A More Civilized Age: A Star Wars Podcast - 52: "Rix Road" (Andor 12)

Episode Date: November 23, 2022

Surprise! Thanks to a very kind mystery contact with their own very kind mystery contacts inside of Lucasfilm (and/or Disney Plus), we were given last minute screener access to the Andor finale. And you better believe we hustled to watch it, prep our notes, and deliver the longest episode of our Andor season and one of the longest episodes we've ever recorded. Come for our emotional reactions to the return of voices we'd thought we'd heard the last of. Stay for our dive into 2000s-era anarchist philosophy. And then rate us five stars for all the time we dedicate to talking about our very favorite absolutely rotten relationships. ALSO: As a special bonus for our Patrons, we recorded our own live reactions when we group watched this episode together. Go to patreon.com/civilized, support us at the $5 level, and you can hear each of our exuberant pop offs, our surprised gasps, our wavering voices, and our howls for the most rancid of love stories.   NEXT TIME: No episode on the 30th (this is that episode), and potentially no episode on the 7th. But we have a bunch of great stuff queued up for December, so look forward to it! Show Notes The Coming Insurrection by the Invisible Committee We are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism 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 Zakeney, joined by Aliaq Kempora, Austin Walker, and Natalie Watson. Surprise, through a sleeper agent we cultivated at Disney over many years, sacrificing countless operatives. We have thrown the House of Mouse into chaos with a palace coup, perhaps. Who could say? But it does mean we got hold of the serious finale of Andor early. And that's enabled us to bring you next week's episode early over this holiday weekend. Unfortunately, it also means we have come to the end of our weekly Andor shows.

No! I'm so sad. I'm so sad and upset. I'm so mad and sad and upset. But the party, hang on, the party is not completely over. We do have some special stuff planned, some. Cool conversations I think we'll have on the tail end of this before we resume our Our viewing our series on the Clone Wars

Clone Wars is a show whatever you want our Clone Wars book club our book club And of course at the end of the month we will be able to have a Q&A on the whole series for our backers at patreon.com Slash Civilized The Dead Speak I mean, yes. That's one of the big notes I have. Unlike the way that concept was used in the sequel trilogy's fractured storylines to sort of spackle them all together and impose a flat circular structure on the world and characters of Star Wars. Here we repeatedly encounter the words of the dead as most of us experience them, as memories, as living words on a page in a dead author's voice, as deathbed messages to be passed.

the loved ones, and finally as political valediction. Over the course of this episode, these speeches bring countless characters to pivotal moments and decisions, or perhaps they are really just beautiful narrations around decisions and motivations that have already been made long before a revolt finally erupts on pharynx. Throughout this finale, Andor raises questions about the role of rhetoric, what attempts to achieve, how it works on its audiences, and when the time for rhetoric and talking,

stops and what happens after. It's praxis time, baby. So we had a interesting experience. This is the first one we all watched together. Can we just stay on that last bit for a second before we talk about how we watch this? Which is there was

a moment later on in this show in this episode where Marva's hollow projection is speaking and she says that she feels like she can sense the people there. And it's like an inverted force ghost and it made me rethink through every other dead speak message here another one from marva the one from nemic in those relations and like for a show where the

force is never mentioned by name um it or its opposite or its most material variation is so present in this episode um that i just want to maybe raise that here so that we can return to it and think through that as a major theme in the episode, that there is something in solidarity or something in the sense of communal, you know, culture and communal love. This is silly, but there's lots of hugs in this episode. People pull themselves together and cling tightly. And that is the force, you know, that is the force in our regular lives.

And I think that that's something really a really radical take on this. not that there aren't hugs and touches in Star Wars, but I don't think you normally see those two things brought together, and I think it does a really good job. And speaking of communal experiences and the feeling of doing things together, Rob, you were about to say that thanks to our mole inside of Disney HQ, we were able to watch this a certain special way. Yeah, I don't know how detailed we want to get about the exact ways we watched it. But we found a way to sync up our viewing experience. And boy, speaking of hugs, that just felt like an hour long hug, really, as we all just sort of basked in in this episode together and tried to catch what was happening behind the watermark. I was really hope. I was going to like suggest somehow that we, you know, however we end up watching this episode, we watch it all together because this felt like season finale and or I want to be here with you watching it. Like there were a couple of times we've been in New York around the same time and we've wanted to do like in person.

things around recording and stuff like that. But that was like, it was perfect. It was like being in the living room together. It was. Rob and I both had hot chocolate. I also had a beer. It's a good mix. It was great.

I had sake. It was yummy. Should we say that if anyone at home wants us to be a group hug, they can go to patreon.com slash civilized? They can. Because along with this episode, we'll be putting up our live reaction mp3 which you'll have to sync up to your own disney plus subscription or whatever uh and then sync up again when we're like there's no way they would do a post credit

sequence i forgot about this yeah we you'll see we skip we get at the end it's like well the credits are really long there's no way there's a post credit and then i jump behind the show it was a joke we're like there's no post credit thing and then you just slide your cursor over to the end we're like oh oh oh stop it stop it now stop it now Mace Windu shows up I'm putting a team together Can you imagine I would be so mad

I'd be so mad No it would look great though And like the music would be hitting And like the set would be hitting It would make it good That's the thing right If my takeaway for Andor It's such a good team that I would follow these people

down into some dark paths In terms of content Because I believe that they could pull it off which is remarkable. So the summary is really simple because I think this is actually an episode that is so taught, we're basically going to go blow by blow anyway.

The broad outlines are that Manmathma, her hand is forced. She is creating a cover story for why she needs to take this loan slash devils pact with Davo Scullden. And at the end of the episode, we will see her and Perrin introducing their daughter formally

to the Skullden family and whoever the little Skullden kid is to be continued, I guess, on the next season of Andor. But most of the action here centers exclusively on all the characters converging on Farix, including, of course, Andor, who learns, who already knew, of course, last episode that Marvel had passed, but early in this episode also learns that the Imperials are holding Bix. Meanwhile, the Imperials are arranging this entire funeral and massive crowd control measures as an elaborate mousetrap for Andor, and under Dedra's guidance, really do not seem to know, like, think about what other impacts that could have on the funeral.

And all of that is, of course, brought to a head during the funeral. when as part of the ceremony where they are taking the stone that sort of contains Marva's remains and essence to the wall where it is to be laid, Marva has also recorded a speech that B2 plays on his big hollow projector. It's a big hollow projector. Good job, B2. It's real big, and it's one hell of a speech. and the Imperials give it a long-running time. This is real shades of Mark Anthony

just grabbing the mic in Julius Caesar and just letting the crowd sort of mull over what they are hearing. And of course, eventually, as she reaches the, you know, the climax of her speech, she calls for open revolt and violence against the empire. The empire kind of strikes first, trying to shut down her message and that sparks a massive uprising and riot

that also provides perfect cover for Andor to go about rescuing Bix but that's not the only rescue that happens in this episode of course Cyril Karn and Sergeant Mosque ex-Sarchant Mosque are also in attendance at the funeral and Cyril

sees that Dedra is in danger and shitty Han Solo rescues her. Oh, my God. And we have a truly weird moment that we think we're at to linger over when we come to it. But it was Carnet.

I have paid some of notes about like political theory, but I think we may go longer on Carned Dedra than the 30 seconds of Carned Deadra. It's so, it's, it laid me the fuck out. You can hear that happen live, Patreon.com slash civilized. Who, I'm getting, I'm getting lightheaded already.

It's worth it just for Allie's commentary. It's worth $5 for Rally's loss on that scene. Yeah, Al, you had a mask off in that scene. Any sort of restraint you had. The tension was there. The acting was there. The looks were there. The, like, it was all there.

There were looks. I didn't happen. No card could make that look. He fucking, this was his moment, and he nailed it. He was. He was, like, patrolling his face muscles. He was, like, knowing what to do. Can I just say, I knew he had it in him.

I knew. Do you think he was inspired by Marvis' speech? That he was like, he was hyped up. I was like, I'm actually, so when we discussed this, yeah, we do see Mosque and Cyril taking in that speech, and they are reacting to it. Like, we're going to have to get there. We've got to get there. It's not the end of the episode.

Andor rescues Bix, takes her to where Brasso and B2 and some of the daughters of Ferricks are escaping the planet on a ship. But his path lies a different way as he goes to where he knows Luthon keeps a ship when he sneaks to Farrick's and confronts Luton with the accusation that Luton was there to assassinate him, which Luton admits. and And Andor presents Luthan With a simple choice that ends the season Kill Andor Or bring him in And then after the credits You see the gizmos

That the gang was building On Narcina And of course They are Death Star Components Wow Wow Where do we even I think we had to start with the music

It's music Wow I mean, so this edition of the of the intro music had horns as its main component. And as soon as we, as soon as they started, we all were like funeral, funeral time. It's funeral zone. I mean, it's one of the most sad and mournful versions of the intro music that we've heard. well up to a point the thing I would say is

it rises and at a certain point the horns begin to sound like wailing sirens in some ways but also underneath them there is a driving beat that gives it also a marshaler like I think it begins as a processional and turns into something more kin to a march would you say it climbs

a thing that I want to note here is and this is you know this is kind of shot through a little bit, but most of the music so far has been largely synth-based electronic. And, you know, yes, you can do, you can have a band with multiple electronic performers in it, synth performers in it. But by and large, when you think about electronic music, you're thinking about the work of a composer who is using stems and, you know, digital tools to produce a song in a, you know, in a program. And likewise, you could use programs like that to produce orchestral work.

People do it all the time. But the feeling of multiple performers playing instruments together is a different feeling for this intro versus the other intros that switch from synthetic, you know, and electronic instrumentation to the sound of horns playing, to the sound of drums, which we again get to in the actual funerary procession later in the episode. episode, it feels different. It has that sense of a bunch of people together, not everything being exactly lined up, the feeling of multiple people breathing out, you know, into the instrument. And I think that that's obviously extremely resonant thematically. So we open on sort of the night before the funeral on, on Farix. And, you know, there's, this is, this episode has a lot of, it It relies a lot on cross-editing, basically, we jump from scene to scene.

And one of the things that sort of ties together multiple scenes in this sort of night before are shots of, I forget Pack's kid's name, but Pack is the guy who read the Secret Radio. I think it's Willemann, Willman, Willman, Willman, Willman Pack. I wonder about, Willamon? Wilman. Wilman, W-I-L-M-O-N. It just makes me move about Bo Willemann.

who was the writer. Yeah. But we see him multiple times over the course of this evening like wiring together some kind of bomb. And I think crucially, you know, this is someone who is, you know, we do not hear speaking in this, but as he is doing it, he is doing it. Like, as he is building this explosive,

he is literally under the guise of a like bust-like portrait, a hollow portrait of his slain father. And it is, this is not a fan. family photo. It looks like, you know, it looks a lot like the photos, you know, the Imperial Prison Bureau took of Andor that we've seen flashed multiple times. But overall, it is just, like he is, he is building sort of this tool of revolt while being stared at by, you know, the ghost of his, of his father in some ways. And this is, this is going to be, this explosive is going is going to arrive like at a pivotal moment in the in the funeral tomorrow and of

course you know literally as as we see a bomb being made uh for for the funeral for for attack in the empire we also see deadra arriving and we see the sort of easy overconfidence of deadra and the team that has been left behind here on ferricks deadra's got her um I don't know what flavor of Stormtrooper were calling these, but they're like... Blacks, the all, like... All black, gray, smoke gray armor. Right. You know, it's not...

I don't think it's literally the dark troopers because those are droid. They're like... Is that still true in canon that they're the droids that are also stormtroopers are the ones that show up in in Canada in that Mandalorian season two episode? Yeah, those were like all droids, yeah. So that was, they weren't even like cyborgs. So these are just like special ops, whatever, all black stormtroopers. Like Gestapo stormtroopers. Yeah, she has never looked more fash than landing here in her, in her white overcoat, you know, flanked by these special stormtroopers.

Yeah. And really quick, going back to Wilman making the bomb, you know, Pock himself does not, his father does not speak to him here, but when you start thinking about, like, well, where did he learn how to make the bomb? Like, he didn't go on the internet. His dad probably taught him basic electronics. You know, like, this is the job that they do. They're salvagers.

They're, they're, you know, repair. They do repairs. They do all that stuff. They dispose of hazardous materials. When you see that her landing, this is a city that is built in the shadow of what looks like a dinosaur graveyard of old warships, it looks like. They're old Starcruisers.

Yeah. And so, like, you have to think about that as being like again this generational thing that's happening this this familial thing that's happening where he's using that knowledge that he learned from working in the shop with his father for years to now to now do something uh that that at least in his mind is about what they did to his father right and i mean as as he's working on the bomb he has a hollow photo of his father you know sitting in front of him on his desk right right um we also uh You know, we see Bix, who is, looks pretty shattered by your experience, which is, you know, we've been, we had an inkling had had happened that the torture had really devastated her. But at this point now, she has sort of curled up protectively in her room and is keenly aware of the little six-eyed camera that is keeping an eye on her.

And that is, of course, Dedra on the other side of that camera, just sort of checking it on Bix to see that everything is as she left. it before she goes on an evening walk with with corv you know and when we see them them go on that walk dedra also puts on what she thinks is a disguise she is the only person well i guess no you know it occurs to me i hadn't seen anyone wear an outfit like this until the next day when we see the daughters of ferricks in some ways with the formal like cloaks that come out but she's wearing like a cardinal cloak and i don't i feel like like nobody on Ferris says it like wears anything like that um you know Corv stands out it's work clothes here you know she is in Assassin's Creed call you know what I mean she is like

she's going undercover in the way you might go undercover in core on course on course on it is it does look like the cover of homeland with yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah the showtime show uh huh it literally is that yeah and I imagine again if you think about you go back to the episode where Vell and Clayah meet on Corrassant. This might fly there, right? The, like, the layered fabric, you know, the hood. But it doesn't really, like, there are hoods on, on Farrex, but they're, like, the hood's very hot-ish.

Yeah, everything's utilitarian. This is, she's, the way that she's dressed is clearly has more of a stylish or aesthetic form to it, whereas everyone's clothes on Ferrex are dirty. Like, hers are clean. Yeah, absolutely. There's like grease stains, you know, like visible dirt all over people's clothes just from daily life in Ferrex. And it's obviously not something of value to them is, is, you know, having pristine pressed clothes. So I think that's honestly one of the big best tells of both what's his name, Vosk.

No, what's his name? Corv. Corv, yeah, sorry. Corv and Dejra is that they're, like, clean. Their clothes are clean. Yeah. They've never gotten their hands dirty.

No dirt under the fingernails. Corf's costume is a little bit better, but Corv's problem is he just never looks like he goes out of fits in. He's a guy who's like never has the right thing to do at the right moment. And like the depths of how out of their depth they are as spies, as it were,

is that Cint is right there. All he does is look around and watch people. Everyone's working. Nobody is just chilling on Farrix. Everyone is working or on doing... It's a planet with only two deadbeats. Andor and Nurchy. Like literally everyone else has

a real job. And everyone knows the handful of people who don't. It's true. Nurti, by the way, is in some of these opening scenes overhearing Zanwan talk to Brasso about

the fact that he called Andor that Zan won, or that cast called and has been formed and Nurti's, you can see immediately that Nurti's mind, the gear starts spinning. It's, I also like the small detail that Zan is worried he's screwed up.

Like, Zan immediately goes to Brasso because it dawns on him after that brief call that the, you know, we saw Andor hung up immediately. The conversation ended the moment that horrible news came over the line, but the thing that Zan has now realized he should have told him is also this entire place is crawling with

surveillance. You can't come to this funeral. And so Zan suspects, but, yeah, you know. So the next time we see Nurchy, he's, uh, you know, sitting down for a drink with, with Zan and Nurti's trying to like reverse psychology him. He's like, he's like, boy, I would really hate to be Cassie and andor right now. Um, it must really suck to not get to bury your mom and Brassos. gotta bury your mom like oh breaks your heart breaks your heart like well you know actually and he's

no no no don't don't don't tell me anything i wouldn't don't you know something i don't want any yeah don't tell me walks away smirking walks away one another and all this is you know we i think we talked about before you know in the trio of episodes of the folks entirely on ferricks about sort of the place of informers in these communities and such

and this is something I think is like looming large in Nurchi's imagination is that even here he doesn't I think it's kind of twofold

I think he's scared of tipping his hand like if things don't go well or something and Zan would remember this conversation things might go poorly for Nurti

after the fact if Andor shows up and gets busted immediately but also I think there's the element of like not wanting to be unmasked to your to your people and so you know you have you have very pleased with the fact that all his suspicions have have been confirmed but also i think there is that that little bit of even here he's hedging and also like a little bit embarrassed of

what would happen if people fully realize and see him for for what he's become here it feels like he acts to some degree here you know we see him throughout the episode you know to maybe take him off the plate for us really quick you know he ends up trying to rat out and or later he's the one who gives them information on where andor is kind of posted up and then it ends up being in the wrong place of the wrong time when an explosion happens and and throughout it we get shots of him you know doubting whether what he did was the right thing as things start to develop and as he starts to hear you know what's happening outside what he goes into the belly of the beast he is taken he like tells uh corv to like fake arrest or fake arrest him and take him into um the hotel and there he sits amongst you know storm storm troopers uh isb agents all the different imperials and stuff all the different And you can see the doubt, but I got the impression. You can see the doubt as he sees people starting to be arrested out of the crowd.

