E0044 Star Wars: Andor Season 1

What can we learn about the Star Wars universe from the lives of its regular inhabitants?  What is life like under an authoritarian Empire? How does the resistance form, and who is behind it?  And how can a show that first aired in 2022 capture the current age in 2025?  Join us for a recap of the first season of Andor as a refresher before the second one airs beginning on April 22, 2025.

Transcript

What does life look like under an authoritarian empire in a galaxy long, long ago, and far, far away? What can we learn about the Star Wars universe from the lives of its regular inhabitants? How does resistance form and who is behind it? And how can it show that first aired in 2022, capture the current age in 2025?

On the eve of the launch of Star Wars Andor season two, we're going to do a recap of the first season of the show and see if we can answer some of these questions. Over the next five weeks, we'll be covering this show with a recap episode each week after it airs. So I hope you'll join us as we take a deeper look inside the heart of the resistance and the empire in one of the greatest Star Wars stories ever told in these upcoming episodes of the ImplausiPod.

Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible, and as stated in this episode, we'll be doing kind of a vibe recap of the entire first season of Andor. Back in 2024 after watching Star Wars Acolyte and thinking it was not too bad, kind of enjoying the story, a friend of the show suggested that I should check out Andor that it was quite fantastic television and I'm quite glad that I took them up on their suggestion Now, it did take me a little while to get through watching the show because

reasons, but there's no time like the present. So let's check it out. And if you are new or returning to this show and you haven't been with me, as I do a recap before, well first of all, welcome. And again, this isn't a point by point entry into each and every element of this show. This is more of a vibe recap.

It's similar to the ones we did for Dr. Who in the recent seasons as seen in episode 40 with Dr. Who goes boom. So if you're looking for a deep dive, this may not be the show for you. We're looking more at the overall themes and meaning and the elements that stand out. So without further ado let's get Into the Dank, which I believe is the title of the first episode, but it might also Bluedles or perhaps Casa, but why into the Dank?

Well, from the first scenes, this is perhaps the most Blade Runner esque I've ever seen a Star Wars property look like. It looks like it's something right out of our cyberpunk primer if we are doing an Appendix C charting the rise of cyberpunk Andor would be included. And it's totally capturing this feeling.

Sci-fi in the seventies and eighties seem to exist on this continuum between clean and gritty. Prior to that, it was almost all clean. Think of like Star Trek, the original series, or Kubrick's 2001, and in the seventies it started getting messed up a little bit. You can think of this in shows like. The Starlost or the ruined space station, parts of Space:1999 or Star Wars itself, and things got even messier in the future as the seventies went on.

So we have this continuum of the two major properties. I think it was always Star Trek on one side, star Wars on the other, and then we had, I guess a third would probably be like the Aliens universe, the Weyland Yutani universe, which really kind of greased up the future and made space seem messy. From there, we got further into the eighties and the grim darks started to take hold of the science fiction imagination.

But we can think of all these properties existing as somewhere. On that continuum between clean and gritty, between shiny and greasy. And for some reason the grittier ends of the spectrum always had more of a cachet. They had a sense of authenticity. And that authenticity is something we'll come back to a little bit later Andor has that authenticity in spades.

It feels like a lived-in universe. It feels credible and knowable and understandable, and we can relate to the characters, whether they're humans, non-humans, or droids that we meet in the story. The other thing Andor has going forward is it's very visually striking. Like the scene with the gloves on the wall and these patterns in the background and the shot later on of Bix climbing through a tube.

It's really visually engaging in ways that I haven't seen in a lot of the other Star Wars media. Granted, I haven't seen everything, but I've bounced off a lot of the Star Wars media that's been presented, and I think this is part of the reason why. Now, I'll admit I'm not great with names. We're introduced to a number of various characters as they flash around during an opening episode, which is kind of the way things work.

We meet Casa and Bix and Lieutenant Gorman and we have a flashback scene with some kids, which I'm assuming mean maybe Casa, but I don't know. I hope that they don't drag out this flashback thing for the entire season. Westworld, I'm looking at you, but if there is some kind of parallel flashback thing, I hope that they pay it off quick.

Don't drag it out for more than you have to. And amidst all of this that's going on, there's one thing I really wanted to point out, and that's the bluedles, which is probably not their official name, but I'm, I'm not gonna look up Wikipedia for anything here. It's just not how I roll. The pointed is, is that the attention to detail, to the minutiae of daily life that the show owners have here in the Star Wars universe really shows there's a lot of care that's going into the production of the show. And that to me as a watcher means, okay, this bear's checking this stuff out. 'cause if they're putting that level of care into the making it, even if it's an aside thing, like the bluedles, or maybe it was just a prop master having a joke or something like that, then there's care going into the production of it.

