Star Wars Andor S1E2: "That Would Be Me" (continued)
Back on Ferrix, Mom and Cuckcube spend a melancholy night in the living room staring at the wall together while Cassa goes out to recover his valuable item for sale from where he's hidden it. He finds it and sits down to rest for a bit, which turns out to be the trigger for the next flashback cutscene.
After trekking through the jungle a bit longer and putting the ancient gorge behind them, the Kenari tribesmen finally reach the crash site. Either that ship was a lot smaller than it looked coming in, or it's broken up and the pieces have spread out over a large area.
There's no immediate signs of life, so most of the party (including young Cassa) hang back and remain in cover while one older girl goes on ahead, spear at the ready. Just as it seems like something is about to happen, we return to the present. Dang, these flashback bits are getting frustratingly brief hehe.
Dawn on Ferrix. A small ship lands near the city, piloted by an elderly man who I assume is the buyer come to collect Cassa's expensive ship part. The cockpit-view we get of the landing is very deliberately evocative of the Millennium Falcon piloting scenes from the original trilogy, and the old man - once he lands and emerges - has some camera shots of him that feel like they're meant to make me think of Obi-Wan.
Based on the visual allusions, my prediction is that this mystery buyer will turn out to be a supplier for the Alliance to Restore the Republic, and he'll serve as Cassa's recruitment vector into the organization. Assuming that Cassa isn't already associated with them, which he might well be given his history of (implicitly) politically-motivated crime. He was part of the ARR heist crew in Rogue One, so that would help explain how he ends up getting to there from here.
He doesn't do much yet. Just scans the cityscape mysteriously. Presumably looking for Cassa and/or Bix, if this is indeed the buyer who Bix summoned.
Speaking of Bix, we now cut to her and her slimy boyfriend being woken up for morning prayer by the hammer imam.
Neither of them seem that into each other, oddly enough. I guess it might just be that they both have too much weighing on them this morning. Or perhaps they've just both Had It with the anvil mosque at this point. He remains unhappy, suspicious, and generally a sourpus about her having a secretive "errand" to run this morning. From his perspective Cassa really can't get arrested fast enough.
Again, the fact that this guy and Bix don't seem to actually be serious yet makes his actions just completely unhinged. Looking back at the first episode, I also see now that the reason I got a "longtime couple" vibe from them is because HE KEEPS AFFECTING ONE. It's pretty much all coming from his end, and she's just sort of tolerant of or oblivious to it.
This guy's got something weird going on upstairs. Not sure what, but something.
Meanwhile, Cassa has Cuckcube help him prepare for the trade, including contingencies in case things go south with the shady-sounding buyer and/or the law catches up to them before the deal is made. Mom, home alone while the other two are off doing their shenanigans, picks up an old keepsake that triggers the next phase of the flashback.
"But how do you remember the parts that you weren't there for?"
That stave/blowgun thingy she's holding is implied to be one of the ones that Cassa's tribesmen carried when they investigated the wrecked ship. Most likely Cassa's own, we can infer. The fact that he's taken it out of storage and put it in the open is driving the point home for her that her adoptive son really is about to leave her for good.
As for the part that she bridges to the flashback of despite not having been there for!
Babby Cassa and the others watch the one girl poke around at the wreckage for a while. She finds bodies.
And then one of the bodies turns out to be living, and hostile.
The young woman leading the group is killed pretty much in cold blood. The guy just stands up, draws a laser pistol, and shoots her in the back before anyone can react.
There may be some broader context here that makes his actions somewhat more understandable. Or maybe he's feverish and in the midst of paranoid delusions or something. But...well, just going by what we see happening and not knowing anything else, this guy seems like a total raging psychopath. If he's reflective of his shipmates and faction, then, well.
The shipwreckee eventually goes down to concentrated dart fire, though his body armor makes this difficult. It's as much luck as anything else that only one native(?) was killed. The grieving tribesmen recover the body of their dead sister and fearfully retreat from the wreckage. Probably going to give it (and any other new arrivals) a very wide berth now, I suspect.
Once again, a flashback segment ends with young Cassa glaring at a monolithic object (the wreckage, in this case) while ominous music plays, with an intense look.
This time, we see his young fingers balling up into fists of rage as well.
Hmm. That visual/musical connection suggests that the big artificial gorge he was looking at before had more to do with outsiders like this crashed and comically bloodthirsty spacer than it does with Cassa's own people.
We learn a bit more about this in the following scene, when adult Cassa goes out to arrange transport for...either himself or the part, I'm not totally clear on that yet. The shady courier guy he talks to had just been looking at the company memo about the wanted Kenari man, and when Cassa awkwardly pretends not to know what a "kenari" is we get some exposition. Apparently, the planet Kenari was the site of extensive mining operations until some kind of catastrophic accident rendered it toxic and uninhabitable. Cassa pretends to be nonchalant as he's told about this, and does a bad job of it.
