Star Wars Andor S1E9: "Nobody's Listening"

So, final episode of the arc. I can only imagine that this will be when things start to turn around. Bix has got Sinta, Mom, and possibly other people who might rescue her. Or at least kill her before the ISB can torture any sensitive information out of her. Either way, she won't be an imperial captive anymore, and the good guys will have managed to exercise a bit of agency again.

As for Cassa, well...the prison he's in prioritizes productivity over security, with the main methods of preventing escape being psychological and social. I can't imagine that the guards are being all that attentive when it comes to watching the security cameras for floor-taser-worthy misbehaviors, and Cassa is a heist specialist. The psychological measures are working on him so far, but I have a feeling that as soon as something happens to give him either hope or time to rest and gather his wits this prison's actual hardware and manpower will hardly be a match for him. The question is just how long he'll have to endure until that happens.

Of course, I don't think anyone is coming out of this without scars mental and/or physical. And there's no guarantee that Bix, at least, will be coming out of it at all. I don't think she was in Rogue One.


"Nobody's Listening" opens on Bix in the hotel-turned-base's improvised torture chamber. Dierdre shows a different, disturbing side to herself while threatening Bix. I think? Maybe? There might be something interesting going on with her here.

As Diedre paces around the room, leaning over the restrained Bix and sticking her shadowed face into the frame like a movie monster while she grills her about her role in the local smuggling ring, a savage grin and hissing voice tone overtakes her. Bix, in one of the few actual spoken responses she gives to Dierdre's questioning, comments that Dierdre seems to be enjoying this a little bit too much. Dierdre doesn't respond to this. Just moves on with her own line of questioning after a short pause.

On one hand, Dierdre's line of work is obviously going to be most attractive to sadists and megalomaniacs. On the other...there's something really performative in Dierdre's interrogator persona. Maybe it's just the actress not quite nailing it, but it could also be that the actress is doing a perfect job of playing another actress. Is this the real Dierdre coming out when she has a victim restrained in a room with her, or is this Dierdre deliberately playing bad cop?

In any event, the man who they tortured before Bix is apparently the guy who owns the illicit subspace radio that we've periodically seen Bix use to contact Luthen and other black market figures. According to him, the incident with Cassa and the comm relay came in the wake of Bix's sixth face-to-face meeting with the person the ISB knows as Axis. I don't know if that's actually true or not, but if it is then Bix is much deeper into this than the audience realized, and probably knows (or at least, can readily infer) more about Luthen than she let anyone - including Cassa - know.

Of course, the odds of it actually being true aren't great. Torture doesn't really provide good intel, unless you have some way of immediately verifying the truth of each answer, and Dierdre does not have that.

...

It's funny, because Dierdre started this whole exchange with a declaration that she hates wasting time.

Well, not really funny, since it's torture and all. But still. The sheer self-defeatingness of this whole methodology is bleakly comical both in fiction and, sadly, in real life.

...

The conversation ends with Bix pointing out that the ISB won't believe anything she says unless she's been tortured first anyway, so there's not really any point of her trying. Dierdre...seems to agree. Man, talk about being bad at not wasting time, holy shit what was even the point of her saying anything to Bix at all in that case lol. Well, maybe she actually WOULD have let Bix get away without being tortured if she hadn't said that, but I don't think so.

The cut from this scene to the Narkina V prison is masterfully disturbing. It goes straight from a new set of hands grabbing Bix, to a bunch of machine arms stretched out over the thingamabob Cassa and his table-group are assembling, and the mechanical whine of power tools at work.

The angle we see the T-shaped doohickey from is also suggestive of a human figure spread-eagled or crucified below the blades and needles.

I mean, I doubt the ISB will actually have a full torture jungle gym apparatus set up, when they could just use one of those warcrime-specced cuckballs from "A New Hope." But, the connotations.

This scene gets off to similarly bleak conversation. Cassa babbling, with apparent excitement, at his crewmates about how they might actually manage to beat the other tables on their floor today if they give it a push, since one of the others has just fallen behind. To all appearances, his mind has been consumed by the prison and its petty headgames.

One of his crewmates, an elderly man with shaking hands who seems to have been in here for an awfully long time, is apparently due to be released in just another shift or two. And, floor boss Kino actually manages to kinda-sorta-smile a little bit as he congratulates the man on this before yelling at everyone to get back to work.

