Star Wars Andor S1E4: Aldhani

From what I gather, each season of this series is divided into three-episode story arcs. The first of these, set on the planets Ferrix and Morlana I, was basically about how Cassian Andor came to join the rebel alliance. It also would have made an extremely good movie, to the point where I almost wish they had done that instead of an episodic TV series. I know that Cassa's story will end with him sacrificing his life to steal the death star plans alongside the other Rogue One characters, but I have absolutely no idea what to expect between now and then. Or, for that matter, how much time the series has to cover before the events of Rogue One and (immediately following it) A New Hope. The exact dates of Cassa's life story have been vague enough so far that it could just be a year or two until then, or it could be the better part of a decade.

Well, episode four! Aldhani! Probably the name of a place, I'm guessing. Or else a person. I'd bet on either the planet Harry takes Cassa to, or a rebel leader that Cassa will be introduced to there. Let's see if I'm right!


Heh, yup. The opening scene has Harry and Cassa aboard the former's ship, fleeing Ferrix and plotting a course to Aldhani that will hopefully elude corporate pursuers. Cassa is thrown off his feet when Harry suddenly pushes them to ludicrous speed.

Man, the Andorians had really shit inertial dampeners back in the day.

Now that they aren't busy running and fighting for their lives, Harry and Cassa resume the conversation they'd been in the middle of before the baddies showed up. Cassa was obviously interested in what Harry was selling back there, but they hadn't actually closed the deal, and now that the two of them are stuck together Cassa has started being more cautious about it again.

This is a nice bit of characterization, imo. It isn't Harry's fault that he and Cassa are stuck on a spaceship together, but the circumstances still ping Cassa's instincts as seeming like a trap. Really shows that he's used to people making hard and soft coercion attempts of various kinds, and has developed reflexes to deal with this.

Harry is fairly patient with him, if a bit gruff at this point. It helps that he assures Cassa that if he doesn't want to join, Harry is still willing to let him off on the nearest inhabited planet and wish him the best. The gruffness also wins him some points when Harry wryly says "or, of course, you could try to kill me and take the ship." Not pretending at any degrees of trust or camaraderie that hasn't been earned yet is, ironically, a good first step toward building trust and camaraderie with someone like Cassian Andor.

It may also have helped that Cassa is a scrapyard worker, and the custom modifications to Harry's ship that dramatically increase its speed and acceleration ignite his professional curiosity, heh.

Cassa still deploys some well-honed cynicism against Harry's offer. Proclaiming the uselessness of resistance, and how people like himself are better off just robbing the rich to feed themselves than making foolhardy attempts to topple their thrones. Harry responds by pointing out that while doing that might earn a living, it's also not going to hurt the people who he wants to hurt. And then, I'm not shitting you here, he tells Cassa to let the hate flow through him.

Not those exact words. But very, very close to them.

In this scene, Harry stops being a gritty Han Solo/Obi-Wan Kenobi hybrid, and starts echoing Emperor Palpatine. And...it's a heroic recruitment scene, with soulful eye-gazing, emotional music, and a sense of hope and triumph when Cassa gives in to his arguments.

My mind is actually slightly blown right here. Like, this HAD to be deliberate. The wording, the gunmetal gray environment with space visible through the windows in the background, the wrinkled old man talking to the rising hero, it's too perfect to not be. And it's great.

I mostly liked the "Return of the Jedi" movie, but that particular scene with Vader, Luke, and Palpatine always seemed to me - despite its impressive meme value - like nonsense at best and philosophical poison at worst. I'm not completely sure that the creators of Andor feel similarly, but what they created here is indistinguishable from what someone who agrees with me on the subject would do.

So, that's validating.

...

One thing absent from this scene is the elephant in the room I mentioned in my review of the previous episode. Does "restoring the Republic" mean anything, to Cassa?

Granted, Harry pointedly does not tell Harry exactly which resistance movement he's working for. And, when Cassa asks him, Harry's answer ("aren't they all the same?") demonstrates that he himself is not any kind of Republic romanticist, and that he's decided not to worry about what comes next until after the current status quo is overthrown. He never does give Cassa a straight answer to his question in this scene.

