It Could Happen Here - May Day Special: The Gang Reviews Andor Season 2, Ep. 1-3

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

Robert, Mia, and Garrison discuss the first three episodes of Andor Season 2, covering leftist infighting, the Wannsee Conference, and a tradcath wedding.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I want you to ask yourself right now, how am I actually doing? Because it's a question that we rarely ask ourselves. All of May is actually Mental Health Awareness Month. And on the psychology of your 20s, we are taking a vulnerable look at why mental health is so hard to talk about. Prepare for our conversations to go deep. I spent majority of my teenagers and my 20s just feeling absolutely terrified. I had a panic attack on a conference call.

Knowing that she had six months to live, I was no longer pretending that this was my best friend. So this Mental Health Awareness Month, take that extra bit of care of your wellbeing. Listen to the psychology of your twenties on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2020, a group of young women found themselves

in an AI-fuelled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts. This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope about the rise of deepfake pornography and the battle to stop it. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Sam Mullins, and I've got a new podcast coming out called Go Boy, the gritty true story of how one man fought his way out of some of the darkest places imaginable. Roger Caron was 16 when first convicted. Has spent 24 of those years in jail. But when Roger Caron picked up a pen and paper, he went from an ex-con to a literary darling. From Campside Media and iHeart Podcasts, listen to Go Boy on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English.

I'm Greg Glott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes sir. Last year a lot of the problems of the drug war this year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This is kind of star-studded a little bit man. We met them at their homes, we met them at their recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to them.

It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Coolzone Media. Whoa, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about, you know, it happening here, which is what we all, you know, we know what's happening.

Yeah. Well, and the it being rebellion and the here being a galaxy far, far away. And the now being long, long ago for this episode. Yeah, we are, these are our May Day episodes and nothing could make more sense on May Day than talking about Andor, the new season of the show Andor. If you're not familiar with Andor, it is a Star Wars show and if you don't like Star Wars or you just don't like the Disney Star Wars,

if you've not enjoyed a Star Wars since you were six, this is not that kind of thing. This is a treatise on how revolutions do, can, and should work written by people who have a deep bed of knowledge, including a degree of on the ground knowledge of what some of this looks like. And it is an immensely important piece of media to be getting out right now. And we'll start by saying Disney, evil, bad corporation, I'm not saying pay them for Disney Plus, torrents exist. Yeah, raise the black flag.

Raise the black flag once again. I don't care how you get this and you know what, I'll say this, I suspect the people making Andor don't really care how you get this. This has been the most financially successful show in generations. Fuck it, don't pay Disney money if you don't want to. I have no issue with that. I don't know whose login I'm using and I haven't for years.

Garrison can vouch for that. Just watch it. Be like Cassie and Andor and liberate Andor season two from Disney and watch it however you feel comfortable doing so. Yeah. Yeah, use your F movies, use your whatever, yeah. This is a podcast about the current season of Andor, which is coming out in three episode blocks every Tuesday.

The second three episodes, so we're now up to six episodes, came out yesterday as we record this, Tuesday of this week, and there's two more weeks of Andor coming. This episode, we're going to be talking about episodes one through three. We should probably start with a little, if you haven't watched it, go watch it. Just watch season one and then you can watch season two and listen along with us. If you're a crazy person who's not going to do that, we'll summarize season one for you, which is that there's this guy who grew up on a planet that was destroyed by the Empire.

He essentially lived as a hunter gatherer until the war came to him and he was forced out of his home and grows up very angry Is taken in by some people who are kind of like petty criminals and petty Almost petty rebels, you know but not in the rebel Alliance since just in that well We're gonna commit some crimes around the edges and try to get by and the show is about this guy getting inducted into a revolutionary organization run by a man named Lutheran that is very, that is simultaneously very centralized around him and also very decentralized.

And that it's primarily him arming and getting information and attempting to direct cells that are themselves autonomous and often in conflict with each other, which is very realistic to how things like this start on a historical level. Everything that's happening in Andor is based in real history. Tony Gilroy, who is the show runner, has stated that the kind of bank robbing years of Joseph Stalin were one influence behind this. But there are a lot you can see. And in fact, there's a little bit of Portland at the end of season one. There's a number of things that have influenced this show,

a lot of moments in history. The IRA, some of how, like post-Al-Qaeda, like prison, resistance, rebellion, for how terrorist cells form underneath. And also very explicitly, he talks about this in an interview, like the Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan, is an influence on how this went up? Yes, was an influence on this.

Yes. So that's all to set this up. We're now going to talk about what happens in episodes one, two and three of season two. You want to summarize some, Gar? Yeah, let's start with the first episode. So undercover rebel agent Cassie Nandor steals an experimental Thai Avenger, crashes it on a jungle planet, and then finds himself in a sectarian split between this other rebel cell who just had like a disastrous operation.

