A More Civilized Age: A Star Wars Podcast - 43: "Kassa," "That Would Be Me," & "Reckoning" (Andor 01 - 03)

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

A More Civilized Age has never been a show with a plan so much as a set of interests. We’ve never even really known what is coming in the primary topic for our show, The Clone Wars, and that’s allowed us to have some incredible experiences and, we hope, some fun surprises to share with you that compensates for the fact that we can’t analyze this with a complete knowledge of the text. That also meant that we never really had a plan for “what happens after we watch The Clone Wars?” That was a conversation for the future. We’d wrap up our project and then think about whether or not there were any other shows that we felt so passionately about that we’d want to widen the scope of AMCA. But it turns out that if you spend two years working on a Star Wars podcast the future might just become the present and force the issue before you are ready. As you might have gleaned when we watched the trailer, Andor had all the hallmarks of a show that would speak to the things we were most interested in when it came to Star Wars. And indeed, from the minute the first episodes came out, it was clear we needed to drop everything and let our own excitement be our guide. So: For the next couple months, we’re going to leave Ahsoka on the steps of the Jedi Temple at the end of Season 5 and spend some time with Andor. Now, we have a plan for the rest of the Clone Wars and we’d already started work on Season 6 when we made this turn, so we’re not scrapping the heart of what AMCA has been about. But for the next couple months, we’re going to be hitting the latest episode of Andor every week and continuing with our monthly Q and As. We hope you're as excited about these next few months of AMCA as we are. It’s fair to say that the post-Disney, post-Abrams era of Star Wars has been very hit or miss, but if nothing else it feels like Andor already feels like a show that has paid attention to and is ready to spark more of the most interesting conversations you can have about Star Wars and its fictional history. Will it stick the landing? Your guess is as good as ours, but we’re excited to take the ride with you. -Rob Zacny NEXT TIME: Andor Episode 04 Show Notes Huge shout outs to @XEECEEVEVO for the new art! Go check out their visual novel about murder and mystery in a 15th century convent, Misericorde!   Tony Gilroy on the Screenwriting of 'Andor' ‘What’s the Bodega Look Like on Coruscant?’: Tony Gilroy on Making ‘Andor’ – and Fighting Off a ‘Michael Clayton’ TV Series Hosted by Rob Zacny (@RobZacny) Featuring Alicia Acampora (@ali_west), Austin Walker (@austin_walker), and Natalie Watson (@nataliewatson) Produced by Austin Walker Music by Jack de Quidt (@notquitereal) Cover art by Xeecee (@xeeceevevo)  

Let us return once more to a more civilized age, a Star Wars podcast. I'm Rob Zakni, joined by Ali Akampora, Austin Walker, and Natalie Watson. Listeners, everything is unfolding exactly as we have foreseen. As we outlined from the start, we always intended to cover the first five seasons of Clone Wars before jumping to Andor and then back to season six of the Clone Wars. The thematic progression was key to our vision for the show and we're so glad that the timing worked out perfectly for us to make this switch seamless for you and for us. So welcome to the vision.

We, we, we, we, it's extreme, it's extremely funny to me because, because. It's okay. So for people who are just joining us, we just finished the fifth season of Clone Wars, which ends on a pair of bangers. And then we recorded our first episode about the first arc of season six of Clone Wars. And in, go ahead, Natalie. And we had a surprise for you in that episode. We did.

That a surprise little funny thing that we were going to make a surprise, make a change, make a, we're all in a Star Cruiser together. Right. And we had to do a detour. We, in that episode, we decided we would finish season six of Clone Wars. I mean, we decided this in a Discord call previous to that or Discord conversation previous to that, but we announced it in an episode that you're not listening to now that we're going to finish season six of the Clone Wars and then go into Rebels to help emulate the feeling of Clone Wars. ending after season six and then only coming back to season seven after like six years. And then Andor came out. And we'd seen the buzz. We'd seen positive buzz.

You know, you see positive buzz though sometimes. And we were excited. I mean, our first impressions from the trailer. We're very, you know, very like this, well, this will be great. Once we finish Obi-Wan, we'll get to Andor and we'll watch that as well. as a like a Patreon bonus because the plan has been to do that sort of stuff

as Patreon bonus as we had a Book of Buffet as a Patreon bonus we've done one for people who don't know we did the audiobook Duku Jedi lost as a

Patreon bonus certainly will be won we thought like oh Andor we'll slot in there and then we watched Andor and it's good

we'll talk about it today we're going to talk about the first three episodes today and then next week we're going to talk about the fourth episode.

In the week after that, we're going to talk about the fifth episode. And we're going to cover

this show weekly. Is it fair to say, this is the vision? This is the vision. It's the autumn

of Andor. Ooh, I love that. And then we'll go back to Clone War season six with the first arc already recorded.

That's a very funny. That's going to be very, very funny. We'll talk about it. We'll talk about Obi-Won on the Patreon still at some

point. um patriot obe one the show has never looked more mid than after watching these three episodes of andor well and so and so this is this is the other thing is i think we were all aware that like obi one kind of highlighted how difficult it was for us to be like not like talking about stuff that we're eager to follow uh and like want to talk about in in in some way shape or form but we ended up kind of like not really knowing what to do and not feeling compelled enough by obi to really like solve that problem and then the first night those three episodes dropped i think austin was the first one to watch them i'm like getting into bed at one a m and austin's firing

up a conversation being like we need to radically rethink how we're going to approach this fall i think i said do we need to radically rethink uh your honor that was a leading question it was a leading question because I wanted to have the conversation about it and we emergency called the next day we did without with only Austin having seen the episodes the four of us

we felt it through the computer and the universe that we needed to make a vibe shift to Andor immediately and it was just And we have to be current with it. We have to be, we're going weekly. We're going to be topical.

It's going to be, we're in the conversation, baby. Maybe. We're going to try to do, you know. Maybe. These are not four episode arcs where each arc has its own story. These are going to be a single episode and we're going to talk about that episode when it comes out. We thought about going biweekly and trying to hit two episodes, but that's going to sprawl. I know it's going to sprawl.

And I would personally rather edit a 60 to 90 minute episode every year. week, then have to do three to four hour episodes every two weeks right now. Right, yeah. Also, we don't know the pacing because we're experiencing it, you know, as it's out, which is exciting. Also, our highs could come crashing low. Oh, we might be ruining this entire conversation, at which point I'll be like, do you remember when wicked, stupid Austin told us all.

all that we should reconsider what we were doing. You made us watch Andor. And we all wanted to continue watching Clone Wars, but no, that could happen. That could happen. I'm ready. I put my name on the line. You know, my name is my name, and I'm going to put it out there for it. But it didn't happen yet.

So we can dig into these first three episodes of Andor. I don't want to take them one by one. I do feel like there's sort of a trio of episodes that have a more interesting arc. as a trio, rather than sort of as, as, like, individual, like, episodes. So just to sketch out, give you the broad outline here, two stories are sort of told in parallel across these, these two stories. One is Diego Luna's Cassie and Andor's escape from the planet Farrix, where a lot of things are going wrong for them all at once, which we'll get to in a second.

and then the other story that we sort of get glimpses of is his time on a planet called Canary where Canary, right? It's Canary? Canary? Yeah. I think so. Yeah. Sorry.

But Canary is a fun. I wonder if that's how they got there. Canary in the coal mine. Yeah, there's an abandoned mining planet. Yeah. Right. Oh. Throw that up on Star Wars.com.

Jedi secrets revealed. We get glimpses of his time there with what appears to be like a village of abandoned children on a ruined industrial world and what brings his time there to an end. But in the present for the show, it opens on him conducting another stage one appears of an ongoing search for a lost sister. He's gone into the red light district of this industrial system, this corporate system that he lives in. And while he is there, he runs afoul of a couple of corrupt, pissed off cops. They attempt to shake him down. He resists. And in the initial struggle, like one of them is knocked to the ground and, unluckily for everyone, dies.

and with their with and you know what that means once you've killed one cop and you got one live cop left with you there's no there's no real shot in letting that guy live so so now and or has two dead cops on his on his record however it it seems like it maybe should not be a problem because when we do meet the chief of corporate security. He immediately surmises exactly what we have seen. He immediately surmises the cops were deadbeats. They were clearly like doing something they shouldn't have been doing. And got got.

And he urges his deputy inspector. Is it Cyril Karn? His name. I don't know Cyril's last name. Yeah. That might be right. Yeah, it's Cyril Karn. And he urges his, like, Barney Fife-esque, wannabe imperial officer, deputy inspector, Cyril Karn, to just let this one lie.

It is not worth looking into. But unfortunately, because the chief has to go off to basically an Imperial CompStats conference to present crime stats to the local imperial government, Karn is left unsupervised and immediately launches a full investigation into what happened to those officers. And that means that Andor needs to go on the run. And so throughout this, we see him trying to rapidly wind down affairs on Farrex and arrange his escape. He has a very valuable piece of imperial equipment that will fetch a high value on the black market. He also gives off the impression of a guy who maybe is a lifelong hustler who it is all coming apart around him. he owes too many people, too much money, there's too much bad blood, all his favors are being

called in, there's really nothing left for him here, and so his friend Bix, who is his black market contact, reaches out to a valuable client of hers to be the broker for this valuable piece of imperial hardware. Before that deal can go through, Bix's jealous. boyfriend, Tim, with two M's. It's Star Wars now. If it's Tim, that's just a guy. Tim. Well, this is a show where we get Tim and we get GIF, J-E-E-E-F.

You add an M, you change an F to an E, this is what you do to get Star Wars name. J-F and Tim. But Tim sees Bix and Andor talking late at night in a bar. and immediately reaches the conclusion she's running around on Tim. Who would do that? And does what any cool person would do immediately rats to the cops

that Andor is the guy they're looking for. And so on the day the deal is supposed to go through, we get Deputy Inspector Karn leading a really wired up SWAT team effectively under the widest group of men I've ever seen. The costuming is incredible here. It is just the largest widest, like, platoon of, and I'm saying wide, like, like offensive linemen.

Yes. It's a couple of units out there. Like, they're, they're really, yes, absolutely. Some big, meaty men. Absolutely. Shoutouts to whatever costume designer, like, got this brief, because they nailed it. Like, you can't find people

who really look this way that easily, but you can make people look this way. And so, Karn and his over-eager, like sergeant, Mosque, go on what amounts to a raid in Farrix. And while they are there, Andor hooks up with his contact

from what he thinks is the black market, what we know from trailers, is probably a Rebel Alliance operative or a proto Rebel Alliance operative. And everything goes to how. There is a huge gun battle as the raid goes bad. Tim gets shot

trying to protest the rough handling that Bix gets. And Orr ends up recruited by his contact, Stalin's Gar's guard, playing Lumen, to run away with him and learn some real tradecraft. And it ends with a sort of parallel of him remembering when he was pulled off Canari by his adoptive mother, Marva,

and now being pulled off Ferrex by Lumen. And we also see Cyril Karn contemplating the disaster that he has wrought on his team, on his career. with his with his choices so that's kind of what happens across these these three episodes and yet it somehow doesn't capture so much of what makes the show like that plot is sick right like we haven't seen the sort of these sorts of places in star wars for an extended period of time in a long time in if ever in main series stuff i think it's places like this that show up in extended old old e u stuff that made me like a lot of old e u stuff the feeling of like being

at like a salvage yard or a freight yard or whatever like that stuff has always been sick what this show does beyond that core plot um beyond the like all the class stuff that's going on is it's just well-made filmmaking um it gives a lot of these spaces room to breathe uh it gives lots of characters lines that aren't like cringe worthy to hear and forced um uh and the editing is just like supremely good in terms of creating a sense of tension around things like

the big action sequence towards the end in moving between the two timelines the cuts are right and I think that that's just like it's wild to see it it's wild to see

a show that is in just three episodes outclassing what the last like decade of Star Wars production has been you know. I feel like there's like

a like a triangle of what you can get in a Star Wars show where it's like you can either get like good you can get two but not all three and it's like good writing, good acting, good

production value and you can throw like set, costuming uh editing like feels looks good and you can get like maybe two of those. That's what we been told for a very long time is like you're never going to get all three but you'll get to

maybe you'll get like a 70% of all three but you're not going to get a hundred percent of all three ever and they let us have all of them in this one they they gave it they they're doing they're being so nice to us and saying hey we're going to write this dialogue and make it sound really good and we're not going to do any cornball shit and it's going to be awesome and also no one had a bad feeling about anything no one yes and i'm so grateful for new listeners we have kind of uh we got a it's not a count but like clone wars for the first three or four seasons was addicted to just dropping lines from the previous star wars material and most of all was i have a bad feeling about this and this is just not that show it's not there are references there are

small little nods. Like, my understanding is he has the, the brayer blaster pistol that, um, uh, Kyle Katarin has. Yeah. Uh, and there's like some, one of the ships is pulled out of an old EU or tabletop manual. So there is like stuff in there, but it is not that sort of like, I mean, we talked about this last, on the last Patreon episode. It's not that Easter egg YouTube content mill shit, you know? Right. this. These YouTube videos are going to be up now. But that first pass where it's like,

they said all too easy, just like Darth Vader did, that's not here. It's just not what it is. It is probably worth pointing out here. I think one of the reasons that a lot of us were excited about this one is this is a Tony Gilroy led show who was the fixer director assigned to Rogue One. Gareth Edwards, I think, still has the formal director credit on that film, but it sort of was one of the first, I think, Star Wars films to really go sideways in this new wave and was apparently, like, massively rewritten and reshot, and Tony Gilroy oversaw that. Gilroy is also the director of Michael Clayton, the George Clooney, sort of legal noir film that is widely celebrated. And, of course, his brother John, a longtime collaborator,

editor on a lot of his films is also credited with being an editor here as well. But Gilroy's entire Uvra is like he is the, what I'd say is like the masterly bureaucratic thriller is what he tends to bring to a lot of things. He was a co-writer on a lot of the Born Identity movies, and he is the one who wrote and directed the spin-off with Jeremy Renner, Born Legacy, which, Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon like brutally dragged in public

there's real falling out there but actually secretly really good really good boring movie because it leans into this it leans into how do institutions function how do people function within those

how do they change your like motivation and your morality and I think that's something that you know you already sort of sense that this series is going to be interested in those same questions. And also, does a great job of establishing

institution as a character in itself, pre-more security. You sure have a strong feeling for what that organization is and who tends to work there at the end of these three episodes. Yeah. I don't know if you'll have dug into any

side material at all. But, you know, Gilroy is out there doing interviews and talking about his process, but I just wanted to bring something into this, which is for script magazine, he had this interview. And, you know, I think one of the things that is that comes up pretty early is like, how do you, how do you not be precious about the material when you're doing Star Wars shit? Right. Like, you're doing blaster pistol genre stuff. And what Gilroy said was, we're doing a thing where we're basically saying all this stuff is real. We believe in it as much or more than anybody ever. There's absolutely nothing

cynical about what we're doing. Without even analyzing what other people have done before, the whole team is saying, we're going to go down and get inside of this thing like no one's ever done before. We're going to go down and figure out what people do and how they live together and what it smells like, and we're going to get it really filthy with this. And the thing that I kept coming back to was how uncycical this is about Star Wars, it doesn't feel like it needs to... I really love The Last Jedi. You know this about me. I think it's a fairly cynical film about Star Wars. I mean, I think it's very optimistic about what Star Wars could be, but I think it's a pretty damning critique of what Star Wars is around the ways in which it slips into

bloodline legacy shit. And it's a critique of that part of what the quote-unquote Skywalker saga had become. And I think that it, like some of my other favorite Star Wars media, wants to, like, confront Star Wars in that way. This film or this series so far does not, it feels like it wants to dig into the corners where Star Wars was already good and shine the light there versus undercut something.

And I don't mean that in a, here's like, I'll tell you exactly what I mean. There are scenes in this show where people stare at screens, that are like vector graphics and have straight up traditional conversations about stuff that you the reader, you the viewer can't understand because you're looking at Star Wars 1970s like air traffic control screens. It pretends as if that's totally legible for everybody in the scene. It doesn't do the thing that a lot of, I think even Mandalorian gets here sometimes,

where it has to wink at the genre like conventions on display. I mean, I think the worst of it has not actually been from Star Wars. It's been from Marvel lately. This is the like Spider-Man making fun of the name Dr. Octopus thing, where it's like, dude, you can't make fun of Doc Ock. It's Doc Ock. It's in the world you're in. Like I understand in that particular sequence, in that particular sequence he's not in the

world he's in. I get what they're going for. But the text is still a Spider-Man text. And I feel like this is a show that so far feels like it wants to lift Star Wars a bit, But it isn't lifting it from an oppositional perspective. It's lifting it from a where can we find the corners of the stuff that already exists and zoom in? If like as you talk about that, I think about like Ryan Johnson in a lot of his movies wants to talk about either like with The Last Jedi he wants to talk about Star Wars, what it is. But a lot of his films, he also just wants to talk about the genre he's doing that he's playing around with.

