Star Wars Andor S1E4: Aldhani (continued)

First of all, Harry's entire existence seems to be a secret from everyone involved in this heist besides Val herself. This is a big part of the reason she was so reluctant to take on another member who knows him; it's important that most of the team not know who they're actually working for. Presumably, this is also why she went walking out alone into the middle of the wilderness to meet Harry.

I wonder if most of the team just think they're doing crime, rather than rebellion? That would make sense.

She spends a good deal of time reiterating to "Clem" that Harry does not exist and that Clem's recruitment at this late juncture was Val's own idea. Even though she thinks that it's a terrible idea.

Cassa just kinda shrugs and nods along. Really, what else would he have to say to this?

He does get a bit more talkative when she reveals that the plan is to infiltrate an imperial armory with a full garrison in place, rather than some downtown logistics office like Harry told him. Which, uh, is a bit of a taller order than Cassa thought anyone was signing him up for.

Not sure why the hell Harry would have told that lie, to be honest. If the truth would have dissuaded Cassa back on the ship, then it'll also dissuade him when he's here on the planet, no? Like, there are presumably people living on this dirtball, if the empire has an armory somewhere on it, he could go to ground here as well as anyplace else right?

There must be more to this, for Harry to have made the calculation that he did.

Well, they trudge on bitterly together, hiding under rocks from the occasional air patrol that flies overhead. Val tells him the depressing history of this region; these mountains were once inhabited by a culture of low-tech shepherds who the Imperial Navy saw as an ideal workforce for its new weapons facility nearby, so they just kinda herded them all off their land and pressured them into taking factory jobs. All very familiar-sounding to Cassa, of course. Eventually, she brings him to a campsite and introduces him to his understandably bewildered new squadmates. Three hardbitten gruff fighty guys, and one woman who's either a native that escaped the ethnic cleansing and enslavement, or is pretending to be one as her cover story.

Val did mention that there are still a few small native villages left in place, so it works either way.

Cut back to Coruscant, where space FBI agent Diedre and her underlings are reviewing the corporate reports on the Ferrix incident. Sounds like the final death toll of that fiasco was five, including Tim. Well, Dierdre is still being ultra-shady about wanting to find out exactly how that stolen comm unit made it to Ferrix but NOT wanting her boss to know that she's looking into it. Yeah, still not sure what to make of this; who is she working for?

Her peers are also weirdly reluctant to let her do what to all appearances is just part of her job, investigating the theft of something stolen from her sector and brought into someone else's. It could just be office politics bullshit, of nobody wanting anyone else to advance ahead of themselves, but it could also be something more clandestine.

Many mysteries and secrets going on in the mysterious secret police agency. How surprising.

Meanwhile, in high orbit around that same planet, Harry's ship awaits its turn to land. And Harry takes a minute to either get into character, or get out of character. Your guess is as good as mine so far as to which personality, if either, is his "real" one.

He also trades in his retro brown Star Wars robes for something more fashionable before coming in for the landing.

Complete with ostentatious rings and bracelets that are hard to make out in the screenshot.

Time to go shmooze with the galactic elite? I'm surprised that the guy in charge of doing that is also the guy running around making shady back-alley deals and recruitments out in the middle of nowhere. I guess a ragtag rebellion needs everyone to pull double-duty sometimes.

Also, apparently at least some parts of Coruscant are still as bustling and techno-optimist-looking as ever. Quality of life, civil rights, etc may or may not have gotten worse for the average person in the decade and change since Republic turned Empire, but from the outside you wouldn't be able to tell.

Which, well. I guess that's just realistic.

We zoom in on an elevator, taking a new arrival down from the spacedock. And it turns out we aren't following Harry anymore, for the moment; we're following a sad, regretful Douchenozzle.

Heh, well that took me by surprise. I wonder where the hell the story could be going with him, at this point?

The sad piano music in the background as he mourns the shambles of his life, buried under the monument of his failed cop fantasy, actually makes you feel for him just a tiny bit. You can make a long list of things he did wrong and reasons why he deserves all this and more, but at the same time, part of his arc really was "he refused to let the murder of his underlings go uninvestigated in the name of profits." There's a reason the situation lent itself so easily to him casting himself in the maverick hero role.

It turns out he has no place to return to besides his mother's apartment. And she doesn't come from nearly the privileged background that I'd been imagining.

Given how young Douchenozzle is, I'm wondering if he had just finished his education a few years ago and was still paying debts (or had just finished paying them off) using the profits of his meteoric rise within corporate security when he lost it all. The framing kinda feels that way.