Their leader got killed, so no one's really sure who should be running things. They capture Cassian because they think he's an Imperial pilot, and he tries to negotiate with them as their infighting continues. Meanwhile, Imperial intelligence agents converge to develop a plan on how to squash potential resistance on the planet Gorman as they plan to extract calcite minerals from the planet's core, potentially endangering the stability of the planet. To build the Death Star, by the way. Yes, to build the Death Star.

Yeah, so what's happening is these minerals are necessary to collect the system that makes the Death Star's big planet destroying gun work, but at this point, basically no one knows that in the Imperial intelligence. And they're being told that it's part of like an energy independence project. Mon Mothma, the senator from Chandrila, who eventually becomes a rebel leader in the Star Wars movies, is helping to plan the trad-cath wedding for her daughter against Mon Mothma's own wishes. And she runs into some difficulties with someone who helped her clean up some of her financial blemishes to help finance the rebellion.

So this is most of what happens in this first episode. We have some of Andor's previous comrades from Planet Ferex are on this farming planet and they're nervous about potential inspection. So I guess specifically, do we have anything we want to talk about on this first episode? Yes. I want to talk about on this first episode? Yes. I want to talk about the scene where they talk about clearing out Gorman. Because when they talk about mining it for this mineral that's necessary to make the Death Star, they're talking about basically doing deep fracking at the core of the planet

that is going to make it uninhabitable, right? Like they're basically tearing out the core of this world that produces high quality textiles right like it's a. Famous kind of a luxury goods exporter that's really all they make there's the spiders there that make a nice kind of silk. That's what the planet does and it's got this population of people who are used to being given a lot of autonomy because they make this very this nice nice, this like luxury product that all of the rich people like, right? So that the folks running the Republic and in the early years when there was still more, the Empire was still more on the Republican side, still people didn't want to fuck with them too much because they make a luxury good, right? There was a massacre there kind of early on in the Empire when Tarkin-

The Tarkin massacre. Yeah, landed a cruiser on a bunch of protesters killing them. But other than that, it's been pretty quiet for a while. There is like a small and not super competent or armed rebel cell starting up on the planet. And they have this big meeting, the Empire does, where everybody gathers at a castle with the guy who's in charge of building the Death Star to talk about how to clear off this planet. The meeting itself in this part of the episode is based off of the Vonse Conference, which was a conference held in 1942 by Reinhard Heydrich and managed by Adolf Eichmann to

plan the Holocaust. This is where they actually sat down and talked about how are we going to build death camps, how are the death camps going to operate? How will we evacuate people to the death camps? All of that. There was a meeting, a bunch of guys showed up. There are minutes of the meeting. Tony has stated, if you've watched, there's a great TV movie.

It's like 20 years old at this point called Conspiracy. It stars Kenneth Branagh as Reinhard Heydrich, who was the architect, who was like the guy running the Holocaust initially. It stars Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann, an incredible Eichmann, by the way. This scene is deeply influenced by that movie. There was another German movie also that the movie with Branagh was based off of, but Tony Gilroy has said that that movie was an influence and that this is based on the Vonsay Conference. There's a couple of lines that are almost word for word.

One of the big differences is there's a point at which they bring in a couple of PR agents who are outside of the empire that's like an outside PR corporation. The propaganda arm. Yeah, well, I think they're an outside contractor who does marketing normally and is doing propaganda, if I'm remembering right.

I think they're part of the Ministry of Enlightenment is what they call it. Yeah, yeah. Um. Incredible name. They have some of the best bits from this meeting. Their job is to put out propaganda that makes the Gormans look arrogant and unloyal and bad to everyone else so that when they're massacred, no one will care. Yeah. Quote, hasn't there always been something a little arrogant about the Gorn?

Yes. Very good. It's very good. Yeah, they talk about how they like create false news stories and like influence public opinion to be weaponized in favor of the Imperial project. The Ministry of Enlightenment stuff is very good. The other line I really like is from Dedra, one of the main characters from like the previous season who is this like female ISB agent. And she's sort of being made the Eichmann of the the Gorman project. And like she talks with a chronic Ben Mendelsohn's character

like about how propaganda really only gets to you so far. And instead, what they will need to need to work on is actually like controlling the Gorman resistance from the inside. Like you need to count on rebels to do like the wrong thing at the right time. So about like, like, like Astro turfing some kind of insurgency that can actually in the end service the empire's interests. And like this is what she's talking about for her project being is actually like helping to influence the way that the resistance operates on the planet,

instead of just focusing on public opinion and propaganda and military might. Yeah. What I really appreciate about this scene is the degree to which it shows, number one, how information is siloed in a situation like this, how people are on a neat... Like, this room is informed at the start. Whoever your boss is, if they're not in the room, they don't know about this.