Like, as he sees his fellow people, I think he begins to realize I will always be one of them. And I'm never going to be one of who I'm sitting. Like, I am the odd one out here. I'm, I'm, well, that's the thing is it feels like at the moment he makes the decision in this early part of the episode, that it feels like he thinks and or being. caught is inevitable right he's going to get busted look at this place why not be the one who picks up the paycheck on it right uh i'm just i'm just greasing the wheels this is just going to make it go by quicker right no you know what i mean and importantly he's not he's not asking for a place within no he's asking for a way off the planet so well that's a good point it were said like

honestly in a lot of ways he's been set up as in so it's like a parallel to and or that they you know he Andor owed him that money, but they both seem like guys who's hustled on the margins of pharix. And what Nurti is trying to do is what Andor set out wanting out of the Aldani job. I want to get paid

and I want to get out. Yeah, exactly. I'll, you had something. Yeah, I do wonder how much of like his behavior is self-preservation and how much like he knows of both sides because like he pointedly does not and I'm sure people wouldn't let him in on this,

but like he does not do. anything to stop the riot, he protects himself so that he will be behind enemy lines and like not on the streets being beat up or shot. Like I wonder how much of that is like premeditated because it's such a specific thing of like, hey, can you take me in? Yeah. I genuinely don't think you think there's going to be a riot. Because what makes the riot inevitable is, well, I think what makes it inevitable is Marva's speech and what the empire does and reaction to it. And I think so much of what unfolds over the course of that speech for Nurchy is also like the community's you know, mom is out there lecturing all of you about what she's, what she's seen and sort of

the picture she paints of what life on Farrex has become. And I think, you know, you see landing on his face, this realization of partly, yeah, I'm a man without a country. Like, I'm not with my people. These imperials are also not my people. And at this moment, I feel guilt for not being among my own. And also I feel guilt at

now hearing this, having sort of divided myself off from these people, having that, like, having Marva speak from that perspective. And now it's too late for Nurtjee to go back on what he's done. He's, like, he isn't aware that these,

that the sides were drawn up this way. until this moment and unfortunately he's found himself on on the wrong side of it um you know the the night sort was brought to a close with a cut to corassant where madma is fighting down uh her her anxiety and stress uh she's she's in her wrap and we see her sort clawing at it and have to uh you know open up her jacket and and try to catch her breath as she brings the car around to pick up Perrin who was saying goodnight to people at the club. She's not pulling the car around. She's been waiting in the car.

It's parked already. It's like she got in the car and he kept saying goodbye. Yeah. You know, it's one of those things where like you agree to leave the party and then you leave and your partner has not left. Oh my God. The car is completely still from the beginning of that scene. And they're in the front of the park.

Like they're not around the, there's she's been sitting at the entrance to the party. She had the car valied back. Yes, exactly. He says to her, I thought you left. Right. Yes. Yes. I love that he walks in with his drink.

It is like, he's giving Julian from trailer, trailer park boys. And I'm just, I love that for, I love those. The urine rules. In the glass. In the glass is amazing. And then he kills it. He kills it as soon as he gets in. And it's like, you could have done that in the party.

And that, no, he brought it with him. Why not? It's his glass. It's his glass now. Pairin ain't driving. It's not his glass It's somebody else's glass from their house So the other thing that unfolds here

It's gaslight time Because no sooner has he sat down Gatekeep check Gaslight She's seet at him She opens with I can't believe you've been gambling again And Heron maybe for once in his life

is accused of something he has not done. Like, for once in his married life, a parent is innocent of these crimes. And he's actually offended. He's kind of shocked by these allegations. And crucially, at this point, Mademma asks Chorus the driver, hey, like give us some privacy,

knowing that this is too juicy. And so we cut to Chorus as he reopens the microphone to listen to this domestic strife. And Perrin is like, whoa, hold on. Let's just go back to the party and find who's been telling you this stuff. And let's clear it up. I'm like, I promised you I wouldn't gamble. I haven't been gambling.

And Mom and Mama just keeps going in. You know, go to Kanto Bite and do whatever is you need to do. Go to the gambling planet from the last Jedi if you got to fucking play cards. Or whatever else you do. Or whatever else you get up to. and Perrin sort of like you kind of because here's my assumption on this is Perrin legitimately he has never her wingman in this way occasionally plays like the political husband part and he is aware of that role but like here he is just genuinely

baffled and so he sort of you know whines at her this is wrong Mon this is people trying to take you down by coming after me you tell me who is saying this, and I will tell you why. And he raises another question, where would I get the money? And that's what Madhama wanted to bring this conversation around to. That's what scares me the most.

Uh-huh. And he says, someone is lying to you and she finishes with him, that we can agree, and looks toward the driver's compartment. Uh-huh. I'm a parent truther. I'm sorry. I think I'm sorry. I thought. I think that they're in on this. I think that he's doing a good job.

Shitting man. AMCA diving in front of him I gotta tell you, Allie, this is how shitty men win This is it Everyone's so charmed by how shitty they are This whole season I was like I'm with my mother, I believe in her, fuck parrot But him in the seed I was like

They're in on this together They agreed on this and I know that I'm wrong But I want to have any idea how much I've been wearing my smoking jacket since Andor started back up. Like, I see these cozy motherfuckers just being miserable, and I'm like, damn. Oh, oh, to be burrowed. You should start walking around with a glass of alcohol at all time. Yeah, unlike what you do now, Rob.

Yeah, come on. We should close the loop on them on Mothma. Yes, yes. And the, we see Clovis, the driver, Chloris, Chloris, not Clovis. Clovis is Rush Clovis. Right, right, right, right.

We'll address him later. And Clovis Bray? Do we have two different? No, Clovis Bray is destiny. I always get this fuck up in my mind. Um, uh, but we get in, in the ISB HQ. A Blevin siding. A blevin sighting.

Blevin talking to Chloris, uh, haven't seen Blevin in a minute, I feel. No. And regrettably, it does seem like Bliven is exactly who he seems to be, which is is he's smart, he's capable, and he's obvious. Like, when Chorus brings this report. It's Chloris. Chloris? Yeah, it's Chloris.

Per the subtitles, anyway. When Chloris brings this report explaining that they're having these financial difficulties and seems to be tied to gambling, Blevyn loves it because it explains so much about these finances. He probably should just look at those finances and come to

his own conclusions, but he doesn't. He's happy to have an explanation, and I think the implication in the scene is they also see it as a way in, a way to gain leverage, a way to gain understanding. And it kind of does exactly what Tay, what Tay suggested it would, which is that by doing a deal with a dude like Skullden, it would make Manmavama seem to Skullin, like everybody else on Khorasan, but that's also apparently working on the ISB. that the minute this report reaches Blevon, it makes him less curious when it should make him more. Right. He's like, ah, this actually answers a lot of

questions about the finances here. Because suddenly it's like, oh, the money's been moving around. Remember, $100,000 a month coming from the account to the personal account. And suddenly it makes sense. And currently they have 400,000 unaccounted for? And it's two, but yeah, it's hundreds of thousands of dollars

we have missing credits missing from not, have not gone back in. right they've not they've not found their way back into the into the flow they've disappeared because what they've gone to is luthen and so suddenly it's like oh yeah that's the money that you owed the card sharks you know that's the or the loan sharks who you took money out from so you could go gamble or whatever right like that suddenly it makes perfect sense you paid somebody under the table you brought that shit to an underground you know gambling ring yeah okay that sounds like rich people shit you know and as we dreaded you know where we leave manmabma and perrin they both look like they're going to going to the gallows as they lead uh they lead leda to the door to receive the skullden family and i swear she smirks she looks who's she who is the she in this question uh mom or later later okay yeah yeah yeah yeah yes like lady like our little our little trad calf chandrelin uh she is she looks pleased as punch this is a dub for her she got one of her Tradulin.

Tragulin. God. There's a Zee, who did the incredible cover art for this, for our show, made a really good point in a group chat I'm in with them about the Tradgatcath stuff, about the Chandraillan stuff that I think also gets put into conversation here with some of the Farrak stuff that we're going to get from Marva especially. and also from cast putting his or holding his or touching his father's brick in the wall and remembering some of that. Zizi said, okay, so maybe this came up in the episode and I missed it, but something I really liked in episode 11, there's a sort of fun juxtaposition between Leda's interest in the old ways and the presentation of the Farah's burial rights. Something about idealized tradition versus practiced. I think it's interesting that the chant Leda is doing with the elder is presumably not an old.

chant because it's referring to returning to the old ways. It's about the old ways. It couldn't be an old chant because then it would just be about the ways that are. It's a demonstration of cultural value that the old ways can have for a community that practices them versus the poisonous desire for a perfect old way practiced by reactionaries building a community around searching for a cultural practice to fill a void. And I think that juxtaposition is super clear between those two things, right? Like you go get the elder and then you do the chant about how the old ways will save us.

No one says that on Farrex. People just say these are our ways. These are our ways. I lived with our ways. They're part of who we are. And I think that juxtaposition is really, really good. And I think is, again, like you look at this scene and you see, like, Tay doesn't look happy. Not Tay, sorry, Perrin doesn't look happy about this either, you know?

It's not like he's like, all right, yeah, cool. And maybe that's just because he doesn't trust, because he knows who. Dameus Golden is. You know, he knows what the score is there. But I, Leda, please just punch.

Yeah. I, I do think that an interesting part of the, um, Farik's side of this is that their ritual, like, adapts to their tradition adapts to their present where like they, they use their ritual in,

um, as a, as a tool against the oppressive, you know, fascists that are occupying pharix. And so in that way, it is even more so a part of them. It is like, it is a tool. It is like an act that they are willing to manipulate and use to support themselves. Yes. I've never popped so hard as how that brick gets used.

Fucking rules. Patreon.com slash level. Well, also dawns on me here, though. because I guess this reminds me in some ways of I often contemplate how Mina must experience the world as like yeah like but also a very smart dog but like naturally it's your dog of course yeah but but I think it's like

the thing is this is like this is a creature that I've often theorized has to engage in magical thinking where you have still a little agency, but you want to make things happen, and so you try little rituals and you do your little thing, and occasionally the thing you want happens, and you're like, I figured it out, I figured out how to make the good thing happen. And dawned on me in this moment, Leda thinks this is her victory. Like, Leda thinks that by doing all this fucking embracing the elder and all these, like, you know, in the harbor, tie me down, bind me up, whatever, all that, all the

catechism shit she thinks like through will and through like discipline and embrace of the old ways she has bent her parents to doing this and she does not realize that she's a pawn in this like this is this is the real old way you are being used to seal a marriage alliance yeah like this is this is it you're you're you're a commodity right and this whole chant that you know is to paper over that. It's meant to make you feel like you have agency and something you do not have, right? It's meant to make you feel like you're submitting to this. Right, exactly. Is it self-comfitting. Can you imagine anything, can you imagine anything more painful than not being able to submit and be held by all these constraints and structures and rules? And

meanwhile, the actual causes are absolutely obfuscated. You know, she was not, as far as we know, and I think we can be pretty confident, she was not briefed on what the reason was. behind this. Imagine poor Perrin. You're like, hey, you and Mamavamah may not agree on much, but one thing was that, like,

our marriage is pretty, like, trashed, and, like, the customs that brought us to this, it hasn't really worked, we're not doing this. And then overnight, she's like, I think we need to introduce Leda to Davos-Sculton's kid. Can you imagine the way,

especially, like, you just have this, like, accusation of like in your eyes eyeballs and gambling that can you imagine you're saying to be like what and it's davo it's probably the dude you did used to go gamble with and to do other stuff with bro is davo ooh is davo like a friend of parents yeah they've talked about that yeah he he makes that illusion yeah when i know your i know your husband well i know your husband well and she's like i bet you do i forgot about that uh-huh i forgot about that but In this case, is this a moment where Perrin and Leda actually feel supported by Mon Mothma? Not by parents' face.

Go look at parents' face in that scene. He is not happy about this. He is not like, you know, because we've seen him be in that mode where he's like effusive and like, hmm, smug. Sure. He's actually looks kind of. This is a look serious. We've seen him look.

Yeah. He's just taking L's right now and he feels it. He doesn't know to hide them, you know? And also, like, it dawns on me here, too. because he does know that my mom of them is a target she's got political enemies etc

like there's got to be an element of like this is getting scary now like weird accusations have been leveled against you and now she's bartering your kid kind of out of nowhere and like you kind of want to ask why but I think kind of core

what's going around in this marriage is parent does not want to ask certain questions yeah they're not tight enough to have that conversation cool So the other thing that happens when Blevin is getting the briefing on what the fake limo driver overheard is that the raid on spellhouse occurs during that conversation. And everyone's like, hey, come on. Come on the briefing room.

We're having popcorn. You hear clapping, clapping in the background and cheers. Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. Like, that ass, that is the vibe. That is the vibe. But it's a really interesting moment. He walks in and Lonnie is there. And he asks like, what's going on?

And, you know, the Krieger's group. Somebody tells him, you can cross Krieger. You can close your files on Krieger. Uh-huh. But he asks any prisoners? And, like, Lonnie's just like, no, they're still counting the bodies. And to me, it also looks like, Blevine is kind of. kind of disgusted. There's no prisoners.

He knows. Like, he and Lonnie also see, like, this is just kind of, like, pure violent, malevolent savagery. That this is just bloodlust being sated. But Deidre is the one who's actually going to say it. She's on the phone with Partigaz. And again, to that point of, like, the dead speaking or who they speak for,

the Empire doesn't have, like, doesn't have guidance in this way. the empire the empire is material the empire is in the now the the the empire is like a for in inevitability it does not it does not learn things from the dead in this way but it can only learn things through through things like interrogation through compulsion through espionage and so i think it's very loaded when you know when when she makes when she makes this point uh that you know dead men basically dead men tell no tales they needed they needed they needed prisoners to interrogate

and she says we get nothing from dead body someone needs to be in the room saying that and part of the guys is not having it

you know I felt like there was a change that came over him the myth the spellhouse thing came into focus and he says

today was about wiping the taste of Aldani from the emperor's mouth but also the way he delivers the line is like a man with blood

running down his own yes and it's like it shuts up the axis stuff right that's a big problem. The actual

the fomenting is difficult to pin down, but today we killed 30 people and Danto Krieger. Right? We got, we knocked out an entire rebel cell. That's, that's guns on the table. That's narcotics, you know, uh, seized.

That's the big, you get to make the big show of, of look. We've, we've upheld law and order. You know how the police do. Yeah, front page on the news. Exactly. Right. Um, that isn't, we're trying to track down a mysterious supplier. It's real shit that moves the needle for the emperor.

And I, I, this was the most since maybe episode four or something where they got me being like, Debra's right. Like, again, fuck Deirdre. We know that, right? But I have been this person who says shit like, somebody in the room has to say this so many times. Whereas like, all right, fine. If you want to do the thing that I think is stupid, you can do that thing.

But I want to make us all, you have to say out loud that you're doing it despite X, Y, Z. I'm telling you, if you want to commit to it, that's fine. But you have to commit to it with this. You don't get to ignore that this thing that I'm telling you is true. And that's, that's fine. You know, disregard what I'm saying, whatever. But you have to hear it and you have to sit with it and then make the stupid idea or make the stupid decision. I've been that person so many times and they fucking got me one more time with Dedra.

A person who I hate to be like, yeah, that's right, Dedger. tell him. Miserable. What a trick. No, and it's, and the thing is, like, it pisses Partigaz off that she's, that she's pushing this point. Again, nobody ever wants to, like, you never gain power from being that person. At most, you'll gain power later when you are proven right.

Maybe, but that actually requires a lot of open-mindedness and understanding what transpired that is, that is not guaranteed. All Partigaz, Partigas doesn't see that these issues are even that connected. For all of us talk about, you know, wanting. the team to sort of weave their jurisdictions and sort of like have a holistic approach to all this he wants to draw the sharp line between like we got Krieger

you just focus on access and Deirdre's whole point is it's a web and we've needed to tug on every string you just caught one of them so now everything rides on what is going to happen on Farrex one more thing happened the night before

it is we jump back to it after the scene with Mama and Perrin Vell shows up as Sinta is setting up her surveillance on Corv and boy this relationship seems pretty cooked like mom and parent

are doing better than Sinta raised her hand just now you're right I think you're right Ali go ahead This episode has reversed my feeling like I thought everybody because I was like I think that's pathetic I you know if you're going to be on it be fucking in on it

but I think that there's something in like She's able to understand why Cintra did what she did, which is not picking her up at the airport so she can watch the, the, the, uh, Deidre and Corv walk through the streets. But I think that like there's, Sinta is the sort of person who has had the trauma to lose themselves in it. And like, knowing that Sinta has been here alone,

knowing that Sinta does not have the ability to, like, pull back on her own, that like, just look at me for a second. second thing here is actually like an important and worthy like a moment of affection in terms of like building this up but look at Sinta's face so when Vell says come away from the window Sinta is facing away from her and we see her sigh kind of roll her eyes steal herself and turn around like she is facing someone to whom she has obligations, but like not much like warmth for at this point. It seems the vibes seemed very bad to me. Oh yeah. Yes. But you're saying, Allie, is it doesn't take a lot to recognize another person

who you have slept with and care about. And to say, hey, it's. good to see you. That's all. I mean, that's literally what Vell said. Yeah. A little, like a little squeeze of the hand or like a little smooch even. But hold on. Like just a little acknowledgement that, you know. Well comes in hot already doing the like, but here are all these little tests you didn't know I was throwing down. Like, nice to see you too. It's the other way, which is Vell's already there and Sinta comes in and is like, oh, you're here. Right. And it's like, this is everything I've been doing. And she's like, okay. And, and, and Sinda's like, this is like, this.

is what's going on this is who's here this is and and and val's like mm-hmm and then and finally she's like I know every like I understand why you did what you did but I'm I still want to acknowledge the fact that I love you in a romantic way and I'm happy no no sin oh you're saying Bell Val is yes the way that Vell looks at Sinta is with like longing and and there's like a sparkle in her and it's so painful because the way that Sinta looks at her is just with like it's with like resignation.

It's like you wore me down and I'm I'm I we are doomed like this is doomed. Yeah. They should have they should have ended this relationship. They should have broken up a little while ago. It should have said like as long as we're in camp on Aldani this is fun but like

Right. We know what this is. I'm married to the cause. And the cause is filleting Imperials in quiet corners. It sure is. When I started watching the scene, I was like, Vell, if you're going to be here, fucking be here and do the damn thing. Don't do this passive-rogressive stuff.

But by the end of the scene, I was like, Sinta needs to Vell at her life. I don't think so. See, I think Sinta needs someone whose head is in the game. I like Senta needs anybody. I think Sinton needs a knife. You need, like, community. You need your humanity.

