Star Wars Andor S1E6: "The Eye"

The once-every-few-years pseudo meteor shower that lights up the sky over these mountains is known to the local Aldhanians as "the Eye." So, we're finally at the night of the heist, when the Eye will be distracting personnel and frying sensors for the gang.

Predictions...well, the heist is going to be successful, I'm pretty sure, since the show has been implying that this operation is the initial shot-in-the-arm that lets the Alliance to Restore the Republic grow into a force that we know will ultimately win. However, it's also going to be messy. I wouldn't be surprised if Cassa ends up being the only survivor. Or if Luthen ends up getting caught (or killing himself to avoid getting caught) back on Coruscant, forcing Cassa and Val to rebuild their own lines of communication with Mon Mothma and the other masterminds.

I do hope Gorn survives, at least, if only so I can see him doing more untraceable social-engineering based sabotage at his next deployment. I could watch Gorn do that all day long.

Let's see how this ends up playing out!


Before the night of the heist descends, it is brought to the audience's attention that Cassa has a new hat.

I know I've been thirsting after Cassa ever since he lost the beard, but now I kinda want to just forget about him and have sex with his hat.

...my sexuality is having the same arc as Nadia Om's. This is probably not a good sign.

Well. Moving on.

It's the morning of the heist day, and the team are all psyching themselves up for the operation. For Cassa, unsurprisingly, this entails staring off at the horizon with a surly, haunted expression, but not everyone can do it as quickly and efficiently as that. For instance, Namek has barely gotten any sleep last night due to the stress of the mission ahead and the ideological impurity of those undertaking it with him. He's been doing his own psychic-up by working out his feelings in the form of a new Medium post essay about the role mercenaries have to play in a successful revolution. He's sure Cassa will be pleased to learn that people like him are like guns, spaceships, and other expensive tools that the revolutionaries need to spend money on sometimes.

This catalyzes a little debate about revolutionary idealism versus criminal nihilism. Cassa isn't purely a mercenary, after all. He'd never take a job for the Empire or its deputized corporations, no matter how many kyber crystals they waved in front of him. But unlike Namek, he doesn't believe that positive change is possible, at least on any appreciably large scale. The closest thing to revolution he can imagine is making life a little worse for the people who he hates and a little better for the people he likes, locally and temporarily.

There's some tension, but ultimately both men decide that having the same enemies is all that counts for now. They can trust each other's motives for the duration of this mission, and if they survive the mission they can maybe worry about what comes next and what they'll each have to do with it.

Meanwhile, off at the base, Gorn has most of the work already done for him. Two of his commanding officers are having their morning coffee together and shit-talking the natives while also eagerly looking forward to the pseudo-meteor shower. The meteor shower that those same natives had a big cultural Thing about observing from this very mountainside before the imperials pushed them off of it. Gorn stands behind them, silently watching, listening, and letting the hate flow through him until he is fully psyched up.

This conversation also fills in a little more of the details on the state of affairs with the indigenous-ish human tribes known as the Dhani. The Dhani are basically getting the same treatment as the modern day Bedouins in...pretty much every middle eastern country besides Jordan. Herded off the land the government wants and pushed - either through economic pressures or by brute force - into a process of sedentization doing low-paying labour for nearby developers. Some natives still make their pilgrimages up here every three years, but the imperials hate letting civilians this close to the base, and with their plans to expand this base into a major supply hub in the near future (apparently, the massive network of caves under the mountain are ideal for this purpose) they're going to have the entire mountain walled off soon.

In the meantime, they've been doing weirdly effortful shit like opening cheap bars and entertainment centers along the traditional routes through the foothills, peeling away as many potential attendees as possible from the main group. Like stamping out the native culture is as much of an end itself as it is a means. I wonder why, though. It's not like, eg, colonial America, where the natives actually kinda sorta presented a threat to the settler society. Maybe just trying to prevent further headaches later on, when the region starts to be urbanized in wake of the militarizing.

Also, while they're talking we get our first look at Dhani people other than team member Sinta.

Interesting. I wasn't expecting to see that much phenotypic diversity from the Dhani, considering they're a low-tech society that's been in this geographic area for a pretty long time. Then again, we were told that it's not JUST the natives who come up here to watch the lightshow, so some of these pilgrims could be immigrants with pro-native sympathies.

Anyway, Gorn just watches and fills up his rage meter. Offering just a few words in the way of response when one of the bigshots idly addresses him.

I still am torn over whether I want to learn more details about Gorn's story with the dhani lady, or if the story is better served by mentioning more arcs than it has time to explore.

One of the asshole commanders ends up kind of stepping into the main antagonist role for this episode, actually. I suppose someone had to do the job now that the arc plot is actually happening, and there really weren't good opportunities to introduce him earlier, so, heh. The white-bearded fellow in the pictures above is apparently a promotion-hound careerist who tries to sweep any sign of trouble under the rug instead of solving it longterm, and who (implicitly) is affecting aristocratic mannerisms to better fit in with the upper-officer clique. He's...almost the same character as Dickface from the previous arc, honestly. Like the military and private sector versions of the same person.

Also, Major Fucknugget has a wife and son living onsite. The former can barely hold down her contempt for him. The latter is fearfully silent in his presence.