And you don't tell them. Like, we do not want... This is the tightest of closed circles. We are doing a genocide, and we're not talking about it to other people. They report directly to the emperor. No other people beneath the emperor knows what's happening. And even the emperor doesn't really know all of the details at this point.

Yeah. And this is like, the people are cutting out, they're cutting out the director of Imperial of the ISP. They're cutting out the director of Imperial Intelligence, cutting off like, Grand Moff Tarkin. They're cutting out the most important people in Star Wars, I have no idea. It's not even clear to me that Vader, I mean, Vader probably knows, but there's no fucking mention of him at all either. Yeah, he can read minds, so I assume he's been able to like glean some things but Yes, he's not a part of this

Because he's not a Death Star guy. Yeah, and again, this isn't like a massive population. So they're viewing this primarily as like a PR Problem so both you need to get out messaging that these people are arrogant and bad so that nobody supports them when we start killing them. And we need a terror cell that can be trusted to carry out attacks against the empire that will justify what we need to do right so that that's the point of this meeting it's very well shot it's very well done. There's a lot of understanding of like just history in it that I appreciated as a Holocaust nerd that's a bad way to frame it. But yeah, that is a bad way to frame it Yeah, nope. Nope. Nope. Anyway, no if you've watched these episodes and you loved them and you found that scene chilling go watch conspiracy with Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci The tooch the tooch the tooch playing Eichmann Garrison.

Damn. All right, let's go on a break and then come back to talk about episode two. Yeah. Hey, my name is Jay Shetty and I'm the host of On Purpose. I just had a great conversation with Michelle Obama. To whom much is given, much is expected. The guilt comes from am I doing enough? Me, Michelle Obama, to say that to a therapist.

So let's unpack that. Former First Lady Michelle Obama and someone who knows her best, her big brother Craig will be hosting a podcast called IMO. What have been your personal journeys with therapy? We need to be coached throughout our lives. My mom wanted us to be independent children. And she would always tell me,

stop worrying about your sister. Having been the first lady of the entire country and representing the country and the world, I couldn't afford to have that kind of disdain. What would you say has been the most hardest recent test of fear? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith.

And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless D***less Me. I'm the old one. I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard.

Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. It could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress.

Listen to Beardless D***less Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glodd. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives.

It's kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote unquote drug thing. Benny the Butcher.

Brent Smith from Shinedown. Got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote, Marine Corvette, MMA fighter Liz Caramouche. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real.

It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava For Good Plus on Apple Podcast. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist,

and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his pizjar in our apartment. I collect my roommates' toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29,

they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. We're back. Did you guys know Stanley Tucci, super pro Palestine? That's cool.

Oh, nice. With an actor like that, that I've really enjoyed. I always am like white knuckling it. If I, when I decide to Google that and I was pleasantly surprised with the tuch. All right. That's what I got here. Let's do episode two.

The Empire arrives on this farming planet to complete inspections on Coruscant. Our little slimy weasel, Seril Karn, keeps rising through the imperial ladder at the Bureau of Standards. Mon Mothma's financial schemes to help secretly fund the rebellion start coming undone as one of her like backers or like- The guy who's moving the money around for her. Yeah, he's helping her wash her money. One of her collaborators, Tay Kola, starts to kind of back out or ask for some assistance and is getting erratic in his behavior

as he's going through a divorce. And is making kind of vague threats about, well, maybe I'll talk to someone about what I know, right? Yeah. If I don't get something out of this relationship, I might be forced to do something else to ensure like my safety and financial security. Meanwhile, Cassian is still on this jungle planet held captive by these by these sectarian leftists who start firing at each other and totally totally break down. A literal circular firing squad. It's beautiful. They go full they go full

Red Army. Japanese Red Army, thank you very much. Japanese Red Army and Cassian barely barely escapes over the course of this like multi-day like conflict with the remnants of this rebellion cell. Let's talk a little bit about this leftist infighting plot point. Yeah, this is something I've never actually really seen depicted in any kind of like mainstream media thing, which is something that happens in real movements, which is that when movements suffer serious setbacks or when, you know, and we see this more commonly in real life when sort of like, you know, the tide of a movement falls and everything starts falling

apart. And these are people who just got absolutely obliterated in a battle of their leaders dead, a bunch of their comrades died. One of the things that happens in this is that this is when these this is when social movements evolve into infighting. You know, and this is what was happening inside of like the American left roughly from 2021 to 2024 was you got you got this giant really vicious cycle of infighting because this is this is what happens when there's no

longer a threat to hold everyone together and people have this tendency to because they've just lost right everyone's trying to process the emotions of of their defeat of like the really serious psychological damage that they've suffered, like in these battles. People lash out at each other because it's easier than trying to fight an enemy that has just defeated you. And, you know, there's a complicating factor in this, which is that like, you know, these are also the periods when, like, rapists tend to get ran out, right? And when abusers in the scene tend to get ran out. But on the other hand, it turns into these really, really nasty sort of... Sometimes they're sectarian, sometimes they're just sort of like...