Like, Brick is by recontextualizing the hard-boiled PI thriller in Brick as, but also they're all high school students. He's playing around with the trappings and, like, the trappings and affectations of that genre to sort of highlight them and also sort of make them seem both stranger and more exciting in this new context. I get it. I think what you see in, you saw in Rogue One, this is. well and you really get it here is like if i're ever running for you my star wars tabletop campaign right where it's like and it's going to be like a crime epic thriller thing i'm not going to be doing a thing where it's like hey let's talk about what star wars is and what it means in pop culture no no no no no i want to talk about how does law enforcement work in the star wars universe

you know what's the what's the procedural aspect of that and that is that's where Gilroy is hyper invested in this like who does the work what do they work on how do you what's that pay what's the valuable thing that they do i will say because i watched this right over watching collateral to go do the waypoint plus man hunting episode on that with y'all um i very much had michael man in mind for all these episodes and the like the very center part that labor has here i mean it's immediate, right? Allie, you message me while you were watching and you were like, I can't believe we're starting in a Star Wars

host pub. And we are, right? We were immediately like, okay, this is the sort of space that, you know, brothels have existed in Star Wars in gesture, in mainline Star Wars stuff. In, again, extended universe and other content

that exist outright. But in you know, attack of the clones when you're on Coruscant, you only will certainly see someone dancing in a bubble somewhere being suggestive, right? Like here is, but here is, but they're backgrounded. They're not exactly. It's all like very, very, like, light texture of a background that you have to like pause the, like, pause the movie and like frame by frame to really acknowledge them.

Otherwise, it just blends in. But here, like, it's, I was like, like, this is so horny. Like, we're, they're really out here. We are at the brothel and, like, what do you need? Who do you want? And so are the fucking mall cops. Well, but that's, that's one thing I found so interesting, too, is that the power dynamics in that brothel. And we learned later, this is not like, this is high end.

This is a high class establishment. And the power dynamics are, they will serve you if they like you. But, and so this is why, like, Andor is. sort of last to arrive in the scene he comes into the bar and immediately the woman who runs the whole shop comes right over to him because frankly because he's cute is

the vibe like a handsome charming guy walks into this place and he moves right to the front of the line and the cops who've been there for a while yeah maybe their money's green but not here you know it doesn't spend the same and so they

get pissed off because even here they're being they're being sort of like looked down on and sneered at and they're watching this guy like brush right past them and they become and I love this too the way you can feel that entire

encounter going south because first they try to like be a little friendly to him because his eyes follow the bartender and they're like don't don't even try it she'll break your heart and you're like all right yeah these are like bar regulars like shooting the shit across

the bar but the minute The minute the hostess, like, comes over to him, all it takes is him making eye contact, and they get mean, and they get, like, really convinced that everything is doing is a provocation. And you can't, and you can't get out of it. There's nothing he can do to get out of it. Well, as soon as they realize that, like, and or isn't going to be chummy with them. Like, he doesn't respond, like, he doesn't engage with them when they're, you know, talking about the hostess. not being, you know, not being worth his time or whatever. Like, he's not

like, ha ha, yeah, my fellow bud. Like, it's like, no, he, he has zero fucking respect for you guys, fuck off. Um, and that becomes just as the conversation between him and the hostess progresses,

now they're like, they're there because they're power, hungry, thirsty perverts and like, pervert not in like a horny sense but also it's kind of horny because we're in a brothel but like they want they want respect they want to command they want people to be like you know saluting them they want people to like they want that dynamic and they're not getting it from the girls that

they're paying that they're here to pay to you know hang out with them or whatever and they're not getting it from him who they're like you know we're meeting in the same space like let's kind of vibe with each other let's be let's be bros you're not going to get it from andor um and so he's not going to even play the game right where like they explicitly produce they produce spaces where he's supposed to like read read the script so to speak he's like hey guys i don't want any trouble like he's supposed to do something like that and he doesn't he doesn't provoke them he just is like i'm not looking over at you act i'm not i didn't give you any look and they're like what's you know you see something over here that's so funny

and he says absolutely nothing or something of that effect and it's like but it's not even tinted it's not even it's not like it's completely affectless he has no regard for them he's not even gonna try to like get into it with them which they might enjoy a little bit they're so below his time

partly because the host has just told him Ghani I forget what her name is Ghani's the other one she's like they're just sentry guards they just like to play it being cops, right? Like, she puts him on, on speed with them very quickly that he does not need to give them his attention. But she's also hanging him out to dry because he says you should take care of them because

they're causing me problems. And her response is for a woman like her, she does not need to give a shit about offending these guys. But it's not going to blow back on her. And that, and that's the thing that Endor is also trying to get at is, like, these guys are going to be somebody's. tonight unless you do something and her response basically, but they're not going to be mine. So we're good.

God. I was just looking back at it and they deliver that line that is like, that's an awfully hard look for a little thing like you to him. And it's just so funny to think about based on where this goes in three minutes. It's like, yeah, uh-huh. And it was hard as hell. Listen, you don't play. he he he absolutely does not he doesn't find it so he's here looking for he says his sister right right he's from canary he's asking for a girl from canary there's lots of back and forth around like

oh are you are you are you looking for girlfriend yeah right yeah what are you're being very front you're being very aggressive and eventually the host is like you got to go like you're being too you're being too much you should leave yeah like people who come here asking asking for girls' real names, you can tell is not a welcome thing to happen in this place. This feels like a transient place to some degree where

first of all, he asks her for do you know her real name? He doesn't signals that he doesn't remember his sister's real name or like never knew her real name or doesn't know, I don't know. What name she's going by maybe? Exactly. and the hostess responds like of course no one here uses their real name and you know she's left since it's been months since she's left so you get the sense that this is sort of a semi-transient space for people coming women coming in and out of working here and then he walks out the door and they follow him into a real set into a place that exists

Yeah. Also, those bubble things with like the people in, it's so fucking freaky and cool. It's just like, ugh. I love that we walked by those twice. Like I love, like it was like, I don't know, it just felt good to like be, we're on the street. We're like walking on the street. Also, the music of the bar wasn't bad. It was a relief not to your massage as a canteen of music in the backdrop of this too. Don't, don't disrespect the jizz. Don't. We don't need it. We can stay Giz appreciators and also love the and or canteena music, non-canteena music. I bet we get cantina, I bet we get Jiz music before the end of the season. Just to be the right venue. Absolutely. I'm going to see Max Rebo somewhere. I know it.

I'm holding out here right now. I'm holding out of time. Rebo's on the come up right now, probably. Making a name. but the the the sound mix like the sound design of the of the next scene in which uh the two cops basically follow and or out they're like you got a permit to be where did you park what where's your car like what's they just like are finding in his face as they pepper those questions and when you talk about the mix yeah it's all being like mixed in from like behind him and so it's just

this sense like this sense of like you they're so far away when it starts and uh it's it's so effective there's like this heartbeat like like like sound that like starts escalating as the questions like get more fervent like they are kind of getting more as and or is realizing like I'm not going to walk away from this situation without them like shaking me down like I need to pay them off but like there's like it the this is one of the most tense this and the final act of or the final scene of episode three are some of the most tense Star Wars like action scenes that I've felt in a really really really long time I was dreading this encounter and this is like we're in the first five minutes of the show right

like and then it just gets really real really quickly it's really fucking intense um and so he he asks them to come forward and you know take his money um and i have i'm curious if y'all felt like he was always planning on fucking them up and like walking away with his money and him like asking them to come forward was like just him setting up okay go ahead rob or if it was like i couldn't tell if it was like a game time decision like You know what? No, I think he was drawing them in to beat them up and then bounce. He's not going to give him 300.

We know where his credit situation is for the rest of this show. He does not have money right now. Right, right. He was not going to let them fleece him for a few hundred credits and then move on. Like, I think he was planning on knocking them out, you know. Walking away. He knows that they're not respected here and they don't have backup here. This is not their territory.

Like, you know, rough him up and bounce. And instead, this happens. Well, and also, I'm not entirely sure that he gives them money they go away. Like, that's the other thing. Like, he, like, when he hears their guns, clear their holsters, really puts his hands up and refuses to move. Like, look, this is, this is how we view cops now. Like, these guys could do anything and then, like, say anything about what happened.

And I think he realizes, like, he's in that box now. And so, yeah, I think he doesn't, I think he doesn't necessarily have the money to give. And he also, like, I think he's doing the calculation of even if he gives them the 300, does he lead this encounter? Right. Do they not like, do they not, do they, do they, is he sure they won't kill him? Is he sure they won't, like, make up some bullshit felony charge and, like, take his money and then throw him in the clink for God knows how long. They get the rest out of this? Wow.

Yeah. Why not? So his, his only play, I think, here is to use their greed to get them to expose themselves. and so I think I think he is like I think he could have gotten away with gotten away from this he would have

but yeah I think from minute they make it an issue he does not feel that there is a nonviolent path open to him what I think it's so interesting because I think this whole sequence and you said like we know that this is how cops work right or something to that effect a second ago

and I think this is one of the sequences there where people could see this and say, and or is a cynical take on Star Wars or something. But like, I actually think this is just a doing, it's taking the lens that Star Wars has always been interested in, which is like, how does bureaucracy and, you know, the monopoly on violence intersect with regular life, right? This is not that different than stormtroopers barging into the bar looking for somebody. It's just that it reflects our contemporary reality in relationship with what law enforcement looks like. It doesn't shy away from that.

It doesn't dress that up in a way that's kind of like, like storm people have stormtrooper key chains, right? Yeah. Like there, I bet someone in the building I'm in right now has a stormtrooper backpack. Do you know what I mean? Like people, stormtroopers got cute. No one is going to have the shitty guards from the fucking brothel,

these centuries on their backpack this, this fall season. Give it 10 years. years, they will, right? Because the machine will buff it up, right? The machine will find a way to make, I mean, I promise you, A.O.3. There will be some bullshit story about Kravus. Right. Well, the thing is, you know, not that guy, but the, um, uh, Karn, you know, people are going to want to fuck that guy or, you know, draw a cutesy fan art of him, the same way they did with Hux, right? And that's like eventually going to be the thing that, like, makes little cute chippy key rings of him.

the shitty bureaucrat like mid-level lieutenant cop right like it's gonna happen that machine will function but for the time watching these episodes it's not it's not familiar looking stormtroopers doing the um the like mayberry police fuck-up you know thing right it's it's kind of scary drunk cops which if you've ever dealt with is a scary situation because they have a lot of power and they know they want to throw it around but they don't have as much power as they they wish they had, and so they're going to take that out on you, right? Yeah, they're pathetic, but they wield power. Like, they can, which, it, it, it, like.

You'll come back to this at the end of these three episodes, right? Absolutely. But with the Stormtrooper, the Stormtrooper is like, we, we laugh at them. They're goofy. They're, they're, you know, they're ineffective. They're ineffective. They're inaccurate. They're like, they're all these, they're memified.

They're all these different things. And also, they're, they're, they're. they're they're faceless they're like this they're like a cartoon they're just this like you know image of um enforcement um but they're also they become but you know they're in fortnight like i'm running around as right a star trooper these other fuckers aren't going to be in for you no one's going to want to know the cop who gets his head put do not put this full in fortnight please no um or do so i can kill him um um So I can find him out.

Anyway, we get the dude realizing what's happened and it's an all-timer sequence. It's everyone is realizing things. And it just seems, it's so improbable. Like, I had to rewatch it. I was like, did he catch the ricochet of the blaster shot? No. I think that's what happened. Isn't it?

I don't think so because there's no blast or not. He just falls wrong. He just falls funny. Yeah, Andor like head butts him. So, yeah, they come up to check Andor's pockets. Andor's like, no, the other pocket. And when they go in for that, he does a backwards. headbutt and it just kills him.

I warned you about Bobby, bro. These are like level one ads. Like we're in the first level like you're learning the controls like you do like press X to headbutt and you do and it's like, oh, oh, and then they're down. But yeah, this will, it's, it's so harrowing because there's no, there's no, there's no, everyone is so again I think coming back to this taking taking itself serious it is self-serious and not only is the like the other cop's whole like power dynamic like machismo like fronting just drops completely he he's begging for his life at on his knees in front of Andor and Andor is also in disbelief he's like he's faking it what do you talk like flip him over like he's like he's like he is also. So there's no way that this fool just died. This is, and I think the other thing makes the same, like,

this scene I was already, like, fully won over. This is where I was like, we're going to be something special. Because the thing that is Lee Boardman playing Kravos, like, I don't like these characters, but I have empathy for, like, his buddy just died. Out of nowhere, his buddy is just dead. And he's, like, trying to wake him up, and he's just dead. And when you see the realization as, like,

the second after Andrew realizes, the guy is truly dead. He's not faking. You see Kravas have the realization almost the same time as Andor of what the calculation is from here. Right. I'm a fucking loose end. I'm a loose end. I'm done. And he's desperately telling the story of like, well, you know what? We'll make up a story. We will figure this out. We'll go together. Largely the truth. He's like, I'll just admit what we did. I'll just admit what we were basically doing and we're fucking around and it got out of hand. But you also know that's never going to happen

like you get you let this guy go you're going to go to the cop shop with this guy and he's going to stick to no he fucking even if they did walk in together like right now as as he's in this like distressed like emotional like threatened state

the the cops are going to protect the cops and or knows that and or knows he could walk in with a quote unquote well meaning cop that is like no we're gonna we're in this together buddy like trust me like we're both going to like walk away from this like clean you walk in there with him you're not walking out ever

like you're like the system will protect its its employees its own and or will and or realize and he's like well I've you're given that beat to sympathize with Kravos where it's like this guy's like trying to figure way out of this and you also know there's just no there is no talking your way out of it. Like, you shouldn't have gone down that alley, man. It's sympathy, but it's also like, it is, like,

it is the, the amalgamation of every decision that that guy, that that cop has made up to this point. Like, he, how many other people has he shaken down in the same exact way? How many other people has he intimidated? Like, how many times has he wielded his power as a cop to, for his own benefit? And, like, this is the time where it fucking caught up with him. And this is the time where this, the respect, like, he, he isn't going to get the power play, the power dynamic that he wants out of this. And he, and he, as he's kneeling there, just looks so pathetic and sad.

And, like, it's just, it's super raw. It's super. By the way, we're not going to, there's going to be no, uh, Kravah shot. first edit of this one. Like, this is the most, like a character gets shot in the face on screen. I was like, holy shit.

Uh-huh. Yep. As, okay, so killing a defenseless person begging for their life is like one of those like Star Wars mortal trigger things for me. And we saw it in Clone Wars so many times of Asoka being like,

oh my God, you can't kill him. We're Jedi. To like come into the show and have it be like, okay, Andoror is a protagonist and he's a hero, but he is not the hero that you've seen so far. Like the things that he needs to do to overcome adversity is the shit that needs to get done. And it's shooting this guy in the face. There's no like, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say, there's no like moral code that we have to like abide by so that we're not, you know, complicated. Like the, the, the fact that the Jedi aren't in this moment, I think, is what allows for a lot of this, like, moral ambiguity and, like,

and, or just, like, we aren't, we don't have to adhere to, well, this is how this type of person is supposed to behave. And so there's, like, a little bit more play space, I feel like, with Andor as a character, because he's not obviously attached to any sort of overarching organization or group or people. like Mandalorian has his like Mando values. Like there's, you know, there's so many protagonists of Star Wars that have this attachment to a larger, established, institutional thing that comes with values and beliefs and principles and all that kind of thing.

And, or it's kind of, he's ambiguous to us right now. Like, we don't know how he's been in, how his character has been informed where he comes from. It's worth saying, and maybe folks don't. I don't quite remember this, but like, the first thing that we see of this character ever is in Rogue One, and it's him shooting a guy in the back as he's telling him everything's going to be okay. Right. He killed, like, this is the debut of Cassie and Andor in Star Wars is him killing a dude with no, with no moral, you know, and no interest in justifying it, right? and I mean we later on we kind of get the where does this come from and it's he had an

opportunity to shoot first once and he chose not to do it and someone died in one of his flashbacks right there is a moment where he sees someone being like stalked being you know an imperial or a republic officer we'll get there you know has a moment where he could have intersect or intervened and chose not to and so it It's, I think, very on point that every time since then, he has pulled the fucking trigger. And we'll see how that goes, you know, going forward, I guess. Anyway, we're all, we're really belaboring these first six minutes, which is a problem because we're about to meet the best character in Andor. B2.

Emo. Emo. B2 Emo. B2 Emo. B2 Emo. B2 Emo. B2 Emo. B is a great little droid.

I love this point. I would die for him. I would die. Old man, droid, this old man dog. You know, there's this very like... Elder dog. Elder dog vibes. And obviously, you know, if you listen to the podcast, you know how we feel about

droids, which is we love them and also want them to be emancipated from slavery. Boy, there's an interesting line about what rights are ascribed to droids here later as well that we'll get to. I may have missed this. I'm excited to hear it. Anyway, we get B2 going to wake up and or. who is dreaming inside of a scrap ship in a huge scrapyard

and B doesn't just call him Cassian he also starts calling him Casa and then we get our first flashback Rob do you want to explain what these flashbacks are I guess you already kind of hint you already basically said right they're interesting their flashbacks to you know at first you think

like maybe it's a civilization in a wilderness or something but you look around and he's like he's in a village where everyone is using like crude tools and there's like hunting rituals and such but you realize like they're all wearing cast off like industrial clothing all their tools are like cast off

repurposed like industrial material and there's no grownups anywhere in the frame I was like it just took me a minute I thought there were a couple like grown adults but they're just like prematurely aged kids. It's like the oldest person you see is like 22, 23 years old. And then everything else.

