Star Wars Andor S1E7: "Announcement" (continued)

Mom is a little reluctant to just up and leave her home with only what she, Cassian, and Cuckcube can carry on their backs. However, Cassa makes a compelling argument for her not owning anything that isn't either a) readily carriable or b) easy to replace with the money he's got now. She's old and not super able bodied anymore, though, so he at least sees the sense of letting her get a night's sleep before setting out in the morning. Besides, he did want a chance to say hello/goodbye to Bix, and he can do that before they leave now.

...yeah, they're going to regret that delay. Pretty sure either Mom or Bix is going to die in this episode. If not both of them.

A little predictable, if I'm right. But then, if we're doing a grittier version of Luke Skywalker's background with Cassa like I inferred earlier, the outline does call for his adoptive home and parents to be murdered.

...okay, making another prediction now. Val comes to the planet to kill Cassa as instructed, but then ends up helping him escape from the imperials who have also just identified him. That seems like what the pieces are building themselves into. Mom, Bix, and (most importantly) Cuckcube still may or may not survive themselves.

Anyway, that's later! For now we cut back to Coruscant, with the big dinner party at the Mothma residence that she and her husband have been snipping at each other about for the last few episodes. While dodging her daughter, her husband, and her husband's space nazi friends, Mon Mothma manages to find one face she's actually glad to see. An old childhood friend who I think is now a...banker? Financier? Something like that.

After exchanging pleasantries and catching up on the years since they last met, she asks him if he could give her a hand with something political that calls for maximum discretion. He uncomfortably tells her that with the company she keeps and her proximity to the (literal) imperial core, he's not sure if she really wants to know about his politics. They might be a little spicier than her Overton Window covers.

She tells him she's relieved and - while keeping up the appearance of the two of them just smalltalking - tells him that she needs to move large sums of money around without any imperial agencies being aware of it. Why? Because of a political organization she's bankrolling. Call it..uh...a charity, yeah, that sounds good. No, he cannot hear any of the details. No, she will not be telling him who else is involved. She apologizes if her politics are too spicy for him to want to get involved with; if they are, she'll ask him to kindly forget that this conversation ever happened.

Heh. And just last episode, we had Luthen calling Mon Mothma out for being a foot-dragging centrist unwilling to follow her professed ideals to their logical conclusion. Everyone's a moderate and an extremist from two other people's perspectives, I suppose. A good reminder of why "centrist" and "moderate" are such treacherous things to define; everyone assumes that the mean is somewhere closer to themselves than it actually is.

It's also a reminder that, for all that someone like Luthen might be able to call her out, Mon Mothma still is a key figure in the resistance, and she manages to be that while still having reservations about their methods and ultimate goals. On one hand, you'd never be able to do a revolution with only Mon Mothmas. On the other hand, if you had a senate full of only Mon Mothmas there'd be no need for a revolution.

And, well. We know the spiciness of her politics escalates from tobasco sauce to habenaro paste by the time of the trilogy, when the senate itself gets dissolved. So.

Back on Ferrix, Cassa pays his nighttime visit to Bix. She's at least as surprised to see him as Mom was, but not nearly as happy. Cassian Andor has become a very unpopular name around here since his disappearance. A lot of people in their community - and even elsewhere on the planet, after hearing through the grapevine - blame him for the imperial crackdown (if Time had survived he would likely have been the main hate-sink, but he didn't, so). Martial law is quite a bit worse than corporate administration as it turns out, if only because the corporation was too cheap to actually do any policing most of the time. Bix's face tells the story for us, and I don't mean her expression.

I can't remember if she got that from the corpos in episode 3, or if she must have gotten it since then. When Cassa asks her how she did get it, she deadpan says "I bumped into a wall," and he wisely doesn't press her on it.

He pays her back the money he owes her from before, but it just feels like a hollow gesture at this point. What's unspoken by either of them is that if she and his other friends HADN'T been so patient with Cassa, HADN'T kept giving him extra chances and doing him favors he hadn't earned, then none of this would have probably happened. They should have followed their own better judgements, and the planet would still only be oppressed by a lazy megacorp that doesn't care about it instead of a hair-trigger police state that actively resents it.

...

Does Cassa realize that this - the increased suffering of the people he knows and cares about - was an intentional part of Luthen's strategy? Probably not, I don't think. But then, as has already been discussed, this was always going to come sooner or later. Sooner is better, even if it stings extra feeling partly responsible for it.

...