I never liked this guy. People are getting in trouble for being bad. I'm gonna just accuse this guy of some shit. Personality conflict stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is something that happens every time there's a cycle.

I mean, I remember this god, like, I mean, you see the shit in scenes, like from like 2013, 2014, there was like a huge cycle of this, there were kind of cycles of this in like 2019 when things were kind of falling apart like by ISIS. This is just like something that's a reality of social movements that you don't ever really see depicted. And the other thing I think is fascinating about it is because Andor is the person who's watching it, right? Andor has no idea what the fuck is going on with the internal dynamics of this group.

No, no. My pay's famous. Yeah. He knows who, like, the leader is because Luthen's team has been, like, supplying them with weapons. But they don't know about, like, the internal structures groups for like Opsec reasons. No and the leader's dead Like the leader got killed in this ambush, right? There's a year about her. She's named in the first season, Mai Pei She's one of when when Forrest Whitaker in season one gives that very famous rant where he's talking about all because he's the anarchist militant leader He's talking about all the different groups Separatists, Human Cultists Galaxy Fertigists They're lost, all of them.

Only I have clarity of purpose. He names my pay, along with the other different. So she's clearly a fairly well-known, I think she's a republic restorationist kind of person. So basically a social democrat militant leader, and her group's just gotten fucked and she is dead So he knows of them, but he doesn't know them Yeah

And because of that you get you get you get you get two things at the same time that I think are both really important One is that you get to see what this kind of like infighting looks like right like like actually depicting television You get to see what happens when movements fail and and when people start to invite, and two, you get to see what it looks like from the outside, from Andor's perspective, where he's looking at these people, and he's like, what the fuck is wrong with you people? All of you guys are clowns. Yeah. These are fucking children, like I'm doing a serious job.

Yeah, and this is also a thing that you get, this is a real movement dynamic, where it's like, you know, you're watching people who, after 2020 or something, you know, you've been through your first movement, and you're in your first movement cycle collapse, right? Yeah. If you've been doing this, and like, you know, if you've been doing this for like a fucking decade and you're watching all of these people do this shit again, and it's just like oh God fucking damn it. Like the kids are like, you know, they haven't been through this before it's really traumatic and they're doing all this like Completely incomprehensible bullshit, which is also like to own the outside if you look into this And someone is not part of one of these scenes and you're seeing all this drama

It's just like what the fuck is wrong with you people like why are you doing this? And the fact that you're getting all of this like you know fucking Disney show is Fascinating it's it's it's why I mean and it shows the depth of knowledge and the yeah The the sheer amount of understanding that the people writing this have of how movements go. Again, it's granular and it's to a degree based in some real experiences that some people on this team have had. You don't understand stuff like this otherwise.

And as this group is interrogating Cassian, trying to figure out who he is, they keep trying to dig into what rebel group Cassian is a part of and who he's working with and he's like refusing to give them this information because That's good security culture. Yeah, and they're like, but you know who we work with and he's like, yeah, you shouldn't have told me Very very good stuff and it's oh god it starts, you know We didn't say this with with one. Episode one starts with another beautiful Cassian speech because he's infiltrating as a TIE fighter pilot,

this base where he's stealing an experimental craft. And there's a young woman there who's like a technician who has his in, right? And who has clearly just made her break with the empire. And she like meets him briefly. She's like, sorry, I know I'm not supposed to look at you. I'm not supposed to talk to you. And he like grabs her and he's like, sorry, I know I'm not supposed to look at you. I'm not supposed to talk to you. And he like grabs her and he's like, no, this is what it's all about.

Is this moment of connection between us where we, we both, after all of like this, being frightened and alone in the dark, we're together and we know that we're doing something. This is what every, this is, this is everything. This is the moment you find yourself. Yeah, you become yourself. And this is another thing that that was the moment in this season where I was like, oh, okay So the people are it's still the same people It's like these are people who are just of the left in a way that you don't really ever see even with like old

Communists who are writing stuff. It's like I have given this speech to people Yeah, like dozens and dozens of times like this is a thing that if you do this work Like you have literally given this speech To a new person about like yeah, yeah, like this is the reason why and like it's Fucking I'm just like that mind is blown that this shit is just like appearing In mass media where people who aren't from these movements are just like encountering this and the reason why again when I say Andor is like historically profitable The reason why, again, when I say Andor is historically profitable,

after the first season, every year afterwards, for a couple of years, the number of people watching it increased. By which I mean, each year after it came out, more people watched it than had watched it in the year it came out. And that doesn't happen to TV. Yeah. It simply is not how television works. Which is why Disney was like, here is a quarter of a billion dollars make and or season two Yeah, this is the first time Star Wars is like visually looked good in like a decade

