Andor Recap: Friends Everywhere

Is it fair to call this a middling episode of Andor, maybe the first such episode in the show’s history? Like last week’s installment, only more fragmented, it sets up an interesting parallel story line between Cassian and Syril, who temporarily switch planets for the similar yet opposite purposes of sizing up Ghorman.

Cass fulfills his obligations in a particularly irritable way. Sent to Ghorman with an amusing fashion-designer identity, he talks to a hotel employee who witnessed a local Empire-approved massacre as a child (instigated by none other than Grand Moff Tarkin), meets up with father-daughter Ghorman Front members Carro and Enza Rylanz, and tersely lectures them about how they’re not yet good enough at rebel spycraft. He also observes the military transport contributing to the Imperial building — the facility disguised as an armory that the Imperials won’t even admit is an army, confounding the Ghorman Front.

These lies upon lies are echoed in Syril’s story; he spends an early part of the episode engaged in conversations that amount to double/triple/quadruple bluffs. He’s booted from his office so the Imperials can do a security sweep and then interrogated about the bug they find that he knew was in his office but has been using to make himself look sympathetic to the Ghorman Front folks he plans to betray. Syril must feign outrage to both the ISB security forces and the Front rebels (who in turn attempt to gently flatter his presumed Empire-grown sense of propriety by saying they think the ISB is running a shadow government without the knowledge of that well-meaning Emperor Palpatine!). This leaves Syril playing multiple roles at once, and he’s so convincingly officious that you might wonder, however briefly, if he really is temporarily galled by the Imperial interference. After all, if their disrespect at all reminds him of Eedy, he might start to see the Front’s point.

But no: He’s in Coruscant to briefly, gleefully rendezvous with Dedra and the ISB, reporting on what he’s found and getting himself and Dedra permission to take their operation to the next level (which means allowing the Ghorman Front some token wins, to further embolden them). He also has one more kitchen-table berating sesh with Eedy.

All of that business is an episode highlight, for sure — though it doesn’t really tell us anything new about Syril, Dedra, Eedy, or the ISB, apart from confirming by implication that Syril and Dedra do, in fact, have sex, which, honestly, you’d be forgiven for wondering whether that was the case (or if this was the first or only time; their kiss hello after presumably months apart is not exactly the stuff of great love affairs, which is also why I love them). That interpersonal zing (or anti-zing, really) goes a long way when the rest of the episode deals in perfunctory piece-moving. Luthen drops in on the safe-house apartment Bix shares with Cass, and though her sizing-up of his motivations is sharp (“You came here to offer me something and you changed your mind”), it’s mostly in service of Luthen observing her drug-drop use, having Bix defend it (“I use it for sleep”), and Luthen simultaneously warning, complimenting, and patronizing her.

Luthen has bigger matters to attend to: Kleya (Elizabeth Dulau), his right-hand woman, listens in on the feed from one of Luthen’s bugged artifacts, and she learns that their unwitting source is about to have his entire collection “recertified” in light of discovering a forgery — which means that unless they act fast, the bug will be discovered. And if that seems like a vaguely redundant story line, just wait until another round of who-is-the-spy emerges in poor Wilmon’s story line, where he’s stuck training one of Saw Gerrera’s men and not allowed to leave until the guy knows how to use the fuel-stealing equipment properly — after which, Saw tells him, they can “get rid of” Wilmon, for security’s sake.

Ah! But that guy was a traitor, feeding information (false, in this case) to the Empire, so Saw shoots him, not Wilmon! That also leaves Wilmon to operate the equipment. The final scene of the episode, where Saw and Wilmon lift some fuel unimpeded by Empire knowledge, and Saw encourages his new revolutionary to inhale the seemingly toxic fumes as a gesture of mad defiance, is certainly something. It’s a big swing; it also plays like the culmination of a long-standing psychological duel, rather than, like, three scenes of half-baked intrigue. It’s an intriguingly odd moment and certainly raises some questions about Saw (at least for those of us who don’t have crystal-clear memories of his Clone Wars episodes at the ready), but are they questions that anyone watching Andor really had at this point? Once in a while, following this terrific show does feel a little like taking orders from Luthen Rael: We want you here, doing this, and you may never see the precise benefit.

Rebel Yells

• Just in case Ghorman wasn’t French-looking enough, Syril busts out a beret to wear for his trip home. Magnifique!

• Even in a more adult-oriented form, Star Wars is not exactly a hotbed of sexual intrigue. An exchange between two super-nerd fascists in one of Andor’s weaker episodes — “Turn out the lights.” “I can’t believe you had me followed.” “Turn out the lights.” — may also qualify as one of the most sexual moments in the entire franchise. (I’m sure someone will point me to a canon novel, or possibly some Reylo fanfic, where things get far more heated.)

• We finally see a Ghorman spider in action … in a display case in the textile shop that serves as a front for, ah, the Ghorman Front. No word on whether it, like the souvenir received by Eedy, is also named Syril.

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