You need to know. what you're fighting. Sinda knows what she's fighting for. But like... Sinta knows. Had it and lost it. But like, speaking of ghosts and like thinking of the dead,

like, Senta needs something to like live for and not regret, right? And like, Val is trying so bad to be that person. How long is... Can Sinta fix? Can MCA fix Sinta? I mean,

the thing is how, for how long has Sinta been, uh, you know, motivated by revenge or by anger or by, you know, hurt for what's been done to her family, um, rather than, I feel like Sinta is another one of, I've sacrificed to everything type of people who have no attachment to remaining a part of, like being a part of the next world or the next order or whatever, you know, comes next, but wants to make sure whatever this is now,

ends and is destroyed. Her life will be a bridge and not and not will not reach the destination. And I can imagine that being why it's so hard for her to commit to Vell in any real way. Because she's like, I'm going to die during this process. You don't understand that this is not, we're not going to get there together. You might get there. And I'm committed to giving all of myself to this. Exactly. And I have to imagine that there, there would be a guilt that Sinta feels because if Sinta were to die, which she would do without hesitation, if the situation called for it, the amount of hurt that Vell would, like, it would destroy Vell.

You can tell. It would just. But like these are all things that we're deriving from our reads. These are not things that Sinta has said out loud in these words. And to that, I mean, to that point, Vell. A look is a thousand words. It is. It totally is.

But Vell isn't reading those looks in the same way. You know, Vell is just feeling rejected, understandably. Yeah. You know, I, you know, you got to at least meet someone halfway. You got to. It's tough. Look, it's, it's tough. It's just not, not what anyone needed the night before the big funeral.

Relationships are about compromises. I mean, so much is said about, in terms of the body language, in that Vell is hiding around the corner when Sinta comes in, like, not, I mean, obviously they're spies. They're trying to, like, keep a low profile, but that she's like, Not cowering behind the corner, but she's posted up and, like, peeking around. There's a, it's a passive and not weak in a moral sense, but it's like, she's afraid in a real way of what Sintas reaction is going to be. And it turns out that what she fears is true here. So. And the distance, the physical distance between them is maintained.

Like, they never close the, like, they never close the distance. And Vela's not walking up to like hands on shoulders, hands on hips. So when she turns around, she doesn't walk towards her. No. No. Oh, God, I just have a horrible thought. That's miserable. What?

So it's Sinta's bond with Vell that gives Vell sort of the fortitude to carry through the mission on Aldami. Uh-huh. Yeah, I know. Is the entire relationship kind of instrumental in that way? I don't think so. Because we see Velt later running into the fog, into the smoke, rather, of the bomb. And that's not the safe Sinta. That's to go do the work.

And, again, I think that that's, right, right. And I think that that's just who, I think that, when it's go time, Val clocks in. And when it's not, she cares deeply about having rejuvenation and relaxation and love and care. Because that's where she comes from, even if she hates, or she comes from, maybe that's where she wants and why she left, where she left was it was all fake political, rich family bullshit. Yeah, when you're getting married off for political advantages, whereas she's found a relationship based on love. And that's the distinction between these two people, right? Is Sinta had a family she loved and lost it to the empire.

For Vell, in some ways, the old ways, the chandelion ways, the ways of wealth did not provide a loving family relationship. They're both having their own private revolutions and they want different things. For Sinta, it's about restoring a world in which families like her could sustain themselves. And for Vell is about finding that and building that. Sentence her family. Right, exactly. But Zinta, Vell can't be Sintas family because Sintas family is dead. Right.

Right. Well, I mean, it makes it extra shitty when Sinta sort of throws, it was Sintu, sort of through the rich girl running away from her family in Vell's face. Because the thing that sucks there is like, Vell can't control that. Like she, like, you have your upbringing to that. You're conditioned, but you are raised the way you were raised. You have the habits that you have. have that are formed like she has a family to go home to she has customs that she follows there

uh she she needs certain things to touch to touch to touch base with and sinta kind of on some level holds that all against her because there's like that divide of class and there's also the divide of how nice for you have all that and it's shit and i like that i like that by the way it's messy in this way like it is not admirable that sinta holds it against val that like oh how nice for you you have a family mine got massacred like it's Vell is not a champagne socialist

are you Vell is not tweeting Vell is shooting people also Right like that is like But that resentment is so understandable But on some level you die When like this someone you're really close with Is also like well off to do this thing You can like not really relate to anymore

I mean this is the thing that Without getting too deep into it Because we're not quite there yet But Nemik says that the frontier of the rebellion is everywhere, and that even the smallest act of the insurrection pushes our lines forward, right? And part of what's being said there, and part of what comes up in Marvin stuff, is that we all have these small things that the empire has, I mean, they're not small things. We are small in the kind of wall of all existence because we're individuals, but we all have things that the empire has taken from us or denied us or pushed us away from or pressured us into. And resisting those things, you know, is important, is always part of the revolutionary project.

at least for NEMIC. And this is one of those things where they don't have the language to talk about this in this way. Like neither the interpersonal relationship language, they have not been to therapy, nor do they have the political language to talk about that like, hey, you hate the empire because it did this to you. I hate it because it did this to me. We have differences here. But fundamentally, we are both committed to this. And I think it would be better if we were committed to each other in this way also. I don't know why I slipped into, like, the future looking at his phone meme.

I'm sitting here on fair. Remember, the frontier of the rebellion is everywhere, and I wish my frontier was closer to you. Undestroyed. Oppression is the mask of fear, and I think it's time we remove our masks and talk face to face. So we see Andor has come home. We see him sort of detached from a wall in the pre-dawn darkness.

He touches his father's stone on the wall. We see a stone with a little sigil on it. And as he does that, he hears Clem's voice. And Clem begins to offer a sort of life philosophy through the lens of the work of being a scrapper. and sort of the philosophical outlook that attends the work they perform as a family. He opens with, here's the thing, Cassian. The man who sees everything. The more blessed.

Thank you. Look at that. Here we go. Stand back. Let it drip. Look how quickly that's cleaned up. Hard to believe, right? Two minutes.

No longer no shorter. You know, why did they make this anymore? Because I'd rather sell you a brand new system at ten times the price. I mean, how'd we go? 60, 70. Just sitting there. 500 credits each. People...

Don't look down the way they should. They don't look down. They don't look past the rust. Not us, though, man. Eyes open. Possibilities everywhere. Just need to get this clean up before Marvel finds us doing this in the house. and a speech later calls like brings up rust actually it is a thing that comes up i think in marva's speech

it is marvis yeah and you know getting to this notion of well like for me when i hear the speech i think partly and it's i think it's underlined by by nemic is that in some ways this this corruption this evils actually much more fragile and ephemeral than you might think that things might look irreparably broken and unsaligible, unrecoverable, unmentable. But Clem's perspective is that there's so much all around us that if somebody just gave it a little like attention and care and, you know, and hope that it could be recovered, that it could, you know, there's treasures that abound that are just like given up on and left to rot.

And obviously, you know, that speech is partly about the family business, but also it's just about an entire way of life, and particularly, I think, one that is probably particularly resonant on pharix where you suspect a lot of what people trade in and have to rely on is recovered. It is not, this is not an import economy. This is a salvage economy. This is a, you know, a barter economy. And so much of it relies on being able to take cast off things and make them your own and make them new again. It's also, you know, obviously it's also, you know, a call back to Nemex's whole thing with the flight, Pather, and the old imperial communications thing. But it's also just about Andor, right?

Andor is the person. I mean, Andor sells himself this way to Luthan forever ago. It's so easy, they don't even notice you. You walk right past them. People don't look down, right? And it's what Lutthin wants to do to Andor. He sees a person who's covered in rust and wants to, like, clean him up and put him to work and in a real way I think so much of this show has been and or seeing himself as a

person of rust as a person who is you know I'm dirty I'm just trying to like make that I'm just trying to get through there is no fixing me there is no turning me into another person I don't talk to me about theory don't talk to me about causes the world the world is rusted right we can't clean it I can't make myself fit the world differently and I can't change the world The world is the world. And so I think that, you know, here in this moment, having this be one more reason for him to slowly start to think about what it means to have the opportunity to change and to change yourself and also to change the world is just, it's really good. It was very good to hear Clem's little workshop philosophy laid out here, you know? Yeah.

Also, when he says eyes open, possibilities open, I think back to how much we've said like, how much of a joy it is to see Andor like really absorbing his spaces him being really resourceful him knowing what to look for what to do and like it's so good

if this was like 2004 or whatever I'd be making a live journal icon with Andor's face that said eyes open possibilities open it's right there it's the thesis it's who he is

also like I do just love that the show is planting its flag on right to repair like really hard just like you know the problem with modern capitalism is nobody takes pride in anything you can't fix anything it all just becomes junk and waste and that's a it's a crying shame

they don't they don't build them like this anymore or with a little a little bit of know-how something could effectively be immortal that it will last forever and be something you can you can pass on and I you know we made this joke on the watch

through, but like 100% Clem is running a community flex server. Oh, sure. Absolutely. Yeah, he'll load that shut up for you. Don't worry about it. 100%. There's also just like one more

instance of parental advice here that I just, that feel so real to me. I talked about before with Wilman and Pock in a previous episode the way that they exchanged looks. You know, I grew up working for my father a lot and like, to me this scene called to attention every time

he was like, if you see a quarter on the ground, If you see a penny on the ground, pick it up. Like, that's money. That counts. There is no money that isn't money, you know. That style of parental worldview being passed on is so real. And it's so far from the sort of guidance that we get from mentor and parental figures in the rest of Star Wars. Like, Obi-Wan is not telling Anakin that you can look through the rust and repair things.

things. Their life philosophies aren't grounded and material in that way. You know, we will rule the empire as father and son is somewhat less resonant than you want to restore a car together? Right, 100%. It's not as, you know, it's just not the same. Don't hit the same. Actually, that might have worked on Luke, though. Yeah, I wouldn't. That's the thing. If Vader was like, did you know that I also like. We will hot rod your ex-wing. A hundred percent. They could have bonded over repairing droids. They both did. that. That's a thing they both cared about. They didn't even try it.

Right? Luke should have just showed him R2 and C3PO and been like, look, I love these guys and you loved these guys and through love. Oh my God, it's like, and Ratatoui the minute Vader sees R2, it's just like whoomp.

So having sort of paid that respect, he then makes a Beline for Bix's shop. He vaults the wall. And is immediately cornered by the guard dogs that we saw in the opening of the series that protected the used ship dealership

I guess and Pegla's there and immediately and this is a thing that I love that they always make a point of doing this do the right thing is a movie that also kept like sort of rattling around my head as I watched the series just this feeling of like over the course of the series

so much a feeling of there being like a neighborhood and just like little rituals that people have to observe. Like, are you going to be an asshole? No, you're going to ask after you extend sympathies. Like, even if we're not tight that way. And we saw that Pagolo was not tied that way with Cassian. Like, he was impatient with him, didn't want him hanging around that yard anymore.

But here, the minute he sees Cassian, all that's sort of forgotten. And it's just like, it's so good to see you. And also, I'm so sorry by my mom. The bring in for the hug. Again, lots of physical contact in this episode, which again underscores the absence for Sinta and Val. And then Cass realizes, why are you here? Yeah. And Pegula says he's just looking after the shop until it's sold.

Well, why would it be sold? Where's Bix? Where is she? Where is she? And so there's, this is how he realizes there's going to be work to be done the next day. And it goes right from this, from this, from him thinking about Bix, realizing presumably off screen that she has been captured, that she is being tortured. that she is, you know, under duress in this moment, directly to Cass back in that old beat-up ship, finally.

Raining. Book open, raining, rain, pouring. Nemek's voice, there will be time. There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea.

It occurs spontaneously. And without instruction, random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions, that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyrion requires constant effort, it breaks, it leaks,

authority is brittle, oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. I know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles. As moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try.

Bro. I... I don't know where to be... I mean, yeah. Natalie, go ahead. I just... I... To hear, it's been...

Okay, so we got like that little taste of Nemik's voice, right, last episode. Which is from this. Which is from this, crucially, crucially, crucially. The end of this. segment is the piece that we heard last week

but I missed Nemek's voice so much like hearing him was so comforting in just the just hearing his faith

again his faith in this movement in a rebellion in resistance I feel like it meant so much to have that in us and carry that through the next through to the end of this episode and to just remember where Cass was when he got that when Vell insisted that Nemek insisted that he have the book

remember that Cass is his ideal reader which I think is so important to what this book is and what it isn't and what Nemex who Nemex audience broadly is. is and to see him just sit with it genuinely. And then, you know, we should say that while this, you know, you heard the narration, but while it's happening, we are seeing other things, right? We're seeing, you know, Bix, you know, in, in the cell, the prison cell in the basement of the, of the, whatever, the third floor of the hotel, wherever she is.

Luthens, looting, looking over the skyline. Looking over the skyline. And, and we see Cass with it. I mean, he, when it's done, he tosses it away, right? and goes to look out into the rain. I have no idea if he's, has he kept it with him? Is it something he will come back for? Is it something he leaves with?

But it seems to have hit him for real. And it was so nice to see it here, so close to the end. I have a billion thoughts about this. I don't want to just dominate the next 17 minutes. No, but this is your shit. This is your shit. The big thing for me has been like, what's he believe? what is the philosophy of the of the rebellion what is the political position of it because that's a

it's a big open question we talked about it on the last q and a we talked about like well what could he be building on we talked about where does it fit in for our own anti-imperial positions and on earth and i mean you can draw a lot of lines here to a lot of different places um uh you know I should say that my own personal history is shaped by a particular line of of education right that puts me in places right so obviously for me i'm like oh yeah i want to talk about marks but like these questions have talked about and i'm not i'm not going to talk about marks i'm actually going to some other more anarchist places here but if this stuff if you hear that shit and you're like yo these are you know that niggas spin i want to hear more you can find that

stuff this has been the thrust of hundreds if not thousands of scholars it's been their focus for hundreds of years i mean you want to zoom back Rob, you're a classicist, like, you can go back. People have been having this conversation. What is the nature of the state? What is the nature of tyranny? For as long as there have been people, you know. If this resonates with you, it has resonated with so many others.

And there are like, there are like-minded folk, and there are more places where you can get this type of ideology. And there are differences. and people come down on different things, right? So for me, obviously, you can go back to the manifesto. The end of the manifesto is often misquoted, but in essence, Marx does say the only thing the proletariat has to throw off is their chains. They should unite, et cetera. You can also connect this to various active, you know, communist and anarchist movements in

the early 20th century, the late 19th century. You can focus on the debates around the world versus local revolution. And, you know, that's a huge part of interior. conflict on the left. But even beyond that personal focus, there's stuff that you can dig into with things like, you know, for Nemek, he keeps returning that idea, that tyranny is unnatural. Empire is unnatural. And that's like Thomas Payne. That's Rousseau. And they believe that like humans are fundamentally, you know, Rousseau is writing in a sense in response to Hobbes and Locke. It says, yeah, there's a state of nature. But that state of nature is not one of competition and

violence. It's one of fundamental freedom and that society gets layered on top of that and corrupts us. Mind you, all these guys got their heads real fucked up by the discovery of the new world and projected a whole lot of things. Huge. The state of nature is bullshit. Fundamentally, right? I mean, the state of nature is super interesting, right, because like the idea that there is such a, I do think, I do think that for Nemek, one of the things that's true about, one of my notes here, I've written down the things that Nemek believes, and one of them is that he does, he's He's a naturalist about this. He believes in natural law the way that Rousseau or Kant does, that freedom is not just

a social right, but is the natural true state of being and that tyranny must actively impress itself on top of that, which is not Marxist. Like that is not, I mean, there are people who believe that. He writes like an Enlightenment writer. 100%. So resonances that I was, like, both from this and his earlier speeches, he reminds me so much of actually Machiavelli. Sure.

In terms of like the ways in which he think, he's trying to write a handbook as well, like one of the last things he's working on when he dies is what's the role of mercenaries in an armed struggle like this? This is literally like multiple chapters in the discourse is in the prince. It's meant to be distributed. He's writing this to speak to. He is not waxing on to talk to other philosophers or in conversation at the ivory tower. Yes, exactly.

He is he's trying to communicate to the people to, to, to, citizens of and outside of the empire. Exactly. And something super important is that in Star Wars there is natural law. The force does exist. I know. The force... This is a world where there

is the dark side, right? And the show doesn't ever use those words. I think it's really smart to never use those words, those words, because we also, as human beings on Earth, talk about metaphysical things. Natural law is a metaphysical thing, right? Most philosophers who We're talking about, like, Kant is not talking about genetic natural law.

Kant is talking about things, you know, in terms of metaphysical reality. And in the world of Star Wars, we know that the force exists in metaphysical ways. And so this is, we're seeing a philosopher try to talk about a thing in terminology that is not Jedi terminology, right? And that's so fascinating to me. It's such a smart way to tackle that. Again, especially in an episode where Force ghosts exist in a real. away without them being forced ghosts. We can always hear from the past, right? So one thing also that sort of jumped out at me here is that he's also articulating, and by the way,

I actually think one of the funny things about all this is Nemek needed an editor, and he's trying to do like three different things in this text and speak to different audiences. And like, it's got decent poetry, but there's elements of like, I'm writing a revolutionary handbook like that has instruction manual stuff. I also want inspiring, soaring prose that, that will, like, inspire the populace to actions of revolt. And these things get wedded together. All the time. Like, the degree to which he's, like,

trying to do it all at once here is very funny and cool. You're getting an outro here, Rob. This is the final bit of a text, presumably, where you get to do that, you know, a little bit, I hope. You know, I think all of the, I mean, I don't know, right? Because when you look at manifesto work, it is not where you're talking about the price of linen, right? Marks does that over in Das Kapital and in the Grun

because those are books about economic theory and science. The manifesto is meant for workers to read, right? And it's not just him. This is generally the other stuff that comes to mind for me here. I think there's something really interesting happening here where this is not a nationalist project. You know, he in what he says, he says that it will happen everywhere. It's already happening everywhere.

