Star Wars Andor S1E3: "Reckoning"
Inauspicious title for our protagonist. But then, given that we ended the previous episode with Douche Force about to make planetfall, this kind of has to be a rough episode for him.
We open on young Cassa back on Kenari, having entered the wrecked ship alone with his dartgun-staff in hand. It's not clear if he came back after his group retreated with the one girl's body, or if he just stayed behind while the others left and made the very foolhardy decision to go in alone.
Inside, he sees a body wearing heavier, lighter-colored armor than the guy who killed his tribeswoman, and...is that a clone? He looks kinda like the clone template from the prequel movies, but I'm not entirely sure.
The armor is also kinda similar-ish looking, come to think of it.
Well, if that IS a clone trooper, then that would ID this is a Republic warship during the hottest phase of the war. If I'm mistaken, then it could be a ship belonging to either faction (or a neutral third party that crashed for unrelated reasons) and the timeline is a bit more open.
...
I won't lie, I was kinda hoping that this would be a Separatist warship, just so that I could see the prop designers' take on the goofy battle droids that fits Andor's aesthetics while still being recognizable.
...
Cassa finds an important looking room deep in the ship and starts freaking out and banging things with his staff. Either in frustration at not finding anyone to avenge his tribeswoman (and, now implicit, the state of his homeworld and people) on, or at not finding anything he knows how to use. Possibly both.
There's also a visual emphasis on him staring at his reflection on a reflective surface before having his freakout. Angry at his own weakness and impotence in the face of an antagonist that won't even give him a target he can strike.
Back in the present, adult Cassa watches the grim, grimy industry and overworked, underpaid workers of Ferrix with the expression of someone who used to hate what he's seeing, but has gradually grown numb to it.
We're giving Cassa an eco-guerilla flavor, I see. And, unlike most Hollywood depictions of such, this one is basing itself very strongly on the intersection between environmental destruction, imperialism, and class conflict.
...on that note, I continue to wonder if the Kenari people were living on that planet before the Republic started the strip-mining, or if they're descendants of workers who got left behind after the planet was officially "abandoned." Same end result, but the differing historical context would point to different real life analogues, and also flavor the exact type of hatred Cassa would have grown up feeling for the industrialists and those who theoretically are supposed to be controlling them.
Anyway.
After we've watched Cassa bounce around between disgruntled friends, coworkers, and general people-he-owes-money-to a little more (this is kinda starting to get repetitive, ngl), we jump across the neighborhood to Bix meeting up with Old Man ARR. Arr...Arry? Harry? Harry. It turns out they know one other quite a bit better than the earlier framing of her "finding a buyer" suggested. They recognize each other on sight, start talking casually, and apparently she's already entrusted Harry with information about Cassa, herself, and the general situation around her that I wouldn't expect her to share with many. Especially stuff like "Cassa isn't actually from the place his papers say he's from."
I don't think Cassa or Mom would be thrilled about her having disclosed this. Unless it turns out that they also already know Harry and he independently learned about Cassa's backstory from them. Anyway, the relationships here are definitely more complicated than it seemed.
While Bix and Harry start looking around the neighbourhood for Kassa, the Douche Force landing shuttles arrive, and Mom and Cuckcube look over the escape plan that we saw Kassa pre-booking last episode (wait, did he even tell them about his arrangements? I guess Cuckcube might have relayed some details to Mom against his wishes). And, here we resume the past events on Kenari.
The placement of these flashback scenes could have used some rethinking, ngl. Maybe making them longer and fewer would have made for better pacing.
So. Babby Cassa flips out at the ship interior and starts smashing things with his stave. It turns out that doing this ends up making a lot of noise. I doubt he could have ever predicted this, real fluke, I know. Fortunately, the party attracted to the racket are not more surviving members of the ship's insanely trigger-happy crew, but rather a trio of scavengers who seem to have just arrived to loot the wreck themselves. And, even more fortunately, they're not the type of scavengers who also scavenge people on the side. One of them appears to be a younger Mom. Another of them, hidden behind the others' legs in the screenshot below, is a less rusty Cuckcube.
They warn him that if he's going to be loud and he's also not doing anything particularly important, he really ought to leave before the official recovery team arrives. Nice of them to warn the boy. Unfortunately, he doesn't speak their language, and he assumes offworlders to be hostile by default. Even as Cuckcube tries to warn them all that a Republic frigate is already inbound.
The show is doing a good job of reminding us how much continuity there was between Republic and Empire. There might have been a dramatic self-coup involving unlimited power and lethal spinning motions at the highest levels of leadership, but from the ground level it had to have been much more gradual. For people out on the periphery, the Republic already was the Empire by this point in time. In fact, it was probably the Empire before a boy named Anakin Skywalker was ever born on Tatooine, and the changes on Coruscant barely made any difference.
