Star Wars Andor S1E11: "Daughter of Ferrix" (continued more)

From Luthen and Saw's grim conclusion, we return (very) briefly to Cyril. He's getting something out of a safe in his mom's house in the predawn quiet.

Not sure what it is he's removing. It looks like a data disc of some kind. Something he stole from Preox-Morlana before being let go? Credentials or security codes or something? I don't think it's evidence, or he'd have eagerly turned it over to Dierdre. Hmm.

Then we're back to Luthen, for a scene that I have extremely mixed feelings about.

It's not that this is a bad action scene. At least, I don't think that it is. There are some bits that confused me, but overall I was able to follow, and it was pretty well made as these things go. My issue with it is...here, I'll just do the summary first, and I think you'll see what I mean.

Luthen is returning home from his visit to the anarcho-pirate group, flying his tricked-out little ship away from the planet and having a coded hyperwave conversation with Leia. As always, they appear to be talking about antiques. Suddenly the call drops, courtesy of the Imperial patrol ship with a massive comm-jamming array that just snuck up behind Luthen. The tractor beam comes a second later.

Interesting ship design. Like a heavily scaled-down star destroyer with less gun and more other stuff.​

Well shit.

Fortunately, this turns out to not be an ambush. Just a standard anti-piracy patrol doing a stop-and-frisk, since this system is known to have dissident activity going on. Luthen is able to provide convincing forged credentials and ship ID when asked for it that appear to pass muster, all while quietly warming up his ship's special anti-stop-and-frisk countermeasures. He hopes he's not going to have to use said countermeasures, but he's warming them up just in case.

The imperial captain decides to pull Luthen's ship in for an inspection even though his licenses are all clear. It's been a slow workday, and he figures his mostly-green crew could use the practice. So, Luthen is forced to do the thing he'd been hoping he wouldn't have to do.

By the way, the interior shots of the patrol ship are some grade A nostalgia.

I might not have ever been that into Wars, but I still saw those movies a few times in my childhood, so the nostalgia hits.

And, well...that's not where the throwback vibe ends. And the impact of it gets, eh...

When told to shut off his engines and prepare for inspection, Luthen starts to comply and then suddenly turns his engines up to full power. Claiming that there's been a freak malfunction, and trying to turn his thrusters off instead caused them to fire at full power. He's trying to fix it, please be patient.

Thanks to his tricked out engines, the imperial ship is supposed to turn its tractor beam up to high power. They tentatively accept his story for now, but the timing and the unusually high engine power are both starting to make the captain suspicious. However, Luthen manages to talk soothingly and compliantly enough to keep them from shooting until his special countermeasures finish warming up. A volley of railgun shots fired directly backward out of the tail of his ship.

I had to watch this a couple of times to get why these kinetic projectiles were able to penetrate the larger ship's shields, but the fact that they are kinetic projectiles rather than the usual energy weapons or explosive missiles seems to be the key. Firing them directly backward toward the imperial ship's tractor beam projector, while the beam is working at high power to counteract Luthen's engines...well, tractor beam physics seem to lend themselves really, really well toward acceleration. And I imagine the ship's shields weren't at full power to begin with, if they thought they were just bullying a civilian cargo ship out of boredom.

Tractor beam projector impales itself with hyperaccelerated kinetic slugs, allowing Luthen's ship to go suddenly shooting away at high speed. The imperials lay out suppressive fire to force Luthen to evade while their fighters deploy and catch up, but quickly find out why Luthen was so determined to not have his ship looked at. Literally every bit of cargo space aboard that "cargo ship" has been replaced with either engines, or weaponry. Including these...giant lightsabers?...that fire out of the sides of the ship and let it spin around and slice up nearby fighters.

Luthen destroys something like half a dozen fighters while dodging the big ship's suppressive fire, dashes out of the planet's gravity well, and escapes to hyperspace while the imperial officers watch what just happened with dazed horror.

...

Okay, so. My problem with this scene is that it's a Star Wars action set piece. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. It's not a bad Star Wars action set piece, as far as those go. In "Andor" though, the shift in tone and sensibilities is downright jarring.

None of the action scenes in this show so far have been "thrilling summer blockbuster" material. The ground combat has been gruelling, confusing, unglamorous, and slow. The one aerospace dogfight we've seen so far, during the escape from Aldhani, was a little more meladramatic and featherbrained, but the focus was still on the fear and confusion of combat and there was still some underlying grit (we had someone die from being hit by unsecured cargo for god's sake!).

This was just a Star Wars space battle. The cinematography, the music, the sturdy camera sweeps as we follow the ships in cinematic dogfighting motion, the light-bordering-on-cavalier attitude toward the loss of human life. I'd say it's even on the sillier, more prequel-trilogy-ish side of Star Wars spacefite scenes, what with the whacky James Bond gadgetry that the luthenmobile unfolds into.