If that, like it's, it might be 19 that passes for 20s, you know? Right. So, like, he's growing up in kind of this, you know, semi-Peter Pan or Lord of the Flies. It's not sure which type of setting. And the other thing is we're sort of tricked into thinking it's like this, you know, antediluvian wilderness. And they see a, they see what looks to me a lot. like a separatist

like droid deployment ship crashing through the atmosphere and it's not an unknown sight to them but it's an unusual site to them and some of them are like curious like it like there's like a mixture of reactions that's like curious

threatened like afraid and like more intrigued and amazed like there's a lot of different types of reactions to seeing this pass through the sky but um but yes they they go on like it's crash marks like the start of a like ritual hunt uh you know they've done they done face paint for this and uh you know cassian uh or cassa as he's known back then and as this first episode is titled it's worth saying yeah um it appears that this is the

first time he's allowed to go on a hunt that he puts on some of the makeup and one of the other kids like tries to like knock it out of his hand but the girl who's going to lead the expedition overrules and and signals that CASA can can come along which i think another interesting part is um this whole series like there's a lot made of cassian's relationship to women uh in this in this opening series and what we see here is either because of it's just like the sociology of this community or it's just the age cohort that is running it but like it's a trio of like late teenage girls who appear to be the leaders of this little clan. There's one, I think, like, boy among them who, like, is sort of treated as a peer.

But, like, this is a village run by young women. And when he's allowed to put on the face paint, you see Kasa, like, looks at this girl and, like, does his paint identically to hers after she allows him to come along, either in respect or mimicry or something. but I think it's interesting to see that like formative moments for this character is established as this is a guy who is comfortable like and comfortable and thrives kind of under the role of women and what we see in the next you know series is they talk about he's got a you know Don Juan-esque reputation but also again is very comfortable like treating big as a senior partner in things. So, like, I'm curious what the series is going to do with this, but it's definitely a note they're, like, making it quite a point of, both in these flashbacks and then in the early establishing stuff on pharix. I mean, the other thing we have to just, like, dig into here is humans have never been

racialized or ethnicized in this way in Star Wars. And I think there's a lot to unpack, and it's, I'm going to be very curious as how it can continues. Most like formally in terms of how do Star Wars treat ethnicity and culture and race is that nothing these characters say is subtitled. Nothing here is translated for the reader or for the viewer, which traditionally only happens with non-human species. Right. Right. Sometimes you get non-human species translated. Sometimes you will get a subtitle. But most of the time, especially in stuff we've seen, seen lately, stuff that we've covered on the show, you'll get someone saying Mucha Shakapaka, and there's no translation. There's no. There's maybe a droid there to say, like. Right.

The Great Java says blah, blah, blah, or whatever. Or this character says blah, blah, blah. Or a human will respond in a way that reveals what was said. And obviously, all droid language is treated this way, or often droid language is treated this way. Like R2D2's beeps are legible to people in the world. Or Han and Chewy's relationship. Right.

Or Han understands Chewy, even though we, the viewer, don't. But we don't see this with human characters. And we do not see what follows in this, which is that he is a Canary male. It means something that he is from Canari. You know, you know that someone might be from Corellia in Star Wars. Hans Sulla's from Corellia. That might mean something. You know, Luke is from the backwater of Tatooine.

he's a moisture farmer he's a farm boy there's something happening there in terms of social position I'm not saying that that's not already the case but I think there's something very different with the way and or is treated racially here there's like explicitly a beat of him being being described as a man with dark features which like he is just a man with dark features but there is content happening there right there is something there is meaning being made there that's drawing on something and I'm not 100% sure where it shakes out for me. On one hand, I mean, we are off to the racist with like, ah, he's from a village tribe of people who put, who've like, you know, we don't, we don't know what happened here yet. We'll continue to learn. We know there was a mining accident nearby.

But they're also running around the bush with blow guns. But they're also running around the bush with blowguns and putting on war paint, right? And we don't know. We just don't, we don't have a fucking clue, right? And so like, how will it continue to unpack that? And also, this is a, I mean, again, we will get there, but it ends with him leaving this space. I think it's something very interesting about, an open-ended about how they're going to, in the long run, treat him being taken from that place, and whether that was a choice he should have had more to say with. But these are issues like, as soon as we got here, as soon as we see human characters speaking non-galactic basic, non-English, my ears were perking off. So, actually, you know what, let's just, let's just talk about the entire flashback. Let's talk about the little flashback thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm good. Because, first of all, they go to the, they go on the expedition of the crashed ship site. And this plays out across all three episodes, we should say, just so people who have not watched these episodes, but you should go watch these episodes if you can. But yeah, this plays off through flashbacks that are intermittent over the first three episodes. And at the end of the first episode, the last thing he does is tell his little sister, or at least the girl who's decided she's. his sister in this village. She can't come with him. He's going on the expedition, but she has to stay in the village.

And so the last we sees this little girl, like, going back to the sulk in the village while the rest of the search party heads out. And they find this, they find this crash ship. And a couple of questions that I have from this, are these dudes, like, non-humans? Or is it a bad sign that they're fucking yellow? I think this is... Yeah, I thought it was, like, a poison situation.

There was an accident. It's just them taking toxic-looking shit, right? But the planet is fucked, too. Remember? They say that there was a republic. So this is super interesting. This is why there's no adults? Yes, dude.

Yeah, this is my read. So there's a bit where he's walking to the crash site and looks out over these quarries. Massive mountainous, like deep into the valley that has just been completely, completely mined out. And in the, in the, I want to say it's in the second episode, I'd pulled up. the script and I have since lost the script. No, they say, I think I know you're only, the plan that is under like imperial embargo. Don't even land there. They say, Canari, mid-rim, abandoned after imperial mining disaster.

Someone speaks in alien language. Oh, this is when he's talking to the dude behind glass, like the dispatcher, which is so good. Mining. Everyone died. Abandoned and considered toxic imperial prohibition. A thing I love about this is they called an imperial mining disaster, but it is it's a republic mining disaster. Because the empire, it predates the empire, because when he gets picked up at the end, his future adopted parents are like, oh, Republic frigate coming in soon.

Yes, yes, yes. This is a republic era, right? This is more it's that transitional period where what's the Republican, what's the empire, these are the same thing, you know, have people started calling it the empire yet or still being called the Republican people's minds. Yeah, I think it's worth saying that we're only 15 years from Order 66. So, like, especially as we, like, encounter older characters and situations like this. Like, Andor is probably in his, his 30s at this point.

So in terms of, like, what he's lived through versus what Marva's lived through, for instance. Marva is his adopted mother. Yeah. The, the, like, transition of what the world is at this point is something I hope that we get dug into. Anyway. Anyway, so, yes, there was a mining disaster that made it toxic. The question there, Rob, is yes. Is that because of this?

Is that true? or is this about the crash? Were these people always green is what you're asking? Right. Like, yeah, is it like, you know, in the Embara arc, we saw some people who were like, unlike most species you meet in Star Wars, can't handle normal atmosphere. But the other question I had was, so those dudes have separate as patches on their uniforms. When they come crawling out of the ship, like, we spent a year staring at the shit. like that's a separatist uniform that they're wearing and it sure looks like a separatist ship

from other designs we've seen and like later Marva says oh the Republic you know is just going to like I'm paraphrasing she's basically like the Republic is going to go ape shit here because you killed one of their officers and I was like that wasn't a Republican like Mark, like, is this a continuity error? Or is... They operation paperclip these fools. So this is a real... What's operation paperclip?

Operation Paperclip is the thing where after World War II, the United States just hired a bunch of top-level Nazi rocket scientists so that we could better... Yeah, uh-huh. This is not... Natalie has the face on that everybody, the first time they hear about Operation Paperclip makes. Yeah, you've done...

Okay. There, of course, were trials for many Nazis after World War II, but many of them just went on to high positions of power in Western Germany, around the world. Let's just be clear. Well, because the Soviets also had... Yeah, this is, I shouldn't have just said, this is what I'm saying, not just Western Germany, the Soviets and the Americans hired up a bunch of Nazis. Like famously, Werner von Braun, the father of NASA's rocket program.

The father of the NASA rocket programs had previously just spent the entire war-making rockets being launched at allied officer and also built with slave labor and people like asked like hey like we're gonna like there's gonna be reckoning for what we've done here and then Brown told like collaborators during World War II

he's like don't worry about what we know like we're never going to be held to account for this and he was right basically became like a civic here like you ever seen October Sky which is a movie about a kid from West Virginia who's from a mining fan

family, and he just dreams someday launching rockets. You know his hero is in that? Wernervin Braun. Doesn't even come up. That's kind of a weird hero. Loves Wernerner. Because he was totally mainstreamed. Like, he was a popular national hero by the time of, like, the space race.

So, according to a friend of ours, Rob, you were describing this person as being catalyst-pilled the other day, loving the Star Wars were Catalyst. In Catalyst, they talk about how the Republic basically just hired all the separatist guys after the war slash in the late stages of the war. So I personally feel this was probably a separatist ship that was doing a part of the work that would later become Project Stardust, aka the Death Star, which is very interesting. That's a fun read on this. My suspicion is that it is literally a separatist ship that's been hired by the Republic to go. We will probably learn what they were here doing, right, in long term. but yeah but one of the guys is not dead um comes to as the uh sort of like head of the little tribe

and also the lead scout is advancing on the ship sits up and like shoots are in the back uh and again this is the moment where andor has eyes on him could call could shoot could react in some way and chooses not to does not blow the blow dart well it seems like this is his first excursion Absolutely. Well, and also, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have thought he was going to shoot the kid. I thought he'd be like somebody helped me. Right. Yeah.

The fact that this guy's first reaction to seeing, like after a crash ending to seeing a person, like, was he, had he just been under threat? Like, also, probably not under threat by someone that looks like these kids. Like these, it seems like these kids have been pretty isolated from. outside contact or or anyone else for question mark amount of time like some of them one at one of the girls as the ships crashing like is almost calling out to it like look we we are here almost like a rescue right and the other kids are like don't fucking do that yeah the other kids are like stop um so it's it's it's a really curious thing but yeah the it's just so it's so harrowing the way that that

that officer stands up and shoots her in the back. It's like, it's just a, it's a, it's such a senseless, unexplained, unwarranted thing. But it's also, I think what continues to speak to like the raw, what feels so real about this, what feels like we are, we are so grounded in a very specific moment in Star Wars history and in a very specific world or like, setting that like this sort of sequence contributes to

feeling that grit, feeling that not everything's going to line up perfectly to lead up to and Ray is Palpatine's granddaughter. Do you know what I mean? Like we're out of that world. We're out of the mythological. We're not in the world of that sort of logic, right?

Yeah, we're talking about prophecies and everything must make sense. Everything must be like interconnected in some in some large your way. It's like, no, we're in like the day-to-day citizens world of how they experience the hand of the empire and the republic. And it's senseless. It's violent. It's irreparable. It's permanent. In all these, it's fatalistic. In all these different ways, it's just, it's, it hits so much harder. Yeah. Well, like, in the Clone Wars so often,

when they go to a place where they don't have much contact it's often for a comedic effect like when we run into lemurs and shit who are like who are you guys we're little pacifists okay tell us about your pacifism not too well thought out you shouldn't do the war

got it lemur thank you but here I do kind of like it gets at the sense of like this galaxy is so big there's people who probably have barely any contact with the republic as it is that like they are aliens to each other

Like, this guy's crash landed on an alien planet and has no idea who these people are. They assume, assuming their hostile may be. Right. And then they have me no idea what he is. The way that people talk about Canari throughout this is in that way. Canari is a planet nobody really knows much about. There was an accident there. They know, you know, again, Canarians have dark features, you know, obviously.

But that's all like, I mean, as we're finding out that information, it's clear that it's like, it's information that takes effort to find out like it's not it's not like canari's not like a planet that's in everyone's like general knowledge base like this is something that's either been hidden purposefully from the collective you know understanding or is just such a random place that you wouldn't really know anything about it um and and mara what's her name Marva. Marva. Marva makes it clear that Andor's origins of being from Canari is something to hide. It's something that is like, is absolutely crucial to keep hidden from people. Which we don't know necessarily, like, there might be more to that story that we don't see by the

end. But what we see is Marva and I assume this is her partner and maybe the guy who's referred to as Andor's father later, uh, who would be, who was hanged by corporate security. But either way, Marva shows up. I believe that's true. Yeah. That's, uh, with a much younger B2 emo as well, um, who I think the implication is B2 Emo can't hold the charge anymore. He's like an old phone. He's an old phone. Like he can, like he can, and he's also just like a older guy in some ways, right? Like he has memory problems. He has to rest between doing things. Maybe I'm even older, right? Um, and we know he's older. because we have them, we have them in the flashbacks.

But, you know, there are people who need to take breaks or who need to make sure they have the energy to go on and do a thing. We just get it really grounded here with the language of droids, really materialized. I forget what exactly. He says, I can't tell a lie unless I have enough battery power for it to tune in that story. And he doesn't seem to suffer from the same afflictions in this memory. Or he's kind of a rugged little droid following. But yeah, Marva sees Andor.

beating the hell out of the bridge of the ship because he caught his own reflection and what do you make of that by the way that like he ceases reflection and ridges out my response was that he'd never seen himself Ali go ahead I initially thought that but just like the reality

of like he's looked in waters he's looked at water like it's not I think it's like I think the the idea of what he's standing in being so foreign to him and that gap leading to his friend dying is what

makes him upset and it's not the sort of like animalistic like oh I've never seen my own face so I'm gonna like flip out or whatever. Oh so he's seen other people he knows what faces look like right I will say that Tony Gilroy does say that he doesn't know his own face

in the same interview I know I read I might yeah so he says um the breakthrough for me in writing Andor was that the moment where the boy sees himself in the mirror of the ship and the idea that this boy had never really seen his face and then with the coming empire and its most outrageous contrasts that image was there early for me and then after that it all just built out I guess so I think I think you know if he's if he's connecting that to the coming empire that is you know I think you'd make some connection to what you just said Allie that it is like it is also being in the this ship, being in this thing that represents a different world. But I do think this is one of those moments where I'm like, ooh, okay, like it is, it is playing into feral, tribal spaces in a way there I'm like, all right, like, let's see how you go from here, because there are ways to

complicate this that I think are still, that are still interesting. And I still fundamentally, it means a lot to me that there is a character who is, I should be clear, ethnicity has existed inside of humans in Star Wars before, but it's existed in an almost, almost like the difference between convex and concave. Like, you know, Landl-Kalrizian and Rose and Finn are racialized characters because they're racialized in our world. And that racialization maps in certain ways around the way those characters are written, around the way that they're perceived. There is no, there's no magic circle around media that, like, you go into Star Wars and blackness doesn't exist or Asianist doesn't exist. Like, it doesn't, but it does. In the same way that in the

original trilogy, British, Imperials had British accents. That's part of, it's playing with our interpretive, like toolbox, our interpretive mode. It's assuming something about the audience's interpretive mode and relying on it. So racialization has always existed in Star Wars, but not like this, where the characters themselves, the human characters, exist inside of a system that has racialized them and that has certain, you know, positions around it. And again, I say never, not because, you know, Mandalrians are theoretically racialized in some way also, except you go to the Clone Wars and they're all like blonde hair, blue-eyed Aryan kids. And it's not about that part of it that gets racialized. There are other ways that this could have happened. Clones are racialized,

right? Because they're all, because they all look like Django Fet, who, you know, they all have his skin color so you can see a clone and have a response based on what the clone looks like. So it's, you know, we just watched an episode, which is an episode you haven't heard yet, where a clone gets into a cab, and the cabby immediately is like, oh, you're one of them clones, right? That is, that is active racialization, right? That is happening. So I'm not saying it's never happened, but I think there's something specifically different

about how it's happening here that is interesting to me, and I'd like to see it. I'd like to see what's happening here building to something good and not just move on from build off the basis of like tribal savage type shit I did have a I had a brief thought where like

is there also trans subtext happening here though as well because he mirrors himself after the woman who's leading the expedition um like he's part of again like everyone's society like the powerful ones where he is growing up are the young women and like is he more conscious

conscious of an other relative to them who are his aspirational figures when he sees this when he catches this glimpse in a mirror. I did mean to go back and look at how he put on the war makeup, right? Because the first time I watched it, I did wonder, I might even have it in my notes as to whether he applied it the same way she did. And if that is what the other dude was getting mad about. No, no, no. So he does. So he begins to apply it. He begins to apply it at all. And the dude gets pissed. When the girl says, like, leave him alone. he can come that's when he looks at her

and really pointedly like does yeah mirrors what she's done and so like I yeah I don't think it is like he does mimic her but it is only after she intercedes on his behalf so but it is something I was I was wondering about too when I was when I was seeing this

scene play out um either way Marva and her partner and B2 come in and they find him smashing up the bridge and they decide we can't leave this kid here. And, you know, from their standpoint, totally reasonable, right?

