Star Wars Andor S1E9: "Nobody's Listening" (continued)
From Cassa screaming about how no-one is listening (and also not being listened to by most of his cellmates, as well as Mothma not being listened to by the senate. It's like, irony, and stuff), we cut to Dierdre on Coruscant being listened to quite attentively by ISB command.
They apparently did get some true information out of Bix. It's impossible to say if the stolen items she claimed to have fenced to "Axis" are actually the missing items Dierdre thinks she's matched them with, what with the confirmation bias at play, but she did also talk about her recent nighttime visit from Cassa. Including the detail of him being clean shaven now, and him apparently having come back from his mysterious absence with a large amount of money in his possession. Looking at the timeline, and comparing Cassa's description with eyewitness descriptions of the rebels at Aldhani, Dierdre thinks there's a pretty good chance they've managed to ID one of the perps. If she's right, then that would also imply that the Aldhani heist was indeed masterminded by Axis' organization, since he's the one who Cassa vanished with. Her case for an organized galaxy-spanning dissident network is getting stronger with each meeting.
The fact that her initial suspicions were based completely on hunches and paranoia is unfortunately irrelevant at this point. She grabbed her twice-per-day opportunity and has since been wrangling it with incongruous competence.
The long and short of this is that Cassian Andor is now one of the most wanted men in the galaxy. The joke's on the Empire, though, because it already caught him.
Fortunately, Mom at least hasn't been taken in. Partly because leaving her free on Ferrix gives them at least one likely person who they can observe for the same reason that Sinta has been observing. And also partly because Mom is too old and frail to survive torture, and Dierdre doesn't know how to get information out of people without torturing them.
...
No, really, Dierdre actually says that. And it elicits an understanding headnod from the other ISB bigwigs.
It's kind of darkly hilarious.
...
Speaking of Sinta, I guess neither she nor Mom ended up doing anything to that hotel while they were torturing Bix in it. I...think I need to stop making predictions with this show, it's clobbering me with every single one of them lol.
The next morning at Narkina...
Erm. It IS the next morning, I think?
...
Okay, I've already acknowledged that distances and travel times in Star Wars have always been deliberately undefined, but I'm really being weirded out by how quickly everyone seems able to travel between Coruscant and everyplace else.
Assuming that the sequences we're cutting between did in fact happen concurrently.
Well, metatextual astral projection accounts for Dierdre and Luthen at least, and they're the ones who do this the most. But there are still other cases that make me wonder about travel times.
...
Anyway. At the start of Cassa's next shift, his floormates have managed to get more information filtered over from the other work crews. Apparently, when the power briefly went out the other night, an entire floor of inmates was being killed. Both shifts. One hundred people. Nobody is sure why. Was there an attempted riot or breakout? Was it a malfunctioning taser-floor? Something weirder? Everyone is fearfully whispering.
The fact that the electricity appeared to flicker out throughout the entire rig for a few seconds when this was happening...hmm. Well, either it was indeed a malfunction that caused power surges and the like throughout the facility, or it was just sheer energy expenditure that caused that near-blackout and this rig doesn't have nearly as much electrical power at its disposal as the guards want them to think.
Well. Accident or otherwise, this doesn't bode well. Honestly, if it was a malfunction then that's much worse for them than the alternative.
It does, however, give Cassa a long-awaited opportunity to establish some leadership and influence over more than a couple of his fellow inmates. He quietly points out to Kino that if there was ever a time when the guards ARE watching, it would be right now, and that the more unruly the group gets as they react to the rumors the more likely consequences will be.
And, without arguing with him, Kino recognizes the wisdom of Cassa's words and starts barking at everyone to calm down, it's all just rumors communicated via a game of hand-gesture telephone, for all they know nobody actually died last night at all. Just get your shit together and treat this shift like any other shift until we learn something more concrete.
He might not want to admit it, but Kino is starting to recognize the extent of "Kiff's" understanding of social engineering. I don't know if he suspects that Cassa is a bigtime criminal who got randomly caught for a petty offense yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if he does. Anyway, Cassa's starting to get his ear now.
Next scene! Cyrill having another miserable breakfast with his mother. Their relationship...doesn't seem to be getting any better as time goes on.
His mom is still being passive aggressive at him for not seeing her at any point during his Preox-Morlana tenure. He's still insisting that she had an open invitation. She's snooping through his stuff and then trying to guilt-trip him for not wanting her to snoop through his stuff. She keeps whining at him for not spending enough time with her even while he's living at home, only to turn around and be overjoyed at the news that his work hours are about to be increased due to a promotion. Promptly forgetting about her desire for him to be around more and running off to inform the uncle who she begged to get this job for him of how much she's just helped his own reputation.
Yeah...I was a bit more on her side for the first few episodes' worth of their interactions, but that's shifted. It's especially noteworthy that Cyril is very obviously trying to test her when he tells her about his promotion. Like, he says it, watches for her reaction, and then looks distinctly unsurprised-but-still-disappointed at what he sees. She values his company less than she values the prestige he can bring her, and only demands the former when he can't provide the latter.
I can definitely see how this upbringing would shape someone into becoming a compulsive ladder-climber at the nearest soulless megacorp. Don't know what Cyrill's dad was like, but if he played a role in raising him I kinda suspect that he was similar.
Cyril continues to be the Bad Luck Brian of the galaxy far away after work that day, when he waits outside the Imperial Security Bureau's main office (I guess most of the big galactic agencies are located fairly close to each other on Coruscant) to try and catch Dierdre as she comes into work one morning. And...I think this is one of my favorite scenes from the show thus far.
See, for all that he's a bad guy, Cyril is still for the most part a normal person trying to make his way through life. Normal people can be bad, after all. If you met Cyril at a cafe or something, you'd think he was just a guy, maybe a bit of a douchenozzle, but whatever, basically just a normal person.