And that means to me like, okay, this is worth paying attention to. It should pay off down the road. Not necessarily as. Chekhov's bowl of noodles. Not everything has to have a deep significance, but it's a signifier, right? It shows that they're putting in the effort. It's like the M and M's test that Van Halen used to put in their contract riders.

If the producers are taking care of that level of detail, it means they're also taking care of the lighting and the sound equipment and all the other stage setup stuff. So you look at the small details that show that attention to care is being paid. And so, yeah, with the. We have an overall great first impression, so let's do this.

We've got a murder, we've got a mystery. We've got a Q 36 space modulator, and we've got a plot going on. Let's get into the show and see how it goes.

Well, we talked about how sci-fi can be either grit or shiny, and Star Wars tends towards the gritty. Sometimes it can be very shiny. Indeed. And I think that's my favorite part of Star Wars Andor episode two, which is titled, is that you Mr. Johnson? Or it might be That would be Me. But either way, it's that Wild Bell at the beginning of the episode.

I guess this is a tubular bell of some kind, but regardless, it's got layers to it. And some of those layers we talked about just a few moments ago with respect to episode one, that authenticity and attention to details, a signifier of quality, but it's also that those layers have nothing necessarily to do with, you know, 

the Force or Jedi, or all the sci-fi stuff, they're just part of daily life. The fabric of the daily life for the people on this planet. And that's one of the things we glossed over in a review of the previous episode, that the Imperials were treating this planet where the incident was taking place as a real backwater planet, you know, really on the periphery of the empire, which is why they didn't have much of a presence there.

So they're dealing with this other firm where we're seeing the security guards from. Things are done a little bit differently here, and for a lot of the Star Wars shows or movies, that doesn't necessarily seem to be the case. It almost echoes all the way back to the first movie to episode four, A New Hope where tattooing was just like way out in the middle of nowhere.

And then all the events took place more in the core. So we have that linkage to like early versions of the Star Wars universe and it really gives it some weight. And I like how it ties in with the mining themes and the stuff that we're seeing as well with the guys. Sitting here striking the bell, we can see that it's kind of been worn and bent in by years and years of use.

And again, it's those visually striking set pieces that are jumping out at me. But if we look at the other main event from this episode, it's the appearance of Mr. Johnson, in this case portrayed by Stella Skarsgard. We have this wonderful establishing shot where it looks out. Over the scenery in the town where this is all taking place.

And that's amazing. And obviously I'm referring to him as Mr. Johnson because if Andor as a cyber punky Star Wars, then there clearly must be one mr. Johnson here, right? I have, again, only seen two episodes and I have no idea where this is going, but that remains to be seen. We know how the Mr. Johnson plot plays out and.

That's the reason why I'm calling our Mr. Johnson by the actor's real name Stellan Skarsgard, is that challenge that comes when you have a lot of those "Hey, it's that guy" character actors, right? I find it's really hard for myself at least, to separate the appearance of an actor that's recognizable from having a role in the show, right?

You can see that with a lot of. I think it happens with HBO shows as well as Law And Order and other serialized shows on television where if somebody recognizable shows up, you know they're gonna have an impact on the plot just by the dent of them showing up in that position. So sometimes it can be a bit of a giveaway.

Right? That we're hinting that there's more going on taking place with this character than we're originally suspecting. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and I'm not suggesting by any means that Stellan Skarsgard should stop acting, but just, you know, I wish we had some more of those kind of actors that we can spread it around a little bit.

And these are. Incredibly trivial quibbles, right? We have amazing actors in key roles with strong attention to detail, playing to the background elements, and it's gonna be fantastic, I think. What more could we ask for as fans? Really the second episode of Andor is one where we're introduced to more characters and there's more moving parts kind of happening, but we're starting to see where that's gonna go, but we don't necessarily know yet.

This is one of those moving pieces that introduces a nuance to the board, so we'll stick with it. We've also got the backstory with the kids going on as well, and a few other things I haven't touched on, but we'll see what's up in episode three.

And in episode three, the hammering continues of those tubular bells, which is titled, I think 38 Simulated with Lieutenant Gorman featured heavily here, but it might actually be called The Reckoning. So I'll let you cue up a tune by, except in the background, or we talk about this guy, Syril Karn. Now, I haven't mentioned his name up to this point, even though he is featured heavily in the show.