His mother angrily slaps him across the face before tearfully embracing him. Which definitely supports the above reading. This was his - and possibly her - one shot at escaping poverty, with god only knows how much of their lives' efforts invested in it.

And also, like, obvious parallel to Cassa's living situation on Ferrix. Probably don't need to point that out, but for completeness' sake.

Elsewhere on the planet, Senator Mon Mothma - a woman who's had minor roles in like, three or four Star Wars movies over the decades and has been played by at least two actresses - makes a history museum date with her longtime high society chum Harry Luthen.

You'd never think he was anything other than an aristocratic fuckboy who's spent his entire life prancing from art gallery to opera house to country dinner event with no interest in politics beyond the occasional spirited discourse over space champaign.

Is this who he was, originally? Or is the other Luthen (I assume that's his actual name, so I'll use it for now), the grim interstellar guerilla with the weight of worlds on his back and implied cultural trauma informing his every action, the truth, with this version of him being an adopted guise? Or is there yet a third who we haven't yet been introduced to?

...also, it turns out this isn't a history museum. It's a historical artifact auction-house for rich assholes to buy archaeological plunder.

I wonder if this practice being an aboveboard thing done in well-lit and openly advertised street-level galleries predated Palpatine's rise? If so, then by how long?

Luthen answers my question about his true nature pretty quickly, as it turns out. As soon as he and Mothma are able to slip away from their respective attendants and have a private conversation, the foppish affectations and accent all fall away, as she seems to have been expecting them to.

Hmm. And he seems to actually OWN this antique store, looking at the way he's able to walk around the place.

It's definitely possible that Luthen was lying to Cassa about the personal value that that crystal amulet had for him, given that ancient artifacts are things he's literally surrounded by...but I still don't think so. And, in light of this, I wonder if bartering away his own people's precious history is actually what lifted him into his position of (relative) power? He has artifacts from many worlds in this shop/museum, but it would make a poignant kind of sense if he started out by peddling those of his own out of sheer desperation. Maybe.

Anyway, Luthen is here to talk to her about funding. Including the funds he promised to pay Cassa, along with presumably other people. The show uses this as an opportunity to show what's been going on among the galaxy's erstwhile ruling class as Spinnin' Sheev slowly works to erode their power and encircle it with his own. Senate security details and chauffeurs are constantly being replaced. Bankers at the financial institutions they go to are constantly being replaced. Imperial Security is slowly but surely trying to make itself the biggest employer in Coruscant's senatorial district, and sympathetic elites like Mothma can't just move money around the way they used to. She even needed one of Harry's own henchmen to pry her suspiciously-military-mannered cab driver away from her in order to have a moment of privacy.

Real culture of paranoia being built up in the upper echelons of society. And probably not even just the upper echelons, though it would naturally be more concentrated there.

We know that this change in the relationship between senate and security state will ultimately culminate in the senate's entire dissolution and replacement with a system of military governors at the beginning of "A New Hope." The theft of the death star plans being linked directly to one or more senators might have been the final catalyst, but it seems like it would have happened sooner or later anyway. Interesting that we're getting a look at an earlier stage of that process now, almost fifty real world years later.

...

It also, interestingly, mirrors the gradual loss of corporate power before the encroaching police/military establishment that we saw earlier in this episode. It makes sense, looking at the circumstances of Palpatine's rise. He basically two-timed as both the leader of the republic, and the leader of the (largely corporate) separatists. He used both the senate and the corporations to get absolute power over the military, and now that he has it he has no more use for either of his old marks and is working to reduce the Empire's reliance on them and edge them out. This Italian-style corporate fascism we've seen in "Andor" so far is just a stepping stone.

Of course, giving his military clique all the powers once held by elected representatives and the private sector also means depriving his regime of any peacekeeping tools other than military force. And, to quote A New Hope itself, "the harder you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." One can probably assume that this is the reason the Alliance to Restore the Republic had so much more in the way of actual fleet assets by "Return of the Jedi" than it did two movies previously. When the Empire threw all its soft power away, it enabled/encouraged a lot more people to go "screw this" and throw in with the rebels.

...this show is literal sorcery. It's not just the best thing to have ever come out of Star Wars. It also retroactively makes every other part of Star Wars better for its existence. The original and prequel trilogies didn't have nearly that amount of political nuance in them, unless you squinted hard and put in in work to fill in the blanks yourself. But they do now!