But he isn't saying we need to build a new national identity. So I'm reminded of things like the very end of France for the Phelan's Wretched of the Earth, where the Wretched of the Earth is a nationalist text in so many ways. It's an anti-colonial nationalist text. It was written while Phelan was fighting in the war for Algerian independence, the anti-colonial movement against the French. And it has to be a nationalist project because it's about restoring Algeria to the Algerians and pushing out a colonial oppressor.

But at the end of that book, what he says is, we cannot fall into the pitfalls and the trap that happened in America where there was a revolution, and then it turned back into European style colonialism. They returned to the imperial form. We have to resist that and find new ways of being, right? And I think it's so fascinating that here we don't see Nemek saying, despite how much the show has been like, Aldani custom is important, Faris custom is important. It doesn't, you know, he is not saying we need to find an anti, we have to find a nationalist ideology. He's instead saying, embrace your locality and fight back there. And then at some point, this comes together and becomes a galactic cause.

There will be the moment where the siege breaks, right? I can also talk about Gramsci and the War of Maneuver and Position, which you should just Google, or you've heard me talk about this a million times. I think a lot about another big thing here for him is that it feels in line with autonomous Marxism and Autonomism, Hart and Negri, Bif Oberardi, Federici. people who autonomous Marxism is sort of it moves away from the idea that there is a there should be a single revolutionary state or party or even like it moves away from the union as a key place for resistance and moves towards the idea that revolution happens in small ways everywhere resistance is always happening in daily life the everyday worker is resisting whether the everyday worker is a gig worker or a mother and housekeeper or a or someone who's working on the factory. or a student or unemployed, there are all of these ways. You can work to rule. You can do industrial sabotage. You can organize. You can do mutual aid. You can do black block stuff. All of that in the autonomous sense is like, we have to use all of these different ways and it's bottom up. It's not access. It's not looking for a luthin to like lead everything, which again is so interesting

in this because of how luthin is going to react to what he sees, something that he did not really put together. I mean, his fingerprints are on barracks because of him being here forever ago. But what follows in this episode, this was not a luthan plan. And the way that he retreats from it, I think, says a lot about his own revolutionary position and ideology. But the biggest single touchstone, I think, worth raising, and this is me reaching a hand across the aisle to the anarchists, even as a socialist over here. I know we fight a lot, but I have nothing but respect for my anarchist kin. The first is thinking about the place of anarchism in the wake of the 1999 WTO protests, the broader anti-capital, anti-global capital movements

then. There's a book called The Coming Insurrection. It's an essay called The Coming Insurrection, which was written by a group called The Invisible Committee. I'll link this and the next thing I'm going to talk about in the notes. There are French anarchists. Some of them may have been arrested for sabotaging electrical lines on trains in France. But towards the end of the essay, they lay out their diagnosis of the state of neoliberal capitalism and imperialism. They set up kind of a program for resistance. And one of the sections is like, where do you start here? And to me, Nemex's recurring focus on the elemental feels so in line with this versus the Rousseau version of state of nature. They write, attach yourself to what you feel to be true. Begin there and encounter a

discovery, a vast wave of strikes and earthquake. Every event produces truth by changing our way of being in the world. Conversely, any observation that leaves us indifferent doesn't affect us, doesn't commit us to anything, no longer deserves the name truth. There's a truth beneath every gesture, every practice, every relationship, and every situation. We usually just avoid it, manage it, which produces the madness of so many in our era. In reality, everything involves everything else. The feeling that one is living a lie is still a truth. It is a matter of not letting it go of starting from there. A truth isn't a view on the world, but it's what binds us to it in an irreducible way. A truth isn't something we hold, but something that carries us.

It makes and unmakes me. Constitutes and undoes me as an individual. It distances me from many and brings me closer to those who also experience it. An isolated being who holds fast to a truth, we'll inevitably meet others like her. In fact, every insurrectional process starts from a truth that we refuse to give up. And I'm like, oh, okay, right. Like, Nemek's entire confusion at Andor, I feel like this isn't, this is almost like his, his way of processing Andor's, um, his confusion with how could Andor not want to fight against these guys?

How could he not have his own reason for wanting to resist and wanting to break out of the imperial um control and the truth is that everyone does have a reason it they just need to discover it for themselves and it's being actively pressed down it's actively being being you know subsumed right and marva ends up saying this in the message we'll get to in a bit probably very soon that she always knew that that he had that in him also right yes again my favorite things about the show is it's better that it is not all nemic it's so important that the Nemek speech is bookended by two personal speeches from Andor's parents because that is how that is how the world works. It is as often something someone close to you

says as it is that you've read a bunch of good theory. You know, like I want to come back, go back to your point that you made very quickly earlier of these aren't forced, like these are real ghosts of the past that are speaking to us. These aren't forced ghosts. We're not relying on some sort of like magical or divine intervention for some like inspiring speech or or philosophy or something to cling on to some like mantra almost to to you know push the main character forward in their whatever their fight whatever their you know hero journey is um no we're we're we're relying on our own real histories on our own real relationships with uh you know the people we love And I think that's not untrue of the force ghosts.

That's the thing, actually. This rehabilitates them for me in a real way. Yeah. Because it reminds, Obi-Wan Kenobi isn't a force ghost. He's a guy that Luke, that mentored Lucan died. And loved him.

And like that's the truth. It's like the force is love. The force is like love. Like it's, it's, I think in the past, the way I've looked at those apparations, like even thinking about,

the mortis arc let's fucking go let's fucking go now we're in it baby if you have not heard us talk about the mortis arc if you're an and or listener and you're like all right once the show is down I'm not going to listen to anything please go listen to our episode on the mortis arc of clone

it is also if you don't know anything about the mortis arc it is going to like fuck with your head about how you conceptualize the force and Star Wars but someone make a skip list for our show for people who don't have time to listen to everything, but should listen to the best stuff.

You'd be doing God's work. Please, thank you. But thinking about sort of the aberrations, just the presence of force goes in general across all of Star Wars that I've experienced, so many of those I've always attributed to the magic of the force, right? Oh, they untapped some unlocked power within the force to enable them to do that. no like that is but that's the thing that separates i think the ones i like again the stuff with obi won right from the stuff at the end of rise of skywalker where ray is hearing voices that she

has who the fuck are those voices ray here's all these force ghosts she doesn't know who the fuck any of those people are no as like mace windew is it like who this is an avatar like why are all the avatars like speaking through this that's not what's like that's not how this works it's about the relationships you have um and i just really appreciated and or grounding that in a very material tangible way marva made this stood in front of b2 emo and recorded this and and made it to speak nemick you know sat at his audio book on his rock with his kindle and recorded this to be to to to live beyond his own life, their own lives. And I just think that's one of, like, the greatest things that Andor has done.

And it's like the trick that being a fan has played on me, right? I don't want to put, this is on me in a real way that like, oh, right, force ghosts are metaphors. The work of Star Wars has always also been metaphorical. And you get so caught up in like, well, actually, force ghosts didn't really exist until Quigon learned how to do it. And then Quigon passed that down to Obi-Won. And it's like, shut the fuck up. Stupid lore, stupid lore, Lord.

It's a metaphor about the lessons you learn from people and the way that they can reach you after they're gone and the way that you can take those learnings and they can surprise you, things can remind you of what you were taught. And in Luke's case, it's about letting go, right? It's about letting go of all the tech. Again, we talk a lot about the technological relationships in Star Wars versus knowing your instincts and having a physical, organic touch to the world

in the way that in Star Wars that they're drawing up, if not a binary, at least different relationships. between positive and negative relationships with technology. All that's happening. And it's, it goes back to Obi-Wan being like, stop trying to like feel with your physical body where the remote training droid is and just be at one in the moment, be mindful, et cetera.

The second thing I want to quote here and then we can move the fuck on finally was I was like digging through notes from when I was teaching classes on this stuff. I was a TA for a course at CalArts called Marxisms and Anarchisms. And I'm pretty sure that's where this stuff came from, which is there was a book collection from 2003, published by Verso, called We Are Everywhere, the Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism, that is a collection that describes itself as something between an activist anthology and a grassroots history, agitational collage, and direct action manual. It's a really beautiful book that's like, I don't want to say it's like a coffee table book for, anti-capitalism, but that's kind of the vibe. I will again link the website that has all the material for free on it in the show notes. And it was put together by primarily American and

English scholars, but the pieces that are collected there represent people from every inhabited continent on the planet. And one of the first pieces in the collection is by Subcomandante Galliano of the Zapatistas, who at the time was still writing under the nom de Garre. Subcomendante Marcos, who is the person who you would be familiar with if you've ever read Zapatista stuff. Zapatistas are a movement, a still active movement, though I'd say a less, the war, the war between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government has come to a sort of equilibrium at this point. I don't believe there's been active fighting in many years. Largely, it's an indigenous and agrarian anti-capitalist movement. They run about like,

I know, 10,000 square miles or something in Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of people are kind of de facto live under the Zapatistas. And Galliano writes in this chapter, On the one side is neoliberalism with all its repressive power and all its machinery of death. And on the other side is the human being. In any place in the world, any time, any man or woman rebels to the point of tearing off the clothes that resignation has woven for them and the cynicism that has died it gray. Any man or woman of whatever color in whatever tongue speaks and says to himself or to herself

enough is enough, you just for struggling for a better world for all of us that all of us are fenced in threatened with death. The fence is reproduced globally in every continent, every city, every countryside, every house. Powers fence of war closes in on the rebels, for whom humanity

is always grateful, but fences are broken in every house, in every countryside, in every city, in every state, in every country, on every continent, the rebels, whom history repeatedly has given the length of its long trajectory, struggle, and the fence is broken.

The rebels search each other out. They walk towards one another. They find each other and together they break other fences. And it's like, okay, I have no idea what Gilroy, who wrote these episodes, you know, was referencing when writing Nemik's stuff. But I think a really good place to look is the stuff in the wake of the WTO protests, the anarchist and kind of anarchist communist left movements, 20, 25 years ago, because that's some of the most resonant anti-imperial writing we've seen in our lifetimes that actually feels like you could pull on it and get something that is populist like Nemmik's work, that is decentralized and insurrectionist in character, and that is,

if not literally naturalist, at least drawn to this idea that the revolution is, if not inevitable, then coming, right? So it was really rewarding for me to like get this big chunk of Nemek and to get a sense broadly of what this is because it also starts to show us some of why there is difficulty in building a revolution around some of this stuff. I mean, I'm hoping that in season two we start to see how do you start to pull these people together. If this is the philosophy of it, it's a, I love it. It's fantastic. It is not about creating an organization. It is not about creating a state that follows, right? Many of my criticisms of anarchism are alive in this text, even though I am also a fan of a lot of anarchist

thought. And I think that it's so nice to see something that plays this way. But also, I do want to again underscore, and I've said this again and again, think about all the other things we could tie it to. Like, you know, again, you can tie it to Enlightenment-era thinkers. You can read this as a libertarian text. I think that it is, I will not be surprised if within the next year we see a big breakdown of how Nemek is a big time libertarian, right? He talks about freedom a lot, and people who are libertarians hear that word and think that everything else can go by the wayside because that's the core of it all, right? So I think carry this stuff.

If any of that sounds interesting, go read up, go find your path through this stuff, because I think that it's really fascinating, and I think that it is valuable to find a language that you can make your own to help work through what your position is in the world of the empire. So thank you for letting me have this time. Thank you. That was wonderful. I returned my minutes or whatever it is. No, I mean, you that needed to happen 100%. If I got to wax on about mommies for like who even knows how long. You did not wax on for mommies this long. I should have. We have an awesome walker. We need someone who's going to go back to his Marxism and anarchism

teaching notes to talk about a Star Wars show. We are blessed. We are lucky for it. We are absolutely blessed to have this. This is why they won't invite us to invite us

to Star Wars Celebration. They're going to. People are going to be in Disney.com's fucking mentions being like, let more civilize it. Let more symbolize it. And we're going to be fucking there.

And then we'll be like it's not really our scene. Thank you for the invite Oh Jesus a little intense No There are a lot of people in Imperial costumes here Oh my

But then also I'll be like Hey I see a lot of content fans out there I'm them I'm in there I'm in there That's the thing Natalie's got her hair Done that fucking

Like bun The deader was always rocking. The Dejra. The Dejre bun. So, looks good. I think the, the, one of the things that hits me with this speech in, in some ways is that I think it

is doing a lot of good work, laying the groundwork for how quickly this transformation is going to over, like come over the population of Therick's. Like, what he is outlining is, like, it's funny. don't think this is, this is actually, I think he wants it to be, I don't think it is an effective insurrectionary speech. If Nemark were there and he climbed down a soapbox on fair, because he doesn't go. You need Marvin's speech. But what he's outlining is the process of what happens, right? Because when he says, when he says these things that, you know, whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cost, he's not talking about people

are already transgressing as the empire testing its boundaries. He also means just internally, the compass is now oriented toward revolt that like the patience with the status quo is like has actually been exhausted and like it is just awaiting a moment a signal a sign and this is what

Marva is going to give them and it's why as we see all those reaction shots during her speech what we are seeing is not persuasion I think that one of the great things here is that it doesn't there's this

they didn't come for a funeral and then leave like and then start a riot at the like they they knew everyone assembled for marva's knowing exactly how things were going to proceed this wasn't like a call to arr this was the rust was cleaned off it was already working under there do you know what i mean it's a pre-battle speak like pep talk like they were like i do wonder though like but i don't think i don't think everyone did show up today we're going to fight the empire i think what's key here is that over the course of her speech what she is saying is we all recognize that it is time to fight the empire and nobody can like nobody can look in themselves and like sake talk of all things they have to lose all the things

they're the things they're afraid of nobody when they do that internal inventory shrinks from it because and i think this is kind of what he's getting at in this is that when it is pose when when somebody sort of brings the moment to a head there's going to be a ton of people who like now there's a choice before me and it's actually a choice that's already been made this is this is what I was getting about persuasion is that there is sometimes this idea that we come to our beliefs and our actions via a really open-minded objective intellectual process and we evaluate arguments rationally et cetera and this is how this is how change happens and I think what's kind of cool here is that I don't think I don't think anybody over the course this

episode is persuaded of anything and or is not being persuaded in the scene and or is hearing things he's already decided or put or put into action he's hearing the words yes exactly like it is like it is a feeling that he's already following now he's given like a description for words for what he is feeling and outlook but he is not pretty persuaded to it, the way that I think maybe Nemek sometimes intended, nor is Marva's speech persuasive from the standpoint of all these people on Farrak's were happy until she got everyone riled up. What it is doing is sort of like summoning like this deeper scene of anger. I think it persuades one person or one group and it's the imperial that they are not in control.

And that's the, and that's the match that lights the keg, right? Because they They think they have control until the moment she finishes speaking, does the call to arms. And if they hadn't moved in, I know we're getting ahead of ourselves, but if they in that moment said, it's an old woman speaking. Right. All right. Maybe a few of you do rush at us still. Okay. We knock you out.

We arrest the ones that come in on us, but we don't push in. We don't flood the streets with weapons. We don't put the tanks out there or whatever, right? We don't have a bucket full of grenades ready to go. For instance, the whole thing is different, right? But it's that they respond and that they're afraid that the chum is in the water, you know. Yeah. Right.

Like, which goes to Lutheran's point, going back all the way to Aldani, is that we can't do this without the empire. That the empire is a necessary counterparty in the rebellion because it is going to be their actions that continually sort of provide the wind and the sails of this movement. But, yeah, it's a. And what we see literally next is them beginning to put the wind in the sails as they start to plan for the funeral. Yeah, we go to the briefing in the morning as they first they sort of start with the hall of table projection of downtown. And then they go up on the balcony and show her and us the set, the ground, the terrain of what's going to happen, the two roads converging into Rick's Road. and the way they keep describing it all is it is a giant box

it's a trap for it's a trap for Andor and that is all they see it as by the way like the prefect keeps talking about they're having lots of little skirmish about marching permits with the daughters of Farix

and who really cares they they they he's like showing off to Dedra how much they've got them under their rule of thumb in a way like just like that shit had an Aldani yeah He talks about, oh, yeah, they asked for, for, you know, for 40 people we put that we pushed back.

So we gave them 30 or something like that. They basically like a capacity permit for how many people can take part in the march. And they've sort of been messing with the funeral organizers. And they taught basically the point, yeah, the point of it is they're talking about all the little wins that they've, the fake little wins that they've given the people of Farrix and how. it only supports, you know, how much power they really have over them. It's like, oh, yeah, we'll give them these little tiny, insignificant wins. And what I love is that they are insignificant because 40 people don't show up to Marvis' funeral. The entire, all of Ferrick shows up to, it's hundreds of people show up to Marvis' funeral.

The permit doesn't mean anything. The permit is a facade, is a fake piece of paper that the Imperials assigned. meaning to and it has no meaning to the people of ferrics the people of ferrics are going to perform the custom as they've always done and whether or not they get a piece of paper over it doesn't fucking matter you can imagine this was the first time that al-dani came to see the i after occupation and it took 15 years of occupation for them to be whittled down to the 60 or 70 people that it is during the episode of the eye versus the original tens of thousands right well they also pointed don't like follow the rules at all like the the thing that i really like about the scene is that like

we're seeing like the height of technology and like the the power of what these people think that they're capable of and it all gets washed away because they start two hours earlier and like they have no idea how to prepare for that and it's that easy to get a wind over on them despite how long they've been planning this well the other thing i i dig here too is yeah there's so many things like, Dedra has tunnel visioned on finding Andor as a way to get to access in a way that I'm not sure Blevyn would have, just because of the way he views things like this, where she doesn't tune in at all to the fact that the prefect is horny to just unload on this

crowd. Like he, like, on some level, he kind of wants something to happen. He wants to make a statement of force as he has since he got this job and he was like, I want the title prefect. I want my little cape, and I want to be a little viceroy. And now it's I want snipers on the roofs, right? Right. And she does pull those back, but doesn't really seem to get, hey, this is, he wants it to be a Tinderbox in a different way than you do.

Right now? He wants a Tinder box for the whole town. The only person that Dedra cares about is Andor. The whole point of this is about Andor. The prefect wants to exercise control. He wants to feel powerful and he wants to feel like these are his subjects and he can do whatever he wants. He can hang people if he wants to. He can torture people if he wants to.