They don't see any other kids, all the other kids ran off. They took the, they took their dad, and they ran away from the ship. And Marvin knows that there's some sort of frigate. B2 says, Republic frigate, you know, just dropped out of hyperspace. It's on route. And Marvin decides if we leave this kid here, the Republic's probably going to kill him. And so she takes, she and B2 and, her partner take this kid

off world and you know at the end of the episode he sort of flashes back to breaking the clouds on his on his homeworld as they as they leave and it's both a warm moment but I'm with you Austin like at the same time these strangers took him from his people and like that also has a history

in like colonial relationships and like you know uncontacted tribes. And I think if both those are there here, both are present, they took him from his people and also they saved him. Both are true. And from their perspectives, like, both have an argument. But I think that is, that's a complexity. It has to, it has to wrestle with. That relationship is a relationship of, of an unbalanced, a power imbalance. We're like, he does not want to go with them. He has a group here. They might be right that the republic,

that the republic folks coming down here are going to fall hard on his on his family here but you're taking this child from from his family and it mirrors a moment that's happening in the future for andor where yet again some white person on a ship is dragging him off on into something right because to stay would be to to to die to die exactly but it but nevertheless that is not a he is once again leaving behind people he's once again leaving people to pick up the pieces of what's gone wrong, right? Where he doesn't get to be there. And again, for me, it's hard not to think forward to Rogue One,

where at the end of it all, he gets to be in the, he gets to stay behind and do the thing he wants to do, which is protect people, right, even if it costs him. So we should, I'm excited to get to Rogue One and actually draw these lines more directly. I don't know, maybe he made it out. Maybe he made it out. Maybe he made it out.

Maybe he's just for the Death Star Super Laser that was, There was kryptoning the entire planet, maybe like... Didn't that clone get out? Didn't Dave Volone say that clone got out? That was... Got exploded by 400 billion grenades. Yeah. It could be possible for Andor.

Cut to Rogue One part two. Andor and Jinnor. So, well, that happened. Oh, nightmare. That's where this builds to. It's the worst show ever made. Quote me. Anyway, so that's all the background stuff.

That plays out over the course of three episodes. Should we come back to the moment of and or being fucking scared in a scrapyard and go forward from there? Yeah. Yeah. I say scared. Scared is probably wrong. He's like, he wakes up and starts talking to B2, right? And he's like.

He's got to make sense of a morning constructing an alibi. Yeah. I love the scene where, I mean, I love his relationship. with B2. I love B2 in general. I love his relationship with him. I love the like the anecdotes that we've kind of already mentioned of of or the details that we've already mentioned of and or asking Cassian asking him like can you can you do have enough charge to tell a lie? It's not like it's like I love how like mechanically dependent this is. It's not do you have like is your programming capable of telling a lie? It's do you have the charge necessary? And then

B2 is like, yes, of course. And he's like, okay, I need you to say that this and this. And he's like, well, that's two lies. I only have charged for one. So I'm going to need to go home and recharge. And then I can tell the second one. And it's just very, very good. But then Andor sends B2 to go back to Marva's house to let her know that Cassian's

okay. And Cassian goes to the mining yards to see a friend to, seems like he's worked with before in the, like in these, you know, scrap metal mines and stuff like that. And, uh, they have this conversation where, uh, Cassian's like, where were you last night? And, uh, his friend whose name is, yes, um, is like, oh, I just, only murders in the building and Steve Martin's character played a TV to detective called Brazos. So, like, I watched the final episode of the first season of that and then started Andor

immediately after. And it was, like, a show where Brazos kept coming up. And then Brasos is pivotal to the opening of this episode. That's extremely funny. So, so, yeah, so Brasso's like, I just chilled last night. I didn't really get up to much. And And Orr's like, no, you, you and I had a whole night. You and I, you, we were at a bar.

We got in a disagreement, like this whole exchange, and then... Just a quick aside there, a thing I love is Brassos can tell how strung out Andor is. He knows this is so bad, but also Andor doesn't yet. Andor doesn't realize his face is jacked up from the fight. Brassos realizes the bullshit story they're concocting is missing a key element, which is why was he visibly in a scuffle last night? Why is his face, like, bruised and marked? and so he supplies the rest of that anecdote because like he now he like he sees exactly the

like where what what andor needs to be covering uh how deep he is and and or thinks just a story about where we were last night will get the job done and it is beyond that i also want to say ferricks the place that they are this planet that seems to just be a planet wide scrapyard that has a reputation as such as we'll come to learn is so well rendered as a location it has so many little details that are sharp and memorable

the wall of work gloves is such a smart, quick bit of world building everybody goes through a gate out into the scrapyards to work and before they do they have to grab gloves to wear out there

and when they come back they hang those gloves back up on a public wall, which immediately suggests a sense of, you know, solidarity and community and no one's stealing gloves. No one has their own gloves. You get the gloves. Maybe you do, but you put them up on the fucking wall outside to begin with, right? And it's in front of everybody.

And that's on top of it just being a deeply populated place. There are dozens of extras here. There are fires being lit at the bar in the background. this feels like a place in a way that I don't think anything in the last few live action shows we've seen has certainly not the stuff in Book of Boba oh hell no could you imagine if Mos Eisley had this type of like if we if they had a bell guy and it's kind of excusable they don't they go to that location all the time in that show and they've not and it's it's it's

it's become so much less than even what it was in the first movie where it was a set. And y'all haven't watched Obi-Wan yet, but there is truly, there are sequences in Obi-Wan that are embarrassing, I think, especially in urban locations where they're supposed to be the sense of depth, and it just doesn't play. You can feel the screen. You can feel the volume, which is the name of the shooting set that they work in. That's kind of the 3D or the kind of big screen-based sound. stage, which has done a lot of good stuff in Mandalorian. It works for certain stuff because it does produce a naturalistic sort of light on everybody in a scene that's coming from a certain place.

Like that stuff works. But when it comes to like producing, and maybe it's a combination with CG, I don't know what the entire production process was for Obi-W-W-W-W-W-W. But like this single shot of the main stretch of this town on Farix is so much more convincing that it's a real place than anything that happens in episode two of obi one where they're on this this like uh you know cyberpunky you know planet uh where where some of the early action happens it is you know it's not embarrassing people have a bud i shouldn't say it's embarrassing you know you have a budget you're working with your budget you have certain production demands that that you do

your best with uh but it's just it it does such a good job of creating the sense of place Natalie mentions the bell guy and I'll just say this here because it's not plot I mean I guess eventually it will be plot important the entire town wakes up to the sound

of someone banging on this big bell that might also be a piece of a scrapped engine or something because we kind of see similar shapes later in certain warehouses and the show spends 90 seconds with this dude gearing up to hit this bell

and then beginning to hit the bell and playing this rhythm and the town slowly waking up and everybody getting out to go some people are already waking up because the sun is up already right that's how it works right some people don't need the bell they're up already

and everybody else starts to wake up and the first time we hear it the first time we hear it is the end of the day yep right oh is that true is at the end of this first episode is that right no so it happens at the start of episode two but it does mark the end of this work die that we're correct oh for some reason I thought the start

of episode two was was a morning but okay sure that that is it's such a compelling detail to bring this place into into reality it gives it a sense of history and culture it helps it helps set the the sense of like okay these people have rhythms they have routines etc and yeah I just I just love that that detail so much. Agreed. We go from the Sue and Brasso

to corporate security headquarters on Morlana 1. And we meet D.I. Cyril Karn and Chief Hein, Chief Hein played by her old friend.

I know a lot of you are like, oh, it's the dude from the head of the Knights of Arn from Game of Thrones. No, no, no, no, my friends. That's Mr. Hurst from BBC's Pride and Prejudice. Oh, it is. Yes.

Okay. I thought we were going to have some sport. Uh-huh. Yeah. And he is still playing the same dude of like big, bluff, lazy, sleepy, indifferent. But we get a real sense of the, um... Okay, here's what I love so much about, like, what is established in this scene. A lot of empires struggle with the problem of you do not have enough good troops

to station in all the places that you might need troops, So you were forced to have like second and third tier forces. And the problem is they are not very good at their jobs and they don't do what you need them to do. And so they don't police the, you know, police the periphery very effectively. But then also what might be worse is when they do. Like because they are so ineffective, what might be more dangerous is if they try to go above and beyond the minimum. And you're sort of forced to depend on people like that. And the tension there is embodying these two characters.

D.I. Cyril Karn and Chief Hine. Cyril Karn, it is so funny the way he has introduced. He's bringing the report on the homicide to the chief. The chief is kind of annoyed that the report is already prepared. And we get this little Apple Polisher, Eagle Scout motherfucker, going, two men dead, sir. If that's not worth staying up for, then I'm not worthy of the uniform. Yeah, he's like stayed up all night, like working on his fucking book report.

And Hein immediately takes stock of, speaking of your uniform, why did Sears look weird? He says, have you made modifications to your uniform? And Carn sort of, like, lamely replies just little ones, the piping, some minor tailoring and alterations, et cetera. And it's true. Like, everyone's wearing these dark blue, like, almost denim blue uniforms with bright orange piping. But the orange tends to be faded on the standard issue uniforms. And they are baggy. They're baggy.

They're work clothes, right? They're not military uniforms. They're not customized. Yeah, they're, they're, what size, you know, there's no schmedium. It's like you're getting like. And Korn is tailored perfectly. Like he is wearing like, honestly, like movie Nazi. I was going to say, my man, my man's got the Hugo Boss look book back in the, in the quarters.

he he wants to like he's emulating what like the imperial uniforms that will come to know in like the original trilogy and even like looking forward to the sequel trilogy of like the first order and like how tight and like really really like tailored and and pristine those uniforms like he's he's incoming fashion I mean obviously fascism is already you know I mean everywhere but he but he but he is like this very aesthetic fascist symbol. Right, but there's, he is the difference between, you know, the Hein, the chief is the guy who's like voting for austerity measures and is happy to have, you know, get rid of labor power from the unions. And, you know, this is the dude who, who, you know, wished Thatcher could have lived as a queen. And Cyril is the one who takes it that step further, right?

He's like the move from passive, conservative to active fascist. So the other thing is this. You know, the age difference between the two men, like Hein is in his 60s, pushing 70s. And Cyril is like mid-20s, early 30s. And he keeps doing things like, he, like, clearly he thinks the chief is lazy, he doesn't know what he's about. And the chief, like, calls out details.

He knows where these guys were killed. he is not, he knows his shit and Karn doesn't get it and there's a sequence here where after getting all the details Hein thinks about it and knows exactly what's happened and you may even want to like splice in the audio from the sequence

tough case bad timing I'm sure that in several days with the proper resources I can bring this case to a stop I don't mean just the talking I mean stop This case appears to bear all the hallmarks of what I like to describe as regrettable misadventure. Sir.

Two dedicated Primor employees caught in the sad orbit of heroic calamity. I don't understand. I want you to conjure a suitable accident. But... And let's make sure it's on the far side of the plaza. Let's get it outside the leisure zone. But they were murdered. No.

They were killed in a fight. They're in a brothel, which we're not. supposed to have, the expensive one, which they shouldn't be able to afford, drinking Rivnog, which we're not supposed to allow. Both of them supposedly on the job, which is a dismissable offence. They clearly harassed a human with dark features and chose the wrong person to annoy. I suspect they died rushing to aid someone in distress. Nothing too heroic, we don't need a parade.

They died being helpful. Something sad but inspiring in a mundane sort of way. you look stricken deputy inspector are you absorbing my meaning here trying sir there's a very he gets he knows exactly what happened he can reconstruct the entire thing and he understands that in the in the position he's in which is we should be clear they are corporate police they are corpo police uh here at the edge of imperial control their own control over this region is technical more than de facto. And it is best for Hine if things just, if something like this goes away,

because he can anticipate what it blowing up could lead to. And what it leads to is tighter imperial control, more oversight, exactly. Less freedom, you're not going to be able to go to the brothel anymore. These guys get to go to the brothel because this doesn't happen normally. Well, not just that, but like, any time you say, like, oh, now we're going to really enforce the law, in places where you don't really have the means to enforce the law, now you have a problem. Like, this is, I mean, this is the entire, like, what's the bit in season three of the wire

where Bunny Colvin realizes, you know what we need is a brown bag? A paper bag for drugs. Yeah, where it's like we need something that allows us to look the other way from something that we do not have the means to enforce and really is toxic for us to try. And then the other thing Hein is kind of driving at is like, We need to do less here because if we try to do more like God knows what's going to happen. And Karn can't get the message. And I do think there's going to be fallout from this because it goes from a minor problem to by the end, like, things have happened.

You can't easily cover up. Absolute shit show. He fucked. The fact that this arc ends with this herb fucking up. just taking the biggest L of all time in Star Wars. And he's about to become a nightmare. He's, I think, we're about to see an all-time villain. He's going to get revenge-pilled.

He is like, he's going to go so far down the route. Because what does he have to lose now? Yep. He's going, I'm so excited. He's like, he's going to be a really fun character to watch. But, but yeah, I love how the lead-up to this sequence is, is the commander like asking oh I know that that officer

he was so unpleasant he was such a like everything about this is also you get the you get the sense that this isn't the obviously the first time that an instance like this has happened and this is just like this is protocol this is protocol and what

Mr. Brown noser thinks is protocol is actually like it feels like this is one of the first times that um uh what's his name what's the karn carn yeah carn yeah this is one of the first times that karn is like has like really good material to present to um the commander like of like this is like this is what i'm going to cut my teeth on this is what i'm going to like you know prove myself with and their understandings of what it means to be an officer art could just not be more different and which is what makes Mosque the character we get introduced to I believe in the next episode so fascinating because

it's like you feel like Karn has found a kindred spirit he's like oh mosque is my guy like mosque it's it's really good mosque gets me yeah yeah um yeah I mean like Ali do you have something here well yeah I just want to say like my my favorite thing about the scene is like how much of an echo it is of the the personality that we see in the cops in the first scene like it's an incomplete ringing of somebody who like feels like they should have more respect than they do and can only perform it um like the moment when he's like you edited your uniform and you realize they're wearing the same outfit and like he just looks like such a dork is strong i am out yeah it's all yeah and he even

he even says when he's talking about the type of accident that it should be he says it should be something sad but inspiring in a mundane way like the way he plays down even like like the way that karn is like these are two officers these are two like this is this requires the utmost attention and he's like no it should be something kind of forgettable honestly like it should be something that's like they were you know they did their unfortunate you know The beat where they died trying to be helpful. Like, you know, it would be a great poppiganda going for us is if we could just convince people for a minute that occasionally we at least try to be helpful. Like, there's also like, you know, this show's been in production for a while, but there's definite, like, Karn fully has the Blue Lives Matter, like, flag on his wall where he's like, our lives are more valuable.

Our job is enormously, enormously hazardous. And we need to back the blue. We need to help each other out and stand by each other. And Heinz realizes, like, this job isn't that hard. It's not that dangerous unless you make it that dangerous. And occasionally shit happens, and that is the cost of, like, doing this business. And you do not need to make a whole thing out of it. Because by and large, the people you police hate you with the reason.

And so all he wants is just like, let's just make up a story where they're trying to be do-gooders and they get God. And we can just forget about the entire thing. And, like, Karn can't let it sit. But I love the, I think it's such a good sequence. And it's so, like he says, you know, Hines points out his real value is minimizing the time the Empire expense, thinking about Preax Milana benefits are superiors and by extension, everyone at Primor Security Inspection team, which at the moment includes you. And that ultimately, like, it's interesting, this recasting of what these, this early. sort of found this founding era of the empire looks like where the entire thing now partly defends depends on a front line of private and corporate security forces

administering this the entire thing like so far at least and the shift in how they think of themselves right because hein very much thinks of himself as a corporate officer someone who works for the company who keeps the company's board clear who makes sure the company doesn't have to get into trouble with the empire who isn't going to get they're not going to give up any of their autonomy there's constantly at fear of total nationalization instead of just the sort of whatever the you know uh central government capture has has started um and for both uh carne and who you the person you mentioned earlier but what's his name is it it's oh mosque ma what is it what is it Mosque, Linus Mosque.

Mosque. They are very much in an opposite view with a speech that we'll get to in a little bit in which they are the, like you said, the first line of defense for the empire, right? They are imperials first and part of this company second. And part of any sort of local community dead fucking last. Yeah. So back on Farrex, like Ando realizes it is. time to go and asks

his old friend Bix Killeen to basically make contact with a particular client of theirs and or has something valuable to sell an NS9 StarPath unit seal intact untraceable

he explains a bit later not that any of this means jacked shit to us right like it does though he explains it later and I was like that does make I see now what that's valuable oh yeah he does minute later, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right now, who knows? Yeah.

But also, like, they are clearly, their relationship hangs by a thread. They've slept together. Oh, for sure. Yeah, their exes. Yeah, for sure. But I think that's neither here nor there. It is the fact that, like, their business partnership is soured. Like, she's sick of the fact that he always seems to be, like, having some other agenda in play of these not being totally up front with her.

and I think he's kind of frustrated by the fact that like it is like she has guys like Tim hovering around for for one thing and the fact that her like her her approach of the scam is different and bears its own risks but they're they're getting really fed up with each other but she has a she has one really valuable client who be interested in a piece this valuable and has expressed interest in meeting And so this is Andor's play to get off the planet, but the revelation that he's sitting on one of these Star Path units really pisses her off. And because she's in her feelings about it, Tim notes that every time Andor comes through, she gets upset. And it's up to Tim to protect her.

