Star Wars Andor S2E3: "Harvest"

I can think of at least two meanings for this title, given where we are with the various subplots. Both of them very ominous.


Open on Cassa, flying his prize to...somewhere. With the Yavin IV rendezvous a bust, he may or may not have already had a backup destination in mind. If not, then well, hopefully Kleya can get through to him from Coruscant and help him figure something out on short notice. I doubt that gunship has the fuel capacity to keep flying around for much longer.

Also, it's crazy how the right angles and lighting can reframe the purposefully villainous-looking TIE family into something hero coded.

The effect kind of gets ruined a second later when the gunship moves to the left and we get JJ Abrams'd by the star behind it too hard to see anything at all, but until then, this really makes it look like a good guy ship off to do heroic stuff, despite the menacing shape and the decades of pop culture priming.

The serene space beauty slowly glides into gritty claustrophobia as we pan in through the cockpit window and see Cassa pulling at the wires behind the gunship's controls. I'm not sure what exactly he's trying to do, but it definitely isn't what he succeeds at doing in our abrupt jump to screwball comedy a moment later.

Let's just hope the inertial dampeners on that thing are better than the Aldhani freighter's.

...I'm really not sure why he was screwing around with the wiring for the thruster controls, if he's already figured them out well enough to take the ship through a hyperspace jump, navigate it to a specific patch of planetary surface, and land it in the jungle without crashing it. Hmm. I wonder what he was doing there.

Anyway! Cut to the farm on Mina-Rau. The opening scene suggests to me, once again, that the conditions here are a heck of a lot better than what most real life migrant farm workers have to put up with.

Seriously, what is even the point of hiring undocumented workers if you're going to treat them this well?

Maybe it's literally just an act of charity on the part of the local authorities. Taking in refugees and giving them a livelihood even though it doesn't save them any money? Wait, no, that couldn't be, an earlier scene had the foreman say that this farm wouldn't be able to operate without undocumented workers. So, whatever is going on here, it's not that.

...

Granted, on the topic of space immigration, the realities of hyperspace travel in this setting are starting to make me look askance at this entire subplot.

Hyperspace-capable vessels are cheap and plentiful. Interstellar travel takes hours at most, and more typically mere minutes. Most small ships have versatile VTOL capability that lets them touch down basically anywhere, and the skies of at least most planets don't seem to be policed anywhere near enough to detect all these small takeoffs and landings.

I don't think that immigration law as a concept could exist in this universe. Getting around the galaxy without a paper trail is simply too fast, too cheap, and too easy. Things like travel visas and legal residency statuses are unenforceable to the point of complete obsolescence. Governments will be using different measures to control and police their populations, not personal legal residency laws.

I still appreciate the real world relevance of this plot thread. I just don't know if it makes any sense in-universe.

...

The aforementioned foreman drives up, and calls Carcrash over to quietly give him some bad news. The imperial auditors are moving this way after all, and they'll be going through this particular village's visas by tomorrow. They're not checking everyone, but they're checking a lot of people at random, and a bunch of other people who happen to get their attention for whatever reason. Another group just got arrested early this morning.

With everything we've been told about this farming project, its importance to the galactic economy, and its reliance on migrant labor that doesn't seem to bother the locals but which does seem to bother the imperial government...hmm. I suspect that what's going on here is that the Empire just wants to gift this land to one of its pet megacorps, and they're just looking for excuses to dispossess whoever owns it currently. Yeah. I think that fits the available evidence better than anything else I can think of, and it matches what we've seen of the Empire's general administrative playbook. They've been finding dumb reasons to restrict legal work migration, and then looking for illegal migrants to get their employer in trouble for.

As for who DOES own it currently...I'm really not sure. The worker villages are each called "councils," but I don't get the impression that this is full on worker-ownership-of-means-of-production. Some kind of partial co-op deal? Not sure how you'd reconcile that with the need for migrant labourers, though. Well, whatever, whoever owns this place it ISN'T a company belonging to one of the moffs' cronies, and I guess that's all that matters.

The foreman gives Carcrash a forged emergency repair order, calling for his mechanic team to relocate to another sector that's already been checked ASAP. Hopefully it won't be looked into. Carcrash thanks the foreman, and the two of them hope that this will be over by the time Cassa gets back so he doesn't end up stumbling into the middle of it. There's also a line that I think might be hinting that the foreman knows about Cassa's other job and other employer, but it's ambiguous.

What isn't ambiguous is that at the end of the conversation, it's Carcrash who gives the foreman a comforting hug rather than the reverse.

The foreman was actually starting to break down a little toward the end of the conversation. Asking why Coruscant is doing this? Why won't they just leave them alone? What is the point of any of this?

I've already shared my theory on the subject, but I guess the details aren't readily available to low-level administrators.

Anyway. Not everyone signed up for this the way the Rix Road group did. The fact that the foreman is going out of his way to help them so much despite having much less knowledge and buy-in (how little, exactly, is ambiguous as I said) is still pretty darned noble of him. He deserves the hugs.