Yeah, oh my god, and it looks incredible. It looks gorgeous gorgeous There's so many super long like tracking shots this season where they're going through massive sets with all singular one takes. All the previous Star Wars shows are filmed on these digital sound stages with LED screen backgrounds, but you cannot achieve this level of in real life fidelity on a digital background screen. These are huge sets. Specifically, the Shangririlla set is like massive

as you walk around like Mod Mothma's like Senate estate or whatever for this, for this Treadcath wedding that we'll talk more about in the next episode. Just like really, really like excellent craftsmanship going into this. Yeah, just beautiful. Okay, speaking of beautiful set design. Hey, my name is Jay Shetty and I'm a designer. Beautiful set design. me, Michelle Obama, to say that to a therapist. So let's unpack that. Former First Lady Michelle Obama

and someone who knows her best, her big brother, Craig, will be hosting a podcast called IMO. What have been your personal journeys with therapy? We need to be coached throughout our lives. My mom wanted us to be independent children. And she would always tell me, stop worrying about your sister. Having been the first lady of the entire country

and representing the country and the world, I couldn't afford to have that kind of disdain. What would you say has been the most hardest recent test of fear? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith.

And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless, D***less Me. I'm the old one. I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it?

A lot of cussinging, lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless,

it's me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glodd. And this is season two of the World on Drugs podcast. Sir, we are back. In a big way. In a very big way.

Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote unquote drug man. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote.

Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamouche. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs Podcast Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcast. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains

and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend, and I found his pizzeria in our apartment. I collect my roommates toenails and fingernails.

I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it.

All right, we're back. Let's talk about the finale of this little three episode arc. Cassian's trying to contact Luthen and learns that his friends on the farming planet are actually being subject to some kind of Imperial inspection. He's advised to not go there, but of course he does anyway to check on his friends as is Star Wars tradition, a la Luke Skywalker in episode five. People on this planet are trying to evade this inspection by forging emergency work orders, but their scheme falls apart.

They might have been ratted out by one of the top guys running this silo, and Imperial officers arrest and interrogate people for not having proper work visas. And the people on this planet are Cassian's friends from season one who he lived with, like the guy who was effectively his big brother. Brasso. Yeah, Brasso. The guy who hits the cop with the brick in the finale of season one. You're goddamn right he bricks a cop. And then Bix, who is his girlfriend,

partner type person, kind of off and on, and then because of her connections to him, gets horribly tortured in season one. Yeah, and as well as young terrorist Willem, who throws a pipe bomb into a crowd of stormtroopers in the finale of season one. So these three are in hiding on this farm planet and are now in trouble because these Imperial inspections and immigration officers are on their tail. On Shrandrilla, Mon Mothma talks to Luthen, who's there for work because he's like an artifact, like a dealer. But she tells Luthen that the guy that they were working with to help Mon

Mothma secretly fund the rebellion is showing some erratic behavior and may need to be, you know, bribed to keep quiet. Luthen, being smart and serious, knows that no, no, no, no, no, you cannot simply bribe this man into silence. This man needs to get taken out right now. You need to close this. Look, he brought in the cops. Like, he brought in the fucking cops.

Like, he brought, he threatened them. He has to die. That's the way these movements work. He's threatening to snitch. This guy needs to get dealt with immediately. The other plot point that I don't think we'll have much to talk about, but is very excellent, are slimy weasel Cyril Karn and his new abusive girlfriend,

Dejra, have, have Cyril's wonderful mother over for dinner in just a fantastic, fantastically uncomfortable scene in less happy occurrences. As the Imperial officers investigate and search this farming planet, one of them tries to sexually assault Bix inside their little RV home. Bix kills him and eventually Andor arrives with a Thai Avenger, takes out this Imperial battalion, and Bix and Andor and the kid are able to escape, and Brasso unfortunately dies in a high-speed speeder chase.

And he dies, but it's like a believable move someone would make under fire, but like, man, there's tall fucking grass. Just drop, go to the ground. Don't get on a motorbike while you're above the fucking crops. Like, get on the ground, hide, hide. It's a stressful environment. It's a realistic fuck up, right? It sucks, but it's realistic.

People do stuff like that all the time in gunfights, yes. So it's one of those where I was like, no! But also like, yep, that's what happens. Yeah, one of the things that isn't really being talked about with this show, but I think is actually is very important, is that it is absolutely unflinching in its depiction of patriarchy. Like, I mean, there's, you know, there's this sort of obvious horrifying scene of like this ice guy, I mean, increasingly over the course of this thing, like just going from like, hey, if you like date me, you can not get deported because we have to maintain the...