When I do a review, I usually don't refer to anything else I don't like. Trailers are spoilers and I don't look at other sites. I don't check other reviews. I'm just going on the text of the film, or in this case show as presented and seeing what it brings to me and drawing those associations for myself.

I'm terrible with names. I'll admit and I'll catch on eventually, but I've been referring to Lieutenant Gorman here as Lieutenant Gorman because of that association that name has, with another text. In this case, the genre defining film. Aliens, which I hope to be talking about in depth later on this year when we look at the Weyland Yutani cinematic universe.

But in that, Lieutenant Gorman was an iconic character that had a lot of the same newbie energy that we see here with Syril Karn, especially in the drop scene. Referring to 38 simulated drops, but no live action. So when we use another character as a reference, that referent the thing that's being referred to, brings all their associations and tropes and stereotypes and everything else with them.

So we kind of overload that operator by using that name. There's a whole lot more there to unpack and there's a lot going on here with serial carn as well. We can think of the role of the Imperials and the junior officer here who's not imperial, but related to it, uh, with their first big assignment. But the one thing that really stood out and.

There's a lot to like here. The one thing that really stood out is those tubular bells, or rather it's the cultural practice of the hammering that we saw in the beginning of episode two that came through from the miners and the workers in the previous episode. It's kind of like a line through all of these episodes that we see in the local practices for the people, but.

How the imperials or imperial adjacent, uh, security officers react to it. And as they're walking through the streets and reacting to the hammering of the populace on the wind chimes and pieces of metal, they think that it's all intimidation, which is. Absolutely the wrong take, right? The Imperials as a colonial administrative force absolutely misread this situation with arrogance on the level of some of Rick Martel's best heel work, but also something that's going to cost the Imperials dearly.

Yeah, so for Lieutenant Gorman or Cyril Karn, we have that moment where their arrogance comes back to bite them. Not that that ever happened to Rick Martel either, but all these references, all these associations can come to add more layers to the story, not just internally like we saw with the hammers.

Bells carrying through from episode one to the next, but also the external associations as we draw on the tropes of other characters. And that makes it something really interesting as viewing, not just from a Star Wars perspective, but you know the story that they're trying to tell. But there's a lot going on in episode three and 14 minutes into this podcast.

We haven't really even talked much about Cassian Andor himself. So let's get into that because we see him here as a child and. Oh my child. Can you leave your family behind? Can you travel the darkest road? That quote is what's running through my mind. As we look at Cassie and Andor and flashback, we see that mirroring the juxtaposition between Andor, and the past and the present.

The mirror between the corporation and the rebels, or the. Rebels in the different worlds that we see colliding. The main point of the reckoning of, uh, episode three of the series that is, is about Cassie and Andor and the impact that he as a character has on those around him and the lives that are impacted by the decisions that he makes.

Sometimes those decisions are very centered on the self, even though from. Outward appearances, they may seem to align with another cause. We can see that with him smashing the imperial tech as a child in this, in the crash spaceship, and then the juxtaposition of that, the scrap yards in the part of the episode.

It might look like it aligns, but the path that Cassian Andor is on is rather different. That bit that I quoted a few moments ago is paraphrased from an almost 40-year-old novel by Guy Gavriel Kay. It's book three of the Fionavar Tapestry called the Darkest Road. It's a pretty good fantasy series if you've never read it.

I guess nowadays we'd call it a Isakai novel or something where there's a blending of real world people within a kind of melange of Arturian and Fantasy mythos. Kay was a Tolkien scholar at the time, so there's a lot of those really classic fantasy tropes within that novel. It's, uh, good. Check it out.

And a lot of that series is really about fate and destiny. And that brings us back to our main character Andor, and the path that they're on, the choices that they make, and those that are left behind that cannot accompany the character on their full journey. Well, some of the characters will come back during the course of the show.

Like I said, it's, I'm going in pretty spoiler free here, so I don't know, but I'm just making assumptions based on how traditional storytelling, which, if it's told as anything, is that likely some of these characters will show up again, but this feels like it's all been prelude that the first. Two and a half episodes has all been getting us to this point.

This has been act one and the episodes that we've seen to this point are all connected and it's been fantastic.

As we close off episode three, we shift into the next set of episodes, but there's one last part I'd like to bring up with respect to episode three, kind of a bridging element, and I think this applies to Star Wars as a whole as well, and it's the role of droids within the Star Wars universe. In other episodes of the podcast, we've really been looking at, uh, the nature of artificial intelligence in a lot of ways.