He threatens his son with physical violence for the crime of being sick too often when he needs his family to be presentable. Also, he seems to be putting down the natives extra hard whenever the other officers are within earshot, like he thinks that being classist himself will help raise the others' estimations of him.

While the similarities are definitely intentional, I didn't get the impression that Dickface was as holistically terrible of a person as Fucknugget. This guy is awful on every level, and every new thing you learn is just meant to make you hate him even more. The fact that the show still manages to give us a little bit of nuance, with the hints of class insecurity being at the core of at least much of his odiousness, is impressive in light of that.

While that unpleasantness is going on, the infiltrators split up into two teams. Cassa, Namek, Skeen, and the other guy don their uniforms and set up along the pilgrims' path. The base's security force apparently patrols around the peripheries in small groups during the Eye events to make sure nobody gets too close, so the four just pretend to be one such group and hope nobody notices that they appeared out of nowhere.

Meanwhile, Val and Sinta slip around to the far side of the reservoir created by the river the imperials dammed up for the base (the damming of this river - a sacred river, no less - is implied to be part of the reason the dhani tribes had to leave) and scuba dive across it.

Interesting, that the women are all on the sneaky team and the men are all on the disguise team. Not a lot of women in the Galactic Empire's security forces, I guess.

Also, check out this amazing shot from below of Sinta and Val diving across the lake, while the first few pseudo-meteors light up the sky above them.

This underwater sequence is short, but it's beautiful.

Also, we learn a little more about Sinta and the man whose name I just now managed to catch (it's Taramin). Taramin, who has been coaching the other men on how best to impersonate imperial soldiers, is a former stormtrooper. Which gets a stunned reaction out of Cassa.

...

Stormtroopers were more or less the only imperial troops we saw in the original trilogy, but here in Andor they seem to be a specific corps, with the policing and guard duties they performed in the movies being done by less disciplined troops that don't wear useless white armor. Also, the stormtroopers are being talked about in Taramin's backstory as something like an elite force with extra strong indoctrination.

Reading between the lines a little, it seems like the stormtroopers might have grown overtime to replace all the other security forces and ground troops. And also, inevitably, suffered considerably in terms of the quality of the average trooper.

...when did the white armor troops switch from being clones to being recruits, exactly? It couldn't have been that long before the present day of "Andor." I'm guessing the first few generations of recruited stormtroopers were trained by the clones.

...

We're also told that native lady Sinta almost flipped out and quit the team when she learned about Taramin's origins. Apparently, the stormtroopers were called in to clear out the natives who refused to be relocated, even if there are none still stationed here now.

Speaking of Sinta, she and Val seem to be a thing. A couple episodes ago, Skeen lamented that Sinta wasn't single. Watching the way she and Val interact before and during the underwater infiltration, and how Sinta barely seems to say anything to anyone besides Val (and Val herself seems to mostly hang around with Sinta when there isn't leader-ing to be done), I think that's the implication.

...

This is making me wonder what sort of bigotries the Galactic Empire (and possibly the Republic before it) has regarding skin color and sexuality. Both the imperial military defectors we've met are black (and most of the other soldiers and officers so far have been white). The same episode that reveals the lesbian couple among the rebels also shows us Major Fucknugget's unhappy heterosexual marriage.

Obviously, these details make the allegory of Andor more pointed regarding our own world. But they also make me wonder if traditional, real life bigotries actually are supposed to be a thing in Wars, in addition to the robots, aliens, and indigenies that are already open for persecution.

...

As Val and Sinta swim across to the dam and start doing some kind of sneaky sabotage whatsit, the boy squad takes up position to intimidate the approaching column of Dhani pilgrims. They play their role silently, grimly, and uncomfortably, which doesn't really contradict the role itself fortunately. Cassa in particular has got to be feeling some things right now, coming from a similar-ish "wrong side of colonization" background as the people he has to shake his gun at.

Gorn comes out (naturally, he's made sure to manoeuvre himself into place to command the perimeter guards during this Eye) and sends various squads to patrol various boundaries, naturally sending the infiltrators to patrol the area near an entrance to the base that won't be visible to any others. He also, in order to do this, has to briefly stare down the leader of the Dhani procession.

Either Gorn is feeling some utter agony at being looked at and regarded this way by the people he knows he's wronged and that he's trying to help, OR that old guy knows him and is actually in on the plot and playing along. Most likely the former, but the slim possibility of the latter does amuse me a bit.

Curiously, the base commanders themselves apparently see fit to have an in-person meeting with the pilgrims, and exchange traditional gifts of space goat pelts with them. I guess the Galactic Empire is still paying some tiiiiiiiny amount of lip service to embracing diversity or whatever, at least on planets where there's still development that needs doing. This is apparently the event that Fucknugget was bullying his son for being sick during, as the latter - pale and exhausted looking - has gotten dressed up and is meekly showing the flag with his parents.

I wonder if that kid is going to end up being a more important character, of if he just exists to make us hate his dad a little bit more than we would anyway. Hopefully the former.

Said father, meanwhile, makes a big show of complaining to the other upper-officers about how bad these sheepskins smell both before and after making the exchange. Desperation smells a lot more strongly than space goat, though.

As the hides are exchange, Val, Gorn, and Taramin exchange surreptitious radio contact on their whacky low-emissions hidden communicators. It's showtime.


This will probably be a three-parter, but possibly not. Really dense episode, it already feels like a movie.