I know you're illegal. And that's fine. We know we need a bunch of you. We're not here to arrest everyone, right? Because we need the crops from this planet. But I am going to arrest some people and I can make sure it's not you if you go on a quote unquote date with me. Yeah, and then you know, and it's just, and it escalates from there into just straight up like sexual assault, right? And this is really, really, I mean, obviously it's jarring

because it's, you know, like it's an onscreen depiction of an attempted sexual assault and then she like does a fight and she kills him, right? But this was also very, very jarring to a lot of people because people are very and this is a Star Wars thing, too They are very used to seeing fascism Depicted through its own self-perception right people are very very used to seeing fascism as something that is strong that is ordered this discipline that is dangerous and the problem is the reality of fascism is that like a Lot of it is just a bunch of dipshit rapists who are like pretending to be those guys.

Yeah. And, you know, and this is one of the things Andrew has always been very, very good at, is you saw this last season, right? With Dejra, who is, her thing is that she is, you know, the very common American archetype of the cop who breaks all the rules to get the job done. And then, you know, and then like that's how she first is first introduced introduced and then you see what that actually looks like in public which is you know she is just straight up torturing Bix with like the screams of an entire the death scream of an entire species and That's in season one. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's that's in season one and and what's powerful about this is something Andor also doesn't so the prison break episodes He's like this this fascist self-perception, right of the sort of strong-order discipline unified thing That is just propaganda. They are not actually like that behind the scenes, right? It's just these fucking

Incredibly violent like petty losers doing this fucking shit And then you know I mean everything about about the sort of patriarchy side is that you see this on the other side with with one Moth was like You know her sort of like money cleaner who's like her old friend, Té Colma like literally is demanding that like Juan Mothma have sex with him in order for him to keep doing this money washing shit. And this is also something you see in movements all the time, which is like guys with resources using their access to resources to force themselves on women like in the movement and this and you know and and there's there's like

a third dynamic here with with Take home, but which is like another thing you see all the time in movements is guy going through a divorce who? goes completely off the fucking rails and starts doing shit that dangers everyone and You know starts doing sort of like weird predatory shit, and I think I don't know that there just hasn't been much analysis of like Yeah, this is these are all Ways things that like if you have been in movements you have experienced patriarchy in all of these ways you have experienced cops Doing shit to you. You have experienced stuff from inside the movie big part of how

The major greens Organizations that were dismantled in the green scare were taken down was through members of these different groups who had been doing direct action who were misogynists, right? That is always an easy, easy way to break into and shatter a movement is find the guy who's got that going on about him and turn him. Yeah. And you know, and you have that on one hand and the other hand with like the cops, this is like a very, very common, like cops just like sexually assaulting people for fun is like a thing that they do all the fucking time and same thing with ice because I mean

This is obviously like I don't think you said it right like this is just literally one-to-one They're doing ice raids and Star Wars yeah, and the heroes are the people who like And or coming back with a tie fighter blowing them up right like you know Yeah, also I do want to someone let you know I do want to point out that like, this show also quietly has had like the most realistic lesbian relationship in all of Star Wars. Yes it does. This season it's like, oh, someone on this crew is a lesbian because they have depicted my culture perfectly, which is, you know, okay, so like the rich

girl lesbian and the like broke non-white Like guerrilla lesbian who came from nothing his family was killed by the Empire get together as an intense item dream an operation And then the moment the operation is over their broke girl was like fuck This was a bad idea and now they keep running into each other and movement things that are like They're sort of avoiding each other and one of them is still, perfect depiction of lesbian culture, incredible, no notes, love the lesbian rebels, happy for them. Oh, incredible.

Yeah, it's beautiful stuff. The quality of the writing, like everyone was worried who loved Andorra season one, like, oh fuck, how could they possibly compare with season one like, oh fuck, how could they possibly, how could they possibly compare with season one? And it's just getting better. It's just getting better. They did it again! They fucking did it again! You crazy bastards, you did it again! The thing I want to close on was with this wedding, which is, there's a bunch of really

fascinating things about it. One is that, okay, so on the very non subtle level like they are cutting back and forth between everyone dancing to this like sort of tech upbeat techno thing like they're cutting back and forth between like Mon Mothma dancing at this wedding and like the ice raid that's happening which is like you know this is the level of political subtlety that you need to be working on with the American people you have to just be like I'm hammering you over the head with the point which is like all of you motherf people. You have to just be like, I'm hammering you over the head with the point, which is like all of you motherfuckers are going to brunch,

and like, the ice raids are happening. Well, that is an aspect. I think it also proves there, you can operate in that zone, because Menothma is still a very important figure starting the rebellion. She is not just a useless lib, right? She's critical. And you have someone like Lucent who can put on nice clothes,

can do this persona and extract intel at this party. In one of the previous episodes, he's like talking with this guy who introduces his son who is in the Imperial Navy. And he was talking about like, like, like a recent operation on a planet. And Luthen was like, oh, really? Tell me more. And like, it's like you can, you can still extract information at these like places where power is like flaunted

and exchanged. Yes, they are still bad, but if you are like an aspiring rebel, you can use these places to your advantage. But no, there absolutely still is this juxtaposition of yeah, this like, you know, riotous party with like this horrific ice raid. And yeah, like the material conditions in these people's lives is very different.