It's not just, okay, Rob, my read on this is different. Yeah? I think Tim is. getting upset because every time Andor comes around, the hair on the back of her neck stands up. Yeah. Like, and it is unfucking resolved. I think she is still down bad for Cass and knows it's a bad idea because it always breaks bad. And Tim can only see her once a week. They are only allowed to hang out once a week. And let me tell you, this three minutes with Cassian is more intense than that one day with Tim. And I don't, I'm not, you know, she is not going to leave. Tim for Cass. She is not over Cass in my read, but she, I think it's like she still has that

intense feeling for him, but is a fucking grown-up who knows that having a spark with someone is not the same thing as having a good relationship with someone. And he has fucked up too many times on jobs and shit. And so she is going to do her best to keep some distance. And Tim gets in his feelings because he can see that he can get a rise. and a proximity and an energy that Tim cannot get. Tim has always held at arm's length. Whenever... Even when he's brought in.

Even when he's brought in, I'm running errands. What do you do? Like, it's, it's, information is withheld constantly from Tim. And... Tim just has the worst vibe. Tim is really truly feels like the sort of guy who can't decide which slur he wants to use today. So... I hate this motherfucker.

Allie. Well, I think there's something. important happening in Andor, which is that there's the story of two men's lives, and it's how being so swaggy could lead to your entire downfall. And being such a herb could lead to your entire downfall. Because Andor just has it. He just has it. The hostess wants to talk to him, the Bix is going to let her into his business. He talks to women and the his boyfriend. Big alien guy. He totally like talks him down. Oh my God. I love him. A big alien guy.

I love him. Everybody loves him. I mean, Diego Luna is just incredibly hot, incredibly charismatic. The energy coming off of him is just... This is a swag story. They have fallen backwards into their new Han Solo, like, in... Yes. But, like, a totally different sort of charisma.

But, like, he's very real. Han was so in your face and was, and Han is like, we love Han, obviously. Um, but he's like, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's a ham. He's a, he's a bit of a ham. And, and, and, and, and or Cassian is like, he's loke, he's loke. He's trying to whisper something to you. You know what I mean? And also, it's pulled back. It's, it's, it's just. Well, that's the thing, because on some level, like, he's very charming, but also never gives you the sense that he cares at all whether or not he charms you, which just makes it more intense. Yes. It's like that it, that it's like that it is so effortless that it comes across is like, but also, but also. so I don't really care. Like, take it or leave it. And people will take it. Andor is the type of guy who comes to you for a request. And when you're like, okay, yeah, and like a week, I could probably get, he's like,

I can't wait that long. And you're like, all right, I'll figure it out. Yeah, I'll figure it out. I'll make it happen. I will say, I will say this, though. Like, I think, yeah, Tim is jealous and he does recognize, like, he sees in Andor, like, a threat that he can never, like, something that drives his insecurity and also a threat to his relationship, but he can never, like, fully hand.

handle but also like I came out of this fully believing it's not like that with bix and or anymore like it really is not she is she is over this shit and like why is like why is tim really held at arm's length because she is running a huge black market ring and he's not part of that business like he is he's a junior partner in the relationship in a few different ways but like he's a kid from the town and does not need to know what they all get up to and it is better if he doesn't for his own sake because he's not built for that life and also because he's kind of a chump and like if he did know about it he would make things worse but you got to you got to listen you got to make peace with it at some point you have to

be the guy who says my wife is a criminal mastermind and I just need to not know about that life I need to be you know I've seen the sopranos do you know what I mean you got to be able to be that person. Or you gotta be like Tim. And be like an ex-wife guy. An ex-wife guy. And that is not what Tim is. No, I mean, I hate Tim.

Like Tim's the fucking former. I'm glad he got got. But like I, but I do think like what his kind of tragedy here is all he sees is like his own relationship insecurity. Everything like plays into that because he's no he knows he's out of his league and he know like on a few different measures. and what he can't see is like, and it's fine, she doesn't care. Like, you're actually, you're actually incredibly secure where you're at.

You're under no thing. Because the things that are good, the things that are good about you, like she sees. And the people around you see. And she's keeping you out of this stuff for, not because she doesn't think that you're good enough for it. I mean, she thinks you're too good for it. Yeah. Yeah, which I think is honestly giving him way too much fucking credit. Like, Bix, I don't know what you see in this guy.

like you're so hot and he's... They work together he opens the store for her one way it washes the other you know she gets a bit of work late That's all it takes Well and they both

So this is all takes She and and or both sort of She jokes about like You know Did you have a run in with a jealous husband or something But also he jokes with like Well what's with you and Tim They both use

their charisma and their charm and, like, their sheer sassiness to get a variety of things they want. And that's just part of the game. They have it, so they use it. They're, they've got swag. They both are swaggy. And that's why they should be together. I don't think they should be together. I don't think any chance of them being together is now done.

No, I think Bix is going to come find him. I think, I think Bix is, I mean, a Bix might come find him. I don't know how it was going to... Wow, I can't believe Bick showed up just as the Death Star Laser blew up Sarah. I think you're... Go check out A.O.3, check out some fanfix for five years before this show started and them running jobs together. So... That sounds great.

But also... No more. Nurchy and Vatch. We got... So this is our thing. He has so much swag, but also he's been drawing, he's been overdrafing that account for it seems like years. Do you get the sense he hasn't pulled a full shift in the scrapyard in years. Has done it because everyone has.

But like has not pulled a shift there in years. And everything is overdrawn. He runs on favors. He runs on credit. And even a dude like, he gets sort of buttonhold in the street by, by, what is it? It's Nurchy? Nurchy. Yeah, Nurti.

And you are C-H-I. Yeah. And he paid the big dinosaur guy. Nurti has a great fucking jacket. jacket. Oh, yeah. I love them. For collar. I mean, everybody on Farrex has dope clothes. Everything has color that's faded, but everybody's still high

saturation in a way. That's, yeah, it's also good. I want that Adidas's green hoodie that that kid is wearing so bad. Yes. And like, some people have, like, fake Carhart on. I need all this shit to be. We'll get to it, but this has such

immaculate, uh, like, Northern Ireland vibes, honestly. It's like, the fact that there's so many things that do look like soccer jerseys. They aren't for Star Wars, but they look like the kids are running around in like football uniforms. Yep. It's true.

But anyway, big alien is here too. We love him. Vetch. See, I've been, when I was a kid, I was Vatch, people would be like, could you be big and threatening nearby? And I'm like, sure, I don't know what the deal is, but okay.

And I'm not, again, but I'm not actually the heavy. can't do that like what do you want you're just gonna hang out yeah I like Cassian yeah he just told me I had to stand here I'm not actually gonna shake you down oh it's so funny and also we get we get Bix

running to what looks like I think she's getting into like whatever their phone infrastructure is like you know there's like main switchboards where you can't be like traced because at the end of the line you can be traced but if you like cut in on a main switchboard like Robert Redford

does in three days the condor the call is like confidential bick seems to have a line on getting access to like that level of the com network so she can talk to her client but the thing i love here is that tim tries to follow her and for her ferricks is water that she effortlessly swims in like it is it is a crowded busy again like to the point of it's a busy crowded set it is such a feeling of like physical space and locations and like streets teeming with life and like blind corners et cetera and you see tim try to like tail her through it and everything is opaque to him like it is it is like she is roadrunner going into the painted tunnel and just managing and for him it's rock and i think it's like it is such a foreshadowing of like how this is all going to break for

Tim, like in some ways he isn't even part of this community in that same way. That's what I was going to say. He feels like out of place. I'm really curious. He seems like someone, he seems like someone who didn't grow up here. I don't know how he came about being here, like being on this planet and working in this shop with Bix. And he feels like somewhat of an outsider um i don't know if that's just listen there's herbs everywhere it's you can be inside and outside at the same time yeah it can happen you know yeah maybe he was really sheltered as a kid maybe he you know maybe his parents you know saved up some money to get him off planet schooling like who knows what happened there are ways that you can end up that's that part's not

his fault however he ended up being the way he is is is the part that's his fault is what follows that part is what his well and he thinks this is his business like that's the other part is like you don't to an extent like you don't go here like work your shift work your fucking shift stay in the shop speaking of people working their shifts

we do get some great little short scenes with Karn first leaning on an air traffic controller guy looking at this vector map of the nearby space sector trying to locate if there were any ships that were unaccounted for the night of the murder.

And they do find, they end up finding Andors heading towards pharix. And he does like the exact shitty manager thing, more than the shitty cop thing, the shitty manager thing of basically telling this guy like, you're going to have to, okay, I want you to find this thing. And the guy's like, this is going to take me hours and hours and hours. And him being, all right, well, I'll find somebody else who wants your seat as chief air traffic control guy. and making him work that OT, that unpaid OT, if he wants to keep his job. And I know it's unpaid because at the beginning of the next scene with him is a bunch of other, like, technicians working at, you know, these corporate stations, eating their blue noodles.

The blue noodles is so good. It's so good. Being like, well, listen, we get, at least we get OT for this. And someone being like, can he even approve OT? and someone's like that's his problem not if we don't get it it's so good i just love to see people doing jobs it turns out yeah i also yeah i love him immediately threatening someone job someone's job after doing the same and doing something that like his commander told him not to do like yep very efficient character work in yeah the boss is out of town yeah the boss is out of town

I love as as the as the his boss like left he was like don't put your fucking feet up on my desk like stay low key and immediately he's like feet up I am running the show today I'm gonna and I'm and he's gonna I know he's doing I this is the thing I'm curious about is he doing this to like to impress this guy or to go over him to go above him yeah yeah yeah so this is I was like, there's no doubt in my mind, this guy wants to be imperial, like, honest to God, like imperial officer. The thing is, it's unclear to me that there's actually a mechanism for him to do that. Like, this is, like, if I got a job working, like, on a Brinks truck or something, there is no ladder that takes me from that brink's truck to Delta Force or something like that. Like, it's not, it doesn't work that way.

I think there is a line for him because in that. first conversation with Chief Hine, Chief Hine says, I'm going to talk to the Imperials, and if you're ever in the position, the point is brevity. So, like, it feels like, it feels like, um, Karn is in the position where he, he wants to leap over Hine because he wants that imperial access, but also he doesn't think that Hine deserves it because Hine is willing to look the other way on this thing. But it's still delusional because the thing is, because the thing is, is like, it's, your job is to deliver a report to the, it's like a client briefing, basically. Like, they're not looking at you as like, you're a man in, like, you know, Priax Morlana. That doesn't seem to be the situation. It seems to be like you're a security contractor. He's looking to the future, Rob. He's looking at this and saying with guys like Hein running it, this is imperial in a year.

And I'm going to be there to pick up the. fucking pieces. Like... Somebody's new when we get folded in. When we get folded in, we're gonna get folded in. He's looking around

and seeing all these slackers eating their blue noodles with their loose uniform regulations and they're going to the brothel and he's saying all of this,

this is Republic era bullshit. In a year, this is all going to be black and white, cromed out. No more of this color bullshit.

We're going to be imperial. That process is going to happen. And I'm going to be the one to I might even be the one to push the first domino because I'm going to reveal how badly we need that. And again, I think that that comes out of this conversation that he ends up having with Musk in the next, not mosque, Tosk. Mosque. Mosque. Not Musk. Different. So I was going to say the the group of tax that are hanging out when they get a line that he had a Deferix. again they try to warn him he says well we have jurisdiction there

and all the techs who like work at the dispatch office most of the time they just warn him like they got their own way of doing things out there like technically we have jurisdiction but and this is crucial they have no they have no cop shop there and they have no patrols and so they try to get across this note of like we could go there but we don't we never do

it's yeah it's it's you just you really get the sense that karn has never as the sequence continues has never been an on the front lines kind of guy he's never been in the action he's read about it he's probably watched some star wars tube videos of some shit i don't know like he has he he has like this like fetishization of what this experience is going to be like like he's like okay like let's suit up like he meets mosque they they just they are fucking bros immediately like they it really parallels the first time aniken meets tarcan in clone wars where they have that whole sequence as they're escaping from that lava place where Tarkin's like I have some ideas for and Anakin's like I like those ideas I also have some ideas and it's like winner should be more guys like you

it's like it's a very it mirrors that in a way but you know obviously Anakin and Tarcan end up being who they end up being and I don't think Karn and Mosker like they're like parodies of that almost but

yeah he has this like fervor that he's like he asks Moss says like are you going to be joining us like on on the ground sir and like there's all this like I think there's like a deference there that mosque is giving him of like I mean do we want to jump to that scene at this point and just have this conversation about that because this is episode two now we can come back to the cast stuff

but but to stay on Karn for a second he meets with mosque who is who immediately the place that he meets mosque feels different it is not the 1970s sci-fi quote or, you know, tans and oranges. It is dark. It is lit by screens. Everyone is in their blues still, but there's a different sense as Mosque comes in. And it's a little bit as if Karn has transformed this place

into his image of, like, what the workplace should look like. And Mosque introduces himself. Sergeant Linus Mosque at your service, sir. Sorry to arrest you in the middle of the night. No, sir. Privileged, sir. Got the brief on the right end. Let's move on this, Quickly, we have a dangerous mobile suspect in a very serious crime.

Couldn't agree more, sir. Tempo is crucial. Velocity in the service of inspired leadership. Is there a worthy substitute? I think not. So one suspect. How many men do you think we need? I say 12, sir, just to be prudent. Will you be suiting up with us, sir? I think I should, don't you? Absolutely, sir. Show force, boost morale.

Nothing like seeing an officer on the line. Excellent. If I may, sir, hats off to you. and Chief Inspector. Two men dead, line of duty, colleagues, subrages. Exactly. I thought of anything less than one engagement on a case like this. Unconscionable, sir. Derilection of duty at the minimum. It would be, wouldn't it? I've seen it, sir. Half measures.

They take it slow, the wait and see. It's a plague on discipline. Face your men, yourself, the rest of your life, knowing you did less than everything you possibly could. I've been saying all along we need a stronger hand with these affiliated planets. is fermenting out there, sir. Pockets are fomenting. Corporate tactical forces are the Empire's first line of defence,

and the best way to keep the blade sharp is to use it. So, well, thank you, sir. I'll pass along your kind words to the Chief Inspector. Sir. And, you know, he explains to Mosque, Karn explains to Mosque that he woke up in the middle of the, of the night, because he wants to go. He wants to do this.

He knows that this guy is on pharynx, you know, he's zeroed in on where he is, and we're going to get going. And Mosque, it's interesting, I don't know how much I read Mosque as playing ball. with a superior who he can tell is kind of a little shit but like respects his superior because it's his superior later on he will give a very bad a carton will give a very bad speech and mosque will be like very inspirational sir and there's a little bit of brown nosing there but I also can't help but think he knows that it was a bad speech you know but he's doing he's playing he's going by the script right mosque needs a boot to lick like Heinz isn't that person and mosque is the same sort of cop who's like rattling against the walls of like the potential that he should have but doesn't. Exactly. And the the moment he's able to see someone who has like even a little bit of an ideal is like, oh, I'm going to follow this guy. We're going to go to the top together because this is also what I want. Like I think we get later in this conversation, it really feels like Karn is like a little bit out of his league here because he is not like. He's met the real

fascist. Right. He's not the real guy. And like, he, he, he, he, he dreams of himself as a powerful person, but not as a violent person. And I don't think that, like, as we get to the action here, he is, like, able to keep up with Mosque in that way. And so Mosque delivers this thing, right? Where, where he's just itching to bust noses. He's just itching to shine up his little badge and to step into the streets because Hein has not let him do that, right? He got put on this assignment ready and eager to kick down doors and be like corpos are here and he has not been able to do that and he thinks that it's not just a strategic mistake but an ideological mistake and is this is the moment where I'm like oh my god we have to watch this show immediately well so also he

gives like when he's I don't remember what he's responding to uh I think I think uh Karn is thanking him for for quick response and mosque velocity in the service of inspired leadership is there were the substitute. Uh-huh. Uh, like, which is, you can, you can see, like, there's some sort of, like, handbook he pulled that from. There's some sort of, like, motivational,

this is futurism, right? This is literally the thing, right? Like, we have to move quickly when leaders tell us to move. And that is, like, the, that is the height of service and duty. But I do think there is something that, like, Ali called out that it's so important. in here, which is that in some ways, Karn is comfortable with his dreams being dreams. And with Mosque, there is the sense of this is the person who could do anything.

And I knew there's a real question. I'm curious how this is going to play out. Who drives the ship from this point? Who's in charge of any of this? Like, Karn just wanted the guy's name. He just wanted to be able to make an arrest. But the minute he asks Sarge, what do you think we should do here, it turns into something else and Karn does not make a decision for the rest of this opening three episodes he thinks

he does he thinks he's in the pasture seat because the guy salutes and all that but like this is mosque's team this is like his concept of the operation the best way to keep the blade sharp is to use it like that is that's his M.O that he he they've been given power they've been given you know quote unquote, I mean, in a way, and Mosque is so ready to wield it. Mosque is so ready to wield his license to kill. And this is what happens when you like, you know, there's that whole argument, like, towns kept hitting SWAT teams, like throughout the 90s to deal with, like, crime epidemic and then cast off military equipment.

And the argument has always been against stuff like that is once you give people these tools, they start to itch to use them. I mean, this goes back to fucking, what is it, Cicero? that the blade itself excites to violence. But, like, Mosque is very much, their little, like, corporate rent-a-cop force has a group of riot troopers there who do not get enough.