So, there's a good reason for that gun to not be fired yet. I just hope that it WILL be fired eventually.

...

The scene ends with Cassa agreeing to participate in a major data heist that Harry and some other ARR agents are planning against an Imperial logistics hub. And then, we cut to a place that I didn't think we'd be seeing until much later in the series, if ever.

This is actually something I've kinda been curious about for a long time. The prequel trilogy spent much of their screentime on this planet during the late Republic era, and the remastered OT showed some glimpses of it after the emperor's amusingly literal fall, but what was Coruscant like during the Galactic Empire's heyday? How much, if at all, did it change? I'm looking forward to seeing this series with its more grounded and sophisticated politics show a bit of this.

Well, our first city-level shot shows that there's a lot less hovercar traffic than there always was in the prequels.

Could be meant to show a period of austerity and anxiety, or it could just be that Sheevy was actually really good with public transportation before he regrettably decided to turn his macro-engineering talents toward pointless superweapons instead. Make whatever Mussolini jokes you desire.

We follow a woman named Dierdre as she attends a...at first I thought that this was a company board meeting, but as the scene goes on it seems more like an Imperial security agency. Dierdre sits quietly and watches the big bossman of the Space FBI rant and lecture everyone on what they're doing wrong as they report on their sectors in turn. Great leadership there. His ranting does provide an interesting corollary to the monologues we heard from the corporate security people in the previous episodes, though.

Dickface was all about not rocking the corruption boat and keeping it floating atop the sea of greed and incompetence no matter how rough the waters get. Linus and Douchenozzle had their delusional gung-ho nonsense about being the true first line of defence between civilization and chaos. This grumpy Space FBI chief - the guy who runs the agency that the corporate security forces all bow to - has a very different take. If you want to fight chaos and defend civilization, he says, you should go join the Imperial Navy. What his agency and its private sector toadies do is more akin to health care. Tending to society's diseases, alleviating symptoms, treating infections before they can spread. They don't solve serious problems, they solve unserious ones to reduce the chances of them becoming otherwise.

His take is, if anything, even more authoritarian and self-righteous than the Douche Forces', and deeply dehumanizing of not only their enemies specifically, but of the individual lives of everyone under Imperial authority everywhere. But it also shows just how high on their own supply the corpos are. They think they're hot shit. Their boss' boss, however, knows that he himself isn't hot shit, which makes the private security thugs basically less than dirt. There's a strange kind of humility in this guy's strain of tyrannical lunacy that the others' lack.

Anyway, when the subject of the Ferrix incident is raised, the bossman declares that he has now officially Had It with that bungling CorpSec department, and it's time to remind them what happens when they don't take their jobs seriously. Meanwhile, our temporary protagonist Dierdre takes notes on that stolen comm-relay that turned up at the scene of the shootout, and secretly talks to someone else about how to recover it.

The fact that she's being all secretive about this suggests that perhaps Dierdre represents other interests. Either another Imperial agency, or another dissident group. We'll see where this is going. For now though, she and her people just want to know more about how the missing device ended up on Ferrix and who left it there.

I feel like this lady is being set up as our next arc antagonist, but we'll see where it goes.

Back to Harry and Cassa, now landing in some desolate grassy hills on Aldhani. As per Harry's instructions, Cassa has changed his appearance (good thing he had a full beard to shave off and make himself hard to recognize without) and chosen the alias "Clem" to work under for the duration of this mission.

I've mentioned that I don't like beards, I think? Well, I don't, and without his Cassa is pretty bangable I must say.

Harry has a meeting here lined up with a cell leader named Val, who will be leading the heist. Curiously, Harry doesn't want Cassa revealing his true name to her or his other soon-to-be-squadmates either. Don't know if this is SOP for Alliance field operations, or if there's something a bit more political going on here.