And this is his land and his territory. And none of that matters to Diderot. In fact, the less like chaos, the better because it'll make a clearer path to and or hopefully for her. So she pushes back on snipers on anything that is like fatal, like, But he's still going to kettle the crowd. Of course. And, you know, that's like so much of this is, does any of this happen if the empire isn't there in force, right?

Like, in some ways, there we are recreating on a much larger scale exactly what Karn did when he went there in force to arrest Andor. It's just you being here is going to create the confrontation that is going to bring these things to a head. And she can't quite see how unsteady this guy is as a, as a, partner or or she cannot see that this and to in her defense neither can the rebels nobody can see because luthan also shows up over the course this morning he rolls in on his cool motorcycle meets up with um vell and they have the exchange about you know okay now it's clear

luthin fully is like well we'll just have to kill the minute that we'll let the empire rest and or and then we'll kill him before he gets into the hotel but like nobody can conceptualize that things might happen at this funeral that have nothing to do with Cassie and Andor directly like this funeral can be anything other than an intelligence operation where somebody is lured into the box and trapped there is no conception of this is a crowd this is a people right and they're they're all here at once with their own agenda and neither the empire nor Luthan really

see it, see that it has this like other other possibility. Lutthin should have read theory. Lutthin should talk to Nehick more. Well, Lutthin, you know, Luton's a creature of the shadow war.

I mean, this is, this is the thing. And, uh, to, in some ways, I think the, the type of,

not happen. They could be right. This is, this is, this is in the, dynamic speech, another thing that I think is really great is at the end of it, you know, he gives that big, you know, attempt to call to action, which is, and remember this, try. And that's in tension with the inevitability he paints it with, which is, again, a classic leftist

tension, right? You know, Mark says, I'm doing science. The history of the world is the history of class struggle. The natural contradictions of capitalism, of any social formation carry with it, the revolution that will bring the next social formation, this is all going to fall apart. And historically, capitalism has said, not this time. We're going to catch on to those contradictions and address them in small ways. We're going to encourage people to be reformists instead of revolutionaries. We're going to convince you that you could cash in and go big instead of continually be at the bottom of the boot. And the Marxist struggle, the leftist struggle has been, if this has been inevitable, why hasn't happened yet? And also, if it's inevitable,

why do we have to do so much fucking work to make it happen? And that tension is there. And it is because people try that things pop off here. It's because people like Marva have like done the big call to action. People like Brasso and Willman are prepared to like throw bombs and bricks that shit pops off. And it's totally possible. Luton could have been right. Dedra could have been right in this moment where people don't do the work.

No one's there to throw the bomb. No one's there to deliver the speech as aggressive as Marva's is, as direct as Marva's is. Marva could have delivered the speech that is gestures at anti-imperial sentiment but doesn't go all the way in. But we've seen that she is radicalized throughout this season, ready to pull the trigger, ready to be as loud as she can be because of what she has seen. And again, if Karn doesn't fuck everything up, you know, eight episodes ago, Marva dies. And she might say Farix used to be different. I remember another time in Farrix,

but she doesn't say it's time to fight the empire and it doesn't lead to what happens here. And so it is, it is, I'm not saying that Luton is right, or Luton and Dedra are right to not expect this, but they've seen it not happen so many times, right? That I think that's,

it's an easy mistake to make. How many times have we seen the world not change? You know, so. I saw, I saw an amazing meme today that was like the dominoes meme. And the first one was that, well, the end is Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star, the largest domino, the smallest dominoes, Cyril Karn has to prove Mommy wrong. Cyril Karn, the determiner of the universe, of the fate of the universe,

is just delicious, delicious food for me. Thank you. It's reminded of that meme of like, finally published my book, How I Defeated Fascism with the Power of Love. Chapter 1, I learned that it is impossible to defeat fascism with the power of love. Chapter 2, the power of incredible violence. But so.

Before it all blows up still. We're still technically not there yet, right? Yeah, we get Andor and Pegla waiting in the tunnels. Oh, this has one of my favorite lines of, of this episode. And Brasso arrives and Andor is immediately, first of all, great brohug. Great hug. Bring it.

They just hold each other. Arms linked. Arms, hands linked. It's all the way around. The minute Andor sees Brasso, he's like all the stuff he's been keeping in just starts rushing out, the doubts, the fears. He just starts babbling like all his guilt about all, like, all like, he, like, he, like, Like, he feels, like, honestly, it seems like he feels so guilty because he is, he feels on some level, like, people see this as an abandonment of Marva.

That he just, like, his first, the first thing he tells Brasso is, I wanted to take her with me. I wanted, like, I didn't want to leave her here. I wanted. And we get a great moment where Brasso lets him unload some of this and then stops him and says, she told me. She told me this. Tell him, none of this is his fault. It was already burning, he's just the first spark of the fire. Tell him, he knows everything he needs to know and feels everything he needs to feel.

And when the day comes, those two pull together, he will be an unstoppable force for good. Tell him... I love him more than anything he could ever do wrong. Oh my God. So two things about the speech. I joked about this the other day. But I'm actually a little like won over by it. This is such a different thing from what Marva said when they parted ways,

but it feels like something Brasso would tell Andor as a final message. Like I don't, like, I think, like, I can totally believe like Marva did. the end come around of this, that she realizes. I bought that when you said it while we were watching it. But then hearing the speech she gives, it brought me around to believing she meant it. I think Marva told him what he needed, which, what he needed to hear at the time when she, to get him to leave. To get him out of there. To get him to leave and to get to safety.

That that is the lie and that this is the truth. Yes. Right. That's what I fundamentally believe. I also think, like, we see that Farrex has a culture around last rights like this. Like, I wonder if there would be, if Andrew would be there, part of the, the ritual around her own death, around her recording what she did in this would also be like, you've to say your last words to your family. And like Brasso is also taking the responsibility there of the person who's receiving that message. He says it like it was a practiced thing.

Yes, he, even his eyes go up like he's trying to like recall it. Yes, yeah, exactly. It's so good. It hits so hard and it's, it's extremely good. And my favorite thing is Andor's response to it when, you know, now it is time to part ways and to, they talk about, he asks about Bix, Brasso tells him that, you know, she's over in the hotel and that they have some friends still within the hotel likely like that's how they're getting information out um so uh brasso says to to and or you take care of

yourself and ander responds it's too late for that and it's like i didn't really get at the time but now now we've seen where it goes and what his big thing at the end of the day it's not about himself anymore it's it's not about taking care of himself it might never have been really take about you know like he always had this obligation to marva i think he's been selfish in the past but in this from here on out it is not about cassian and or like we've always talked about him as someone who's like i'm just going to score big and then pay my debts that's how he sees the world and it is that option is off the table now right it's like he can't hide behind that anymore. He knows

that there are debts that aren't, you can't just hand over in credits, right? He already paid those ones off. Narkina was the end of it. Like, when Malsh, when Malsh says we have to like, you know, we have to bear witness and it's what, what Andor itself sort of come around to in the prison. Like,

there's just a lot of things he can't walk away from now. There is no. And, and if you're, he tried. He took his money and he was like, I'm going to go to, I'm going to take this money. I'm going to go where the Empire can't fuck with me and just like live my life. And immediately it failed. Like, it crashed. on, crashed on takeoff. There is no escaping this. This is what the empire does is you think about going back to Aldani. The Adani were pushed down from the hills into the lowlands, into the cities

where they became part of an industrialized effort. They became part of an imperial system about, you know, imperial labor, right? Factory labor instead of traditional, you know, a mode of being. And it is, the empire wants you to relate in transactional ways. Go make your money. Go pay off your debts. There aren't things that can't be rendered in terms of money, right? You know what, Nurti, we got a bounty out on Andor. Don't think about communal responsibility. Your only responsibility is to getting paid, right? Your responsibility is to take care of yourself. You're an individual. You're not part of a collective. Think about the ISB, constant internal competition. It is not about working as a unit. It's about trying to stab the person in front of you and get a little bit further

on. Again, we don't we don't know enough about the imperial economy to talk about. whether or not our contemporary moment of capitalism maps to it. But I think it is incredibly fair to say that with the Sith at its ideological heart, this is a state about individuality. It's a state about competition. It is a culture built around trying to get yours, right? The people who lead it, that is what it is about. Think about Vader and Tarkin kind of sniping at each other in a new hope, right? That is what the empire is about. Think about Blevyn and Dedra. And that is space that Empire wants you to exist inside of, constantly competing with each other, not collaborating, not working as a unit. And if you convince people that they don't have

debts that can't be represented in credits or dollars, then it's actually very easy to get them to be in competition mode. But once you have obligations to people and to culture and to your place that can't be reduced to dollars and cents, that's a much harder thing to break up in terms of your relationship and your, you know, that sense of camaraderie that you have with other real people. And that's what we see here again. These people owe it to Marva in a real way to listen to what she has to say and to act in this moment. You mentioned camaraderie there. Uh-huh.

Andor is not the only little guy with a big buddy that we see here in a moment. I need to zero in because I need, and listeners, please, write in and explain this to me. Because it is the weirdest fucking detail in this whole show. And I, like, I watch this exchange, like five times trying to figure out what is happening. From this scene, we see Sergeant Mosque in, like, a civi,

like, what looks like a tactical harness, but I think it's just, like, the type of vest I have to carry fucking dog treats in. Like, it's a work vest. But, like, it's kind of vaguely tactical. He and, he and, like, Moss and Cyril are writing the, sky bus that Luton came in on in silence and we look so the camera's position in the middle of the aisle looking at them both sitting separately on like on benches on opposite sides of the aisle

holding their ass in their hands. Cyril is examining his wordlessly mosque sweeps his hat out into the aisle and presents it to Cyril. Cyril takes it and gives his hat to mosque and then they don each other's hats what is happening bro moment bro moment I mean at the time one of y'all said this is jersey swap right

like it's like the end of the game where two people respect each other and they swap jerseys there's a pregame so I don't this is what bros do okay rob It's so weird And they're not talking They don't look at each other They don't like there's no like

Want to switch Like there's no Nothing It's just They don't even look at each other After they put them on They just they put them on And then they look

Away from each other It's so good It's so weird They're such little freaks I love them It is the It is the warmest gesture Anyone has offered to Cyril

This entire series Like this entire series, we have never seen this level of, like, warmth. It is so strange. This is such a strange moment. I can't get over it. This is his only friend. This is his only friend in the world. And look how he treats him, but we'll get to that.

Oh, my God. So things begin to pop off here. You know, Pegla takes off Cassian goes to his little Overwatch position. The minute Pegla breaks cover, Nurchy realizes this is the moment. His eyes sort of track up. He knows exactly where in that building cast probably is. Luthan arrives, he and Vell have that exchange. But the way it ends is they think they have plenty of time to get posted up.

Luton says we need him dead before they start asking questions. And they've got five hours before the end. You don't have five minutes. And as they say that, the anvil starts going. Chop, chop. And everyone is caught out. and immediately it kind of scares everybody. The Imperials look uneasy and this is unsurprised.

Luthen and Val look really startled, but they're just going to roll with it. And then we cut two, and this is fun, a marching band, warming up, and everyone is wearing their formal clothes, which we have not seen. But everyone's got like their little worker brigade outfits here. Drip out. It's incredible. The daughters are all wearing red-belted ponchos, the daughters of ferricks, and all the instruments, the instruments look so cool.

So this is, this feels like it's the same, like, horn and wind section that we heard playing the end or theme at the start of the episode. But what I love is all the instruments we see look ferricks as hell. They look industrial. They look, like, reclaimed and, like, crudely fashioned. And it's fantastic. It's of this place. Like, this is, this is Farrix culture. Like, no one is, everyone, as soon as the, as soon as the, you know, the bell chimes, everyone is ready to go. Like, no one is surprised in Ferricks. You talk about, like, you know, everyone being kind of unsettled or fearful of the bell starting.

Everyone in Ferris is suited up, ready to go. And I just love The detail of the instruments Feeling so of this place It's not, you know Some, ooh, funky, you know Star Wars The Giz Man didn't show up. Yeah, no.

Listen, listen, listen. Max Rebo. Max Rebo could play a funeral dirge. He could. You know. Nice noodles would be leading the parade. I know she's led to some funerals, you know, so I'm sure she could perform.

This is the next step. And so we see the march begin as the funeral train begins to move up, and the prefect is now out of pocket. He's screaming at whoever his adjutant is. Of course I hear it. I'm just not seeing it. I've started. They're coming from all over town. I want everything out here.

Show of force immediately. I want everything out there. Show of force immediately. And here, like show wearing its politics on its sleeves. So there are stormtroopers here, sure. Mostly what's here are riot cops carrying modern riot equipment that we have seen deployed again and again. Saw it deployed a lot during the, during like trade protests, you know, 25, 30 years.

ago and we've seen it deployed a lot since 2014 in protests against police violence here but also against austerity in the UK and to be fair also police violence and we have like these have become sort of the symbols of the the state's most oppressive aspect and institutions and and again just a small detail is just like we are constantly seeing human faces right like it is it is a has to be a conscious decision, right? You put stormtroopers out there. There are stormtroopers there. It's part of it's important to be like, hey, we brought the stormtroopers in. But these riot cops, you see their faces. These are human beings who have made the decision to ally themselves

with the empire for personal gain. These are not, they're not robots, right? These are, that guy's name is Jimbo or whatever, right? Like, that's real. That's Gloop Shito. Glob Shito. Jabo Hood grew up. Jaybo Hood grew up and decided to join the empire. I know. Hard to believe, but here we are. And we see the some great shots here as the band converges in front of the building in the center of the square uh you know we we we see the a wide lens looking out uh at the at the gathering at the gathering musicians they sort of form a circle in all this uh and or in his little watchtower spots luthan through his scope and there's a great little beat as he is first briefly totally confused as to why Luthan

is there. He looks down and to the side as you see him think about it and then you see the realization hit of he knows exactly why Luton is there and what that signifies. Other thing I'll note here, the band and most of the marchers and their funeral

clothes, we mentioned this back when we saw the trailer that all the colors seemed reminiscent of rebel uniforms and boy they're all here. It's the yellow the reds, the oranges. Sintas wearing the green, that we see, like, rebel pilots and, like, ground crew wearing throughout the films. And so, yeah, it is, it is hard not to think that, like, this is a foundational event we're about to witness.

That what's about to unfold is going to become part of, like, rebel mythology. Speaking of witnessing things, just in front of Luton, who is watching all this, happen, March, March down, Cyril Karn and Mosque. And you can see Luton be like, oh, my fucking God. Oh, Luton clocks them? Luton absolutely, instantly, 100%. And it's just like, he just stands there. He doesn't, you know.

This was one of the most excru-patryon.com slash civilized. Yeah. Excruciating, excruciating moment for Luton. They touch. They walk, they like bump into each other. It's like. It's so. Oh, but.

My God, it's like, oh. And like he turns out almost faces him. It's so close. I felt like I was being, I felt like I was being attacked from so many, like this, from here on out through the rest of this episode. Oh, doesn't it feel like so many things are about to fall off a shelf? Like just so many things. My chest was so tight.

I was holding my breath for like the next 30 minutes. And I swear to God I almost passed out. It was like, zero. right next to Luth it. And the music is swelling and everyone is joining together and there's not like a, there's not a breath. I mean, I thought when Nurchy tells Korv, we said this already to fake arrest him, I was like, is it going to pop off early?

Like, what's like, are people going to react to that? Like, it was the tension high. And B and Ambraso walking through the entire group marching one step after the after the other as the riot cops literally run down the road to try to like. set up a wall. Right. There's scrambling. There's like such an emergency and like and and scrambling and and just messiness about the,

the imperial, you know, police rushing to meet the crowd who are just walking extremely solemnly with pride. And Vicks hearing it from the jail cell and humming along. This is the other thing that we have so many shots of people looking through windows, looking through obsuscated, you know, like vents or, or frames or things like that. We have Bix looking. We have Dedra looking. We have Andor looking. And it's Bix looking out and just being in this other state, like this catatonic.

But she, but it's familiar. It's, she's wrecking, like, there's some, there's like a sweetness. there that she's able to like recognize this um the funeral march that uh playing that you know shows some light behind the the sort of that something's getting through like that catatonic hay she she's in the other thing again it's on the nose but like this is her marvell is going to say i've been to countless you know uh uh similar events to this one you have to imagine Bix has been to. This is what it means to be on Farrex. This is in you in that way. The way that if you grew up in a church, you might still have those hymns in you. Even if you haven't gone in years and

years and years. This is part of who she is. And again, it's a very straight line. It's very on the nose. But it is rare that we get the story that is like the heart of a funerary right in your culture can bring you, you know, back after being literally, you know, violently harmed by an imperial state. It hits for me. It works. It's not like she like snaps out of it. No.

But she's able to leave. She's able to leave that room with Cassian from hearing Marva's voice, from hearing the music, from seeing and hearing Cassian, it like makes her feel safe. Again, there is strength in attachment. There is strength in community. That stuff is real. Somebody should have fucking told Yoda that. Yody doesn't understand it.

Just saying. So the other thing I just want to say, like, so Nurti doing this shit, you know, the weird thing is he raises. I will kill Yoda. I will kill that little green frog for what he did. Yoda has seen so many of his attachments die. He lives such a life.

That's right. I can't believe we're having this now. Yoda can't get attached like it's just like they're already gone soon why attach be safe

Yoda doesn't want to adopt any more humans so the other thing like so Nurtry does by like doing this is I think one he's hauled out

and arrested in front of the crowd or something like already is like raising tension levels to have this thing erupt in the middle of the crowd also goodbye to Korv's paper thin cover of, I'm just here with the funeral.

Yeah, and syntheses it. But two, this is where Debra completely now gets eye off the funeral and begins going on her and or hunt, and the prefect now is the only one in charge of the scene and, like, watching over what's happening. So, Debra... The prefect and the security, security guy. Yeah, right, but those two were going to just call shit, right? They're going to stir shit. They're going to want there to be an escalation.