Even if Mon Mothma's doing good stuff, still as an Imperial Senator, her everyday life is very different from someone who is having to hide from ICE agents. Now, the other thing though that is going on in this scene, it's not purely these are the wealthy partying as these nightmare raids go down. The other thing that's going on is Mon Mothma is emotionally accepting this guy who was was my lover for a long time and who was a dear friend of mine is going to be killed. And I have accepted the necessity.

And the only thing for me to do right now is to get so drunk that I can't feel it. Yeah. It's to do drugs, drink and like dance. And that's how you exist under like the horrific conditions that the Empire forces you to live under. Yeah. Yeah. And there's this fascinating thing, I noticed this especially watching back season one, if you go back and watch the scenes and you look at the way it's lit,

you look at the way that there's just this stark, like white light coming through the windows. This is not how it's lit in season one at the way that there's just the stark, like, white light coming through the windows. This is not how it's lit in season one, right? This is a very deliberate choice. Almost everyone else who does this scene would do this sort of, like, warm, rich, like, golden lighting, because that's like, that's how you do these sort of, like, fancy wedding things. And this, the way that it is lit is the same way that they're lighting all of the like like the stark white imperial corridors and there's this very you know, it's like like it's working on like all of these sort of like levels of like like

visual metaphor of of all of this just like oh, yeah This is also Imperial space right and everyone here is operating either like regardless of what side they're on They're operating like in Imperial terrain in this sort of like thing as as well month also was just dealing with like her kid becoming a Tradcath and like trying to talk her kid out of being a Tradcath their kid Fuckin lose shit at her for being like hey Maybe you shouldn't do this like weird marriage thing when you're like a desire like 12 year old marriage. Yeah. Yeah I think I think there's a place I want to end on is there was a really interesting thing where like the Disney account

I think the place I want to end on is there was a really interesting thing where like the Disney account Like just posted a video like I think was on Twitter. That was just one like one hour of Mothma dancing Yeah, and there was like a fascinating reaction to this of like like cuz on the one hand It's like all these people like who I know Victoria Zeller who's a trans writer who I follow who I'm probably talking to on the show at some point soon I had this thing but like oh, yeah Like they're also there's just gonna be weddings that are like based on this chenchilin wedding thing in like like two or three years We're gonna be seeing yeah And there's this interesting dynamic where like on the one hand you have the people who are just completely focused on the aesthetic

And then the other hand you have the people who are like oh, yeah I like this is this is fucking me getting just absolutely fucked up as like all of the fucking horrors Play out around us and having to like deal with and fight all the fucking horrors. Well, like all of the people around me I just like Kind of just completely checked out and I thought it was just like Fascinating watching that sort of play out on on social media and on like in real life like this, you know They're being very very literal about how it works and it's working, I'm seeing people do it.

Yep. The last thing I do want to mention is just a big shout out to Cyril, to Cyril Karn's Italian Jewish mother. Yeah. Oh yeah. The best, the best villain in Star Wars, Darth Vader ain't got shit. Not nearly as scary as Cyril Carr's mother. No, I would take him in a fight over her any day.

How, however, one of the interesting parts about this little like dinner party is how Cyril Carr's like FBI agent abusive girlfriend. The moment Cyril is out of the room, she like takes control of this mother using like all of her like imperial interrogation and like intimidation tactics. And it's like, no, no, no, you don't understand how this relationship is going to go. I am in charge here. I will dictate when Cyril can see you, how I will dictate how your relationship with your son is going to go. Because like Cyril is like my pet. Like, I run everything, and things will go according to my wishes.

See, I had a very different interpretation of that. Really? Because number one, she is not on board. She's going to be doing part of the Gorman genocide. She doesn't like the plan. She doesn't like that she's involved. This is not what she wants to be doing. She wants to be hunting Luthen.

Yes, agreed. And I think part of it is that she doesn't like and I I think this will become increasingly clear She's not thrilled that Cyril's going to get involved in this shit because it's dangerous What I thought they were kind of showing we haven't seen her like abuse him I don't think we've seen her be mean to him other than like Initially when that before they were dating she didn't take him seriously until she saved her life Well, I like he's like a weird stalker than initially when, before they were dating, she didn't take him seriously until he saved her life. Well, I don't know, he's like a weird stalker beforehand.