As if he's being reminded that his own release is only a few months away, and that soon he'll be following the old guy back to freedom. It's not enough to put him in a good mood. Good moods are biochemically impossible in this facility. But it's as close as he can get in the circumstances.

But really, this is just another show of submission from the inmates to the captors. The only things that can make them close to happy are the things deliberately dangled in front of them for that purpose.

We then cut back to Bix's interrogation and...okay, I'm sorry, I just cannot take this seriously.

So, instead of letting a floating black cuckball have its way with her, they're putting these headphones on her and forcing her to listen to a recording of-

Erm.

Okay, I can't make this sound not stupid, so I'll stop trying.

Recently, the Empire genocided some little-known species for the crime of not wanting a fuel depot build on their planet. And the sound of their screams as they were being slaughtered apparently has a psychoactive effect on humans who hear it. The imperial comm officers who picked up the screams on...um...were these screams being deliberately broadcasted for some reason? Wait, how did the logistics of this even happen?...well, the imperial comms officers who heard the screams over radio went missing shortly afterward and were found curled up shivering in a crawlspace three days later. Imperial atrocity technicians then studied the audio, isolated the most potent parts of it (those parts were the screams of the alien children, specifically. Because of course they were) and condensed them into a brief audio loop that inflicts indescribable suffering and anguish on any who hear it.

I laughed.

I didn't just laugh. I fucking cackled.

It's like one of those extra-absurd bits of Warhammer 40K fluff that you know the Games Workshop writers wrote while egging each other on with ironic giggles and fully expecting their readers to do the same.

This scene is taking itself very, very seriously, though. And, as of that bit of exposition, I unfortunately will not and indeed can not do likewise.

The best I can do to dignify this is assume that the torture technician who tells Bix this edgelord magnum opus of a backstory was making it up to mess with her, and really it's just a synthetic audioweapon that some imperial psychosurgeons invented.

On the bright side, there's more expert intercutting work after this, as we cut back to Cassa at his workstation again, and Bix's screams as they blast the RWBY season 3 intro song into her ears distort into the screech of the power tools as they cut away at the doohickeys being assembled.

And, on a more textual bright side, it turns out that Cassa hasn't been psychologically defeated at all! He's just been doing a really good job of pretending to be broken while he secretly works away at...something. During his visits to the work floor's adjacent bathroom, he's managed to pry off a panel and start doing *something* with the pipes behind it.

If only the Galactic Empire was as brutal as Amazon's warehouse managers, they could have prevented this.​

I'm sure there are security cameras in the bathrooms as well as everywhere else. But, Cassa is banking on the laziness of the guards in charge of monitoring those cameras, and so far it seems to have paid off. As aforementioned, he knows that this prison isn't designed with hardened criminals like himself in mind, and the guards aren't thinking to look for professional SpecOps tier shit (or even qualified to know how to look for it).

Yet another self-defeating detail in an imperial security state full of them. Sending absolutely everyone to a prison that can't handle absolutely anyone. And all while Dierdre is trying her best to find him and give him proper dangerous criminal treatment back on Ferrix, none the wiser.

Cassa has also brought at least one or two of his floormates into his escape plans. When a new inmate is being brought in, he and a buddy stand next to each other and share whispered observations about the process with one another.

Which parts of the elevator and handrails are and aren't electrified. Where exactly the guards tend to stand, and how they hold their weapons. Etc.

When we then cut back to Bix, dishevelled, covered in sweat and tears, and involuntarily whispering "friday friday it's friday" even after the headphones are off, we see that Dierdre is...okay, no, this isn't play acting. Dierdre is getting off on this, there's no way to read her body language other than that, and Bix isn't conscious enough for it to be a performance directed at her.

Dierdre does a good job at seeming like she's smarter and more self-aware than the blinkered authoritarian morons around her. She had me fooled for a while. But when the chips are down, she doesn't act any different from them, and she's probably just as deluded about her own motivations for doing pointlessly sadistic things like using torture in the kind of situation that torture doesn't work in as the rest. She might be able to shake her head and point out the idiocy when her superiors get baited into overreacting just like the terrorists want, but I don't think she'd do any differently if she was sitting in the big chair herself and her own ego was the one that got bruised on Aldhani.

A bit of a disappointment. But also a relief. She might have a slightly higher IQ score than most of the other ISB directors, but if she suffers from all the same brainbugs then she'll ultimately make all the same mistakes.

She rocks this hat, though.