And in episode 29 and 30, we talked about that idea of the Butlerian Jihad and the roles that robots have within society. And we talked a little bit about that in episode 39 on the California ideology as well. What triggered this for me was that appearance of that stairs droid that greeted tel scars guard as his land, or came into the station and allowed him to disembark from the craft that he was traveling on.

It reminded me so much of the butter robot from within Rick and Morty, whose only purpose was to pass the butter. It had the same energy and it kept me up that night and I, I know there's a lot going on and. We all have different priorities, but it continued on into episode four. It's that question of what's the difference between embodied intelligence and embedded intelligence as as playing spot the droid in episode four, I was thinking that this is one of the few times that we actually saw one within Star Wars.

We normally think of droids as these various. Ambulatory devices, right, that they're ais that are embodied within robots or other machines. And here we saw a different form, one that's more akin to Jarvis from the Avengers or the computer and Star Trek, or Hal 9000, a computer that's embedded within a particular installation, 

but can use all the facilities that it has around it. And it got me thinking to the nature of Stellan Skarsgards character Luthen, within the show and the roles that he plays, how would he go about trusting that in particular, embedded intelligence, one that would have. All the flight logs, all the communication, all the video of everything that takes place in and around that ship, especially with him going back to Coruscant and having these various roles that they, he takes on having seen only up to episode four.

I think this ties back to a conversation we were having over on the blog and in other episodes about the idea of trust in search engines. You know, the idea of a credence good, but this relationship that. 

Luthen has, in this case, with an embedded intelligence and everything that it has going on within it.

Yeah. Who do you trust? The man or the machine? I. It's a fantastic question and it's one that Luthen must have on an answer to and absolute trust and faith in the reliability of that answer. As we follow Luthen back to Coruscant, we've become much more aware of how involved he is in the risk that he is at, and the greater depth of the story and the reach that this story has as we travel into the heart of the empire.

Episode four is called Aldhani, but it could is easily be called Architecture of Oppression, because this is what really sticks out to me, is reviewing that episode. There's a quote early on in the episode from Mon Motha's husband, where he says "must everything be boring and sad?" yeah, that's a vibe, isn't it?

It captures the reality of daily life under the empire, and in an episode that's a recentering episode. It's still full of those elements of daily life that we looked at earlier, those key things like the bluedles or the droids or what have you, and. In this episode, one of the things that they really use to convey those elements of daily life is the architecture.

We see that in this brutalist imperial building and in some of the other buildings too, like the apartment complexes, I can't tell if they're real buildings from our world. There's something that's just all digitally composited into the show, but it still gives us. Ominous feeling of dread, just looking at it right, like that bit too, with Cyril Karn returning to his mother's apartment, and it's an apartment complex, but it has this sense of awfulness to it. We mentioned earlier that there's this attention to detail in the show, and in this case it's an intentional lack of detail, like this minimalist aesthetic or this brutalist aesthetic that's.

Everywhere within the civilized, quote unquote parts of the Star Wars universe. And it's a kind of fascinating contrast. And this show is all about those contrasts, those dualities, right? Like it introduces us to four different women within different positions. We see Imperial versus Rebel, high culture versus Highlands.

We get these contrasting positions to always kind of. Emphasize the difference of them, and it's not really subtle, but it really does come across, and this jumped out to me as well. One of the other things that jumped out to me in this episode was the quotes after we're walked into the shiny but brutal security bureau I.

At the round table we have this interaction. We are here to further security objectives by collecting intelligence, providing useful analysis, and conducting effective covert action, sir. End quote, to which the commander there responds, quote, very good, dear that is verbatim from the ISB mission statement.

And wrong. Security is an illusion. You want security called the Navy launch a regiment of troopers. We are healthcare providers. We treat sickness, end quote, and that's amazing, right? That cultural aspect of it. The rationalization of what they do, they go onto state quote, whether they arise from within or have come from the outside.

The longer we wait to identify a disorder, the harder it is to treat the disease. End. Quote. It's like their attitude is. The disease and I'm the cure. And apparently Officer Cobretti got his line from a galaxy far, far away. And these parallels that we keep seeing again and again in media from, uh, Renegade eighties cop to the Imperials of Star Wars, to Agent Smith and the matrix regards humanity as a virus.

We keep seeing these again and again and again. In that scene in the ISV, we get our first real introduction to Deidre, whose ambition is recognized, and she's told to steady the ladder before she starts climbing and not to look down. And we're also introduced to her direct opposite the contrasting character of Vel.

The leader of the Rebel op, and it's this subtext and the dialectic between the various characters and the positions that they occupy that I hope will continue through the show. But we see this massive internal shift within episode four, and I think the show is amazing for it.