On a more personally satisfying note, it's also more support for my longtime interpretation of Palpatine. IE, that he was really much, much better at seizing power than he was at using it. Everything falls apart for him as soon as he's finished getting it all.

...

Return to Aldhani. It's been a couple of days (which also means that Aldhani is a couple days travel away from Coruscant, at least for Luthen's tricked-out ship. I know that Star Wars has always deliberately avoided clearly defined travel times, but I couldn't help but notice in this case), and the time has come for the operation to commence. Things kick off when their camp is approached by their man on the inside of that weapons facility, one Lieutenant Gorn. I didn't know the Andorians had any interactions with them, but learn something new every day.

He's no happier than anyone else to learn about the surprise extra team member. He's actually the least happy thus far. But, he deals.

They go over the plan. It turns out Luthen wasn't lying to Cassa. They ARE after a payroll shipment (sounds like it's physical cash they're trying to steal, rather than just data). Just, it happens to be stored in the same facility as the giant armory. But anyway! This base has a small freighter parked in its hangar. The plan is to infiltrate the facility, move the moolah and whatever other useful stuff isn't nailed down onto the freighter, and then fly the ship offworld and (presumably) to a rendezvous with an ARR vessel. Of course, that neighbouring airbase is going to make that awfully difficult. Which is why they've timed this heist to take place during a local phenomenon that happens in the skies over these moutains once every three years. The planet passes through a cloud of reactive chemicals that cause these wtf crystalline shards to form in the atmosphere, fall like an incredibly dense cloud of shooting stars, and then explode from their own reentry heat before they can reach the surface. It's not a friendly environment for sensors, to say the least, so if they time their launch right they can escape the planet while the interceptors are blinded.

You know, this was kind of a shitty place to put an important military facility in retrospect. Lol.

It's a longshot that depends on careful timing and nothing going wrong. But hey, Cassa's life is over anyway, so he might as well end it dramatically going for a longshot heist. And, the plan does call for his "put on a uniform and act like you belong" brand of infiltration, so it's not unfamiliar territory to him. Harder and more complicated, but that's a difference in degree rather than kind.

The other team members all seem to be some flavor of insane, fanatical, or suicidal, if not all of the above. Cassa honestly has the best attitude about this job out of the lot of them, once he's filled in on the details and has had time to think them over.

Two final Coruscant scenes to close out the episode. First, Mon Mothma at home, finding out that the fancy dinner party her husband is throwing tonight will include some reactionary shitmonkey senators who have been urinating on the galaxy every workday while she and her ever-shrinking number of ideological allies throw ineffectual protest votes at them. Her husband is frustrated that she's frustrated. Does she seriously have to make everything political all the time? Can't they just have a normal dinner party?

Her husband is basically a genuine version of what Luthen cosplays as when he comes here. How miserable for her.

...

I think I'd like to see more of MM's outlook in general, going forward. She's sort of an inside look at the "alliance to restore the WHAT, now?" conflict I talked about before. She was surrounded by these people both before and after the switch from Republic to Empire. She's aware of what's changed and what hasn't. She's literally married to what hasn't.

I wonder. Is the republic she wants to restore an idealized version of the galactic society she heard about, before the institutional decay that eventually led to the clone wars? Or does she actually believe that the Republic she grew up and had the first couple years of her senate career in is worth fighting to bring back?

...

The other scene is back at Space Langley, with Dierdre bouncing off of her rival sector commander and supervisor.

She's told to shut up, stay in her lane, and not see giant conspiracies in other people's sectors based on literally no evidence. Also, the director strongly implies that she's a diversity hire and needs to start acting like it.

This is almost directly mirroring the conversation between Douchenozzle and Dickface back in the pilot. In this case, it's sort of complicated by the fact that Dierdre is - strictly speaking - wrong. The theft and transportation of the comm device wasn't the work of an organized rebel group like she's inferring. It was, as her boss and the rival sector commander both assume, the work of profit-seeking criminals doing an opportunistic heist. The fact that the profit-seeking criminal then, after the fact, tried to sell the device to an organized rebel network is not pointed to by any of the evidence. Dierdre is only correct by total accident.

In that sense, Douchenozzle's plight in his own intro was a bit more sympathetic than hers. However, in pretty much every other way, the situations are direct echoes. Gung-ho young security officer with careerism on the mind is frustrated at superiors not letting them investigate something for what they perceive as corrupt reasons. I guess we'll see if she ends up having to move back in with her mom in episode 7.


This arc is off to one hell of a strong start.