Feels a little gross pointing this out, after she just tortured (and ambiguously sexually assaulted) someone. But she looks good in that hat. She just does.

We then begin our first Mon Mothma sequence for the episode. It starts out with her just being her usual ineffectual liberal politician self, but quickly gets more interesting. She gives a speech in the senate railing against the new security reforms. Some senators cheer her on. Some boo her. Most just ignore her. Nothing gets done, and she ends the day exhausted and disheartened like she always does after a senate meeting.

However, the part of herself that actually cares about what happens in the senate building is smaller than it used to be. She wishes it wasn't so. It depresses her that she needs to let her liberal politician side become a mere mask while her real self migrates to elsewhere, because she really did prefer being a liberal politician. When she gets home and meets her visiting cousin though, her new true self gets a chance to bloom.

I figured that Val was her "cousin," at first. But then Mon Mothma's daughter interacts with her like an actual favorite aunt, and the dialogue implies that she's been that since the girl was very young.

So yeah, Val actually is Mon Mothma's cousin.

I wonder which of them introduced the other to Luthen? I'm guessing Val was the one who brought her cousin onboard, but that's just a guess.

Anyway, their aristocratic family back on planet Shitlib are all under the impression that Val has been low-key embarrassing them by flying around to uncivilized parts of the galaxy and doing gay stuff for the last year or so. Mon Mothma is going to inform them that she's finally dropped by on Coruscant to assure them that she's still alive, and will be heading home to embarrass them up close and personal shortly.

I'll take that to mean that Val has given up on the hunt for Cassian Andor, and will be laying low (or, laying high, really) for a while until there's another mission she can help with.

Anyway, neither of them tell the other any important information, but they exchange a little bit of moral support for what it's worth. Val echoing Sinta's words to herself from Ferrix, about how the revolution always needs to come first before their individual comfort or emotional needs. It was nice that she was able to justify an in-person meeting before heading home, at least.

I imagine Val and Mon have nobody else they can stand talking to besides each other during family reunions.

Also, Val really is walking the walk when it comes to giving up privelege and comfort for the cause. In a way that Mon isn't (and also can't, really, since they do need her here on Coruscant, but my point is that she probably wouldn't do it anyway unless forced as she eventually will be).

Back at the prison, something goes wrong during shift change. They get held up in the skyways for an inordinately long time before the doors open. The power flickers once or twice. And they get voice alerts warning them to behave and stay in place or else they'll all get zapped. They're not sure what exactly is going on, but there's a problem.

The sign language signals from tube to tube are only able to relay a little bit of information before the situation ends (specifically, that the problem involves something that happened at a different work floor on the far side of the rig) and they're moved along.

But, this scene does show off the amazing ant colony-like design and animation for this facility again, so that's good.

Seriously, the Narkina 5 rig is some of the best environment work I've ever seen.

That "night," as they dine in their cells, Cassa strikes up a conversation with Kino. His cell is right across the electrified hallway from Cassa's, so they're able to talk albeit awkwardly.

Cassa has seen enough and learned enough to be a bit emboldened by this point. He broaches the subject of escape with him. Not inviting Kino to try and escape with him, that would be a pretty hard sell considering how soon Kino is supposed to be getting out (assuming no policy fuckery). Rather, Cassa just wants to know if Kino has ever thought about escape, if he ever came up with any half-formed plans or discovered any useful information, and that if he has he should pass it on so Cassa can use it after Kino is free and not likely to be implicated.

Kino gives him nothing. And warns that he'll have to punish Cassa if he continues this line of conversation.

That leads Cassa to explicitly talk about what I inferred a few scenes earlier: no one is actually watching them. Someone could be listening to their conversation over the microphones or watching it on the security cameras, but they aren't. So, come on. Stop giving the guards more credit than they've merited. They're too lazy to actually be paying attention, so let's talk.

Kino ignores him and pretends to go to sleep. Too afraid of jeopardizing his imminent release. Too afraid of the possibility that Cassa could be wrong. And, perhaps, too afraid of having to admit that he didn't actually NEED to play the role of petty tyrant at the wardens' instructions all this time and that his own cowardice has made him part of the problem. Cassa repeats the episode title "No one's listening!" And then shouts it as loud as he can, just to prove his point when no warning to keep it down comes forth through the speakers.

But, Kino is just too far gone. He's been here too long, and he has too much to hope for and to be afraid of. He's bought in too hard.


Halfway point.