Once again, this may or may not remind you of something from real life.
Well, speaking of which, Douche Force lands out by the scrapyard with surprisingly little ceremony.
That's another quirk of Star Wars, isn't it? People are really extemporaneous in their landing sites. Even in settings that are supposed to be highly regulated and policed and so forth. I guess in this case they might have trusted the local Ferrix authorities so little that they deliberately chose a sudden and irregular landing, so it makes sense. But still, interstellar vessels - including fairly large ones - landing and taking off being given the same sort of nonchalance as a family car doing the same irl has always amused me about Wars.
They start marching around the scrapyard. Workers glaring and grumbling and hoping they don't get harassed about anything from the sidelines. Cassa and his rendezvous both feel the pressure closing in, with the former taking refuge in an empty building and hoping that Bix can help the latter find him, and that he can then make it to the egress he negotiated hard for. Then, back to the past.
Yeah, they really should have had fewer, longer, backstory segments. Pacing would be just plain better.
The natives(?) apparently made a big mistake when they recovered the body of their own tribeswoman but left the weirdly bloodthirsty shipwreckees behind. As the scavengers now comment, once the recovery team arrives and finds the body of a Republic military officer with a body full of darts, they'll probably declare open season on the locals without bothering to look into such questions as "who shot first." See, this is how you get a social environment that produces Han Solos, smh my head.
Unfortunately, the scavengers have no way to communicate this to Babby Cassa. Leading to a disagreement between Mom (who refuses to let him stay here and be found by the military) and her companion (who insists that themselves and the locals are each responsible for their own safety, time is running out, let's just gtfo).
Too bad they don't have an ersatz C3P0 to go with the R2D2-like. It makes sense though. These are ship scavengers, not diplomats or people who need to help their mothers with housework. Ah well.
The woman who is about to become "Mom" opts to stun the boy and ensure that he isn't at the scene of the crime when the troops arrive.
Whether or not she was actually planning to bring him offworld yet at this point, I couldn't say.
...
No way to get rid of the evidence in a reasonable timeframe? I guess the dead officer's body is a lot heavier than a preteen boy's, and burning it badly enough for the dart wounds to not be detectible would probably take a long time. The kind of handheld weapons that can completely disintegrate a human body definitely exist in Star Wars, but I guess they're not the type of thing these scrap pirates are likely to carry.
Anyway, even if they could protect the other locals by removing the evidence, it wouldn't help Cassa himself if he chose to stay at the wreck. The dialogue made it clear that anyone in the ship is likely to be summarily killed for trespassing on a military vessel even without having done anything else. "Concerned citizens looking for survivors in need of help" is presumably not a story that they would be given a chance to spin.
Yeah. Out here out of the voting public's sight, the Republic must have already been the Empire long before Sheev Palpatine became chancellor. It was probably that way before he started hanging up his first Senate campaign fliers around Naboo City, though perhaps not quite this badly yet.
...
Back to present day Ferrix. Douch Force has found Kassa's address, and brought its entire squad to surround the place before they start banging on the door.
The subsequent raid involves at least as much randomly smashing things in the hopes of pressuring Mom to talk as it does actually trying to find a hiding place. And also bullying the little red cuckcube. That's not nice. He should taze them, just like the boars that tried to pee on him before. >:(
Unfortunately, before that can happen, they're able to get the open commlink with Kassa out of him. Which they then start tracing, leaving at least one soldier to keep Mom at gunpoint and Cuckcube within sight while the rest go for Kassa. Just watch, the one guy they left is going to try to pee on the robot and get electrocuted.
At the abandoned warehouse where he's camped out, Cassa - only just now starting to get an inkling of how close the coppers are to him - finally makes face to face contact with Harry.
Some tense, mistrustful negotiation ensues. However much Harry seems to already know about Cassa, he seemingly has little to no trust for the man. Which, I mean, to be fair, given the reputation Cassa seems to have built for himself in recent times that's kind of understandable. It's just too bad that they really don't have as much time for this as either of them think they do.
There will probably be at least one major twist before it goes down, but I'm pretty sure the general shape of this next sequence will be "Cassa's escape plan gets busted by the douches or just takes the money and vanishes when it sees the heat, Harry gets to see Cassa do some impressive and impassioned violence to said douches and provides his own escape method in exchange for recruitment into the rebellion, and at least one douche gets the cuckzap."
What will end up happening with Bix, her treacherous boyfriend, Mom, and the other minor characters we've gotten to see up to this point, I couldn't predict. I suspect we won't be seeing at least most of them again after the end of this episode, one way or another.
A little short on time (war with Iran, in and out of bomb shelter, no childcare, etc), so I'll be splitting it here. This episode might be a two or three parter depending on how twisty it ends up getting.
