Star Wars Andor S2E3: "Harvest" (continued more)

On the farm planet with the annoying name, the Rix Road cell prepare to make themselves vanish. Predictably, Cuckcube is reluctant to do this if it means there's a chance Cassa won't be able to find them again, assuming he's survived whatever screwball comedy adventure Luthen sent him on this time. Carcrash tells him that it's fine, they don't need to vanish for that long most likely, the imperial auditors aren't going to be spending too long on this region.

I'm kinda not sure how Cassa found them again in the first place after the finale, to be honest. As I recall, the Rix Roaders took one ship away from Ferrix, and Cassa ran off after they'd taken off to go meet up with Luthen and presumably get a lift from him. Wonder how they reunited? Maybe Bix or Twink still had Kleya's hyperspace phone number or something.

Well, in any case, Cuckcube wants to stay with the helpful foreman and his shopkeep wife in case Cassa comes back here looking for them. Which is simple enough to arrange, what with droids being legally things rather than people in at least most cases. Unfortunately, the imperials are headed this way sooner than expected, so the Rix Roaders need to pack up and go handle that "emergency engineering situation" on the other side of the farm complex immediately.

I love the space buffalo just casually grazing in the background.​

Unfortunately, while Bix, Ginger, and Carcrash are able to speed up the packing and get going right now, Twink is nowhere to be seen. Turns out he drove across the fields to bid goodbye to that local girlfriend of his.

To be fair to Twink, they really didn't think they'd need to finish packing until this evening. And, to also be fair to Twink, I'm assuming that the communications deadzone the auditors set up is blocking site-to-site cell signals as well as interstellar comms, which is an easy detail to forget about.

As accursed luck would have it, the imperial inspectors stop right by the general store where Twink and his love interest are meeting, forcing the latter to stay hidden in the field to avoid the risk of random inspection and separating him from his vehicle. Twink starts running on foot back toward their X-trailer even as Carcrash gets on his own speederbike and heads out to look for him.

At this point, "Harvest" starts doing a thing. It continues to do the thing until the end of the episode. I said in the last episode that Andor's second season is way artsier with the production than its first, and this is an escalation of that trend. We're starting to get into...not quite "The Fifth Element" territory, but within sight of it.

As Carcrash, Twink, and the imperials catch sight of one another sneaking through the fields and the stealth sequence turns into a chase, we jump back to Chandrila. Mon Mothma is alone on the dance floor, surrounded by friends and family she has nothing in common with. Her friend is about to murder her other friend, and she can't - or, more accurately, she just won't - stop it. Across the floor, her daughter is dancing with her new husband, a plastic smile on her face to bottle in the upcoming decades of self-inflicted misery. She just tried to communicate with Lita, a few hours ago, and was kicked to the curb. Lita won't let herself be helped. Just like Tae wouldn't let himself be helped. Just like Mon's husband, in his own depressive way, won't let himself be helped.

Out of nowhere, the mother of the groom (who I don't think has spoken until now) glides up and offers Mon a drink. Mon hated her mother for getting drunk at Mon's own wedding, way back when. But, well, Lita has made her own opinions on this subject clear. So.

Someone else offers her another drink shortly afterward. She chugs that one down as well.

Mon Mothma has finally realized that none of it matters. She's found the strength within herself to genuinely stop caring.

The slowly intensifying trance beats of the music fade really delicately into the rustling of grain-stalks as we cut back to the chase on the farm planet. And - much more clearly, in the next intercut - into the static of Bix's hyperspace radio as Cassa finally enters the planet's atmosphere and manages to just barely get a rattly message through the comm disruption.

Cassa is able to glean that Bix is in danger when she quickly abandons the call. Her reason for doing that being the approach of that imperial ICE agent who was creeping on her last episode. He's made a point of coming here to this specific X-trailer, away from the rest of his unit, with just one other soldier to drive the vehicle for him. Given that this guy seems to be one of the subcommanders of the auditor team, I think it's fair to suspect that he might have planted the idea to move this way next in his own boss' ear. As luck would have it, he happened to arrive when Bix is alone at the trailer herself and her companions are all busy trying to sneak through the fields and retrieve each other.

He invites himself in. Asks about that husband of hers again. Inquires as to why she and her friends are planning to move on so quickly when she's still waiting for her SO. And then explains that he's been looking into her visa situation, and he thinks that they might be able to help each other out here.