They don't get to do the riot trooper thing often enough. And Mosque is just itching to, because we have all these tools, all this training, and nobody lets us do the thing. Dude, and it's not just abstract when you say it's cast off military hardware. Like, in this case, it is, they literally descend in, like,

like a clone troop, drop ship, right? Like, this is, this is stuff from the Clone Wars. We've seen these landing sequences like a dozen times before. Yes. Except now they're regular folks that don't have masks on. You can see their faces. These are people who are true believers in the cause of imperial order. And it's worth saying, sorry, go ahead.

What did you say? I was just going to say, these are people who've signed, like, you would assume that they've signed up for this. They aren't clones that were bred. to do this. They are citizens that, you know, you would assume pursued this line of this career. Three episodes ago, I said it's all clones, baby. These ain't. This is people who signed up to go do this. And I was going to point out that the crew that he begins to roll with here, let me tell you, their uniforms look a lot more like his, right? They're in a different, they're in a slightly different uniform. They're in

attack uniforms. They're in material that has like body armor or vests or something, which produces a more stiff, starched effect. But he does not look apart from them in uniform anymore. He looks apart from them

in confidence going forward. He does not feel like he should stand with them. His posture looks forced in a ways that there's don't. At least not at first. Eventually there's also, it becomes clear that they are also in over their fucking heads soon enough. They're all

cosplaying. Well, I think there's an element. I think I think the guy playing Mosque, Alex Fern is inspired casting. I mean, you see he does this role perfectly. But then helps that like

Karn looks like a little boy playing dress up in his uniform. And like Mosque has also like baby face type features

but also a degree of like childish delight in game to play with the toys. You know, one is teachers, Pat, and one is, you know, almost like, you know, a bit, a bit like rascalish in terms of like, oh, gee, here we go. We finally get to have our adventure. And both of them have this vibe of being, like, menacing little children, like, seeking to bring a fantasy to life and play it out in the real world. Do you also get the impression here that one of the things, you mentioned that this feels like Ireland. previously. I believe they shot much of Farrex in Scotland.

There is part of this that feels to me like someone from Britain. Karn is the British officer going to link up with unionists in Northern Ireland or with loyalists across the history of the aisles. Folks who want to keep these places attached to Britain versus having them be their own.

There's that sort of like prep school boy meets up with local monarchists energy. That's really interesting that they want... It's what you said the second ago, which is that like, Ali, I think, said this. He wants the boot to lick.

He wishes that there was great... He being a mosque here. Wants that greater hierarchy in place. And Karn does too. And it's just like layers of this up until you get to the fucking emperor who lives off screen right now. But will we see him soon enough? Oh my God. If there's

a sheave moment... I think we're going to see some sheave soon. That's my guess. So I think one, we're going to get to the thing that actually is like dead on Northern Ireland shit in the next episode. But in terms of their relationship, I do feel this feels like a very British relationship in that for a long time the British officer corps was drafted from like the ranks of gentlemen. And the expectation was they did not know anything. And so like the actual power in any unit was like the sergeants and such. And so if you had, like, if you had a, like, dumbass officer, but you were his guy and, like, dependable, you basically could do whatever you want, right?

Like, very inspiring, sir. Like, yeah, you know what? You go over there and groom your horse and think about the next speech here and deliver to the men. I will go run the rest of this unit the way I see that. And, like, that feels like the relationship that's taking shape here. Yeah. And I do think there is an element of, like, um, Yeah, ferricks feels like this is the wrong side of the falls road in Dublin, in Belfast.

And there is an element of like sometimes these guys feel like royal or constabulary cops. And in that metaphor, it is possible that the stormtroopers are like the British paratroopers who will shortly later. Yeah. And we don't say to. Again, we get through three of these episodes without saying a single fucking stormtrooper. Yeah. You know, I think that's important about what they're doing here. giving it a face is so, so, so, so important and making it resonate.

Speaking of giving the fucking cop's faces, Tim is a snitch. Tim is a gutless little snitch. Why are you touching that guy's hand? Why are you talking at a bar at 8 p.m. at night and touching his hand. Why do you laugh at him? Why are you laughing in his jokes?

Tim, nobody wants a swagless little fucking herb, okay? The problem does want the swaggerless little her. She wants a good, swagless, like, reliable steady. Maybe he goes to church. She's in her fucking a Normie era

right now. Dude, don't go to the Normie era. Don't go there. Don't go. Don't. This man's showing her Facebook memes. You know he is. Yeah, that's funny.

Bix has not Bix has not opened their like Facebook message Like he keeps sending her shit on Facebook Messages it's unopened They see each other once a week Doesn't open it My phone's busted sorry my comment's a little weird

She should be like I'm busy I don't use Facebook is what she says She's like I'm not on there I've been logged in and It's not on my phone She is literally booked and busy though like she has she has her hand in supplies yeah she does anyway he rats like he he rats out and he rats him out but even before he does the rat out it's clear that because because karn put

out the APB on a canary male there's one guy marva his adopted mom is like bro what did you do because you're the only canary male here yeah and I told everybody you were from fest So let's go on Pass another Dark Forces reference It might be, yeah That sounds right I think that's the planet you go to Yep, it's the one with all the

Chalk Cliffs Where you find some Dark Trooper shit, who knows But anyway, somebody on this project Maybe, hey, Tony Gilroy Come on Waypoint and talk about Dark Forces with me I would host Tony Gilroy on here in a second

Are you kidding me? Anyway, so Marvin's like, did you ever tell anybody or Canari? Any of the, like, any of the, like, seven women? He's like, only all the broads. Yeah.

She just starts, like, name dropping. Sometimes you get to talking. Sometimes maybe it's part of your whole, like, shtick of like, well, you know, I'm not actually from, you know, I was actually taken from my world. If Andrew, I don't want casting to be that guy, but he might be. Okay, no, the thing that happens is I think it's the, I think it's the other way, which girls be like, so you were adopted, I guess, because they're looking at Marva and they're

looking at him and he is Mexican. And Marvin is not. And he is like, well, I was from a place called Canari actually. Don't tell anybody. And so I think it's like a little give and take. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I agree. But, no, no, no, I just want to talk about Marva here. here because like the like the thought of like elder care in star wars and the thought of like the age um like span that we get of the characters that we see in this episode is like activates all of my like please talk about this more let's let's let's focus on this um she says such like an old like grandmother slash mother thing to say where she's like all the people i told we were from canari

you're dead, which is just such like, twist the knife a little bit. Just the mean old lady sort of like, I know you're in trouble and I'm just going to make you feel bad about it sort of thing. You're about to leave me alone, aren't you? You're about to leave me alone on this fucking planet. And I don't like putting the heat on. So I'm going to freeze stuff here. Or I can't.

Right, or I can. Yeah. Yeah. And B's getting old too. So it's like, no, they're both little. But what they both know is the community's got her because that is like part of, part of the that ends up being kind of clear about this. Right, yes, is the sense that like, oh, actually, yes, she is, she is someone who meets elder care.

But that's mom. That's mom. That's mom. That's capital M mom. Even in the first scene that we get with B2, it's like, oh, these people stopped by and checked on her medicine. And that's why he ends up going with that bravo, brazo. Brasso. Because he had stopped by and tried to find him. And now he's like, oh, okay, I can go to my friend and make that. shit off because he was already at the house.

Exactly. Also, just a quick aside, we had a brief scene with Cassian that I want to call out here. Again, all the favors are just coming apart at the scenes. He goes to the used spaceship lot. And he's been that ship he was flying around in,

he's been taking off the lot as like an under the table deal with his buddy who runs security there. But his buddy walks in on him changing the transponder on the ship. And we know it's because he's basically like trying to erase any of that like what that air traffic controller spotted like and or is already like tying off this loose end that like this isn't even the same ship

we don't need to worry about it and this guy sees that and he knows it's a bad sign he doesn't he doesn't know what he he doesn't know but he says yeah you're leaving better than you found it the and or away like you always do and you just get the sense again like you always get half truths from this guy there's always like more to the story and you're in more of a thing you thought you were and at the end he says like get lost like I'm not loaning you the ships out of him so he's lost his wheels basically like he can't borrow his car anymore and so again like even without the without two dead cops uh you know his time here is coming to an end because he is just running out of cards to play um he is losing the resources that

has allowed him to sort of like hop from scam to scam through the years but he's holding a He's holding something worth so much money that if he can just move it, everything's fine. He's all, we are in uncut gems right now. We are in, it comes down to one big deal, you know? It really does. I mean, the, the, that this next, like, it gets, it's so tense. It wasn't uncut, I mean, when I watch uncut gems, I, I mean, nothing can compare to the amount of anxiety I had watching uncut gems.

I don't I don't think anyone can people go listen Were you all in our uncut gems pod? Yeah I think we yeah I think we did uncut gems together. Yeah. Yeah. She could listen to that on Waypoint. Yeah, it's a good one. But I just the buildup of like also I have to like again call out this feels like a Star Wars show for adults or at least later teens.

Like Tim is getting drunk. he's like I feel I know that the word bastard is like has been in Star Wars but like when people say it in this show it feels like so much more like fuck you like I want to say like you fucking something much stronger than that

and I feel like that type of like there's like this like recklessness in in Tim's like behavior that is like it's not very it's not very it's not clean it's not clean good bad good versus evil it's like it's very messy and like and and the fact that it's coming from like this jealousy like with his relationship with bix it just feels these are like much more adult plot devices than like I don't know things that we've seen in the prequels or or in even in clone wars the show

you call something that I really love is that it does get something really profound about some of the things that go on under police states is the reason people hate informers isn't really because an informer will rat out like who killed the cops it's the fact that informer networks exist

and that you can like dime people out you don't know why people will do it but sometimes they do it for reasons like this because they're pissed off at their neighbor and they're looking to make trouble for them it's like the equivalent of like swatting in some ways, but it's more insidious. Where, like, why does Tim do this? He doesn't care if those cops are dead.

He wants to create problems for Andor. He kind of hopes that, like, someone comes and kills Andor, or at least takes him away forever. But it's not because Tim, like, wants to help the empire. It's just because the empire is a tool now in the, like, this is a social weapon you can level it. And, like, yeah, the fact that Tim's motivations here are so mixed. And he even, he doesn't even like that he did it. fully. He's a shame the minute he's done it. When she shows up, it's instantly like a realization. Like, I probably misread that. But he doesn't fess up to what he did it because he knows that will

blow this entire thing up forever too. And the other reason people don't, people don't like rats is, I mean, the other part of that is it's not that they want to protect a particular person who did a particular crime. It's that the police net is going to be broader than you think it is. they are not going to come snatch up the one dude and get away they're going to they're going to bust into everybody's stuff some other people are going to be doing some stuff that's illegal and that illegal stuff is going to be stuff that the community might be fine with because it is not hurting anybody here it's breaking some law that they do not care about or it will be that you know that it is being applied uh you know in an asymmetrical way or you're being punished for it and somebody else isn't huh calling the cops on endor you're calling cops on marva you just can't You can't separate those two. And we don't want Marvel going to fucking jail. We don't want anybody shooting in our fucking neighborhood, dude. And you know that that's this type of response you're going to get.

They are not going to send two guys to knock on a door and say, yo, we got to get any of door. They're going to send a 12-person fucking force to come to kick down doors. And you get this. This is a self-policed community. Like, this community looks out for each other. Like, Cassian's encounter with. what's his name? Yeah, Nirmie

and, yeah, the other and Big Man, yeah, and Shrek. And Big Man, and Big Man. Big Man. Like, they resolve that shit. It's not like, and there's no larger guy that they're going to go get, like, larger like crime syndicate that they're going to go bring in.

Like these are just people that are, that have their own inter, you know, connected dealings and wheelings. and relationships and complications and conflicts, but it all gets settled. Like, everything gets resolved. Even when Bossos, like, you haven't been at work, bro. Like, what's going?

Like, everything is, is kind of settled until the thing with the cruiser guy, like the ship guy, who's like, no, I know something different's happening this time. So like, this time, no. But it's the fact that Tim betrays the community at large, by bringing in an outside forces into their community is what isolate

it just it isolates him so much from the rest of the people there and from especially from Bix who like if he was if he knew what Bix was like it's not even that like it's not even that it's not even that Tim is like you killed two officers

is you need to go to jail. It's I feel like you're fucking Bix and I can't handle that. I can't handle that I have all this jealousy towards you. So I'm going to do whatever I can to try and create like to separate you to get you out of my life. But it has nothing to do with what Cassian's actually done. Which is, yeah, it's social. The irony being what Cassian wants to do in this moment is disappear from Tim's life. Right.

If this plays out the way it's supposed to, he's gone. he's out of here uh also i think like again different different flavor of star wars uh bix does come by uh for like casual sex with a guy that we don't like and we know she shouldn't like either and like we like it is she knows something is wrong in this relationship can't put her finger on it but like i think in like again going back through like uh the last Jedi last Jedi is like how do we express like maybe unwise sexual tension with somebody well we'll have it in a big lightsaber fight of like this is oh sexy like lightsaber fight like they shouldn't be working together but also they're really good together and it's hot and it is yeah but here we can

just be adult about it and she's waking up in his bed yeah right she's putting on her pants like and like and that's fine like we don't it doesn't change how we feel about her at all like she's going to discover she slept with a piece of shit happens and again like this is part of the thing like it's not it's not telling a story in this like mythological way it's important that in the mainline star war series you do sexual attention through a lightsaber fight there's that is like the language of tension generally speaking and emotion things build to these things if you're going to have a romantic entanglement between two people who use lightsabers their lightsaber like situation should be intense in that way uh to not do what is to miss the ball, right? It's a miss to not take advantage of that when you're in that storytelling mode. That is not the storytelling mode this is. And it is, I think, for a lot of us who spend a lot of time either literally in the EU, you know, spending time with EU material, playing games, doing role-playing, whatever it is.

Like, there's been this other part of Star Wars for decades that the mainline stuff has not quite gotten to. And even Mandalorian, which I like quite a bit, hasn't. It hasn't given up the cowboy story. You know what I mean? It's still in that genre mode. This is still in genre mode, but it's a different part of the Star Wars genre mode that we haven't seen in mainland material and only really in on those edges.

So it's very nice to see it get this development and to see it develop so well. Natalie, are you still good to keep going? So I will say, Austin, you mentioned that like you thought they need 12 guys to go arrest a guy. I also thought that sound like overkill. Um, until we get to... Actually, we should talk about the speech first. Uh, they're aboard their little, like, mothership with all their little clone trooper transports.

And yes, uh, Moss gives the... Basically, let's go bust some fucking heads, uh, speech. Fire up the troops. And he gives the floor over to, uh, to Karn. And Karn, it is so, again, like, it's affecting because, like, he's a piece of shit. but also it's like he's again

like a little boy who has rehearsed this moment so many times and he stands up and he's like there comes a time when the risk of doing nothing becomes the greatest risk of all this is one of those decisive moments and just getting flat, dead stairs

you're delivering it with too much power yeah you're giving him way too much credit yeah like right it's like he's reading from no cards It's like all mixed up. Yeah, yeah. He has no...

Like, this is it. This is... When he gets to, there is no room for doubt on the path to success and justice. Uh-huh. Like, my skin crawled off my body out of the room under the floor and into the hallway. Uh-huh. Well, and it comes right after Mosque giving his version. of this speech, which is

effective and the guys laugh at his jokes and his jokes are fucked up because, you know, he's like Andor should be considered armed and dangerous we will have the element of surprise but there should be no illusions as to the risks involved. There may be some local residents who are

less than enthused with our presence. And so he goes, you may remind them that there's a territorial form once a month where they're free to make any optional comments or whatever. Any any complaints. And it's just like, this is what they want to hear.

Yeah. Uh-huh. There's a process. Listen, if there's a problem with the way the cops about, you couldn't file a complaint. There's a suggestion bucket.

Throw it in. Uh-huh. So, and that's what they want to hear. That does get them fired up. Anyway, then he does, then he hands over.

And it's just, he bombs, dude. It's so rough. It's a, and again, it's like, it's the first, it's one of many moments.

Like, there's the slow realization of, like these this is a breed apart from him like these guys have hit people with truncheons before and not just thought about it um and they don't respect him uh and they don't they don't know him they don't necessarily like him no he's a he's a he's a office guy no and i think he's trying to get out of it when he asked musk like should i like i should come down like i think when he's sort of debating like should i come down with you should i be on this I think there's a little part of them

that's hoping that Moss is going to be like, no, you should stay aboard the ship and coordinate from above. You know, you're the officer. Yeah. And Moss is like, no, of course you've got to be down on the front lines, bro. Got to fire up the troops.

And like when they're on the shuttle going down, he does not look like he is eager for the ramp to drop and for them to get to business. And like some of the other guys are. You know, this is the juice for them. This is what they're here for. Karn isn't wired that way

He thought he was It's so good Anyway then we meet One of the other best characters of this arc As the second episode ends As our I guess our black market connection Begins to descend in a shuttle

Along with talky guy On the airport shuttle Guy who won't shut the fuck up I'm just trying to have a day man The most British character It's so funny Also if this guy ends up being an imperial spy I won't be surprised

If this guy ends up being connected I won't be surprised That little that little Bluetooth he's got on Is a little suss to me I'm not into it It's so funny He has on this like mustard long jacket With an orange underpiece

And a little A little chappo What's the app Is that what this hat is What are we saying this hat is It's so funny It's very funny And he's, you know, he's doing small talk and then, like, comes over and sits over with Scars Guard to be like, they get you coming and going.