It just doesn't belong in this kind of series. There's another version of this show - probably featuring Jedi with comedic sidekicks - that it would fit into perfectly well, but that's not the version we've been watching. This scene feels like it came knocking at the wrong address.

...

Anyway, the fallout of this incident is probably that Luthen is going to have to retire that ship and start tricking out a different one. Maybe Dierdre will somehow manage to connect this encounter with Axis? I'm not sure how she could draw that connection, but she's made insane leaps of logic that turned out to be correct by sheer dumb luck before, so there's precedent. If she manages to noscope this one as well, then that'll pretty much confirm for me that she's a latent force-sensitive, because no way in hell does a person without magic insight powers guess that lucky that often.

If she DOESN'T make that connection, meanwhile...well, honestly, that would kind of make me wonder what the point of this scene even was in the first place.

I guess we'll find out in the season finale.

The last scene of episode 11 has Cassa getting in touch with a contact on Ferrix. I think it's the guy who he'd been planning his own disappearance with, before everything went off the rails? Pretty sure it's him, yeah. Despite most of the town having turned against Cassa due to him bringing an Imperial occupation down on them, this fellow seems glad to hear from him. Maybe he's just softening on the family as a whole in the immediate wake of Mom's death.

Of course, Mom and her death would be the crux of this conversation. Cassa just wanted to get a message to her, letting her know he's alive and safe and that he's been doing things she'd probably be very proud of him for if he was able to tell anyone about them.

So, his buddy is forced to give him the bad news.

Cassa knew her health was declining. But he also probably suspects - rightly or wrongly - that her health started to decline more rapidly once he left her alone in that house. Even though she was the one who told him to do it. The thought of seeing her again - or at least of hearing her voice - has to have been one of the things that kept him going through his months on Narkina V and the rigours of his ensuing escape.

He doesn't cry, but I think that's because Cassa just doesn't really show sadness that way. You can tell that if he was a person who cried, he'd be doing so as soon as the shock passes him by here.

He thanks the guy for the information, and ends the call. Fortunately, he never has a chance to learn about the funeral. Looks like we're going to subvert the telegraphed climax to the season after all, then, with everyone except Cassa coming to the funeral and expecting him to be there. Which, heh, I suppose is appropriate for a soon-to-be-legendary sneak thief.

I wonder what he WILL be doing in this following episode while everyone else is tripping over each other trying to ambush him, then? What does someone in Cassa's position even do with themselves at after this point?

After hanging up the call, he turns to address his companion Melshi. Looks like those two have stuck together after all, that's nice. Now that they have at least a chunk of the money that Andor got paid for the Aldhani job with, I wonder if they're going to go start a new criminal enterprise together or something. It's not like they can easily go legitimate, being escaped convicts and all, and while they do have some money know I don't think they have nearly all of it.

As Cassa silently mourns his adoptive (well...more like kidnapper, honestly. That whole sequence was kinda super fucked up, and I'm sort of hoping that Cassa will have to confront that fact in season two) mother, Melshi asks him what they're going to do now. Not just with themselves, but also with the information they now possess. About what's happening to the prisoners. About the secret construction project that they seem to be being used for.

They don't have proof for any of that, unfortunately. But they know what they saw and experienced, and they know that if they COULD prove it the regime would take a big reputational hit. A hit that they both very, very strongly want it to take. On top of having every reason to want the thousands of other convicts to be freed.

Speaking of which, the next topic of conversation is how many other escapees from their rig they think survived. The answer is "probably not many." The majority probably drowned. Of the ones who made it to shore, most probably died of hunger or exhaustion, or were killed or recaptured by imperial slavecatchers. A few others might have survived and gone to ground on Narkina V, but probably not more than you can count on both hands.

Are they going to allow all those men to have died in vain?

The episode ends with Cassa pulling the last item out of the safe - a blaster pistol, and handing it to Melshi.

They might not know exactly what they're going to do, but they're going to do something.

Cassa takes one last look into the setting sun over the Niamosian horizon. Thinking of Mom's death along with those of the other escapees. All of them - at least in Cassa's mind - directly or indirectly, victims of the same military-industry machine. The same capitalist capture. The same politics, working throughout the era of Republic to Clone Wars to Empire, always getting gradually worse without fundamentally changing.


This episode contained some of the best scenes of the season so far, even if it also had some ill-considered bits. So many characters got so much more depth to them in "Daughter of Ferrix." Luthen, Mon Mothma, Val, and Lita in particular, but also Cassa himself.

Ironic, that all the stuff that I thought was going to happen in this episode seems to be deferred until the finale. Mom definitely has SOMETHING planned for this funeral. Either she faked her death and is about to do something really whacky, or she's really dead but she set something in motion that's going to pay off at the event.

So, next time, the season one finale.