Of course, the most ominous thing about this is the "random people, and also individuals who get their attention" detail. One of the auditors has been paying an awful lot of attention to Bix. When it comes time to check workers in this sector, she'll already be on his mind. And, heh, I don't think the show would have bothered establishing that guy if the Rix Roaders were just going to completely dodge them now. So, this is gonna get ugly, the question is just how ugly.

...

I just hope that the resolution doesn't end up being "Cassa shows up at the last minute and blows the auditors to hell with the gunship." For reasons including but not limited to "enough of Bix being a damsel in distress already."

...

Return to Chandrila, for the climactic wedding ritual itself. Lita's wedding dress looks less intimidating and more just silly and flimsy now that she's actually wearing it. Mon finds her in the great hall's antechamber, looking anxious to the point of near-collapse. Mon already managed to have one genuine moment with her daughter during this shebang, when she found her crying back on the first night. Now, it's time to make it count.

Mon Mothma tells her daughter something that she's never told anyone before. Twenty-some years ago, when she and Man were getting married, she was waiting in this very room, wearing a nearly identical dress. Her own mother - Lita's grandmother - came to reassure Mon, only she was so slobbering drunk at the time that she could only make Mon feel worse. Mon hated her mother, for that. It's only now that she understands what it was that drove her to drink so much on that day.

Yet another of these charming Chandrilan traditions handed down through generations of idly rich and utterly miserable aristocrats.

Mon is sober, though. And she's going to tell Lita something that her own mother would have never dreamed of. Right now, she says, Lita can march out that door and tell everyone that it's been a lovely three day weekend, but the party is over now. Will there be reputational fallout? Yes, but there would also be popular support. It'll be a controversy, but it'll be one that casts Lita and her family as brave, fearless mavericks. If Lita wants to be that, she can be that. Or she can go through with this and be a good Chandrilan wife. Or she can just disappear from public life altogether and leave her parents to eat the repercussions. Whatever she wishes.

Lita tells her mother that she wishes she'd just gotten drunk and babbled at her. It would have been less contemptible than this pink-haired wokeness.

Hehehehe. Okay then, Lita. Okay.

Mon has the perfect reaction to this. Lita starts to stride toward the door to march out into the hall, but Mon cuts her off and sternly reminds her that the mother of the bride is supposed to LEAD the bride into the hall. Stop defying tradition and get back in line immediately you little bitch.

And man, does that wipe the smug off of Lita's face.

...

Embracing traditional hierarchies as an attempt at rebellion against a traditional authority figure.

Priceless.

...

Mon does have to wipe a tear away as she bullies her daughter into place behind her. But she makes sure Lita can't see it, and Lita visibly gets no satisfaction from her mother's actions here.

So, they step into the great hall and down the aisle of standing guests. They jump over the driftwood log and reach the green circle under the sun window. The bride and groom walk in a circle around each other like feral cats sizing up an opponent. Then they stop, and their parents walk in a circle around them like four more feral cats sizing up opponents.

Finally, Gul'Dan Junior asks Man for his family dagger, which he uses to cut off a lock of Lita's hair. They're married now.

...

I think the reason this seems so silly to me is because Lita is wearing something so close to a real world, modern, western wedding dress.

It's like this random artifact from real life intruding into the fictional Chandrilan culture and reminding me that everything else about this wedding ritual is made up. Without the trailing white dress, I think the illusion would hold better.

...

Anyway, I hope Gul'Dan Senior is happy now. He's literally the only person who wanted this marriage to happen, as best I can tell. So, he gets to be a real nobleman now, yay him. He may find that he's bitten off more than he can chew by getting his banking empire tied up with Luthen's group, though.

Lita just wants to get married to a trad husband in trad circumstances, which includes herself not having any choice in the matter. She wanted a marriage, but she didn't want this marriage.

We know how Mon and Man feel.

We don't yet know anything at all about the rest of the Shadow Council's feelings, though. Gul'Dan's wife has been seen, but I don't think she's spoken a word to this point. The bridegroom, we've been told, was reluctant to hold Lita's hand, but besides that we've only seen him go through the ritual motions and recite the ritual words. Mrs. Gul'Dan might be eager to join the elite in-group like her husband, or she might object to this for her son's sake and just have been overruled. We don't know. Likewise, the son himself. His refusal to take Lita's hand could have meant any number of things.

I really hope we learn more about those last two in the coming episodes. Even if it's not really relevant to the building of the rebel alliance, I feel like addressing the second and third order consequences of the alliance-building is important for the show's message, and the fate of these hapless family members could be a useful totem of that.

We now return to Coruscant, for what might be the weirdest scene of this entire series so far.

It, uh. Defies concise description. There's so much going on with it, and so much of what's going on with it is so psychologically bizarre.

And yet, it's also the first time since the Aldhani episodes that Dierdre has managed to come across as a human being, let alone something within the same ballpark as a sympathetic character. I guess it would have to take a bizarre scene to accomplish that, now that I think about it.


I guess I'll start the next post with Dierdre's mother-in-law reddit horror story.