Val wasn't expecting a new team member for this operation. And is both nonplussed at having to introduce a new person to her tight-nit team just a couple days before the mission, and outraged to hear that this man is effectively a mercenary who Harry had to wave money - money that they absolutely cannot afford - in front of before he would take the plunge.

Harry just tells her that this mission either happens with "Clem," or it doesn't happen at all. Frankly, he'd been about to call it off days ago before he heard about this mystery man on Ferrix who had pulled off a similar theft on his own and gave him an impromptu job interview (he was never nearly as interested in that comm relay as he was in the man who stole it; presumably, there are some diminishing returns issues that prevent the device from being as useful as it initially sounded). Her team was too small and not sufficiently experienced to pull this off with any confidence.

Val isn't thrilled about this, but she doesn't have much choice. Especially when Harry reminds her that if Cassa really does turn out to be a mere mercenary like she suspects and proves himself less than loyal, then they're not going to end up having to pay him anyway. He trusts her to solve such a problem in this eventuality.

While this is going on, Cassa is left inside the ship, watching the conversation through the canopy and being tempted by the ship's unguarded controls.

I always love these through-the-window shots, in movies and film. Especially in scifi ones. I don't know, it just makes everything feel so much realer.

Cassa does briefly reach for the cockpit controls, but only briefly. Part of it is down to the ship's AI speaking up and asking him what he thinks he's doing, but his movements were shaky and uncertain enough that I don't think he was going to go through with it anyway.

Before leaving him on the planet with Val, Harry gives Cassa some collateral pay in the form of a kyber crystal amulet. A genuine cultural relic, he claims, that will probably net him fifty thousand credits on the gray market. Less than the sum he promised him in the event of a successfully completed mission, yes, but Harry insists that the amulet is worth more to him than literally any amount of money, and that if Cassa survives the mission he WILL be wanting it back.

Iiiinteresting. I don't know all the lore on kyber crystals, but from what I've gathered they have some kind of Force resonance that makes them valuable to force-users like the Jedi and sacred to various mystical sects around the galaxy.

I don't think Harry is an ex-Jedi, or even anything adjacent to that. His skills and knowledge all seem very distinctly non-supernatural, including in situations that would call for magic if he had any to use. So, assuming he's telling the truth about the importance of this artifact to himself, Harry probably comes from some religious community that got crushed during the Clone Wars or its sithilicious aftermath. He previously hinted at having a backstory somewhat similar to Cassa's. This could be another piece of that puzzle.

Again, assuming he isn't just bullshitting Cassa to secure his cooperation; we know from his conversation with Val that Harry is very much not above that.

Harry finally calls Clem out to meet Val, and we cut to Morlana I, where we see the results of that Coruscant meeting. Linus, Douchenozzle, and Dickface are all getting put through the ringer by a Space FBI agent.

They're all being fired in disgrace, and their successors will be...no one. The Preox-Morlana corporation has been stripped of its policing mandate over this system, which will now be under direct Imperial control. This shitshow on Ferrix was apparently just the last straw in a long string of embarrassments from Douche Force and its dickish overlords.

Speaking of the latter, Dickface protests that he had nothing to do with this. Which gets him slapped down with an extremely well-deserved "why the fuck did you have nothing to do with your own direct underlings' hairbrained adventure you negligent fucking buffoon?"

This imperial officer is obviously a bad guy, and the living conditions for the people of this sector are unlikely to get much (if at all) better under his jackboot. But, man, hearing him tell each of these bozos exactly what they individually did wrong is incredible schadenfreude, made better by the fact that he is essentially correct in all details. He obviously doesn't take the angle of "maybe don't oppress the people so hard and they'll be less likely to rebel," but he makes every single valid criticism other than that one, and they all just whine and squirm.

He even leans in close to Douchenozzle and congratulates him specifically and losing his company's entire security mandate. Feel like a hero now? Is this your maverick cop fantasy come to life, you utter twit?

From here, we return to Aldhani, where Cassa's mission with Val and the others turns out to not be exactly what Harry led him to believe.


Splitting it here.