And one of the things that makes this show so amazing is that it was released in 2022 under the Star Wars umbrella owned by Disney. It was appointed about the 12 minute mark of episode five, an episode titled The Axe Forgets, where a character by the name of Nemik, a rebel in Training, hiding out in the Aldhani Highlands, along with, Andor goes off on a bit of a rant.

I mean. It's also confusing. Isn't it so much going wrong, so much to say, and all of it happening so quickly. The pace of repression outstrips our ability to understand it, and that is the real trick of the imperial thought machine. It's easier to hide behind 40 atrocities than a single incident. End quote those 13 seconds and the minute before and the minute after.

It's part of an ongoing discussion Anyways, that message rarely gets through. It's part of the ongoing critique of the empire in Star Wars. It's taking place within the show, but like we mentioned with episode four, that critique is a dialectic showing two sides of the coin. And we also see part of that critique through the lens of Syril Karn.

Here he is shown still staying within his mother's apartment, still looking for work and being somewhat discarded by the imperial system. And as we get a panning shot of a sparsely decorated apartment, we see the action figures on the shelf over to the side, representing various heroes of the empire as aspirational figures, we marketed to young men.

It reminds me of nothing less than Dark Helmet playing with action figures about halfway through the movie SpaceBalls. So once again, it's the intentionality of the placement of the little things in this show that matter. I know some people will be quick to dismiss pop cultures being not that deep, but it doesn't mean it can't be, as we've discussed before, and are episode on the Old Man in the River, and we see that depth too here in the little details like the Blue Milk in a bowl of cereal.

As Karn eats it, we see that the little sugar bowls look like planets. And for Kane, the world is not enough, or even a bowl full of worlds like the Galaxy. There's volumes contained in some of these little details, but when we open up the cover, we might not like what we find inside. One of those volumes is Jordan Carroll's "Speculative Whiteness".

You mentioned this a little bit in our previous episode, Terminus Est the book came out in 2024, but it parallels with what we're seeing and we're talking about when it comes to Warhammer 40,000, and Warhammer 40K shares a lot of cultural DNA with Star Wars. What we find in both Caroll's book and in Star Wars Andor is the appeal that the Empire and Star Wars has for a recently unemployed young men like Syril Karn.

But for other young men, the rebellion is more attractive. As Nemik mentions later on in the episode, everyone has their own rebellion. And while the ax forgets, the tree remembers it's all part of the process.

The challenge that we see in Andor for Luthen is how do you trust the process when you don't know what the process is? We hear trust the process often when you're. Starting a new project or watching a tutorial on YouTube, trust the process and you start off and the first couple steps, it looks like hot garbage, and then you're like working at it and working at it, and eventually it starts to come into focus.

It's that idea that you have actually have to work through it to get to those step where it starts to look like an end result. And that's as true for Luthen and, Andor as it is for myself and for you, the listeners of this podcast, because when I say trust the process, it means that this episode is going to be about Star Wars and, Andor, and planning and economics and communication.

And we've touched on much of that, but we've also barely gotten started. We're 27 minutes in and we're only halfway through the season. But for Luthen and Andor, they're trusting the process in something that is long range. And as we've reviewed the episodes of this season, one of Andor, the process for myself has been to find those little things that make something jump out.

And sometimes that happens and sometimes it takes a little bit, you gotta kind of stew on it episode by episode, think it through, and then it'll pop. And you can see those connections and. When I was originally reviewing this, I was struggling with episode six to try and see those little things, but then it struck me that what we were looking for wasn't really in episode six at all.

This is at the end of episode five. What we're seeing, the plans that Luther had put into motion were starting to come to fruition, and at that point, at the end of episode five. He doesn't know. There's a lot of moving parts and potentials and contingencies and things that could go wrong with a very complex and ambitious plan, and we will see that in a moment here.

But right now, at the moment, halfway between episode five and episode six, there's something taking place halfway across the galaxy, and there's no way for him to impact the outcome. It's effectively out of his control. One of the conceits of Star Wars universe has always been that hyperspace travel, the FTL travel that allows from passage from point A to point B relatively quickly compared to at least the laws of physics that we've encountered in our own universe here.

This is the one big lie of most science fiction, right? The bit of hand WA that makes all the stories go round and round. We see it in Star Trek and Star Wars and Warhammer and so many other places because without it, the stories would be very long and very boring. If we were looking at actual Interstellar travel or Interstellar trade or Interstellar communication at relativistic speeds, you know what?

