Star Wars Andor S1E3: "Reckoning" (continued)
As Cassa and Harry do the requisite bargaining and negotiation, the surrounding neighbourhood simmers with resentment at the douche battalion stomping around the middle of everyone's business. Whispers spread far in advance of the muddy jackboots, and Bix hears about them within minutes of their first landing. Her first thought is how to surreptitiously warn him about how close the douches are. Her second thought is "who ratted him out?" The list of people who know he's Kenari is longer than he or probably even she would have liked, but it's still not long, and her boyfriend has kinda been giving her weird vibes since late last night. No one told him about Cassa's background, as far as she knows, but it wouldn't have been the hardest thing in the world for him to overhear. So, she starts looking at him a bit suspiciously as the tension spikes.
And then she starts looking at him even more suspiciously when the dumbass reveals that he knows more than he should about what Bix is worried about.
He (I think his name is Tim, if I caught that right?) crumbles pretty quickly when she starts grilling him. And it's in front of witnesses too. So, basically, Tim's life is over.
The relationship he was (probably) trying to secure by getting rid of Cassa is gone forever. The rest of the community might be losing patience with KCassa, but with the ambient resentment for their corporate masters being this strong they're still going to side with him over a rat. If he gets any sort of financial reward out of the company (doubt it'll be much, since all he did was say "hey, I know a Kenari guy") it's not going to be nearly enough to make up for the social and financial losses he's about to take from being locally hated. Heck, he might even need to be put in witness protection, assuming the company cares enough to provide that (or even has the infrastructure in place to do so, what with how precarious and shitty their administration of Ferrix seems to be).
The scene ends with Bix running off to warn Cassa (and probably recruit some other people in trying to warn Cassa) and Tim running away from the people asking him questions about what they just overheard.
In the warehouse, Cassa and Harry finally show each other the damned goods already. Harry had even better to be sceptical about this delivery than it seemed; it turns out that this isn't just a ship part, it's an untampered hyerspace communications transponder from an Imperial military base. It can give you live updates on the positions of any Imperial warships within a range of several dozen light years.
Jesus fucking christ he was just sitting on that shit? What the hell was he even planning to do with it until now? Th...this thing has got to be worth MILLIONS. Maybe even TENS of millions. Seriously, what did Cassa even have in mind when he stole this thing that DIDN'T result in him running his own damned pirate fleet by now?
...to be fair, this sounds like the sort of thing that would depreciate rapidly with use. Once you start tapping into their comms, the Imperial Navy probably won't take long to figure out how you're doing it, ID the missing device, and lock it out of the network or whatever. But even so, this is the kind of item that fuels the birth of criminal empires or turns the tide of critical space battles.
Well. There are two obvious questions that Harry would want to ask Cassa at this point, now that he knows the item is for real. The first of those being the one I already asked myself. The second, of course, being "how the hell did you do it?" Harry turns out to be a practical sort, and prioritizes the second. Even offering Cassa a substantial boost to the price tag in exchange for telling him how he acquired it.
Cassa isn't in a position to say no to money, so he answers. And the answer is satisfying and disappointing in equal measures. He just stole a uniform, slipped onto a staff transport for whatever shitty corp the Imperial Navy had contracted out the logistics for this particular base to, acted like he belonged, and then grabbed the most important thing that wasn't being paid attention to at the moment.
A look at the news will tell you that shit like this is - embarrassingly enough - truth in television. Fascism really is just all the most clownshoes traits of plutocracy and military dictatorship stuffed into the same car, isn't it?
For Harry, the most informative part of Cassa's answer isn't his methods, though. It's the venomous contempt with which he speaks of the Empire when he describes the arrogance, corruption, and sloth of theirs that allows people like him to pull off insane stunts like that. The fire of his tone clearly betraying personal hatred and aggrievement that goes beyond mere distaste or opportunism. So, after hearing this, and baiting a little bit more of it out of him, Harry goes ahead and makes the recruitment pitch.
It's a pretty great speech, and the show knows it. Gives him the dramatic camera angle and background music and everything.
“These days will end, Kassian Andor. The way they laugh, the way they push through a crowd. The sound of that voice, telling you to stop, to go, to move. Telling you to die. It rings in the air, doesn’t it? But they’ll think about us soon enough. Soon enough, we’ll have something else to listen to.”
The actor's delivery is...actually, here, I'll just embed the clip.
Cassa tries to just get him to hand over the money and end this political tangent, but Harry has apparently scoped out a vulnerable spot of his. He mentions that he knows that Cassa's father was publicaly executed right here in this town. Is that, perhaps, why Kassian feels so strongly about the regime?
That definitely gets a reaction out of him.
I'm guessing that the "father" being spoken of was the other guy who was looting that shipwreck with Mom back on Kenar. The two of them appeared to be close, in the short time we saw them together, and he hasn't appeared in the present day scenes. Cassa's biological father, I assume, died of whatever killed most of the other older Kenari when Cassa was very young, and I doubt Harry knows anything about that.
Anyway!
Harry remains totally unfazed by Cassa's outburst, of course. Being a go-between for the Alliance to Restore the Republic is a career path that presumably gets guns pulled on a person with some regularity. He just stays calm, reminds Cassa that he needs to make himself disappear ASAP anyway, so why not disappear into a place from which he can start fighting back in a way that might actually make a real difference?
He can choose to take the money and resort to whatever escape plan he already had in mind, of course. But things are already getting hot here in town, and Harry is pretty sure that Cassa will have better chances of escaping with him than he will on his own. Not to mention the more satisfying options for what comes afterward.