Bix, of course, is struggling to avoid a full-on PTSD flashback at being menaced by a creepy uniformed man. On top of the fear and revulsion that someone would normally feel in this situation.

Out in the fields, Carcrash gets spotted as he tries to slip passed some soldiers and get to Twink. To his credit, his last action as a free man before being seized and wrestled into submission is to make a dramatic lunge at the foreman (who happens to be nearby) and roar curses and threats at him for "selling me out." Thus making it seem like the foreman was just reluctantly turning a blind eye to the illegal migrants rather than actively trying to aid and hide them. It seems to work, as the squad commander smugly turns to the shocked-looking foreman and tells him that he should take this violent outburst as a lesson about how dangerous these undocumented migrants are and that he should really be more careful about his hiring practices or who knows what he might be inviting in.

Thanks to that extemporaneous performance of Carcrash's, the foreman will be getting off with a slap on the wrist. It's the very least that Carcrash can do for him, and I'm pretty sure he appreciates it. Good on both of them.

On Chandrila, the music kicks into high gear. It's really perfect for this, too. On top of just being a banger of a club-trance track that's totally believable as an in-universe dance song, it has this anxiety-inducing edge to it that's...well, on one hand, there's some fairly popular real life dance music like this. Like, compare with this nineties Eurodance piece that was everywhere for a few years. Even if you take away the melancholy lyrics and the outright horror story of the music video, there's something about the music that makes it feel like Bad Things are going on. We're all dancing, but we're not doing it because we're happy.

The Chandrila dance theme has that going on in it, but there's also something else. Those monotonic, screamy sounds in the song's bridge cycles are just...you know what they really remind me of? The creepy siren noises from the "Alien" soundtrack. Yeah, yeah they've got a really similar quality. There are some actual scifi horror sounds mixed into the already haunting, uneasy flavor of techno-trance.

Anyway, that's the music that plays as a drunken Mon Mothma starts dancing.

Songs for your best friends to murder each other to.​

The camera zooms out. Luthen crosses the foreground, slipping passed the thronging dancers like the masque of the red death. Outside, on the landing pad, Tae heads home after excusing himself early from the party. He's a little thrown to find his aircar driver has been replaced with someone new, but when she tells him that the usual guy wasn't feeling well and had to call in a replacement he accepts it without further question.

She's really rocking that uniform, also.~

Behind Tae, on the forecourt, Val happens to be watching, and she briefly makes eye contact. Just long enough for her and Sinta to register their mutual recognition before Tae climbs aboard and Sinta gets into the driver's seat.

Val can't say anything, of course. She can't even show anything on her face. She doesn't know why this is happening, per se, but she knows that it is happening. The other day, she was passive aggressively whining at Kleya about her girlfriend being away. Well, she's here now, but not any more reachable. And, frankly, Val might be re-evaluating some things now that she's seen the revolution come home to the one place she thought she could go to take a break from it.

The music continues playing for a few moments over the next cut to the farm place. The space ICE officer keeps pushing Bix verbally until she pushes him physically. Then he resorts to physical force of his own.

...

A quick public service announcement: Top Level Canon Reviews would like to make it clear that the Galactic Empire does not condone this behaviour, and that Darth Vader would never stand for it.

Thank you. We will now be returning to the review.

...

Bix manages to clonk the guy in the head with a hammer. It's ironic, because he'd just been commenting on all the tools that he saw out and mid-packing, and he'd also commented on how Bix's strong hands would be great for giving massages, but he somehow failed to consider the obvious consequences of these factors interacting with one another. Arrogance of the oppressors and all that. It's close, but thanks to having gotten that debilitating head-clonk in Bix manages to take him down.

...

In keeping with the show's mostly realistic depictions of violence (Luthen's bondmobile moment notwithstanding), the officer manages to drag himself away after he's taken too much cranial trauma and stumble back out into the field...only to collapse a minute later and not get up again.

My understanding is that this is often the case with brain injuries; the victim can appear to be walking it off for a few minutes, only for things to turn back around very suddenly. So, that's a nice, gritty touch.

...

Bix ends up scoring her second onscreen human kill just seconds after the first when Officer Rapey's driver pulls a gun on her, only to be distracted by the arrival of Twink at a critical moment and letting her shoot first.