We actually have to the best of our scientific knowledge. They'd be very different stories. Very slow, very boring, but still interesting. However, people have studied this, right? One person who studied this is famously is former New York Times columnist, uh, Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman in an economics paper titled The Theory of Interstellar Trade that he.

Published back in 1978 when he was a lowly assistant professor at Yale. Krugman theorized that when dealing with interstellar trade time is relative to the people doing the investment, not necessarily the people on the ship who are usually our point of reference characters, which we see in Star Wars and much other sci-fi media.

But here in Andor we see Luthen is the person doing the investment and he's the one observing this and unable to impact the outcome at all. So he has to trust the process. This is true of almost any form of asynchronous communication as well, right? A lot of economics boils down to communication information problems, so asynchronous communications, even something like posting on the internet, like.

This podcast, I don't know if you, the audience are going to hear this or see this or when, or even if you'll ever hear it, given how the algorithms work. So we together as creator and audience, have to trust the process as well. How Luthen finds out is revealed in episode six, or a customer in the shop asks.

"Got anything from Aldhani?" "Excuse me?" "Aldhani, a big rebel attack last night." We, as the audience have already learned what's happened, but Luthen's trust in the process is finally born fruit. Some of what's aided Luthen's plan is more than just a little bit of luck, and I. Also that contingency that he put in place of having an Andor on the team.

And that third thing that we noted back in episode three is the arrogance of the empire. As noted early in the episode, the empire doesn't play by the rules. They don't care enough to learn because they don't have to. The imperial plans for the Alani are much like what author James C. Scott talks about in his book Seeing Like a State.

There's an imperial plan of rationalization and homogenization that takes place that ignores the local differences in local knowledge and the ignorance of that. Local knowledge is something that the rebels are able to exploit as they carry out their heist. The eye is one of the few points in this series so far that we've seen a classic Star Wars element of a space battle, and it is fantastic and.

Much more tense than we see with the Jedi Normally being involved, Cassian Andor as a pilot also has to learn how to trust the process to allow for the rebels to make their escape.

And here we've reached the halfway point of the season and the show feels like it's just getting started. It keeps surprising me ways that I can't even believe it really hits the mark. But how do you hit the mark when you shoot your shot three years in the past? I mean, we think of so much speculative fiction as being predictive, but it's not.

There's something else at work. You kind of take a look at current trends and you extrapolate on that a little bit. You know, you crank it up a notch or three and put the dial all the way to 11 to just, you know, heighten the drama or the tension. Then you let reality catch up and sometimes you're amazingly on target, you hit the bullseye from miles away.

And that's what we're seeing here with, Andor it's capturing the current moment in 2025 in a spectacular way. But first off, the foreshadowing in this episode is amazing. If I wasn't aware of the title, um, I think it was called collared or the cut of your Jib. That's if jib means collar because early on in the episode, we.

Return again and again to tailoring. We see Dera putting on her ISB uniform with a focus on the tailoring and a closeup of the collar. We see another ISB officer at about the 14 minute mark with his tunic collar askew. We see Cyril Karn in the apartment that he's in that's not much bigger than a prison cell.

Looking out at the oppressive brutalist architecture beyond. And then we see him again later as he is taken to his new workstation, which is part of some open concept from heck. And it's here that the story really shifts. Even though the series is ostensibly about Cassie Andor he is referred to as a loose end, we come to understand that the story is really dominated by six women.

The tale of Teema and Marva, and Dedra, and Vel, and Cinta and Klaire, who are active and engaged in the resistance or the rebellion. Dedra excepted, of course. We're still talking about Star Wars, of course, here within the context of the show Andor the women are the ones getting everything done. They're the ones doing the work behind the scenes, pushing and prodding the men within the show to actually, you know, move things along and stay on target when necessary.

This is painfully obvious by episode four as more characters were introduced, and since then it's become more about. But what happens to Cassian Andor is still a crucial part of episode seven, the announcement it takes place later in the episode as he is queried on the beach of the vacation planet.

Niamos, a storm trooper asks him a set of leading questions. He ends up being the wrong guy at the wrong time with the assistance of an imperial droid, something that may not respond to Cassian's attempt to negotiation. All that foreshadowing comes together. And Cassie and himself becomes collared.

We've spoken before about the idea of robots out of control and the Butlerian Jihad, and I think this two minute sequence really gets the heart of what all that other robot content has been about. It's about the way we interact with them and the way that might be beyond our control or under the control of somebody else.

It's such a pivotal moment in television, the three minute sequence, one where Cassian is arrested, that I really wanted to highlight it. You could write a dissertation or a paper on it, I'm sure, but there's so much encapsulated in that moment and about our current moment and how we're dealing with robots or droids in this instance, and how they take commands from users.