Speaking of Luthen, Cassa asks Bix if she knows anything else about that guy. When she truthfully answers in the negative, he tells her to never talk to him again if she can help it, and that if he or agents of his do come knocking to remind them that Cassa did everything he was paid to do and didn't take a cent more than he was owed, and that he vows he hasn't and will not betray them. Eeeh...I guess he has at least an inkling of what his ex-employers might be thinking.

After that distinctly non-cathartic reunion, he departs from Bix's house and takes a moment to hide from a passing stormtrooper patrol. The sight of their white blaster-soluble armor marching down these streets triggers a post-traumatic flashback.

This is where his adoptive father was killed, the last time that there was an imperial military presence on Ferrix. I don't think they were called stormtroopers yet at that point (and...I think they were still clones rather than recruits? Maybe? I'm actually not clear on when or why the Galactic Empire phased out the clone troopers), but same armor, same formations, same brutality.

Also, his late foster father was named Clem. I think we already knew that from the flashbacks in the first couple of episodes, but I must have forgotten it before Cassa chose his alias in the Aldhani arc. That might actually be another reason he was so quick to kill Skeen last episode; Cassa genuinely was dedicating that mission to a family member of his who was killed by the regime, while Skeen was cynically pretending to. I can see how that might have gotten under his skin.

The following morning, after Mom wakes up, Cassa tells her that they should get going. But, she tells him she's decided not to.

A few days ago, she'd have been delighted to relocate. But after hearing the news about the Aldhani heist, something's changed. For over a decade, Mom has avoided walking down the street where Clem's body was once left hanging. The day she heard about the Aldhani raid, she walked down it proudly, smiling.

She won't leave her home in search of some planet the Empire hasn't gotten around to ruining just yet. Why bother? In a few years, they'll catch up and start ruining that planet as well. And a few years after that, she'll have died of old age even if nothing else gets her first. Ferrix was supposed to be her and Clem's refuge from an increasingly authoritarian Galactic Republic. Why flee again, if it didn't work last time? Why be so cowardly as to flee at all, when she knows that someone else was brave enough to attack a literal Imperial base and steal an entire sector's worth of its lunch money? She doesn't have that much life left, and she's already spent too many years sitting around waiting to die.

She bids Cassa take the money and set himself up somewhere nice. He still has most of his life ahead of him, and she won't judge him for not wanting to stand and fight if he doesn't want to.

The first bit of irony here is self-evident. The second comes when Mom also warns Cassa against continuing the search for his sister, because it's too dangerous and also doomed to failure. Unlike standing up against the galactic government. Heh.

Basically, this scene is the flip side of the one right before it with Bix. And illustrates the other, less brutally calculating, half of a strategy like Luthen's. Encouraging the empire to be its worst self in order to create more dissenters, quickly and all at once, is going to hurt people. But it also shows preexisting dissenters who had been afraid or demoralized that their enemy isn't invincible. And shines a light into the darkness for the people who already have little to nothing to lose on account of what the empire's already done.

Also, Cuckcube has some great comedic interjections in this scene. Wish he got to be in this show more, honestly.

When Cassa leaves, alone as he came, wishing he could have convinced Mom to come with him, we see Mom behind him picking up a weapon.

It was mentioned during the conversation that a new stormtrooper barracks is being built in their city. In light of all the things she said throughout that exchange, I'm pretty sure she's planning a suicide attack on it.

Talk about bittersweet.

After a short interlude with Dierdre at the ISB headquarters, in which she shows her work, is promoted over her annoying rival, and gets Ferrix reassigned to her sector, we jump ahead a bit of time to Cassa vacationing on a planet called Niamos.

Not sure what he's planning to do with himself. I'm not sure if he himself knows yet. For now, he's just trying to have a normal criminal heist celebration, going somewhere with nice beaches, hot hookers, and good drugs. Unfortunately - and unsurprisingly to anyone who's been paying attention - this type of materialistic self-indulgence doesn't suit him. The beaches make him wary. The hookers make him paranoid. The drugs...we don't actually see him taking those himself, so maybe he's fine with them, but overall this really isn't his jam.

There's a great scene where he's trying to have a casual meander down a crowded, sunny beach, but this tense, lurking action music is playing, and the camera keeps alternating between paranoia-inducing birdseye shots, and claustrophobic close-ups on Cassa's face. Like he's a Metal Gear protagonist in the middle of a particularly difficult stealth sequence.