Interesting. The planet certainly didn't look uninhabitable in the flashbacks. Pretty lush and vibrant, except for in the literal strip-mines themselves. Did this accident postdate the flashbacks, then? The mines and high-tech infrastructure already looked pretty abandoned, though. I guess it could have suffered the accident and been rendered uninhabitable a long time ago, with the biosphere (and human population) having started to recover by the time of Cassa's childhood but the Imperial census just never noted the change.
The guy said that Kenari was the site of Imperial mining operations before the incident, though, which would mean the entire thing must have only happened within the last couple of decades. Hmm. I guess the guy might have been using "Imperial" to describe the preceding Republican era as well. Sheevy P definitely strikes me as the type of dictator who would push his legacy backward through history as well as foreward, so I wouldn't be surprised if government propaganda encourages everyone to pretend it was always the Galactic Empire. Either that, or the timeline of Kenari is way more convoluted than I thought.
We now cut to Douche Force en route to Ferrix, in one of the weirdest looking spaceships I can remember seeing in this setting.
I guess other shuttles and escape pods etc have been sideways-geometric like that, but FTL ships in Wars are generally a bit more airfoil-ish. It's almost like it's trying to be a star destroyer and failing lol.
Well, anyway. Inside the WTF pyramid ship, Linus has the absolutely horrible idea of having Douchenozzle give an inspirational speech to the men before they land. It's actually a brilliant idea if Linus is secretly trying to sabotage him like I briefly suspected before, but otherwise truly horrible.
Linus himself has just given a more practical mission briefing monologue of...pretty much exactly the kind you'd expect from him. Emphasizing that Cassa is armed and extremely dangerous (Linus is right about this, but it's by almost total coincidence). He describes the military-like field tactics he wants them to use to arrest this possible suspect within a populated residential area. And also warns them that the other citizens might not take kindly to corporate troops stomping around their neighborhood, so they should feel free to bash as many skulls as needed to keep people out of their way (provided they also tell the people whose skulls their bashing about the proper channels for issuing complaints to the company laiason at the monthly forum, as per policy).
I was going to say that it's weird they're coming from another planet before even instructing any local police to take Cassa into custody, but given their attitude toward the local people it's not so surprising I guess. I kinda wonder what the company's interests on Ferrix even are, tbh, if they don't bother keeping bootneckers onsite.
Anyway, Linus finishes. It's time for Douchenozzle's speech now, and oh my god this fucking guy.
You can tell he's thinking of some cheesy war movie he's seen when he awkwardly strings these unfitting, vaguely patriotic-sounding words together, including an assertion that he can't picture a finer crew for this mission (he's literally never met any of these grunts before). Only, he can't even keep *that* up, and before he knows it old habits have taken over and he's just rambling aimlessly about "sharing positive motivation with the team" and "starting down the path to success." Like he's dictating a motivational pamphlet for desk jockeys.
The men reacted with some curt nods during Linus' speech, and a few even traded brutal chuckles at the mention of skullbusting. After Douchenozzle's speech though, they all look like this:
Linus congratulates Douchenozzle for giving such a great speech after the men have finished groaning and rolling their eyes on their way out of the room. If Linus is playing saboteur, he's good at it.
The final scene of the episode just has the old man who I assumed is an ARR aligned ship-part-buyer taking an airbus into Cassa's neighborhood. And being talked at by an even older man who might turn out to be a secret Jedi master or Imperial secret agent or something, but who could just as easily be a red herring.
I didn't used to think myself a connoisseur of lame villains, but looking at my last year or so's worth of reviews it's hard to deny that they've become a favorite of mine. Douchenozzle isn't nearly in the league of Superbia Dragon, let alone the man the myth the legend Alexander Lilliburne, but he has some of the same type of energy. He'd almost fit as a one-off antagonist in a Bojack Horseman episode or something.
Of course, him being such a bad joke sort of emphasizes the mundane horror of the company, and by proxy the Galactic Empire. And, through the fourth wall, well...we all know exactly who the fuck these people are and how their incompetent jackassery being kinda hilarious doesn't make them any less of a threat to ourselves and everything we hold dear.
Honestly, Dickface is the one who seems further from the reality we ourselves live in these days. I remember when competent, pragmatic villains who were content to just sit back and profit off of other people's suffering without actively going out of their way to make things worse were seen as the big problem for the state of the world. And, true, they did pave the way for the current crop of cackling supervillains, in much the same way that Dickface embodies the structure that ended up empowering Douche Force behind his back. So I suppose that checks out.
I think we're also starting to touch on imperialism, specifically in its neocolonial flavor, with the new details about Kenari and Cassa's origins there. I think. The timeline there is still too vague and the origins of the tribal society living there too unknown for me to say anything with confidence just yet though.
The show is starting to drag a little bit when it's just Cassa and Co mucking about on Ferrix. There's a lot of long, slow, brooding shots, people wandering around for a while before having not-that-important conversations with other people, etc, in a way that feels like they were having trouble filling this episode. Hopefully this will strictly be an episode 2 problem, and we'll have enough plot to go around once Douche Force actually deploys and begins the hunt.
The fact that that's the biggest complaint I can make about the series so far is a pretty strong endorsement.