Well, Harry's good at his job. It helps that the facts are indeed on his side in this case, but he was able to infer enough about Kassian to make effective arguments using those facts, and he had enough unflappability to stay on script even with an angry traumatized man with a verified body count pulling a gun on him. Dude knows his shit. I wonder what Harry's own story is?
...
Granted, I don't know how Cassa is going to vibe with the Alliance to Restore the Republic. The kind of conservativism and apologia inherent in the organization's name is pretty much perfectly calibrated to alienate someone like Cassa. For him, the Republic becoming the Empire was literally just a name change, and he's unlikely to want to fight and die for the cause of changing the name back.
I hope the later episodes get into this. It seems very likely to me that the rebel alliance has some extremely tough internal divisions about this very issue. We know that members of the old elite who were perfectly happy with the pre-Clone Wars status quo - the Organas and suchlike - are prominent within the Alliance. At the same time, we also know that the alliance worked with whoever it could get, and that would pretty much have to include longtime discontents (hell, who else would even know the first thing about fighting a guerilla resistance at all?). There must be right and left wing subfactions, and the latter are probably just baaaaaaarely tolerating the name they're all marching under.
...you know, if Star Wars actually ACKNOWLEDGED any of this shit before, instead of just kind of vaguely glancing in its direction once in a while, I'd probably actually like Star Wars. As I said at the start of this series, while I've never disliked Star Wars I've also never been thrilled about it. Now, Andor is looking like it actually might end up acknowledging this shit, and...I find myself caring about Wars in a way I never did previously. All these names and bits of trivia that I absorbed by osmosis and have been more or less dead weight in my brain for decades are suddenly lighting up and forming patterns.
It's honestly a kind of surreal experience.
...
Just then, a loud metallic clanging sounds from outside the building. The scrapworkers apparently have a system in place, banging pieces of metal together all over the surrounding streets when the cops are hunting for someone to let people who know they have reason to hide from the cops that it's time to run. Cassa gets the message. Amusingly, Douche Force misunderstands it in a rather oddly specific way.
When Douchenozzle asks Linus what all the clanging is about, Linus explains that this is a sort of irritating-but-ineffective protest that the Ferrixians often do when CorpSec comes around. It's just meant to demoralize and disorient them, pay it no mind.
Hmm. On one hand, Linus might be correct about this being a secondary purpose for the clanging chain. It does create a confusing, distracting environment for anyone trying to conduct an investigation, after all. On the other hand, I'm surprised that even an incompetent rent-a-cop squad wouldn't pick up on the warning aspect as well. On the streets around them, they can clearly see shopkeepers react to the banging by closing their storefront shutters, parents pulling their children indoors, etc. Like, the people aren't being subtle about warning each other and reacting to the warnings, they're not trying to hide that that's what they're doing.
Once again, I wonder if Linus is setting Douchenozzle up to fail on purpose. Putting him in positions where he knows he'll discredit himself. Giving him flagrantly wrong answers to every question he asks. Etc. Linus hasn't exactly struck me as a smart guy by any means, but he hasn't struck me as this stupid either, so...yeah, I'm becoming more and more convinced that this is all a trap for Douchenozzle.
Speaking of traps though, the Douche Force manages to surround the empty building that Cassa and Harry are in before the two of them are able to egress. Harry manages to get under Cassa's skin from a whole new direction at this, once he realizes that Cassa had an unencrypted civilian commlink on him leading back to a robot that anyone can find and bully. Cassa likes to see himself as being a pretty smooth operator when it comes to criminal stuff, and usually he is, but being caught in a noob mistake like this one shames him in a way that forces him to be more deferential toward Harry now. Well, too late to do anything but fight their way out now. There are a dozen armed men surrounding the building, and Cassa and Harry both know they're not surviving this without each other's full cooperation and trust.
First step is for Harry to set off the explosive charges he hid by the entrances before he entered the building. Killing at least one douche and probably injuring quite a few more before the shooting even starts.
Three episodes into this Star War series, and we've only had two fight scenes. The first of which was only two minutes long at the absolute most. This one is much more extended, but it has a lot of the same ethos.
For instance, when I say that at least one douche gets taken out by the explosion, I don't mean that he goes flying back across the street and crumples against a neighbouring building, or that he gets spectacularly blown apart. We see the explosion, and then we see the man wobbling forward out of the smoke cloud, clearly brain damaged and burned, and then totters forward and doesn't get up. No scream, his lungs are too full of smoke and microdebris. There's so much implied horror in just what happened to this guy, but it's all just implied. The communication is completely unspectacular and nonchalant. It's the least dramatic, least unimpressive instance of "man killed by an explosion" that I think I've ever seen in this medium, and that makes it so much more shocking. It doesn't look like a movie scene. It looks like news footage.
And like, what just happened *isn't* actually exceptionally horrible or shocking, in the big picture. This is just combat death. Wars produce countless numbers of them. The franchise is called star wars. Enjoy.~
The ensuing shootout, as Cassa and Harry leverage the surprise explosions to try and fight their way out, carries the same sensibilities. It's confusing, awkward, weirdly paced, and generally a really bad action sequence. Which is why it's perfect. Especially when even smugly experienced fighter Harry is revealed to have fucked up bigtime and set a bomb in a spot that would tear some industrial equipment loose, starting a chain reaction that slowly brings the whole building down on all of the combatants in a series of flying chains, falling debris, and partial roof collapses. All while Cassa desperately tries to get his hands on the actual comm beacon that he dropped in the initial chaos and Harry and the douches are basically just shooting blind at each other through the dust clouds while trying not to get crushed.
Okay, the chain reaction industrial equipment falling apart is a liiiittle bit action-movie-y. But only a little.
Three parter it is.