And it might not necessarily be what we expect or the outcomes of those commands might not. Be what we expect. I've said again and again that science fiction isn't necessarily predictive, but here it shows how it can be used to discuss something collectively with a shared imagination. In this case, what robots would look like if they're used by a police force from an imperial state.

And as Cassian ends up being collared, we have yet another shift in the series.

There's a scene early in Andor season one, episode eight, where we see just how fractured the quote unquote rebel Alliance really is. Saw Guerrera played by Forrest Whitaker asks, aren't you tired of playing behind the scenes? Luthen? To which Luthen replies, aren't you tired of fighting with people who agree with you?

And Ooh, that's gonna burn. Apparently the circular firing squad originated long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. It seems that whenever you're working against Empire, you need to have a big tent and, well, star Wars is no exception. Saw Guerrera later highlights the problems, though. Quote, "Krieger's, a separatist. MyPai is a Neo-Republican. The Gorman front, the Partisan Alliance Sectorists, human Cultists, Galaxy Partitionists end quote. And then like a young Jedi and a smuggler, and a Wookie, and some other folks join later on. But right now it's a Motley Crewe. The point is that it could be difficult to align all these fractious forces into working towards the same goal, even if it's one that they'd all ultimately benefit from.

So the challenge is to keep everybody on the same page, or at least have an idea of what the page looks like and try not to, you know. Shoot each other in the foot too much while that's happening. But while much of episode eight, as well as nine and 10 focuses on Luthen and the other major players of the rebellion like mamma, and the collective action that is required, the plight of Cassian Andor trapped in an imperial prison comes to the fore.

This is where we learned that the backup title for a eight could be on program, as the prisoners are forced to halt and raise their hands at the command of their imperial captors. Their prison itself is mostly clean and gives the impression of a tightly controlled, well kept facility. But the reality is somewhat different and time passes somewhat differently in the pit as well.

The void of natural light saved when the prisoners are herded through the hamster like hammer trails from the dormitories to the factories on their never ending 12 on 12 off ships. It's a 24 7 prison. And the most shocking thing about the prison depicted here is how it pales in comparison to the prisons we have on earth.

Reading Jonathan Crary's work of the same title 24 7, which is a work on sleep and light and acceleration and capitalism. In the early pages of it, he goes into the use of illumination for the purses of sleep deprivation in the prison system. It's chilling. Read about the rationalization for its use, how the illumination induces a state of abject.

Compliance in its subjects and its harrowing. So the Imperial Prison in Narkina five has all the hallmarks of that modern system, and the episode that follows episode nine and 10 feel like a hole, like a single Star Wars movie about a prison break that could have been made combined with the first two arcs.

There's enough here in the series for an Andor trilogy or Quad Trilogy even is, it definitely feels like several movies worth of content. So I want to tackle them together. We find out through the tracking of shifts, that time is passing rapidly here, that the story is advancing through the actions of the rest of the cast of Luthen and of Dedra and Cyril.

But we as the audience, are also caught in a weird fugue state waiting for the outcome of casting's time in prison. Part of this waiting is because there is no action on the part of the other characters to find them, say for perhaps Cyril. But it's odd to think that a rescue effort would come from that direction.

So we as the audience must assume that Cassian's hopeful escape comes at his own hand. And sure enough, we're soon given the glimpse that Cassian is trying to exploit the system, working stealthily to test the limits of the cage, defines himself trapped in he continual argues with the supervisor Keno Loy, portrayed by Andy Serkis about trying to take more direct action.

But Keno is head down and focused on his own release counting down the shifts. Cassian recognizes that despite the over show of strength by the Imperial Guards, that this is a paper garrison maintaining order via fear with lower numbers than expected, and that nobody is listening. In episode nine, it's remarked that the prisoners are.

Cheaper than droids and easier to replace end quote, much like we talked about in episode 39 with the California ideology, which sought out robots to replace human workers. Here we see the opposite effect that much of the power in the empire is a fuko, biopower, and the labor derived from those trapped by the empire.

It takes an extreme event to motivate keno and the rest of the prisoners into action. When news of a lockdown in different prison block due to a riot reaches them, and that the entire shift was put down due to the fact that a prisoner that was thought to be released was simply taken to a different cell block, and that there is no true escape from narkina five.

The entire unit of prisoners comes on board with the escape attempt.