Whereas if Debra had stayed in command, she maybe could have kept it from blowing up. Yeah. And it takes no time at all. The minute he's in the hotel, Nurti already looks ashamed. And, you know, obviously part of the deal is to get out of here. You never has to faith these people.

But like no sooner is he in that hotel than he looks like he already has some buyer's remorse. We see now that Brasso is carrying the stone up the street with B2 rolling along behind him. A stone that is Marva's ashes baked into a brick. And we get a great shot of Andor looks down into the left of the frame as we get a shot of Bix looking up into the right. So their like islands are sort of matched.

But a moment later he spots Dedra moving in on him. So it's time for him to go. Cyril now also sees Dedra and yearns from afar. Oh, also we left out the bit where they try. to like get through the police line him and mosque and they got like brushed back and cyrots are smirked at them and mosque like tried to give them a hard stare it was great completely out of pocket yes 100% and now things we can happen fast the band finishes up the dirge as all the bands and groups have converged in the in the square

hold on hold on okay when when karn tells mosque she's here and he like holds her back. Like, they talked about... That's true. They talked about... Moss wasn't like who. Moss was like, oh, my God. She's here.

Like, have they been, like, DMing about... Have they been texting about... His crush on Dudra? She's here. So fucked up. It's so fucked up. But it's great.

I love that he, like, holds him back. Like, no, bro. Wait. There's... there's going to be an ideal moment for you to go save the princess, and you're going to be the epic knight that saves her. And he was right. And he was right.

And it was pretty epic. I'm not going to lie. This is the fucked up thing, right? This is like, of all the directions for the Karn's story to go, I did not think Jody Foster's really impressed and thinks it was really cool what you did was going to be the payoff for this plot line. And again, Luther hears him say it's her. and puts together, oh, that must be

okay, okay, I see. It's just so funny to me that at the end of this day, Luton knows that Karn, I don't bet he doesn't know Karn's name, but he knows that this little nerd is a huge stand for Dedra, the person he just found out about from Lonnie last episode,

or two episodes ago or whatever. Yep, yep. Axis has all information. Oh, yes. Yep. Axis friended you up under under his assumed name and it's just like, so tell me all

about learning more than he wants to know about Cyril Karn, but it all, I no longer know where this plot is going, but anyway. Well, we'll get there. So, the band finishes the dirge. All the groups have converged and now they

sort of square up to the imperial shield wall and the dirge gives way to a pretty rapid, like, advanced. like a piece of music as everyone begins to sort of trot forward down down Rick's road which is already lined with people crowd is surging toward the line the speed the speed has like the literal walking speed has increased like there's there's this there's this

moment where B2 Emo and Brasso like lead the charge like they step forward and everyone steps forward in unison towards the the Imperial line and that feels to me that feels like an active resist like that's an act of resistance that's an active defiance they're they're marching right towards they're going to do this right in front of the hotel in front of the physical location of like imperial control that that they're maintaining of imperial occupation and it's working it's already pissing off the prefect he starts complaining and everyone's freaking out they're losing their minds and and all they're doing is walking towards them There's no, like, obvious threat other than here are hundreds of people walking towards you with a look of just absolute disdain and they're in mourning and they fucking hate you. And let's have a funeral. And then the chant starts, right? I do want to say pointedly that there is a moment where it does literally seem like B2 Emo is conducting this music.

There's a droid beep in the gap between songs. And then once that happens, they start. talking. Well, I, so I also heard, uh, when they're doing the chant, I swear to God, B2's sort of making his servo's murmur along with stone and sky, stone and sky. And Bix is chanting it. Uh, meanwhile, Andor has escaped, uh, Dedra's, uh, little trap. And he has now made his way into the, the depths of the hotel and pulls his gun on the cook

who immediately is like, I'm sorry about your mom. It's like, again, it's a very. small town. He recognized him and or recognizes him first by name. Yep. I think his name's like Temick or something like that. Tem something. How, how, like

it's just so fucking, it's so fucked up. Like here are people working in the, like having to work in the hotel for cooking food for the fucking oppressor. That's the thing, right? He was a cook here probably before all this and like, when it was a hotel. Do I, yeah.

yeah it's really dark it's very weird he just looks absolutely shocked to see him and he lets him know that bix is somewhere upstairs but uh yeah then you again immediately that exchange you know i'm sorry i'm sorry about your mother and once again it's like like the empire literally does not know what's sitting on top of like that is surrounded by connections and like this community they're not they're not they're not what dedra thinks right dedra thinks that the revolution is going to come because someone named Axis is going to like marionette you know all of these forces into into play and it's going to call a shot and like pull the trigger but what's really happening is just deep communal bonds is just people taking care

of each other is people who have who have fondness for one another and who won't like it when they see them other people get hurt you know and who will let your target slip by because hey I'm sorry about your mom you know and that's the thing like this is what Karn should have learned but didn't, right? Is that you can put a wanted poster out on a guy, but the community will never help you find him. Maybe there's a nerchy, but by and large, however they feel about Andor, he is one of theirs,

and he will always be more one of theirs than they will ever feel any loyalty to the empire. And so as he begins moving up the hotel that Brasso turns, brings the crowd to a halt, B2 rolls forward and Marva begins her speech projected in colossal stature like the empire like the emperor and empire strikes back honestly just an enormous hologram towering over the town square it reminded me of what I wanted from the Anderan arc we get those speeches from Saul Guerrera's sister in the Anderan city that's similar in terms of

the way it's deployed, a huge projection, and then, you know, it doesn't say much of value because we don't get a sense of what the occupation is. Again, we're talking about Clone Wars versus a show that's super dedicated to these ideas. The Under an Arc, which I liked, had, like, Shrek politics. Like, basically, it was the King from Shrek was the adversary in that fucking arc. Lord Farcord? I'm just, I'm out. I, oh.

But it's, like, his little. Like, just sit, like, reclining back on his throne, eating little fruits. Like, fruit and throwing, yeah. It's basically the only thing missing is down look at. We have a, yes, we have a real sense of what's happened on pharix. We have a sense of the way the community has been impacted. We understand the streets are occupied. We have a sense of what's being taken away from them.

And then we have, like you said, this speech from Marva. And it's got to be good one, because this is going to be long. And it is now, it is now the third, sorry, the fourth speech that we're getting in this episode. and we get an absolutely marvelous piece of rhetoric that is also like intercut with the impact these words make on various members of the crowd and the events that begin to be set in motion by what they are hearing as she opens the speech

saying I'm honored to stand before you I'm honored to be a daughter of barracks an honor to be an honor to be worthy of the stone A stranger. Feels if I can see him. I was six, I think. First time I touched a funerary stone.

Heard our music. Felt our history. Holding my sister's hand as we walked all the way from Fountain Square. Where you stand now, I've been more times than I can remember. I always wanted to be lifted. I was always eager, always waiting to be inspired. I remember every time it happened, every time the dead lifted me. With their truth.

And now I'm dead. And I earn to lift you. Not because I want to shine or even be remembered. It's because I want you to go on. I want ferrics to continue. In my waning hours, that's what comforts me most. But I fear for you. We've been sleeping.

We've had each other around ferrics, our work, our days. We had each other and they left us alone. We kept the trade lanes open and they left us alone. We took their money and ignored them. We kept their engines churning and the moment they pulled away, we forgot them. Because we had each other. We had fairies. But we were sleeping.

I've been sleeping. I've been turning away from the truth I wanted not to face. There is a wound that won't hear at the center of the galaxy. There is a darkness reaching like rust into everything around us. We let it grow and now it's here. It's here and it's not visiting anymore. It wants to stay. The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness.

It is never more alive than when we sleep. It's easy for the dead to tell you. dead to tell you to fight. And maybe it's true, maybe fighting's useless. Perhaps it's too late. But I'll tell you this. If I could do it again, I'd wake up early and be fighting these bastards.

Start. Fight the empire. I, whoever put this pen to paper and then Fiona Shaw, those, like, just magic, like, true magic. Give it the, give it the fucking Emmy, give it all the awards. Like, just, thinking about Fiona like delivering this probably in like front of a green screen you know right right with no

audience like this is she she's in I imagine that the actual like recording it almost mimics the sort of the produced effect of it of delivering a speech that you know will be heard by hundreds us thousands millions watchers of andor but in but by your herself in front of a recording device and without an audience to, you know. Right. She doesn't have, she can't feel the buzz literally, but she says, she literally does say that she can sense, she can almost sense the people there, right? She's like, I can see, it's almost like I can see you.

And she almost looks around and I almost feel, I almost feel like she's about to turn around and look at the Imperials. And the way that she kind of looks around in that moment, it's really, really poignant. Also, there is a great contrast there really quick to a thing that I think it's Dejra says earlier when the band starts. And Dejra says, of course, I hear it. I'm just not seeing it. And, you know, here is Marva, who literally is dead, who's literally not there and says, strange, I can feel as if I can see you. Well, Ann, so she opens her speech.

By the way, the way the speech unfolds, it unifies, again, themes that we hear when things are talked about with the force, the cycles of life, that there's no ending that death isn't really final in that way, that there's just a return to an unity with. And Marva Marva's speech touches in that But also what is great is It still feels like an almost unpracticed speech Because like an elderly person She's seeing the full loop of her life Come around

And she has this aside about like You know The first funerals she remembers And being there with her sister But as she delivers this line Dedra has given up on searching the building Where Cass was And she comes out

and her back is fully to Marva's hollow as is addressing the crowd. And Debra doesn't look. She's completely checked out of this entire moment. She does not hear a word that Marva is saying. And in this, like, we see Cyril continuing to yearn. But, yeah, just the way that the speech unfolds with, you know, leaving the other time. It is so wild that, like, literally. Karn is wrapped with attention to this speech as Marva talks about the culture and the music and the ritual.

And then Dedra walks by and gains his attention and pulls him away from that, right? You know, you can't, you don't need to put too fine a point on it that here is his rival's mother talking with love and defection and camaraderie and community in a way that his mother could never, right? there is an outpouring towards her of affection and from her of commitment to what it means to be in a place with her people that has to be alien to him but he is compelled to look away because there goes Dedra and he's still his face is still like oh he's about a cry he's a cry baby he's about a cry the way that that Dejra walks behind the imperial line and like kind of looks back at at the projection as if it's not it's no regard nothing is not worth my time not even like it's it's it's background noise it's there's nothing important to happen nothing is about to fucking go off in like 15 minutes 20 minutes here um she's just so casual so nonchalant so focused on Andor that she can't even see the resistance brewing right in front of her.

And like, again, just this this full loop of like the original police chief from corporate security was like, we shouldn't investigate this. Nothing good will come of it. You know what the best thing to do here is and the best way to protect our authority is to not project it. Just leave it. And Karn does it and fucks us. up. And they're like, you're an idiot. You dumbass. Now we've had to come over and clean this up.

And once again, it is all this culminating in the manhunt for Cassie and Andor. And once again, they're just raising the stakes with different people are like, it's going to work out differently for me this time. Like, I know the risks and the forces we're dealing with. Also in this, like, God, every time we cut to Nurchy, I just feel his end feels so tragic here. He's not as developed a character as Skeen. But, like, this is the loneliest death in this series

like this is he has time to hear Marva talking about this and as she's saying you know I remember

every time it happened every time the dead lifted me with their truth and now I'm dead and I yearn to lift you and Nurti just looks like

he is just shrinking just absolutely gutted to be stuck there this is what you've turned your back on yeah and there's the bit so the turn happens

when she talks about basically the accommodation the made with the empire and she turns to we've been sleeping and this is where like everyone like it's so cool seeing like Luthen sort of like starting tune into the speech

and like really thinking about it having just given his speech I think in some ways this is the thing he knows he can't do and we know that from his little like his little performers persona he yearns to give a speech like this he yearns to like

take center stage and do something like this but it's something he can't do and here's Marva just doing it from the heart and like it is working but she be she and what's very clever is rhetorically she still has not named the she still has not named the enemy

she's sitting on it she's talking about there's a wound There's a darkness. There's a truth. And I'm curious what you made of this. We cut to, you know, as she says, there's a darkness reaching like rust and everything around us. We cut to Mosque and Cyril. And they look odd. Not necessarily like they're being won over by it.

But like for a moment, they see the wave rushing toward them. Mm-hmm. And like Mosque looks at Cyril with concern in that moment. like as if to say of course we don't believe any of that right sir right she's a madwoman sir he can't he doesn't say anything

Cyril again eyes just locked on her you can't quite is it because he thinks this is the evilest thing he's heard the most absurd thing that he's heard or is it just that he's overwhelmed to hear someone spell it out and say it out loud these are not random acts of crime Cassie and Andor isn't a guy

who tried to get a check by spy you know it's bigger than that Doing wrong, doing evil, bad things. She sounds like the heroes from his cartoons, dude. Yep. You know, the emperor doesn't get out and do speeches like this. We don't hear this. Maybe he does.

We don't see it. And, yeah, Ellie. Well, I do wonder if it's, like, igniting, though, right? Like, if it becomes this moment of justification of, like, well, if this is how people hear, this is what I'm fighting against. Like I have to protect the empire From this thought Yeah, it's hard His face is really hard to pin on one emotion

Because it's he's he he knows Dedrus here he's probably concerned for her safety He's hearing you know he's he's one against or two with mosque One and a half really just the two of them are like You know they're not Because mosque is one and he's a half Yeah, yeah he's the half scorn's a half

I think if they're both three-fourths is what's happening there That's fair, yeah But yeah It's unclear whether it's resonating with him or he or If it's just the most awful Thing he can't believe what he's hearing

It's very ambiguous and I I love that we're going to sit with that ambiguity Ambiguity for Two years, 18 months, who knows? Ever? Luton looking down and his eyes wavering

as he just sits with knowing he can't like you said Robby can't do this or that he should have been doing this or that he doesn't have this he doesn't have like a local struggle to attach himself to he has to be removed from everyone because he has to be the grand orchestrator

of it all she gets to do this partially because she's dead right she gets like in some ways which she has to look out for her speech yes 100% right And, and there is a power there that I think he didn't know that they could tap into. But it's, it's so, I mean, it's so, it's so hard to see Luthin, like, run away from this, essentially. When everything breaks out, you, you think, all right, I mean, we were talking about, go out, patreon.com. slash civilized um in the live watch is like okay pull out the lightsaber bro like go fuck

him up there's you're gonna do it you pull out the knife from the action figure which by the way that was the thing for the last episode here's the thing i see for me i think there is an element of like definitely regret that he can't take the stage like this that he can't like hear the applause that like someone like marvel would get but i also feel like he is witnessing this all unfold like the thing he had theorized would exist is starting to like he's seeing it

take shape around him like you know because he said early Aldani part of the purpose was to drive the empire into fury that would make enemies and here he's sitting here and he's watching like

an entire community like getting radicalized around him and he didn't take a hand in it I think that is the part that shakes is that it is that he doesn't need like it is moved beyond his need to puppet master it. It is just starting to happen

organically. And that's scary because it means it could move in directions you don't control. He could go to Saul Guerrera and say, yo, don't go back up, Anto. Kreeger has, he can't do that here. There is no one here he can come to and be like, we shouldn't have a big fight at Marvis's funeral because it could break bad

for you. Like, he can't do that. He is not in control of it at this point, right? And that is, I think, a little scary for someone who has built his identity around being in control, having ears, and eyes everywhere. He has ears and eyes here. He has Val and Sinta, you know, since he's been here, Senta doesn't have pull in this community. Do you know what I mean? So I think that it's a scary moment for him for that way. Even if I think he thinks, even if he thinks this is

a net good, even if this is part of what his vision has been, that moment where it tips over from a project you're in control of to a force, to a, from a, you know, a pebble you've pushed down the mountain to a landslide. You're not in control that landslide anymore. I mean, this could be another sacrifice. Like we don't know what happens after we do not

after everyone leaves Ferrex. I mean everyone being Bix, Brasso, B2, Emo and the one daughter pharix and then

the kid. And then the kid right. Yeah. And that's it. We don't know. We don't, you're right.

Like this, we don't know, we don't see the empire running with their tail between their legs. We don't see them evacuating the hotel. We don't see them

fleeing on a destroy. Like, no. In a way, yeah, it's, it's like the last time, importantly. It's like the last time Cassian left. Like, we leave pharix and then we return to imperial occupied, occupied ferrics, you know, prefect hotel taken over everything. What will ferrics look like the next time we come here? But it is that they fought at all, right? That people are committed to doing this. That is the victory, right? I think here and, and this is a stand-in for the rest of the empire. These moments will continue to happen. This is not a one-off, right?

I don't think it's very often at this point that he is witness to the sacrifice. He's often moving in the shadows, moving behind the scenes, like facilitating connections, but he's not on the front lines really like that. Like he wasn't at all Donnie. He definitely wasn't anywhere near fucking Krieger's whole shit. And he's probably smart to bounce, right? He isn't important. Yes, he's an important person

And he needs to go But I think if he just got caught With a random blaster shot Right That would be bad for the cause Very bad, very bad But I think in a way Like he's being confronted

With the sacrifice He's watching people die At the hands of the empire In the name of resistance Like that is the true That is the truth Of the sacrifices that need to be made In order to to break free

Of the empire Well I think this is sort of key to like what and or turns into and the guy we meet in rogue one is that like these are the guys who end up walking in the darkness uh for for for this cause because i think in a really like depressing way but absolutely correct a massacre like this is good for luthan like there is a there's a real utility to this because like the empire's mask fully comes off here like the injustice is palpable, the overreaction is both terrifying to people, but also makes the

empire look weak. This is like, so many causes like this have been galvanized by famous massacres. You know, Austin, you alluded to Bloody Sunday, and there's actually been a couple. There's a bunch of Bloody Sundays, yeah. Like, there were

both in the Irish uprising in like 1920, and then during the trouble, there were two events that both got that name, and each one sort of how they had a galvanizing effect around public opinion began to really undercut the legitimacy of British policy in these spaces.

And, like, Luton has known he needs to instrumentalize this, but also now he's watching it unfold and like a bunch of people are going to die, and he's going to walk away. And what sets it off is Marva now reaches, her rhetorical turn. The Imperial commander and the prefect sense it coming a split second

before she belts out the empire is a disease that thrives in darkness. Brasso and the kid exchange a look and like... Sort of. They don't actually make eye contact.