How much should they make you paid for parking? You know, I'm coming here. I'm coming here for to pick up some stuff. What do you, what are you coming here for? I remember when he used to be, you could just drive in. You didn't have to do all this kind of stuff. Yes, yes. And now.

But then he also says, never changes, does it? And it's like, he's just talking, he's just like old man shit. Yeah, he's just saying words. It's all different than he used to be. On their hand, it never changes. and like it's just it's all just meaningless it's all just like attempts to I don't trust him I don't trust him look I've seen a hard day's night old men on the train who won't shut the fuck up they're up to bad news like he's I don't trust this guy he's gonna come back he's gonna come back he has a he has an imperial uniform on under there for sure the thing that he says he's like you know what they say if you can't find it here you can't find it or something like that and it's like what where it's not worth finding which is not it's not worth finding yeah it's not worth finding yeah send to nowhere. Like, if you can't find it in the galaxy's most, like, inconspicuous scrapyard, it's not

worth finding? What are we talking about? Well, he's in propulsion. He does engines and add-ons or whatever. Maybe he knows what. A ship appears to be cobbled together from, like, Y-wing engines and other ship parts. Yes, I love the big Y-wing engines. Shout out.

So good. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Anyway, episode three. Episode three Reckoning Yeah So yeah

Lumen is Man it's wild That like this planet's hell And I'm like Man their transit situation So much better than like any shit I deal with You know he gets off He gets off like the

The regional flight Or like the little space bus And like hops on a different like Transit vehicle to get to the main city And I'm like it's all networked and shit Like they got pissed because they had to circle that they were like you know kept waiting for like 30 minutes

like wow that's incredible like straight from the parking lot but anyway but he runs into Bix and she sort of flags that this is already like and or's on the run and is in over his head

do these two cops and Lumen you know a taste of what we're dealing with here completely unfazed by it not concerned at all that this guy has, or Luthan, Luton is not concerned at all about the fact that this guy has

is wanted for the murder of some police officers. He's just like, that just speeds up our timeline. Yeah. You should know, too, that it turns out that he has a record, right? That popped up in the last episode. Right, yeah. Imperial prison's record, yeah.

He has an imperial prison's record for, I now forget exactly what it was, but it was like destroying imperial property, assaulting an imperial officer or something, you know, of crimes that sent him to prison, apparently. I don't know if that's true or not or if that's part of his cover identity

from the Fest ID or if that's real, but he does have a record. Do you get the sense that the box comes from that scenario, or is something he took from the original ship that when he was a kid? I think he's just been running jobs. Yeah, I think this is just good loot

from a job. Okay. It felt like to me something he had been hanging on to for like a rainy day and I just was curious if it was like

how far back it would have gone like how long he's been holding onto this. But yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. One other thing from the last episode

really quick. The most Michael Man vibes there were in this for me is him alone on the scrapped ship getting the little imperial device and like holding his pistol

and the synths hit and he's just like prepping for what the next day of his life is going to be that's all moving on it's very good um very good also let's start this episode he's having his final like chat with uh b2 uh explaining that like and this it just broke me man it broke me like why do you have to leave where are you going you should you should stay you shouldn't be leaving us take me with you and i was like oh my guy he's going to white fang this this little droid he's going to wipe fang this little droid i can't i can't i can't look at this anymore. It's so sad. He's like, you got to stay with Marba and I'm like, take the com link. I'm going to tell you where the money is. Tell her to turn the heat on.

breaks my heart. Someone has to take care of her because I'm leaving. Luton has such a presence that is hard to explain. I consistently felt like I'd seen this dude before. I was like, oh, is he in Rogue One and he isn't. But like, he's a new character, but there is something about, and maybe this is just Skarsgaard playing him so well, so comfortably, that he feels like an, you know, an institution inside of this era of the rebellion. Yeah. I just think he nails it. So also, his cane that retracts feels like it's a prop lightsaber to me. Austin, do you know what his last name is?

I'm here on IMDB. I don't know what his last name is. Let's go His last name is rail But the other guy's first name is rail Isn't it? They can't use rail twice That's not allowed

The other guy's rail Avaros Yeah I'm just looking I'm just asking questions Oh maybe he's He's a He's he's escaped the order And now he's

He's out here with his Lightaber cane And he he grew up But he's fucking cool as hell still I'm just saying Now admittedly We'll be That would be so good

Given that rail was like Well Here I'm here I'm Yeah But you gotta drop the accent You can't have these people Look at you From now

We get we get that accent Well now that it's just you and me I can be myself And tell you that I'm Rayo Averroos From Duku-Di lost That's so fucking funny like sniped it's

I guess we'll just have to launch a rebellion now won't we then then whoever made Andor is listening to AMCA I would be Yes Like you are You are listening Again come through we'll happily chat

You'll be respectful We love Star Wars And Michael Clayton And Michael Clayton I rewatched Michael Clayton for this by the way We know the person who made Andor because we made the decision to start podcasting about this in 2020

when we started this podcast that's right exactly this is the plan all along yeah 100% so yeah I mean Scar Scar Scar is terrific here and the way that he draws out so when he finally meets with

Cassian before the raid starts they're conversing in this like I don't have a warehouse it's like it's got all the engine hanging from the, it's like some sort of workshop where they've been like removing engines from like speeders and shit and they're all just sort of dismounted up in the rafters on these chains

but he's having this conversation with him and what's so cool here is like the way it slowly unfolds that like this guy's in the black market as a front he's a talent scout effectively and it takes so long for Cassian to tumble to the fact that like

the goods are like it's more the goods are a token like they imply something he's like i have this really valuable box and we do learn that like it seems like this allows you to plug into imperial google maps that's basically it allows you to do that like which is like historically empires do this like their navigation aids become a valuable commodity in themselves like their like their maps and tide charts are proprietary and they they keep those under like close secret it's not just google it's not just Imperial Google Maps, it's like Imperial Uber Network. You can see where the ships are for 20, whatever, 20 parsecs or whatever the thing is.

You can see where they're moving. And so like, you know, imagine knowing it's, it's having the cops, it's having the police, you know, channel on, right? Yeah. What are my, I'm blanking my words? The scanner, a police scanner. But with like a GPS, too. But with a GPS.

how far away they are from the bank you know if you're here to rob the bank and you know that hey in this one moment the cops are seven minutes out and not five minutes out that's huge amounts of information if what you are as a bank robber you know i think i'm curious what the the because because cassian at one point is or uh lumen is like have you uh uh luthen is like have you plugged it in like do you know it works and he's like well as soon as i plugged it in the value drops. I'm curious, like, what that means? Is there, like, what about, like, using it or, like, what is it a use item or, like, a consumable in a way? Like, I need two things. Like, it's a countdown until you get kicked off the network as they realize that, like, this thing isn't getting

authenticated properly and they kick you off the network. Or he says it's within, like, nine parsecs of anything. And I wonder, is it location registered? So once you plug it in, what you need better be in the relevant radius of where it is. Once you plug it in, it becomes a regional map. But until you plug in it might just be a thing that could be turned on anywhere. I see. Yeah. That's fun.

I like that a lot. I mean, long term, go ahead. Well, he also refers to it as sealed. So it also feels like it's one of those things where, like, on the eBay listing, he said it was like, no. So I'm not going to plug it in and make you give me $2,000 less or whatever. Right. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Also, he's talking about a remarkable amount of money. There's such, like, efficient storytelling happening here. We're up until now the amounts of money that Andor has been talking about is, like, 200 credits, 400 credits. He owes us to do 500 credits or whatever. And then he's like, all right, 40,000 credits for this box. And it's like, bro, that's so much money. That's going to dig you out of all of this, you know?

There's a bit where Luton is like, I'll give you another thousand credits if you tell me how you. you got it. And it's, it's so laughable that this would be worth a thousand credits to Cass that he's like a thousand credits. And Luton's like, done. How'd you do it? And it's like, shit, you're for real, a thousand credits for me to tell you how I got this thing. And we get the, we get the thesis again, right? There's lots of little thesis statements here. And he says, do you just walk in like you belong? And Luton says, it takes more than that, that doesn't it? And he knows it doesn't take more than that. But he wants to hear Cassie. say it, right? And he says, what? To steal from the empire? What do you need? A uniform, some dirty

hands, and an imperial toolkit. They're so proud of themselves. They don't even care. They're so fat and satisfied. They can't imagine it. Can't imagine what. And here, you know, Scarsgaard is really channeling Edward from Twilight, where it's like he wants, he's like, say it. I want to hear you say it. Right? He's really bringing out as Robert Pattinson. Can't imagine what. What? Tell me what they can't imagine. And he says it, he says that someone like me would ever get inside their house, walk their floors, spit in their food, take their gear. And Luton says their arrogance is remarkable, isn't it? They don't even think about us.

Yeah. It's like, it is. No, go ahead. He's nailed an interview. He does not realize he's on. Yes. Yes. 100%.

A hundred percent. He is so slow on an uptake. like the fact that like so now the recruiting pitch begins and he's like but you know all about that and he refers to the fact that they execute his dad in the public square and I actually do wonder is that where his prison record comes from did he like rage out and like you know the officers in charge

or whatever had the good sense like we're not going to book the kid for like being upset that we just like hanged his fucking father but like it creates a record of like assault on an officer or something I wonder if maybe that's it as well But, like, yeah, Luton has read the file on Cassian. As far as Cassian knows, there is no file. And so he, you know, he pulls his pistol immediately, like, you know, wants to know who this guy is. And Sten even, like, and Luton even sort of called out with that device, you know, he needs to identify one of three things.

Like, either he's just a cutout between him and the real, like the real thief, at which point, like, Luton has no need to talk. to this guy. But the last thing he says, or you are the thing itself. I'm not here for the box. If you were the person who stole this, I'm not here for the box. You're what I'm here for. And Cassian doesn't hear that. He doesn't, it does not register for him that, like, the more valuable acquisition here

is talent. I think he, I don't, I think he hears it and isn't interested. He's not looking for a job. He's looking for freedom, right? He's looking to not be here anymore. but he's not looking to be in anyone's debt he's not looking to be on anybody's ship I mean I think this is why down the wire he's constantly looking for the box because as long as he has the box they end up losing the box in the ensuing gunfight

and he wants to keep going back for it he's putting himself at risk to go back for what if we go back for it now and I think it's partly because in his mind this is a armchair read but he can give the at the end of the day he could say I gave you the box you came here for the box I gave you the box I'm going to take my Give me my freedom. Yeah. Give me my free. You're going to pay off my debts.

I give me the 40,000 credits. We're done here. I'm not looking to get on somebody else's shipping. It'll be part of their life or part of their mission or part of their cause. I think he gets that he's being recruited a little bit and doesn't want to be recruited. He doesn't want to get caught up in something big. He's trying to get out of big things. I don't.

I do think there's a fear of what he's being recruited into, though. I think he's like there's because the guy's offering him a ship off the planet in a way you could see how a character like Cassie and be like all right well that's a ship off the planet and I'll figure like I'll figure it out from the next place but curiously or I guess in parallel to what he experienced when he left Canari is Marva was a ship off the planet and to the planet they went he never left until you know now so I wonder if

a part of it is like the next time I leave a planet with someone I'm going to like am I going to just be with them like am I with them for question mark amount of time exactly um but there's such a

he has the box he has the flexibility to leave that person there's such a distrust with the same amount of distrust that he had for Marva when Marva first approached him. I mean, I have expected Luthon to do I keep calling him Luthin and he's Lumen? Luton's right. Luton's right.

Luton. I have expected Luthin to sedate him and like just take him away. And because Because that's what Marva does. We blew past that a little bit. Marva ends up sedating him when he's a child on the separatist ship. Yeah. Literally kidnaps him.

Literally kidnaps him, right? Like it is literally kidnapping. However you want to interpret that is fundamentally he is kidnapping. Yeah. Something that her partner or husband, the dude who ends up, we think, being the now-hung stepdad, being like, I don't know about this. Yeah.

But I guess we're in it now. Big, I'm just, I'm going with this vibes from him. Oh, I just want to say he's credited as Clem Andor. And Marva is Marva andor. So I think that there are a couple and that he's definitely the father. That makes sense. Yeah. okay um well and also i guess it you know we don't know what the political state but like it is

unclear to me whether resistance the empire exists in a meaningful organized way or not like that like cassing gives this rant but you don't get the sense that he feels like there's a broader community people who are like want to do the same shit um which is why he's perplexed when luthon says us who's us exactly there is no i think there has to not be a rebellion now because otherwise the speech Marva gives doesn't really make sense, right? Because Marva's big speech about the bells is the, um, is about being on the impending rise of resistance, right? Uh, and obviously should be talking about it locally, uh, I guess, but it's hard for me not to read that as a broader thing, right? Um, uh, does anybody have that on hand? Oh, I got it. I got it. It took me a second,

but this is I guess we should let's talk about the the raid right as this conversation is happening with Luthin the cops are here so cops are here I was just going to say uh it turns out 12 people is not enough for this because you think okay like you need 12 people to go knocking on the door they don't know where the door is really um they don't but more importantly knock on marvis's door they know that yeah but also it's not a raid on a house It is a raid on a town. And so suddenly, the minute they deploy, they fly in information, they split up to three landing sites. One team is like floating around looking for wherever, like, and or might be.

Another team is like led by Mosque and Karn are heading to Marva's house. And yet another team is like working the streets. and there is a moment it's actually right after so they go into Marva's house and they turn Andor's room they interrogate her

they realize the droid knows something and they go and Carnes says unplug its power unit which I think means don't unplug it from the wall socket I mean I think it means rip its battery out and effectively kill it And Marva says Don't be scared

They can't do that You know You're like She said they can't do that You're my property This is our home And they can't do it It seems

Like they don't It actually does seem like it was a bluff And that did make me wonder Like there's some sort of protection Of a droid's person That is happening here That's an interesting catch I totally missed this

That's huh Yeah That like there's a thing you can't do to a droid, and it is like rip its battery out. That's, of course, only when someone else owns that drone.

And the droid was not owned. And it's in their house. Right. And it's in their house, right. But then horrible timing, Andor gets on the comms to talk to, uh, to talk to B2. And like, you know, try to let them know,

you know, the final message is to give to Marva. And B2 looks so sad that He's giving the game away with a little fucking comeling. He's so devastated. His little head retreats into his little body. B is like a little segmented trash can robot, like knee height that can like extend upwards or kind of retract downwards by half a foot all said based on how many of the segments move up and down.

It's just such a good mechanical design. It's so expressive. So because of the comely transmission, they can quickly like trace it back to where he is, which is that warehouse. At that point, they send the East, the East team to go, like,

raid that location. And they notice, hey, there's a ton of people outside now. They've drawn a crowd because they've raided Marva's house. And Marva's mom, again.

Marva's mom. As soon as they landed, a bunch of people, like, you start to notice, it's like you don't see it until you see it. You start to notice

all these hanging metal objects with like little mallets or little things to hit them with and as soon as they land people see them and they start hitting these makeshift bells it's actually when they leave marvas is it when they leave oh okay so this is the thing so they leave marvus and also this is like this is where you realize they're so overextended because uh karn asks mosque how long till we can link up with east team how far are we from this this meeting this is a 10 minute walk 10 minutes is a lifetime in a moment like this You realize like 10 minutes

But they have all the arrogance and confidence That this is a done deal That's their like they're like Oh it's a little stroll We'll stroll over there They've got it locked down And we'll go back him Start banging on the metal

With that like that signal That that that that That's a town of bells It's so good And they move through it wrong They move through the town Other people move through the town Like Bix moves to the town

they're ahead of them instantly they're so much further past them obviously they're running and not doing like their like stormtrooper walk but like they're they're comfortable moving through this place boarding it up getting it ready for what's about to happen in a way that the cops just are uncomfortable here and the cops so there's an implication that um so there's two things that are very northern ireland here one is that uh in northern ireland is trash cans uh that like notoriously like women in these communities would come out and start banging trash can lids on the streets. It was just a deafening clatter, but also was like a signal that like, hey, uh, like the, the, the RUC or the army is here, uh, in the neighborhood. Um, and it was a signal. It was also just like psychological warfare, which it's, it's, you can see, it's, it's unnerving to be surrounded by the sense of a hostile community. Um, and then the other part is, none of the Rosa label. And like famously, um, and this is, this is, this is not just Northern Ireland thing. Like shit, this used to happen in Boston where people cut down street signs. It happens anywhere

where there's like, hey, our neighborhood is for us. And we are basically occupied by a hostile power. So like they put street signs up, we chop them down. I know which street is Faye and which street is Kent. You don't. I spun this halfway around

and now you don't know which is which. Yeah. And so there's that moment where they're like, we don't know what street we're on. We don't know where we are. This is when they're trying to coordinate the third team to make its way toward the side. They can't do it because the third team is standing in stair road or whatever it's called stair road. And that's why can't think of quickly?