Normal people do not work at the Imperial Security Bureau.
She's enraged to see him here. Not because she dislikes him for any particular reason (at least, as far as she reveals). Not because she thinks he's here on any nefarious business. Not because her workplace or method of entering and leaving it is supposed to be any kind of secret. She's enraged because she can still see him after he stopped being relevant to her business.
He thanks her for getting him this promotion, tells her he'd like to make it up to her if there's any way he can do that, and repeats his insistence that he thinks he can be useful in the search for Cassian Andor going forward. She tells him that if she ever sees him again she'll make sure he spends the rest of his life in a tiny cell in a prison colony somewhere on the far side of the galaxy.
Was he being annoying here? Yes. Was him trying to follow up with her at all kinda stalker-ish? Arguably, yeah. Were his motives for approaching her completely self-serving, under the snivelling display of gratitude? Yeah, no shit. But still. Her reaction is not one that a sane person would have to this. It's pretty clear that if organizations like the ISB didn't serve as havens for Dierdre's flavor of lunatic, then they either wouldn't be created in the first place or they'd be in jail.
...
Heh, I've really got to laugh at myself for thinking Dierdre was being set up as an Only Sane Woman within the ISB, during her first couple of appearance. To be fair, we only saw her interacting with people who were basically dumber, pettier versions of herself, so it made her look a lot better.
...
So, Cyril is left in the cold once again. This time outright threatened rather than merely rebuffed. When we briefly see Dierdre starting her workday a few minutes later (she starts it off by approving the torture of a new suspect, of course. She gets paid by the thumbscrew), she looks legitimately exhausted and disoriented because of that meeting with Cyril.
I was tempted to make a joke of this being a perfectly natural female response to Cyril's unfathomable rizzlessness, and it probably would have been funny, but the fact is that Dierdre would probably look just as harrowed after having to have a nonprofessional, nonhostile interaction with anyone.
It...kinda makes her an even more pathetic figure than Cyril himself. He's able to pick up and restart his life after losing Preox-Morlana, albeit with difficulty. Without the ISB, she'd melt like the wicked witch of the west.
Elsewhere on Coruscant, Mothma (or...Mon? Is "Mon Mothma" her first name, or her full name? I've never actually been sure of this lol) and Val bid each other goodbye, with Mothma advising her to spend some time on the homeworld being a spoiled idle rich girl and doing embarrassingly - but apolitically - gay things for a while. Just as she herself, in turn, will just be an annoying, ineffectual liberal politician who can safely be clowned on in the senate to appeal to the rightwing base for the next little while. If Luthen is wise, he won't ask anything else of them until he's spent some time stirring up trouble elsewhere. They take a moment to comfort each other before Val leaves, and Mothma is left alone in her gilded prison of a home and family.
We see her husband being plausibly-deniably homophobic to Val right before this goodbye, too. So that just reinforces what a great family situation she's got here. I'd ship her with Cyril if he wasn't Cyril.
...
Speaking of Luthen's role in her and Val's lives, though...
IIRC, Mon Mothma is *the* rebel leader by the time of the original trilogy. Are we going to see how Luthen ended up passing the torch to her within Andor's run, with her growing from the less-than-impressive person she was at the series' start to become a worthy successor?
That would be cool. Would basically make her Cassa's co-protagonist, if so.
...
In her next meeting with her banker friend, Mon Mothma is told that he's found someone who can make money appear and disappear wherever she wants it to, but she's not going to like having to work with him. When he mentions the name of Davos Guldan, she immediately, reflexively refuses, and there's a sinister chord of music that would have more impact on me if I'd ever heard that name before. Maybe a Star Wars fan would recognize it and understand the ramifications, but I didn't.
From the name I can infer that she objects to the onion smell, and also to the high likelihood of him selling the rebellion out to the Burning Legion. But those are just inferences.
Anyway, he's a bad guy I guess. Unlike the completely ethical and politically progressive interstellar banker who Mon Mothma has been dealing...with...so far...okay this whole situation is kind of getting silly now that I think about it. Whatever. She reluctantly agrees to reach out to Gul'dan and enlist his fel magic for the surreptitious moving of the heist money.
After some short glimpses of Dierdre planning a countermeasure to some planned rebel attack that may or may not be real and/or related to Luthen's network, and of Bix languishing in jail somewhere as she still tries to get the Baby Shark song out of her head, we go back to Cassa and his jail buddies. Old man Olaf who was just a couple weeks from being released suffers a stroke, and Cassa, Kino, and some others fuss over him while a prison doctor is escorted to their location.
Interestingly, the doctor himself is also a prisoner. Presumably a privileged one owing to his skills, but he's kept shoeless and under rubber-booted guard just like the rest of them.
Tragically, there's nothing he can do for Olaf with the limited medical equipment available to him. Cassa, with horrified silence, is forced to just help the doctor administer a euthanasia poison to ease his passing.
And then, while the guard is distracted bringing in the body bag and cart, Kino manages to get the doctor (who he's had a few friendly meetings with over the course of his kapo career) to explain what happened the other night that generated so many ominous rumors. The answer that the doctor gives is...
Um.
Okay. I am legitimately completely fucking confused by what the implications of this are supposed to be. Maybe there's a more complete explanation coming in the next episode that'll make sense of it, but for now I just am tilting my head at the screen and scratching my head trying to figure out what even is this.
This is the final scene of the episode, but it's going to take a lot to break down, and this three-episode-arc also merits some prolonged discussion and analysis. So, I think I'm going to leave all that to their own post. Probably a relatively short one, but still awkwardly long to bundle with this one. So, that'll be up in the next day or two.