And this leads us to episode 10, titled Up and at them, or perhaps one way out, if Wikipedia is to be believed, and it seems odd to have less to say about an action packed prison break episode than the quieter, more reflective episodes that led up. To it. But I think that's part and parcel of the style of storytelling that we're seeing here, that the action delivers its own narrative and there isn't much to describe.

So much of what we see within action movies relies on tropes that are firmly established within the genre and the prison break genre, as well as established all on its own. So we see much here that's been replicated in other media many, many times before The heroic sacrifice and the Valiant Escape attempt narrow escapes and success against long odds.

The acts of daring and eventually releasing other prisoners to join in and overtake the entire facility. And all this plays out in an enthralling rapid fire fashion. Two chief takeaways from the episode, again, a dialectic showing opposites within the Star Wars universe are the loss of varied individuals along the escape, but the success of collective action.

It's a powerful message, once again, delivered in a story set in the Star Wars universe, but a story that's absent Jedi and forced powers and all the other sci-fi trappings that we've come to expect within a Star Wars story Andor is ultimately a human level story without the power fantasies that suffuse the other tales within the franchise.

Or if there are power fantasies that are a much lower level than the ones we've come to expect. As the escape takes place and we see which prisoners are able to make it out. Much fewer than we expected, but at least some, including our namesake character, Cassian Andor. We take a trip with Luthen back to the dank, cyberpunk underbelly of the Star Wars universe where we started the series.

Here we learn of a spy within the ISB in the setting of a trap for some of the rebels. Here we learn that Luthen faces a difficult, almost impossible choice to warn an ally and potentially reveal the existence of a spy, or to save the spy and risk a potential bloodbath. And Luthen, whoever the pragmatist chooses to save the spy.

It speaks to the calculus that he employs, the amount of resources that must go into getting one spy deep within the system and the difficult calculations that he's constantly making.

And in the final two episodes, we see how those calculations of all come together. Much like we did with the prison episodes. We'll take episodes 11 and 12, daughter of Ferric and Rick's Road together as a whole with the first we see how the death of Marva Andor, Cassian Andor's adoptive mother, the ones who rescued him from that imperial ship.

So long ago as a child is the incident that draws in all the players from across the galaxy as they learn of what has happened through various means and channels, which says much of the various strengths and weaknesses of the communication networks that are employed by the various actors, whether they're Imperial, rebel or other.

Each of the major players has ways of finding out the information about Marva's death. Though they each recognize independently that this could be the one thing that would bring. Cassian out into the light long enough for them to act either seize or slay or otherwise tie up loose ends and to bring our story to a close.

So we have this scene setting that rearranges the players on the chessboard, bringing them all into one corner for that final act. And so much of what we see is callbacks to those little things, those facts that were established earlier on in the story. This is what brings so much weight to the final episode.

As a daughter of ferret has afforded the opportunity for a proper. A funeral ceremony. This is undertaken by the daughters of Ferrix who are respected and the Imperials allow some local customs to be observed, lest their full suppression lead to a larger uprising. Again, we see Foucaultian Biopower in play, but there are limits to the extent of that Biopower, and we see them in the final episode in Rick's Road.

And the various competing groups here start getting in each other's way, and things get wildly out of control. This gives Andor the opportunity he needs to rescue Bicks from imprisonment and torture. But the streets of Rix Road are up in violence, but within the violence there's some fantastic quotes.

Much of it comes from Marva whose speech as a hologram, given as a eulogy is what motivates the citizenry to action as she states. "Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously without instruction." "The imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural," and this gets to the heart of the fight between the rebellion and the empire.

After the riot, we see many of the characters make their escapes and Luthen retreats to a ship, uh, ship that has design cues much in common with the Millennium Falcon. And there he learns that he has a. Stowaway on board that Cassian Andor has joined him, offering him a choice to either kill him or recruit him, to which I suspect we already know the answer.

And finally, as we end, we pan out to see the labor of the prisoners of Narkina five worked into the surface of the Death Star as it is assembled. We as an audience are left knowing that there is more to this story. But not quite sure how it yet connects.

So what happens next? Well, we're not quite at Rogue One. We still have season two of Andor which begins. Now as this podcast episode is being released Andor season two has just begun airing with three episodes a week. So for the following four weeks, join us as we do our best to recap the previous three episodes before the next one's there.

These should be coming out on Sunday evenings or Monday mornings, depending on your time zone. So this is your first time joining us. Feel free to subscribe on the podcast player that you heard us on. We're not available everywhere, but we are happy you're with us. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible@implausipod.com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows@impplazapod.com as well. I'm responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under Creative Commons 4.0 ShareAlike license.

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