They're both just... They're having a look, but they're not... It's not like they're signaling to each other. It's go time. They're feeling internally that it might be about to be going to...

They're both reaching the place that they need to be at to do this. Like, they're both on their own individual journeys of reaching a peak. The kid's face with like on the, he's, he's filled with tears. His eyes are like, but they won't fall. The tears aren't falling. They're welled up.

He's cried them all, you know, he's been crying them for a week or whatever, right? Yeah. And so here, and this is, it is so good that what kicks this off is them being mean to a droid. I think the prefect He charges forward with his cloak And tries to throw it over B2 He blows it He does not cover the hollow

The hollow projector So only cuts the image in half As she says If I can do it again I'd wake up early and be fighting these bastards From the start Fight the Empire At that point he kicks B2 over

He knocks me he picks B2 up And he throws him over At that point Brasso kicks him hard The mourners start charging the shield wall And Brasso starts giving it to people With the Marva brick Tell Marva put brick on my brick

It's so good Just drop kicking the shit Out of these fucking Imperial Cops I invite everyone to go rewind And see the Brasso super kick Because it's so good It's like a superhero ass kick It's so good

He's so big He's so big Brasso underrated And to be fair A lot of the scrapers are also big Which is why the Imperial shield wall Does not hold up very well Immediately the minute they go with these guys

These people work You know what I mean? They're out here Yeah they don't just think they're polishing their armor And like yeah And so they start to They start to cave in that shield wall Like right away And crucially they don't have weapons

Okay nobody nobody has weapons they're using their bodies against, against the Imperials. Like they're pushing into them, kicking, using their bodies to break the, break the line that they've held. They don't have, you know, even makeshift things. They don't have, they have just what they, who they, their personhood against, against the empire. Andor has a gun though. Andor has people and kills them. Yeah, and or is carving a swath through.

the hotel uh you know he's he's he's gunned people down getting to picks and yeah he finds her oh you know who else you know who else doesn't have a weapon except uh a damn good kick is the time grappler the bell the bell ringer someone tries to climb up there i mean a recurring thing is people keep looking up there to be like uh he seems important the fact that he's ringing these bells seems important yeah somebody the security guy gives the order like get stop the bell stop the bell as if like the bell is what is stopping the bell doing what did marva say in that first episode she's like gets to it gets to you doesn't it that's what reckoning sounds like you want it to stop and it just keeps coming it's when it stops that's when you really want to fret

fortune teller turns over a card that shows a stormtrooper being ass kicked out of a tower prefect is that good is that good uh huh huh oh uh so the big next, we sort of figure what's going on here. She's become, you know, in Vonnegut's phrase, unstuck in time. She's not sure what's real, what is now, what is the past, what's the future. She tells him, Marva was here, and And her replies, wasn't she great? And that is enough to bring her, to start getting her moving out of the hotel. And Nurchy goes to the window as this is all unfur.

folding. Dedra comes out, tries to escape the square, but it's sort of now trapped in the crowd. And this is where Wilman arms the bomb, chucks it. Carnes sees this, breaks through the line, breaks away from Moss to try to get to Dedra, I guess. Doesn't come close. The bomb goes off. It's like, do you ever see those like the end of a Call of Duty match that gets won by a grenade toss and you get the replay and you get the replay of like it's the person from across the map and it goes over a building and it bounces off of it's the perfect throw yeah it's it bounces exactly where it needs to not only to blow up stuff immediately but to knock over and ignite an entire well it clears the brown floor of the hotel that andor is going to go through well because

it blows up and it it tosses a tank and then it yeah I guess it does it blows up before the sympathetic explosions even happen you're right you see nerchy and the entire front of the hotel get like blown up Nerchy is just hurled across the room and this is where the you know yakety sacks begins to play because

the big like the harvest the horn of plenty of grenades the empire brought to this march is tipped over and they begin going off and they begin setting off other munitions

and so the entire street explodes. Like everything, the entire screen just white out. It's an incredible sequence. You know, Karn's not,

like, and it brings the, it brings the riot to a hall briefly. Everyone's on the floor, Luton was on the floor, fucking mosque is like, whew!

And, you know, this gives, you know, this gives a brief window where Vell is rushing, rushing into

the smoke sick shot it's a sick shot six shot over running behind her as she runs into the smoke like a goddamn superhero it's fucking sick

this is the shot at the beginning of Batman versus Superman you know I know it's ridiculous that I'm referencing this but of Ben Affleck as Bruce Wayne running into the smoke during fake 9-11 during Superman 9-11

but also like we are fully off in battle Alger's territory throughout all this too just seeing like all hell breaking loose and this is where the prefect

who's been the weakest link of this thing now in a panic opens the stormtroopers to open fire and so now again I think that Dejur

might not have done but now it is it is gun's time happening yep and these blasters I have to say like the effect

of seeing it they hit so hard I know we've said this before in other blaster fights but you feel it again here

Like, these are not pew-pew laser beams. These are fucking laser bullets that are hitting. Like, people are being pushed and thrown around. It's quite intense. Well, and, you know, these are not the stormtroopers of New Hope who are, like, trying to make sure that everyone escapes so that they can lead them to the rebel base. Like, every time these guys fire, people are dying.

People are getting a hit. Yes. And it like This is not Brasso does head but one though Which is sick as hell An important note Well because they try it

Because they know who tossed the bomb Like they try to haul Pack The Pax kid out of the crowd Wilman They try to haul them out And that's where Brasso intercepts them And they just starts dragging the kid out You know and

But it's grim Like this is It is now a massacre Like once the shooting starts The crowd can't break that shield wall they're not like this is not going to be the imperial yoke being thrown off this is now a full-on massacre. Zan 1 gets shot

Zan 1 tries to jump on the back of a stormtrooper and gets hit with a blaster bolt with such force that he goes flying so intense, skidding against the ground and I was just sick to my stomach B-2 was on his side and I was like I'm going to be okay, is he dead somewhere all this

Corv gets got the course what are you doing here when he sees Sinta Dumb as shit, boy She looks scared She's in the doorway I will say this This scene could have been bloodier

She stabs him in the stomach I bet it couldn't have been though Rob I bet that's the thing Right I bet you can't Because she references the blood later Vell sees her later And it's like your hands are bloody

She has like a tiny bit of blood on her hands Yeah we barely see it And I bet that was a I can't show too much blood here Yeah But I think it honestly works It works for the way That like death has

occurred throughout this show is like it happens and things keep going. We don't have, we don't revel in death. We don't revel in like people falling and stay in it and stick in it. Like we, things keep going. The rest of.

I mean, we do see a bunch of people get shot with an anti-armor gun. Yeah, they're opening up a cannon at this point. It's so fucked up. Pegla though. MVP. of this whole operation dragging B2 to safety Oh yes

In this and or sees Seas was become nerchy Just a good little moment But There is no moment Bigger and better Than Dedra getting disarmed And knocked over

And okay this is a little weird The editing around this does get a little weird Like maybe they went a different direction With this scene The crowd swarms her Oh yeah She's being dragged Yeah.

And then the next thing we see is someone picking up the gun and jamming it into her back and telling her, like, do exactly as I say, come with me. But like, the crowd that was about to rip her limb from limb is gone. This is what I'm saying. They have moved on. They are fleeing, right? But we don't see them flee. Or maybe they see, like, because Carn is dressed as a civilian, right?

Like, as he's pulling her out, maybe they're, yeah, they've moved on. he's like one of them has got her it'll you know it'll proceed i mean she gets hit she gets smacked in the head with a brick and she like falls to the ground and then she gets like kicked as she's down like she's getting fucked up um it does look like they're going to like drag her away yeah it's like some like the goo monster is pulling in it is pulling you know it's just enveloping her the whole crowd envelopes her it's really really scary Also, she gets hit in the head with, like, a rock at one point. Yeah, that's what I, that's what, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do think it's Cyril walking, because I feel like there's that wide shot where it's Cyril and her in a group walking together and he has the gun to her back. And then he's like, come with me and he pushes her towards that door. And then they're in this a romantic store room. Yeah. Okay, is it time to talk about this? So tell us about that, you know, talk us through.

Tell me what happens. They push to the room. Somehow they're face to face now. I'm just sure Sarah will turn to her around. She's like shaking and she's overwhelmed. She doesn't know what's going on. Natalie, please. He pulls her in and it's like a dance move.

He like pulls her in close to him and his back is against this storage shelf. And she has her fist cocked. with like some sort of piece of metal or shrapnel or something about about to like clock him in the head and then she looks up and realizes that it's Karn and she's shaking her whole body

is heaving and she says you how I'm Cyril his mother was like you have to introduce you have to make sure that people remember your name

the first thing he says is The first thing he says is, you were in trouble. And he, that's what he has a look on his face where his eyes are like, that's right, you were in trouble and I was there for you. I'm Cyril. Yeah. He like, he gives her, I've never seen his face. Look, he's never looked as confident as in this moment.

Never, ever. He did not have this energy when he was giving that speech to the, to the, to the, to the, to the corpo cops. No. He did not have the speech. He didn't have this face all. ever before she goes I I guess I should thank you and she's still shaking like there's no calm to any of this but he is is is rock like I need to leave I need to I'd have to check the footage again

It's from the neck up You wouldn't know anyway Oh so you checked already Is what you're telling me? I'm watching the scene right now Are you kidding me? Oh my lord Anyway

You have to But here Okay So Swad levels through the roof I gotta say Like give it to Karn In this moment

Truly This is like if 405 turned into the Han solo It's so fucked up He pulls the weapon. She has like an improvised. It's like a piece of, it's like a piece of scrap that she has had his neck like a knife. And he put, he grabs it and pulls it away. I swear it felt like they were going to kiss.

I swear to go. At least embrace and like. I know. He is. He is. Well, because he's already made his advances. She, it's like the Mr. Dorsesne love. Because it's literally she needs to, she needs, he's laid it out.

She knows how he feels. She knows that if, if, like, he would accept her love at any point if she wanted to offer it. I just, okay, this is the first time this, this, I'm pausing this, I'm pausing the conversation. Okay. This is the first time we are recording before getting, like, we don't know what people are going to do in response to this episode. It's true. In the past, we record on Thursdays. We record a day after the episode drops.

people are going to explode about this scene this it's just the whole Twitter's back that's you know Twitter's back this is going to revive Twitter it's going to come back

because people aren't going to be able to do anything with tweet about it I'm forth I mean it's everywhere you are right now whatever mastodon it whatever you're on code it's everywhere everywhere

y'all don't even know yet like it's crazy that we are in we are in the future but in the past yes and we know things that you don't know and it's y'all are it's wild there's going to be wars over the scene and cyril's already in the future thinking about like taking her to work and her job is head of the ISB as he as he takes the kids to school he's going to want to be her number two he's right he's about to be in her circle like that's what's

going to happen that's exactly what's going to happen i mean still what he thinks is going to happen Here's the thing. They're going to make out on Partigaz's desk. Here's the, here's just one. She was glancing at his lips. I, if he was, I'm going to. But hold on, hold on. Let me just off with this.

Now, admittedly, Dedron just sometimes has a look of disgust on her face, just in general, like the whole, like, demeanor. Yeah, it's kind of her vibe, yeah. But. It's how she shows emotion. There's a little bit, I think, still of revulsion that he's, there. Of course. That's not going to stop anything. That's not going to stop. What do you mean? She hates him.

She thinks he's disgusting, but he saved her life and is looking pretty, I don't know, like. No one else she works with is dedicated to the cause that they want the same things. And he just out foot up. Like he evolved. That's what he said six episodes. He said we want. I know. He said.

When he was insane I was a card and he's proving that he was right about it when the pretext didn't have her back

Pentegos didn't have her back he fucking went there to try to get Andor and now she's like you gotta come to my office No I think she's gonna keep him a secret She's gonna bring him But she's a secret

It's a secret nobody can know about him Nobody can know about him Never gets an official rank No He never gets an official He puts him on a little contractor payment. No one ever gets to know who he is.

They meet in the secret. They meet at the hotel. No one is allowed to see them together. No. You cannot tell your mother about us. Absolutely not. We will not be coming home to Edy anytime ever. He's about to be sharing a desk with that other little boy who works in her office.

It's going to be the two of them both holding coffee for her when she comes into the morning. And she's going to walk past both of them and be like, you know, did you do this thing yet? We're going to get another other Dr. Gorse name drop and we're giving them orders. It's happening. First season of season two. I'm going to die. I'm going to die. I can't believe we're not getting five seasons.

This needs five seasons. This needs, I need to spend time with this. I need to spend years with the show. This should be the whole 2020s. The fact that we're not going to get, the fact that we're not going to be here in a decade still talking about Andor. The 2020 should be the decade of Andor. Yes.

Fuck the autumn of. Bandor in the decade she's shaking if you haven't seen the scene I don't know that I've seen people shake like this in television I have except for

Pride prejudice oh my guy it's true and she's in the she's cold and she's shaking and she brings him in and he needs to embrace her I'm talking about of course the Pride and Prejudice with

Kira Knightley and what's his name Matthew from succession McFadden, yes She's shaking And it is hot It is hot, you can't deny that this scene is hot I'm sorry

I love the worm I love him I love the disgusting man You know what's so great about this though It is so instructive I'm not gonna stand in your way It is so instructive Like how you put two

charismatic people in a TV show Yes our desire to mash them together is so strong that it's like episode one these are basically these are basically like little low-level gestapo functionaries yes whose highest aspiration is to be a shitty slightly privy little cog in this torture and oppression machine and we're all like what if what if what if they kissed but like I think it's the fact that the relationship is so miserable the vibes are it's past rancid right it's foul it is it is rotting she hates him they deserve each other and yet and yet

because he wants because also he wants someone to reject him as much as mommy does but i mean like i think that that's part of it i do think that the fact that there is that both that we spend so much time with them with what feel like legitimate grievances which is she knows what the fuck is going on no one will listen to her in her workplace and he is truly in an emotionally abuse abusive, you know, home. We know that he has not been shown love. We know that he has not had access to community. It's great.

Like, it is, I don't have sympathy for these people. No. But I am, Star Wars in the past, has not spent a lot of time with the idea that someone can, like, have a terrible home life that is built around a constant rejection and belittlement by your parental figures. We've had bad parental relationships. in Star Wars. But there's something

so real about the Edian Karn relationship that is hard to if you don't have this relationship with someone in your family she's not an evil person

she's not dark-sighted she's not just like she's just mean she's just mean and miserable and resentful and she projects everything all of her life's

disappointments and failures onto her son I was thinking today about like that turn of phrase she keeps returning to your former triumphs. The fact that she always puts it, as anything Cyril does, he wants a little triumph. And it's such a weird, like, I was just rattling around on my head the way that, like, when did

that start? You know, how long, every time that something nice happens for him, that she didn't... Every time he got a star on a, you know, school assignment. She sees as this, like, defiant act of independence and self-assertion that she has to slap down and, like, belittle. And, like, you're right. Like, you don't like... Cyril, but again, you have sympathy for what the child he was has gone through. Right.

And, like, I will say, like, again, I feel I'm always in this place with this character. I have no idea where his story is going. I have no idea. The taxi vibe vibes were fully off the charts a few weeks ago, and now I'm like, I have, I just don't know.

I just don't know how any of this effects or changes or lands with him. I don't know what his Ultimate Destiny is in this series. I'm so, it's, I'm so invested in them. It is like, you don't have to like like like

like them to be, I mean, I don't know. I like them even though they're terrible. Yeah. Because they're terrible. Um, and I've just, I just,

I need to be with them forever. I need to know what happens to them. They're, they're wildly compelling. They're wildly compelling. And in part because it is such a strange. They're disasters. I mean,

I mean, I guess, you know, we bounce between this and also trying to figure out, like, what the deal is with the parent and ma-ma thing, where it's just like, every time this comes up. What is love in Star Wars? What is, what are relationships? What is romantic relationships? What is domesticity? Like, Andor is interrogating all of that and putting it on display, and it's messy and it's not clean. It's just. I have watched the next Clone Wars arc that we have not recorded.

podcast for. I mentioned this months ago now. And we are about to get some toxic domesticity vibes of the likes we have never seen in, I mean, we're, it is, we are about to get toxic Anakin. He is about to be, I can't wait. I can't wait. I'm so excited. I'm so excited that is where we were going back to Clone Wars and not, you know, whatever else. I mean, people are going to hear You will go back to, yeah, yeah, the audience will. But for us, when we return to Clone Wars, it is going to be, we are staying in this zone. We are staying in the Mon Mothma, Perrin, Dedra, Karn, mode of terrible relationships. Hell, yeah.

So the uprising is just about spent. The next thing we see is Luton now has retreated, and he is looking down on, the fact of the Ferris has basically become a cauldron. Like the center of the city where this is all unfolding is now just covered in smoke and the sound of gunfire dying off. Like this, this is done and he is walking away and like leaving the city burning behind him. Sinton and Vell are doing the same thing. Val notices the blood on Sinta's sleeve. But the main action here at the end is extremely calling. an ambulance but not for me vibes

for Sinta. Austin, you made that joke on the live watch but just incredible incredible stone cold vibes from Sinta. And again, it's a moment where Vela's trying to give care. Mm-hmm. And the Sinta shoots her a look that is just daggers

and then... It's almost like a grow-up. It's like... It's like... It's so brutal. It's so brutal. Look, this is the thing is like Val needed to have a real talk with Skeen because I think Skeen understood

he was like Sinta's hard like he saw that like there would like of all of them Sinta was the hardest of the bunch and there was a hard crew and yeah I don't think Val's fully recognized with with like just how

diamond hard how forged uh Sinta is because part of it is also just the offense of you know if I were hurt of course I would be dealing with it but also you see me with blood on my sleeve

and you don't assume that it's because I just got an Imperial ISB agent like a trout you know so the other thing that's happening here at the end is once again Andor has to leave this all behind much as we saw in the first episode

this time now he is putting all his friends that you get out of the uprising aboard one of the ships at Pegla's Yard. We see Pegla and or isn't there yet, but we see Peggla and Brasso are trying to get

the ship started, which looks like a genuine hunk of junk, not a cool, Blenium Falcon hunk of junk. This looks like a cobbled together disaster of a ship that, you know, the depths of it fully become apparent when it lifts off and realize it's a

different ship with a pair of Y-wing engines. It's so good. It's such a good ship. Yeah. And the, who's the headdaughter of Farrix? I don't know her name, but yeah, she's on there, too. She's here, too. Jezzy? I wanted to say, yeah. Jazie. B-2 aboard the ship, and then Cass gets there with Bix, and he gives them the instructions, stay low all the way to the far side sea, and then climb. And this is where we get B.

being like what's the exact what's the exact change i didn't even get to see you i didn't even get to see you uh ander says take care of bicks until i get there i'm counting on you and b says you always say that ander says and you always come through fully lost it fully done tears so many tears well you know i and then and then yeah go ahead well i just i don't know if we'll see these characters again uh i'm curious well get bix saying Bix says it He'll find us Cassian will find Us again not sure

When it is not sure what is happening fully But like reassured that he's there And he says I will I'll find you Looks at the ship containing Brasso who's lounging on the loading ramp Like a king Just the Lord in his hall

Uh huh That's right Looks like a unit just fully He's an absolute unit Yeah What I wonder is the reason Peglet can't come with him? Does he look after his dogs?