Because they can only stay on the main thoroughfares. They don't know where any of these side streets go. And as well, they send one guy to get, they crucially need the guy to get off the ground. So they send one guy to get air support for visibility. Well. Who do they send? though. Like, do they need air support or do they just need the fucking idiot like out of their

hair? Yeah, I thought that was like a cover because they like, I guess this is the scene where Yeah, one of the cuffs of Bricks is being questioned. She's trying to get to Andor because she realized that Tim has read it him out. She's upset by it. And that Tim got that information by spying on her. Her. Because she never told him. She did not tell him. Which means the only way he could have learned she did not tell him that that and or is from canary which means that if he knows about it that means that he snooped on her right which is like you broke confidence with me that's a different thing that's the last conversation they get to have she gets to run away eagerly um but she's being harassed by cop she's like visibly bleeding because they've they've they've

um like beaten her up um they've like they've handcuffed her tool wall, I think is what happens, because they're questioning her and she tries to run away. And they're like desperate, because now the, the firefight between, like, Andor and Luton are having a firefight between the people who are on the perimeter. Everything is like high intention. People are running. Bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, yeah. Like, they're grasping as stressed.

Like, they handcuff Bix because Bix is someone running by them. Like, they see her and she seems scared and they just grab her. Like, they're, they're. they are clamoring the walk, the stroll, it's not a stroll, it's a jog, it's a sprint. It's like, the workers break. The workers stop their day to come back to be with their families, right? They come back in, hang up their gloves and go pick up their kids. You know, it is like, the town is ready for this in a way that says so much about what the

relationship is, and it answers the question that you may have had when the technicians, the police technicians were like, we're technically in charge of ferrics, but they have their own way of doing things. You know, they are running themselves. Mm-hmm. But. So he, they call for the tack pod actually as Tim is approaching because shit's going haywire. So, but they end up sending this guy.

So Tim sees Bix like bleeding on the ground, like you were saying, Allie. Right, yeah. And he's like, hey, I want to go help her. Tries to approach. He has guns pointed at him. There's one guy who seems to know what's going on and knows not to shoot. The guy behind him doesn't know that.

Tim falls. And then the leader of this group at least immediately takes the gun from this guy. It is like, just get out of here. Because his only reaction is to protect his dude and we'll deal with this later. And that ends up being the guy who tries to get visual.

on this. We saw Brasso. Sorry, say again. We saw Brasso. Like, as all this goes off, all the workers piece out immediately. Brasso lingers, and we see him walking away from the ship later. Fucking King Brasso, baby. Just, like, huge dude, like, just a titan, a colossus of this community.

And, like, what's he done to that ship? Well, so this dude who, like, is a trigger-happy asshole, like, runs. to provide air support and get eyes on the situation and yeah he lifts off and he's tied to what looks like a giant fucking tank basically

and it throws the like everything Kangorong does it throws the flight characteristics of the transport off and it just like tips vertical because it's like carrying a weight and then the thing toe cable style wraps itself around the structure

of the ship and so as the guys giving a throttle he just powers into the side of the ship idiot um and that is and also this this further tips um so east team gets wiped out immediately because luthin was already set up and waiting for this he does the cool like build your exit on the way in real trade crap shit like had the door door wired with charges blew the fuck out of that team uh had to kill a few more of them because Cassian doesn't want to leave the box and they make

their way out and so it comes to Karn and Mosk's team they're trying to head off these guys who are escaping and when this when the ship crashes it is they do not know now

where anything is happening they're like they panic and they think this puts them behind us because they think it was like some sort of terrorist attack or a guerrilla raid on their position. They did not realize that it was just their ship like their incompetent dude crashing. Yeah. And so they're

set up like posted to intercept like Cassian and Luthan but now they don't know which direction is like front. Where are they, where's any of this happening? And so this is I think another reason why they end up completely turned around like literally when Cassian

and Luton show up. Why it's so easy to get the drop on Karn. The like continuous like misinformation, like miscommunication between the security team and the like the like gel of the community coming together and being able to stop this is is so good. Like we get a point of the cops being like, there's two people. No, there's three people. Wait, are there two people now?

And it's just like they are so in over their heads the entire time and like can't even like properly have a comm channel, much less stop what's about to happen to them. It's around here where Marva does, says the thing, as the bells and, you know, makeshift chimes and stuff are ringing, she says, gets to you, doesn't it?

There's a particularly sweaty, pasty, and you know, over his head, cop, you know, kind of guarding her at this point. And she says, gets to you, doesn't it? And he's like, shut it. And it keeps the bells keep going. And she's

is that's what a reckoning sounds like. You want it to stop, but it just keeps coming. And he's like, I told you to shut it. And she says, it's when it stops. That's when you'll really want to start to fret. And he's like, why? What happens then? And that is when we get the beginning of,

then, you know, things do quiet down. It is deathly quiet in this place at that point. And is that where we get the car trick? Yeah, but hold on, though. Here's the one thing. So it's a very good bluff from Marva, but nothing happens. No, when it stops, it means people have taken shelter. And like, Brasso does his thing because he's backing up Andor.

But here's where it differs from like a Northern Ireland situation. It is not like petrol bombs start flying out the windows onto this. Yeah, you're expecting. Yeah, you're expecting that the whole community is going to come fuck up these cops. but they never, they never show. And I wonder if that's just a confidence in, in Cassing, is that self-preservation? I think she's meant to be-

Bluffing two cops to get them out of her house. I mean, I think there's partly that, but I also do think she's speaking broadly here, right? This is the same talk that Luton is giving and that Andor kind of says, right? It's like, they don't know how to, they don't, they can't even imagine us, right? Luton gives a similar speech in response to that.

she is talking about it's when people go to ground and feel safe that they will get to figure out how to respond to people like you, right? The actual cut is the actual cut there to and or putting a gun to Karn's head? Yeah, because that's not a community response, but it is the moment completely going against Karn here. And boy, he should have pulled the trigger again. Well, and, but also, like, and here's the, here's the other thing that I think is, like, we're talking about the villain story that we're creating. Yes. Carn sells them out.

Mm-hmm. Like, all it takes is Luther Miller, just shoot him. And Carnes tells them. Right. Luton says, I'll kill him. I'll kill him. Yeah. And Carn tells them their exact numbers.

He says there's 12 of them. No, there's 14, 12 plus two officers. What a little fucking rat. He's humiliated. and but terrified and it is just like you he could not look

more just pathetic again it's it mirrors the other copying like let's go in together like we can we can figure this out like yeah Karn knows he's like death is knocking on like he he is absolutely at

Cassian and in Luther his will here. Like, he has no power. Absolutely no power. He has no interest in dying. None of these thoughts about have to stand up for the empire, have to tow the line.

All that out the window. Yeah. Where's the fucking loyalty now? Yeah, it is. Like, he sells out the guys he is with. And he's found fucking hogtied in a room like a little just, just pathetic, truly.

And so at that point, that's where, Cassian and Luton make their way over to the garage. And Luton just wants to grab A-car, and Cassing has the idea of, like, what if we create, like, a suicide drone, basically. Fill a car up with some bombs, make it look like we're in there, drive it right at these fools, flip it. It's so good, and they bike down completely on the hook, and there's that little beat after they shot the shit out of it.

The team that was, like, arresting Bix has finally made their way in here as well. they're the ones who finally like bring the car to a halt with a crossfire and there's this beat where because moth doesn't know what's happened to karn and he looks at karn he's like yeah we fucking did it we did it we flipped the car that's we got him and karn gives this like hesitant little like yeah we did you know what this is good it was unhappy we nailed it bro and then the car goes up right on top of the the other team uh that arrived on the scene and boy in that initial shot It looked like all of them died. Oh, yeah.

It's a big explosion. A bunch of them getting metabact and shit, but like it sure looked like three dudes got blown up. Well, that's, I think that was like, that was like a really intense part of the sequence is like, there's no, stay on them, like, go, like we need like one person, you know, it's, it's we need back to, we need to take care

of the like the soldiers that have fallen, like, They're, we've, they're gone, like, we're not pursuing, it's done. We've lost. Like, we need immediate assistance. And in the fact that this is now, like, they're going to have to call on resources. They're calling on, like, it's going to get real big. Like, this is not going to get swept under the rug. Well, this is the part.

Next episode, we're going to be, we're going to be back in that office. I don't know. I'm curious if we're going to be back on the, like, I'm so curious what the frame of the, of the show is here. Do we jump a month? Are we somewhere else in time? Do we not even see Farrex as we move off screen and start to look at the Imperial Corps? That's interesting because this is two days. This is right.

Exactly. And this is all releases one release because there's a coherent whole for three episodes. It would not surprise me if next episode and door is only in it for 20 minutes. It was supposed to be two. It was supposed to be two. And then because it got delayed, they added the third. the third, right? Like that, so it's curious, like,

given that these three feel like such a cohesive arc, I'm very curious what the next, like, what the rest of the season feels like. Totally. If, if we're in a week of Andor's life, or are we, you know, I'm just, I assume we're moving towards broke one. So obviously that seems like it's going to be. We've talked about before what the arc is,

which is this is going to be a two-season show. they've come out and said the first year is the first is a year of Andor's life And the next season is five years of Andor's life leading into Rogue One Right I forgot about that yeah To me that reads as like

Year 1 Getting the Rebellion together and off the ground Or getting Andor bought in Season 2 Five years of working for them You know I suppose we will see I need more brazzo though

I also need more brazo Right When I say there's a chance that this show could betray us and disappoint us. Part of what I mean is it could trade away a lot of what we love about this for locations that don't feel grounded, for focus that is more big picture, referential Skywalker saga adjacent. It feels like it used to drift on stuff from main series or something like that. We'll see how it goes. I'm very hyped off of this opening arc.

I mean, the last five minutes of this are, like, some of the best, like, just shots of Star Wars in such a lot. Like, we're close up on the aftermath where we see the Adidas kid and his dad, the Carhart, Work in Progress, dad, come through to pick up Bix, and we see BMO, B2 emo. Emo. Be too emo, yeah. Be too emo too. With Marva, Marva is in tears. You see the cold breath.

Like she hasn't turned the heat on. Karn is standing in the wreckage. Like eyes red and watery and just looking so fucked up. And Mosque is like, sir, we need to get out. Like, he's like ruddy and, and like, it's just there's such a like there's so many different levels of

like it's like desperation and defeat and like mourning like you feel like Marva's she's sitting amongst the the the

as the cops like ravaged her place and like through everything of the floor she's sitting amongst all this debris crying with her like cold breath like you wonder And it's his childhood room, I think. I think there's a stuffed bantha on the corner. Stuff bantha. His blowgun is in that room.

And we get this serious intercut, like, again, who haven't listened, the intercut back and forth between Cassie being pulled out of the separatist ship, Marvin, but being held by Marva, right? It passed out from her sedating him. And then her crying in his room with his stuff. And then him moving through the hallways of, of her ship as a kid and then moving into him,

moving into Luthens, the hallways of Luthens ship. These are like very direct connected, you know, cuts that are meant to connect these two experiences of him leaving a place with a person, entering a new life. It's very good. Also, we get Bix completely breaking down over Kim being dead. We see Baso in a bar, like, he, like, there's an impending, this isn't the last time cops are going to descend on.

Yeah. He's all right, well, we got to deal with this now. Yeah, this is like this is kind of the night like I'm curious if we do a time skip where we stick with the ramifications of this because like you can Hein's going to come back

and now you can't. Like now there's at least four cops dead at the end of this at the end of this raid, probably more. It's an unauthorized raid. Uh-huh. Yeah. Except they're going to have to

authorize it like that's the thing is i think in a situation like this it's all going to have to get some sort of bullshit in promoter and you're going to have now really come down on this community and like make sure they know who's in charge at which point like and that so that's that's that's the other thing like brasso's sitting there knowing that like they're going to be back tomorrow and it'll be more serious and it'll be more violent like they won today but but at what like the cost is is going to be quite high well an empire like this can't afford to like let these things slide that like part of it is the illusion of invulnerability so like don't even think about resisting because it's pointless because we will just come back stronger and harder the next day

so you have to come back stronger and harder the next day even if the best thing you could do is say like cost of doing business once again like we're going to throw card under the bus and none of this ever happened does not seem like that's going to be in the cards it'd be very it would be very funny if we never saw him again except for a brief scene where hines is like firing him but I he so feels like the primary antagonist of the show at this point and I'm sure I mean yeah the fact that him in and sorry go ahead I'm just curious if we stay with him or if we stay with ferricks or if we stay with andor I mean we're going to stay with andor his name is on the box he's leaving this place behind we're going to get 20 minutes of footage somewhere else

next episode where he is somewhere else I'm curious of all we get next next to episode from Heinz is, or not from Heinz, from, from, uh, Karn is like him being fucking chewed out for this maneuver and stuff being, lines being written on the wall about what's coming next. Yeah. The, in my instinct is that they're going to let this breathe for a second because it's so intense off of three, uh, that you want to let it cool for a second, but maybe I'm wrong and they're going to pedal down. I, we'll see. I think we get, I think we get Karn seething. Like, I think we need to build him, build him into, like, to get dark-sided-pilled, you know?

Like, we need to, like, they can do that in three episodes. We can see him again in three episodes, and they can, we can see him seething and be like, oh, shit, he's back. And we'll see. We'll see. One thing we just don't have yet, though, is, like, yes, he does feel like primary antagonist, except here's the problem. He's been completely ineffective.

Exactly. And so, like, yes, it could be that his humiliation is going to drive him to be a darker and more evil character, but the thing we don't have right now is any competence. We also just, the other thing that hasn't happened in the show yet

is like Mon Mothma showing up. We know that this show cares about Chorusat from the trailer, and I imagine they're not putting episode eight stuff in the trailer. They're putting episode four stuff in the trailer. Right, right.

So the reason that I'm like setting expectations for a pivot is because they showed us the pivot, so I'm expecting the pivot, right? Yeah, I think you're probably right. But we'll say. I mean, we'll know in a few days, you know, fortunately. I guess that we'll call this, we'll call it an arc and we'll wrap up this episode.

We'll be taking the other ones one by one. I wonder if they are more like self-contained or whether they actually do unfold narks like this. And now it'll just be week by week, which we'll be excruciating. But, you know, fun. I know. We've been so spoiled getting these three off the, on the first draw. Right. We got a really, we got a really sweet, like, feature film.

to open this up and now it's back to back to TV land but you know one thing I can promise you is our running times will dwarf the length of the show if you're like man

I wish Andor was twice as long boom a more civilized age tying it all together in knots but I got another Tony Gilroy quote from an article that dropped today Rolling Stone has an interview

with Tony Gilroy The title of this is What's the Bodega Look Like on Corrassant Tony Gilroy on making Andor and fighting off a Michael Clayton TV series Um

So you say fighting off Fighting off a Michael Clayton TV series That sounds like someone wanted him to do one And he was like I don't want to do that I'll have to read this whole thing I wouldn't let it happen but the movie is perfect so What are you going to do? Uh huh

Um He says There was talk of you initially This is Rolling Stone says there was talk of you initially directing the whole show in addition to the show running it. What did you lose and what did you perhaps gain by not ending up directing this thing? And he said, I gained survival. This show is just a maximally imaginative experience.

Every single thing we do has to be designed, every environment that we go to. And we're going to go to a lot of different environments. You got to design the culture, their music. How do they eat? How do they dress? Rolling Stone says, what's really funny about what you're saying is this is the same thing George Lucas said about why it was so hard to do these movies. And Gilroy says, oh, really, I didn't know that. But I mean, I'm sure, because it just is.

You can never just say, oh, they're going to the bodega. Because what's a bodega look like on Corrassant? And that just launches 40 people and 17 meetings. What are the products? What are they selling? Everybody had their hands full. There are plenty of work to go around. And I'll read one more thing from this.

And then I'll stop. Someone says, tell me about the new droid. Or Rolling Stone says, tell me about the new droid B2 Emo. And he says, I wanted that. It was I wanted that. It wasn't a mandate from anybody or anything like that. We wanted the salvage droid. But I also thought, you know, a droid that's an old dog.

Let's have a dog. Let's have that emotional component and see how it goes. And again, that's something you can tiptoe forward on. You don't want it to be kitchy or cute. You really want it to be emotional. Creature effects artist Neil Scanlan and the Creatures Department. It's so much fun to go up there. They are so great.

That's a B2E, Mo. Mina's gotten so many walks since I saw the show. It's like, all right, girl. Whatever you want. at your service at your service absolutely but yeah

so we will be back let's see I think we'll be listening on Mondays while this is running right that's the plan this episode's going to come out on Wednesday

yeah I think right or is this episode going to come out this episode might come out on this episode might come out before Wednesday we'll see no I bet this will come out

on Wednesday the 28th like our normal thing and that'll be the announce of the new move And then going forward or hope is for it to come out on Mondays By Monday's ahead of the next week's episode Yeah They will be shorter than this one because we won't be doing as much set up

Yeah No way no way we go like two hours on one episode This is 320 for three episodes And needing to set up the whole thing That ain't bad No that's not bad for us Great I'm proud of us

I'm the one who is to edit it shit So So, as always, if you enjoyed this episode and want to support the show, you're encouraged to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. If you want to get access to our incredible listener, Q&As and special editions, you can do so at patreon.com slash civilized. We'll be, obviously as we do this, we'll be doing our monthly Q&A about and or. And I guess taking questions about Dark Forces, too, as well. Hey, why, the fire at the fucking gun. Let me tell you.

The fact that the gun's like magazine or clip or whatever in the middle of it, rotates is so sick. It's such a good design. I don't know what it does, but it's cool. So yeah, we'll be back in like probably less than a week. But until then, just take a moment to appreciate the quiet heroism of doing absolutely fucking nothing. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.