It's good comedy, but it's also pretty effective characterization. He knows he doesn't belong here. He can't convince himself that he can enjoy this. The galactic society he's trying to hide within is his enemy, and his instincts are all telling him he should be jumping at it out of the shadows and trying to tear its throat out with his teeth.

The way that his calling catches up with him is...actually pretty bizarre and sort of frustrating, ngl. Like, this is the first thing in the show so far that I think I might actively dislike.

As he's wandering down the beach, there's some kind of commotion, and some thieves or vandals or something go running passed him. Cassa picks up his pace a little bit to get away from whatever chicanery is going on, and a helmeted soldier stops him for running away from a crime scene the way a guilty person would.

Insisting he didn't do anything is taken as proof of his guilt. And then some security-robots get called in to beat up and arrest everyone who the troopers don't like the look of, Cassa included.

Oh hey, that's the same model as Tourettesbot, from Rogue One! Is this going to be the arc where Cassa picks up Tourettesbot? Like I said, I literally remember nothing about Cassa's own role in Rogue One, so I don't remember if he was Tourettesbot's boss or not. If he was, then this is probably where he gets him.

In either case, he gets dragged to a courthouse, where he's tried and sentenced in queue with a whole bunch of other people by a judge with no jury. Resisting arrest with no other crime attached used to get a jail sentence of a few months, but after the Aldhani incident - and with the crime going on that he didn't have anything to do with just now being allegedly linked to interplanetary criminality - it's a felony charge with six years attached.

JFC how desperate are they for prison labor on this planet?

Wasn't he going to choose a planet that HASN'T been put under martial law yet? Why the hell would he have gone to this place?

I mean, it has the irony going for it, with this wanted murderer and terrorist being randomly arrested due to police malfeasance and sentenced to prison without them even digging deep enough to learn he's using a fake name. Incidents like this are certainly possible within a sufficiently dysfunctional, Kafkaesque police state (leaving aside the question of why he'd go to a planet like this one instead of a planet more along the lines of Tatooine for now). It also illustrates Mom's point about how the Empire will come for you sooner or later even if you don't want to confront it. But it just...I don't know. It just feels too much like the dungeon master railroading an uncooperative PC.

Looks like Val is going to end up having to jailbreak him instead of murdering him, heh. Maybe they'll nab themselves a Tourettesbot on the way out.

Final shot of the ep shows Cyril settling into his new job.

Nearly as much a prisoner as Cassa. Hell, Cassa might actually end up being less miserable more of the time than Cyril, depending on Cyril's hours and Cassa's blockmates. Damn.


This episode surprised me in quite a few ways. Most of my predictions got dashed pretty quickly.

It's also a weird one, structurally. More of a wrap-up for the previous arcs than an introduction to the next one. Really, the only scene that ended up helping establish Cassa's next adventure is the random arrest on the beach. Which is probably part of the reason I found it so discombobulating at the end of an episode about literally everything besides that.

It...kinda bookends Val being told to go kill Cassa in the first half of the episode, and then us never seeing her again for the rest of the runtime. Like, bookends it in a bad way. Two mismatching bookends that want to lean into each other, but can't. Honestly, that scene with Val would feel more appropriate as a cliffhanger ending for the episode than the random arrest does.

Gonna have to call it one of the weaker ones of the series so far, just due to the lack of narrative focus and the randomness of the ending. It has a lot of thematic focus, to be clear, but not narrative focus.

Anyway...

Biggest surprise is probably how slow-burn the plot with Dierdre has been. When she was introduced in episode 4, I thought she was basically going to be the arc villain in the same way Cyril was in episodes 1-3. But nope, she's still just slowly creeping toward her eventual story role in the background. Which means she's going to have to end up being a pretty goddamned big deal when the payoff does come. For the time being, I like the ambiguity that comes with her understanding of insurgent politics. The same thing that could make her a highly dangerous opponent also makes a face turn seem possible. Not yet sure which way the story will go with her.

Speaking of face turns, I'm pretty sure Cyril is going to end up joining the rebellion in effect if not in formal affiliation. His last few scenes have all been pretty clearly distancing him from the oppressors and aligning him with the oppressed. But, he could also surprise me again.

Cassa's own story for this arc hasn't properly started yet. Or rather...he kind of had a very short arc already started and ended within the ep, about the futility of running and the neccessity of fighting. I guess? I don't know, weird-ass pacing with him this time around.

Lots of great stuff in this episode - Luthen, Mothma, and Mom's scenes being particular highlights - but I'm forced to call it a not-great episode by the series' high standards. We'll see what the next couple are like.