He is a little bit of a stalker. And she is like, I think you can absolutely interpret some of her behavior as like a degree of like emotionally abused as a fascist couple. Before they're dating maybe? I don't know. Fascist for fascist couple. I think there's elements, including the earlier scene

of them in the apartment, where both of them are very uncomfortable around each other. Well, they're awkward people, but one of the things I appreciated about this is that she is a monster. We see her doing exclusively evil things. And then Cyril, because his mom is so cruel to him, does the most relatable thing anyone does in this show evil things and then Cyril, because his mom is so cruel to him, does the most relatable thing anyone does in this show

and goes and lies down on his bed and has a panic attack in the middle of their dinner and that's when she says, look bitch, this is how shit's, and she's being a good girlfriend in that moment, she's getting his mom off his back. I definitely interpret this scene differently. She did also threaten to arrest his uncle She does threaten to send his uncle to forever jail. Yeah. No, I I can see how you would read it that way I think I definitely do interpret this scene a little bit differently

Yeah And I think the beauty of good writing is is this ability to look at this relationship in multiple ways What I like about the way The Empire is written is that they're not caricatures, but not in a way where they're being like, well, The Empire's got a point, but in the way that like, yeah, these are people. And I understand how folks,

why folks would want to be a part of this system outside of just like the cruelty that it does. Like, Pardagos, who is like the leader of the ISB section that we're watching, is a really good boss. He listens to his subordinates. He tells them when their ideas suck. He does not spare their feelings, but he rewards initiative,

and he's willing to, like, be proven wrong or argued with, like, when people are forceful against him and make a good point, he's like, all right, well, let's try it. And I love showcasing that in the same way that, like, if you make a good point, he's like, all right, well, let's try it. And I love showcasing that in the same way that like, if you talk to people who worked for like, work for companies like Raytheon, they'll be like,

yeah, it was a nightmare evil that we were making and like a very healthy working environment. And that is often the case with some of the most evil organizations on the planet. Like people who are very good at managing people often wind up, like that's what makes fascist systems so dangerous. It's not that everyone in this is incompetent. It's that there are sometimes people who are very good organizers and very competent leaders who wind up in these systems. And that's part of what allows the evil to happen.

The point of Andorra, the point of Star Wars, is that also you could out-organize them and beat them. So, message of hope. Yes, yes. I mean, fundamentally, the show is very hopeful because the Empire, number one, we know the Empire falls, but number two, we're seeing, we're seeing like why, right? Which is this attempt to control everything that inevitably creates more fires than you can put out. Yeah, the tighter they hold their grip,

the more systems will slip through their fingers. Yeah. Which is the line from the theory twink in season one. And I think what makes the Ender Soys special is this does fill in this gap of like... When we jump into A New Hope, you have this fully complete rebel alliance, right? It is an alliance of different rebel cells that have come together to do a large-scale military action.

It takes a lot of buildup to get an alliance of rebel cells. A whole bunch of individual rebel terrorist cells usually have a very hard time working with each other. And it's very hard to get them to coordinate. And Endor is the story of watching these like many different cells slowly start to figure out that maybe it would make more sense if we work together. Instead of just doing random small crimes and like hits on individual planets or imperial processing plants. The ability to see these cells come together is what makes I think Endor so special.

And for the rest of the season, we're going to move forward a year at a time all the way is what makes, I think, Endorsement special. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. I want you to ask yourself right now, how am I actually doing? Because it's a question that we rarely ask ourselves. All of May is actually Mental Health Awareness Month and

on the psychology of your 20s, we are taking a vulnerable look at why mental health is so hard to talk about. Prepare for our conversations to go deep. I spent the majority of my teenage years and my 20s just feeling absolutely terrified. I had a panic attack on a conference call. Knowing that she had six months to live, I was no longer pretending that this was my best friend. So this Mental Health Awareness Month, take that extra bit of care of your wellbeing.

Listen to the psychology of your twenties on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2020, a group of young women found themselves in an AI-fuelled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts.

This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope, about the rise of deepfake pornography and the battle to stop it. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Sam Mullins, and I've got a new podcast coming out called Go Boy, the gritty true story of how one man fought his way

out of some of the darkest places imaginable. Roger Caron was 16 when first convicted. I spent 24 of those years in jail. But when Roger Caron picked up when first convicted. That spent 24 of those years in jail. But when Roger Caron picked up a pen and paper, he went from an ex-con to a literary darling. From Campside Media and iHeart Podcasts, listen to Go Boy on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glodd.

And this is season two of the War on Drugs by iHeart. Last year year a lot of the problems of the drug war this year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We met them at their homes, we met them at their recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real.

Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.