entering the room, look like they need more coffee at least and probably amphetamines too when they hear the sound of his voice, and their faces fall every time he looks like he's about to give another order. Which he does very frequently.
He also pisses all over his own supervisor's instructions by not just pushing the investigation (reasonable and perhaps even laudable on its own, albeit probably being done for selfish reasons) but also by outright losing his shit and shouting about how two of our people have been MURDERRRRRRED! at full volume for everyone in the goddamned building to hear.
...
Actually, maybe he's the one on amphetimines. Or like. Coke. I was employed by at least two cokeheads during my twenties, and Douchenozzle's whole thing, with the stamping and the shouting and the impatient mania, reminds me of both of those bosses.
I guess he could also just have a naturally cokehead personality.
...
Anyway, sooner or later, Douchenozzel's cocaine energy will burn through the rust on Ferrix's wheels of justice, and then they're going to start probing at that ship dealer. And the dealer and his remorseful pigmaster will have little choice but to point the investigators at Cassa in turn.
The final scene of the episode brings us back to that jungle village on Kenari. Some villagers (most of whom seem to be very young, I now notice. Not seeing any old people in the entire village, with the eldests looking like they could be in their late twenties or early thirties at most. Hmmmm) are putting on war paint and prepping to go to the crash site. Maybe that war paint is actually exploration paint, or diplomacy paint. Or else it's just what it looks like, and they're already planning to X-Com that motherfucker.
I wonder if their ancestors shared recipes with the ewoks' ancestors at any point.
Cassian is just barely a big enough boi to go join the expedition. His unnamed sister is just barely too small of a gurl to follow.
Presumably, this was the last time he saw her.
How he would - decades later - come to suspect that she was working as a prostitute on Morlana I, I suppose we'll learn in subsequent flashbacks in subsequent episodes.
That's the pilot.
Someone on tumblr has already summarized my feelings about the Andor pilot more succinctly than I ever could.
That might be overstating it. I've never thought that Star Wars was bad, per se (some individual instalments of it have been, but that's every longrunning fiction franchise). But I also never thought it was all that amazing, until now.
Some parts of this pilot feel like Blade Runner. Some parts feel like National Geographic. None of them feel like Star Wars. And yet, somehow, the entire thing, taken as a whole, does feel like Star Wars despite none of the individual pieces doing so. Not just does it end up feeling like Star Wars, but it feels like what maybe Star Wars always could have been. And at least arguably what it should have been.
Getting into the nitty gritty of what kind of evil empire the Galactic Empire actually is. What the daily grind of space fascist oppression actually feels like, as opposed to just having the camera be present for the dramatic atrocities. The material realities behind resistance, as opposed to merely the grievance and resolve of a heroic protagonist given access to its fruits. And also using indigenous-coded (I don't think they're ACTUALLY indigenous, given the setting) communities as more than just flavor and set dressing.
The thing is, this stuff was always present in the lore. Supposedly, the corporate separatists from the Clone Wars were quietly welcomed back into the fold after the Galactic Empire's victory once examples had been made of some figurehead leaders (who also happened to be the only people who could implicate the newly crowned emperor, conveniently enough). They were supposedly an important part of the Empire's machine of oppression, even as the white stormtrooper armor and triangular warships of the victorious republican/imperial faction continued showing the flag. Slavery and slavery-in-all-but-name under for-profit government stooges was supposed to be the order of the day. The world of "Andor" was always written down in the fine print of Star Wars, but for some reason it never made it into the spotlight until this series.
Ironically, the least memorable part of this pilot is the titular Cassian Andor himself. He has his snark and badassery, sure, but for the most part the detail and grit of the setting and bit players loom so large around him that he barely makes an impression. The fact that he is, honestly, the bad guy from the perspective of most of his friends and neighbours makes it even easier for him to get lost in the weeds from the audience's viewpoint. Just another little ripple in the ambient poverty, fear, and anxiety of life under a corporate kleptocracy. Later episodes will probably give him more room to breathe, and more chances to show off some classic larger-than-life Star Wars heroism once he has the means to be more than a thorn in everyone else's side. His own motives are, after all, every bit as sympathetic as those of his frightened, hard-worn friends and neighbors. And it's hard to say he's really doing anything wrong, even if he might be doing wrong by them.
If this does manage to hit the familiar Star Wars heroics, though, then just having this phase in its background will give that fantasy a sort of grounding that it never did before. If it can do that while KEEPING the messiness and the grit and the unromantic complexity throughout, then that would be truly peak.
Isn't he supposed to be blue with antennae, though? I feel like there must have been a mixup in the costume department.