Oh, maybe. Because the dogs are chained up outside, which kind of breaks my heart. But he stays. But, yeah, Wilman, Bix, Jesse, Brasso, all making the way out of whatever disaster is about to befall Farrex. I do have to hope that we see these characters again,

especially how much Willem has been developed the way Andor has. His father was hanged. He has this angered him from Imperials that were trying to do something that was just pride. We see the prefect being like, I want to hang him because I'm going to hang him.

There's no reason to do this. I just want to do it. And then we also see like the inclusion of Jezzy, who's like a community leader who can like go to wherever they're going and figure out what needs to be done and like pull these people together.

It's like, I really do hope that we go back to this group. begin because it has all of the components there to like oh it's season two now and it's years later they're they've created something what we know about season two is it takes place for the next four years right it's like it is a it is a five years or whatever between here i think it's like this show starts five years before rogue one and this is the first year and then the next season is years two through five right and so like it's easy to imagine one of those arcs being about hooking back up with this group and getting them hooked into a broader alliance or something

or just checking in, you know. So I hope so too. I hadn't even thought about the, you're right, the parallel between Wilman and Andor and thinking about and or going to throw the punch at the stormtroopers in the square at the time and being alone when he did it, right? The community was not there with him when that happened, which got him locked up. And here, Willman is there with everybody. Marba has called them to action

and so there can be a larger response and resistance and he gets saved he gets pulled out of it even though he did so much damage to them whereas Andor Cass was alone when he did it and got picked up and arrested and put into the system

right so yeah that parallel is really strong. It's also the proof of the the Lutheran thesis right where if like there had been five stormtroopers on Farix again and Willem went to go punch them he'd be put into a jail, but because

it was an entire hotel that he was like, I have to blow up this hotel. The retaliation is so much bigger because the fist is tighter. Yeah. Totally. Speaking of Luthin. Yeah. Here we go.

So Luton gets back to the Fondor a miraculous ship that has always spoken back to him. And the ship is unusually quiet and what he gives it in order. and the ship doesn't say anything its camera just regards him

with a single blue eye and immediately I'm like did Ander already figure out how to like hack the Fondor Apparently he already sort of half hijacked the ship It's not responding to him in the right way Right?

Yeah I was curious about that I think at least he he disabled it so that Luthan couldn't immediately get away or use it against Andor without him being able to, like, say his piece, maybe. And we get this a very straightforward exchange.

Andor just materializes behind Luthan and says, you came here to kill me, didn't you? Luton, you don't make it easy. And, and And, and, Ardor's offer, I will now. And Luton sees, Andor's gun is there. And that's what game is this? And Andor makes the off. Which again, is Clem's gun, which I mentioned in the Patreon thing,

but it's Clem's gun. That that's the gun that we associate with, Cass is the one that we see Clem have, which I didn't put together until someone pointed it out to me. And so, yeah, it's like putting your father's gun in, in Luton's hands and being like, all right, here it is. Your new father. Kill me or take me in.

And Luton smiles. And Cass is almost, like, his eyes are not welling up in an, in a emotional sense. But they are filled with, like, he. looks like he could cry but you're not sure of fear or of anxiety or of just he's emotionally he's here he's in this moment it's welling up inside of him he knows this is the next step of his life whatever happens or or it's his death right everything that he's gone through like he's been through the most unbelievable traumatic experiences over the past two months since the last time he saw Lutheran

like the pre-Luthan and post-Luthan life there's a material difference and now he's standing in front of him again and like all roads lead to here if it's not here he has no one he has nowhere this is it so there's something about his costuming here

that make him feel the most Star Wars scoundrel archetype that we've seen I don't know if it's how close fitting the jacket is or the layering where it's like half unzipped and you can kind of see the undershirt or it's the degree to his like five o'clock shadow. Like I don't there is, he looks like a motherfucker in Star Wars RPG scoundrel in this shot. This is the beginning of, leather, leather, tight leather jacket time. Tight leather jacket time. 100%.

It's so good. I wanted the vow. We don't get the vow. We're going to get the vow when Andor is vowing somebody else. himself. Oh, the end of the first arc of season two. Melchie! 10,000, Melchie. Yeah. Well, and also, like,

Luthin, like, and I think this was detectable at the start, Lutthin in that interview he had with Andor was picking up, like, I do think it was a genuine identification with, like, you see the world the way I do, and you have abilities that I have.

And now Andor sort of fully realized, you know, as a true belief believer in this cause, but also someone who is kind of similarly willingness, similarly willing to be utterly ruthless when the situation

calls for it, to see things crystal clear and unsentimentally, you know, this is a way for Luthan to effectively double his power, right? Like this is someone else now who can like serve the cause in this way

to do these types of things that the growing rebellion will need. It will need people like Luton. It needs, you know, as we see in Rogue One, it needs people like Andor, and it's not going to be a pretty or inspiring struggle in a lot of ways, the types of things that he will be called to do. It is not his lot to give Amarva speech and lead people. Just as it wasn't really on the prison, you know, he needed to convince Kino. Right. To move, but Andor couldn't do it. He couldn't have moved those. move those men. He needed Kino to lead this thing. I do, I keep coming back to the,

and thinking about, and thinking about Cass and thinking about what Marva says, and thinking about what Nemek says. And the, the two things there, I think this ends up being, again, kind of the thesis of Andor, you know, Marva through Brasso, right, you know, says that, that this had always been in him, right? Tell him, he knows everything he needs to know and feels everything he needs to feel and when the day comes and those two pull together he'll be an unstoppable force for good

and the other thing in the Nemick stuff the refrain in that speech is remember this remember this remember that Nemek isn't saying understand this thing he's saying remember this keep this you know this in mind

bring it back to your forefront keep it at the front of your mind don't let it slip away don't let it slip out of your grasp remember it because you know it already just remember it and here with and or in the in the fondor looking at luthan across the way it is like a commitment to keep these things at the front of mind instead of letting them slip away and and trying to slip away into the shadows and i think that's like part of the expression on his face there is a there is a mindfulness and a i am here i'm in this moment he is not looking around he is not looking for a way out he's looking at luthin directly you know, looking at him in the fucking eyes. That is not, you know, Ander makes lots of eye contact,

but there is a real connection that he's trying to make with Luton that we do not see that comes from that commitment to bring together what he knows and what he feels. It's such an understated, and in an episode filled with speeches, we don't get a big speech from Luton at the end. We don't get a big speech from Andor at the end. They both know everything they need to know already.

They both feel what they need to feel. Rob, how often have you said you are not 100% sure if Luton wants to kill him or bring him in? There's always the hope. You know, you've talked a lot about the last episode, Luton almost wanting saw to convince him to let him go try to save Anto Krieger. And this is that moment. He's and or saying, you don't have to kill me. Bring me in. Right.

And again, you're allowed to make that connection. You're allowed to have that emotional attachment to somebody. You're allowed to say, okay, we can work together on this. You're not just a liability, even though you know I am one. And all that said without saying anything. He doesn't have to be a point of weakness for him. He doesn't have to be a vulnerability. He can be a strength.

Like what, what, Luthan has said this himself, many, what they need is more heroes. And here is Cassian offering, offering himself up as a hero with nothing to live for but the fight. what more could you want in in someone by your side like Cassian is the perfect person for Luthan to bring in at this point or television television baby they do that little post credit thing which we already kind of hit so they're making the freaking death star you were all you who said they were making things and dissembling things were wrong you were wrong I'm sorry he said it was a death star we're right because there are plenty of people also well the people we really nailed it were I mean I forget who mentioned this. I think they were just stating a theory from someone else, though. They gave credit to. I just don't remember where it came from. But that Andor, everything does, the seeds of his destruction

are contained within whatever he is up to from one moment to the next. And so ultimately, like, the Narcina thing fits in this motif of he is building the gun. Literally what is being assembled is the main battery on the

Death Star that will be the thing that kills Andor at the of Rogue One. Also, seeing the Death Star, like, broken down, like, is, like, in process of being assembled, like, this is really, really wild. I love how they came from, like, super, super, super close in. It also, like, helps visualize how the, the creation of the Death Star comes about, because it always seems like this impossible object.

Like, it is literally of the size of a moon, and it is a weapon. It is a floating weapon. I pointed this out in the in the live react, but like you can really see the way in which it is a big lightsaber, right? Like it uses, we don't see the khyber crystals here, right? But it looks like when you see a lightsaber all broken apart into little pieces where like the Jedi are floating it, you know, in the younglings arc, for instance, Clone Wars. And they're putting the lightsabers together by like floating all the pieces together. It's like, here's the laser emitter. Here's the little bit that's like the hilt at the, not the hilt, but the, like the, the, like the, the,

guard at the top of the hilt. It's all there. You know, you can just slide on that shit together and make it a big lightsaber. Like, that's what it basically is. You're turning on a huge, you know, khyber crystal energy beam, at least in the current canon. You know, that's, that's kind of a newer element to it. But I love it. It's great to see. It's also, like, pointedly not a weapon yet, right? Like, it looks fully constructed aside from that giant gun. And it's like the empire is getting this together but like you know war is already being waged yep in a way yep and again yeah they are using prison labor to build their super weapon it is as clear as day right that is no true about star wars is unpaid prison labor is used to build the death star so you know you can't undo

it that's canon now in our hearts of course anyway even the old canon it was like alluded to the fact that like there was slave labor involved in its in its construction. Well, and I think a lot of it was relying on droids, right? They just talked like a lot of... Right. The multitude of droids in the empire in the original trilogy, like, I don't know. That is the number one thing I want season two to have is let's talk about droids. Some of aliens, let's talk about droids.

Droid emancipation time. Where do they fit into the rebellion? Someone on, I think, BB8. over on co-host to the post from about the so this is in the book

droidography ROGR Roger the sweet cookie baking final operating battle droid from the free maker adventures includes the first canonical notes about droid history and rights and one of the things

that comes up in this which is a canon book it's also for children it's narrated by a character from a Lego show but it's canon notes that pro-droid rights is an intentional political aim of the rebellion, and also that the historical precedent in Star Wars is for droids to have equal or near-equal status with living beings, and that the current anti-droid sentiment is new, that it's a reflection of stuff that comes out of the separatists. That's part of why restraining bolts and memory wipes become recent developed, or they're recently developed to keep droid subservient. Put the shit in the show.

need to see, I need to see people. Somebody send this to the end or writer, to Tony. I know that the show is already being shot. I know that the kids are. He needs to see this children's cookbook immediately. There is important points being made in the freedom for a droid movement in the cookbook for children. Please read it. It can be great.

It's like, well, no, because most of the people would write the history get obliterated by the stupid fucking first order death star thing uh but history would not have looked kindly on how leah and han treated three pio true history would have judged agreed why do we bash droid owners for being respectful to their droids with i i can't say this about c th th th therbio i want to make this joke you can't you love c t vio too much i know that c3bio's vibes are bad but they're just incompatible, like just switch them out. Don't have your fucking weird dad's uptight droid.

Find someone who could chill. Find someone who you can chill. Incredible. He speaks so many languages, but he does. It's very useful. He comes in handy every once in a while. We're just going to keep talking about Star Wars forever if we don't end this podcast. Once we end this podcast, Andor's done.

Andor's really good. Andrew might be one of my favorite television shows. period slash civilized it's certainly been one of my favorite experiences oh yeah this has been a joy i'm so glad we did this i'm so so so glad we got to do this this has been you know we obviously pushed ourselves to do this and no promises on we will not be keeping this pace we will not be going staying weekly i cannot keep it going um we will be returning to to biweekly we have some fun episodes coming up that'll be

before we get back to clone wars which i think you already said rob but yeah just to reiterate We have some other stuff to do. But, so to be clear, this was the episode for basically next week, but we rushed, we rushed the order to get it out. I think a week, so like the following Wednesday, last Wednesday basically of November, I think. So, yeah, this is the QA. Next Wednesday, 30th, 30th, I would love to have the Q&A up. Yeah. Right, for patrons.

So get those questions in. And more civilized age at Gmail.com. Thank you. I mean, talk about, so thank you to whoever sent, whoever, whoever, whatever internal mole at Disney sent us. Shout out. Shout out to you. So that we could do this. Thank you for, thank you.

We were so devastated. I can't even tell you how sad we were. I was so, I was in general depressed on Monday. And, and then we found out we, we had it. And it, it made me undepressed. So thank you for that. Thank you for hearing my depression for a day. Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, I got something important here.

I got something important. B-B-B-B-B-B-B-D-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B. This is from the credits. I just had the credits running in the background. And we got names for the Skolden family. Hell yes. Do we want to know what the other two? Tell me.

So it's Davo Scholden. His wife is R-U-N-A-L, and his son is Steckon, or Stek-E-K-A-N-S-T-E-A-N. St-E-K-A-N. St-C-O-H-H-H-H-H-R-R-E. They're terrible. They're giving me bad vibes. Bad vibes, bad names.

I mean, good names, but bad vibes. Yes. Amazing. All right. I can't wait for more about them. There's more to come in that little. We don't even get, like, we don't even get, we are going to be so suspended. Next, next season of Andrew.

I mean, for one thing, just wait until Andor gets a load of Clea. Oh, my God. Absolutely. Oh, my God. I can't wait. I can't wait. When Cassian and Clea are going to fucking hate each other, let me tell you. Clayah is not going to fuck

with Cassian at all. She's going to be pissed that Luton Clea has been running this shit. You took home your stray? That we know the empire is gunning for already? Yeah.

Bro. But also maybe something will spark. That's just Andor just rolls that way. Put that in the air. Yeah. Uh-huh. Anyway, so yeah.

Patreon episode. I hope Vell gets a new girlfriend. Vell deserves someone better. God. Val deserves, because I know since it's not going to change. I know since it's not going to change. I know it.

Yeah. No. I just, you can't fix her, you can't fix her, Val. I hope fate brings tons of, like, transports full of stormtroopers,

uh, sent his way. And, uh, a bountiful supply of explosives. But, yeah. All she needs is one shiv,

and she's good. Put out the Sinta game. Put out the game where I get to shiv, stormtroopers to Sinta. Arcane makes desire But like it's about Sinta Uh huh Yeah

I'd play that Uh we're on cohost At cohost at cohost org slash more civilized We're on Instagram at More Civilized You know where the fuck to find us on Twitter

Thanks for the shoutouts by the way For people who responded to the Apple Oh yeah that was really Heartwarming Yeah that really meant a lot it was kind of unbelievable to be honest to see how many people shouted us out in in that tweet so thank you thank you very much and again yeah the Q&A very soon uh you can get access to it and to support the show at patreon.com slash civilized I'm gonna die

if we don't get season two like tomorrow I'm just I can't I can't live I can't live okay we need our contact to rush us the dailies now uh that's I think that's a bit much I need, no, I need to find a job on the Andor set immediately. Do you need a script supervisor? I could do that. Don't you think the scene better if Karn and Dedra

showed up? Yeah, uh-huh. And they were just making out. Wouldn't that, do you think the scene would play a little bit better? Just a suggestion. Just a little. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So till next time, rate, review us on your podcast

platform of choice. If they ever ask questions again on Twitter about like what are good Star Wars podcasts just keep up that great work just let them know put the put the word out and that will do it for and or we will be you know we'll be back with some special episodes around it and some you know like tying off some threads but it won't be long now before we resume

the Clone Wars and if you were not part of the journey for that go back and listen I'm sure our community will tell you what the skip list of episodes is I like to think they're all winners But, like, there were episodes. We were all looking to, like, we really had to sit the sand. Yeah, if you have, like, a podcast episode of the year list for more civilized for AMCA, send it through. I'd love to see it. Yeah, check it out.

We'll be picking that up soon. Those Clone Wars dunts are AMCA diamonds, IMO. I agree. I agree. That's so true. The Muircats, Nuvo Vindy. Oh, my God. What more can I say?

We almost made it this whole episode. Without the Nuobindy name drop. Impossible. We already talked about J-Bo-Wood. Thank God. We heard that disaster. Have a great holiday. Thanks for joining us on this journey.

And if you're new to the show, thanks for giving me the shot. My headphones just died. Can't hear him where you're saying right now. I put in a fresh battery, by the way. So, all right. Bye, Natalie. Hope everyone's having a great night. Bye.

We have to clap. We have to clap. No, no, wait, oh, we're clapping. We have to clap. We have to do a clap. Time. That is. Okay.

We've to send the no, because she can't hear us. I am back now. You're back now. All right. No, 50, 50, 50. I wasn't even looking at the clock now. I'm looking at it. Now I'm looking at it.

I was just looking at you all. I was like, Okay. Yay. Okay. Thank you, everyone. Please upload these. Upwood these up immediately. We'll do it. Bye, bye, bye. Right, all the back. We're going to be. Thank you. Thank you.

No.