Heh, okay, I'm glad for this. When the rape scene started, I was kind of dreading Bix turning into a perpetual damsel in distress who Cassa always needs to rescue, but nope. Cassa does end up being vital to the Rix Roaders making their escape, but everybody else still pulls their weight.

Carcrash escapes captivity by virtue of the sudden arrival of a rogue TIE gunship prototype. My suspicions about this ship's intended role are basically confirmed in this scene; that scatter-laser it has is absolutely a dedicated anti-infantry weapon, and these teams of lightly armored ICE shmucks running around in an open field are pretty much its natural prey.

Not that the gunship is a slouch against vehicles either.

Unfortunately, Carcrash gets shot as he flees the scene by speederbike. He kept the enemy distracted long enough for Twink to get to Bix and both of them to get out of the line of fire, and he managed to feint their local benefactor out of legal trouble. The man went out like an absolute badass, but he still went out. Cassa's sadness when he finally gets a chance to land and finds the body is palpable.

We barely got to know this guy, but we saw enough to feel more or less the same way about his death as Cassian.

The music starts in again during the aerial attack, and continues over this mourning scene in full. Well in advance of the actual scene cut back to Chandrila, where Mon Mothma has undergone a kind of...almost a metamorphosis.

I don't think she's danced like this since she was in her teens. If ever. Wild. Total abandon. Not at all happy, but with a feral energy that seems fundamentally youthful and vital. The frilly sleeves of that dress flapping like angel wings - or perhaps a ghostly shroud - as she waves her arms just exaggerates the effect. It's like decades of wealth, decorum, and politics are melting off of her frame, leaving something different in their wake. Something lean, wiry, and vicious. Something that sees no difference between a floofy boudoir on Chandrila and a crumbling ruin shared with farmboys and smugglers on Yavin IV. Something that sees dead stormtroopers on the news and dead childhood friends on her forecourt, and feels exactly as little for each.

Man Mothma sees her wildly dancing, and for a moment seems excited to join her...only to notice within seconds that there's something very wrong. And that she has no interest in him joining her.

The screaming, chattering dance song continues as Mon becomes a blur. One extremely clever shot pans up from her and the other dancers to their reflections being cast on the spherical music-playing droid hovering near the ceiling. All of their bodies compressed together in this flying metal orb, crowing its victory over all.

Outside, Val is sitting on the steps staring into space as Sinta drives Tae off to nutriate the Chandrilan seabed.

I think she's actually having the same moment of crisis that Tae did two episodes ago. And that Cassa did when he was arrested on Niamos. When the rebellion stops being just activism, and becomes one's whole reality. Tae backed down when he came to that bridge. Cassa didn't. It remains to be seen which way Val will go, but I'm optimistic. She might have been taking things less seriously than she should have, whining at Kleya about when she'll get to see her girlfriend again as if that's supposed to be a serious consideration when you're running a damned guerilla cell, true. But on the other hand, she was willing to live on roots and herbs for weeks on end and risk her life dozens of times over on Aldhani. I don't think someone willing to go that far is going to lose her nerve now. It might take her a minute, but I think she's ultimately going to find it in herself to greet the red death with a smile and let it lead her out of the collapsing palace. I could be wrong, but I don't think I am.

Val and Mon are genuine class traitors. Tae, on the other hand, was just a traitor.

The music doesn't stop as Cassa embraces Bix and brings her and Twink - the only two surviving Rix Roaders - into the gunship's spacious cockpit. I don't know how many interstellar jumps that thing is supposed to be able to manage without refuelling, but apparently it has enough juice for at least one more.

The haunted, half-dead look on Cassa's face as he and his longtime companions are forced to flee and relocate yet again is, to be fair, probably mostly down to hunger and exhaustion. He still hasn't had anything to eat since the Yavin chimpanzees captured him, and I don't know that he's had any water (he certainly hasn't gotten any sleep) since escaping them, after all. But that said, it's not just physical either.

The episode closes to Cassa's grimace and Mon's dancing, intercut, and the shrieking music continues on into the credits.


I think this arc calls for a dedicated analysis post. That'll be up tomorrow or the next day.

For now, I just have to register some dazed amusement at this episode's final act. Literally the only two parts of "Andor" that I heard about before starting these reviews were the attempted rape scene, and the Mon Mothma dance scene. I never in a million years would have guessed that these two were actually the same scene.