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In the Flesh: Andor S1E04: Aldhani
🕑 Added 2022-10-15 10:39:30 +0000 UTCThe props on Andor are a real cut above your standard phoned-in miniseries. The datapads and personal effects its characters use carry a sense of weight and long, hard wear, like graphing calculators used in math class after math class across the decades. That same sense of wear and tear seems to follow the poised and elegant Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly), Imperial senator and secret member of the fledgling Rebel Alliance, wherever she goes. O’Reilly imbues the resolved but visibly struggling woman with a sense of desperate dignity. Her enervated clash with her husband over politics and seating arrangements is shockingly adult for a Star Wars show, digging deep into the kind of casual cruelty that can develop over time in a broken marriage between unsuited partners. Their bickering, his casual insults, it has that same lived-in feel that brings so much to the show’s sets and props. That’s maybe the most surprising part of Andor, that it’s visibly evident at every level that the crew, showrunners, and performers are both skilled and care about what they’re making.
Stellan Skarsgård continues to impress as Luthen Rael. The scene in which he undresses and remakes himself into his alter ego, a cheerfully flamboyant Coruscant antiquities dealer, is an episode highlight, and his chemistry with O’Reilly is complex and genuine. Again there’s a deep sense that this man is tired, that he’s lived this way for longer than anyone should and is starting to pay the price. Skarsgård’s body language as he sets his wig and dons his gallery clothes is as crushingly weary as his affect while leaving Cassian with a group of Rebels planning an ambitious heist is measured and reserved. The episode sketches out Vel (Faye Marsay) and her band of freedom fighters with quick, no-frills efficiency, walking us through their camp along with Cassian and catching snippets of personalities along the way. A soft-hearted but fiery youngster. A cold career soldier. A visibly traumatized second in command. Anything we don’t have time for, we don’t see. It’s gratifying to see the show so quickly shrug off the pacing problems that plagued its first three episodes.
As the Rebels fold Cassian into their seemingly impossible plan to rob the Empire of an entire system’s payroll, the pinched, officious Lieutenant Dedra Meero stumbles across possible evidence of organized rebellion against imperial authority. The office politics which unfold around Meero are surprisingly lively and fleshed out, beginning with the sniping of rival intelligence officers to score points with the mercurial and charming Major Partagaz (Anton Lesser) before branching out into jurisdictional infighting and bureaucratic tedium. In focusing so closely on the middle and underside of the vast and strange universe of Star Wars, the show is able to adopt a strikingly mature tone better suited to complex adult situations and conflicts. What a joy to see bureaucracy made exciting by strong performances and firm, careful genre writing. Four episodes in, I’m ready to say that Andor is a wholly unexpected pleasure.
Comments
John Wm. Thompson
I’ve thought a lot about how, as you mentioned in the last ep recap, the show remembers and makes distinct recurring unnamed characters, and I think that’s a mark of quality that sticks through this episode and the season broadly. Like the way Meero’s deputy bureaucrat says he’s going to stay working overnight with her seems so remarkably specific, not in a bond-affirming friendship sense or a quippy Whedon sense, or even a misty-eyed Sorkinian “isn’t technocracy great” sense. It’s anti-Sorkinian. You get the impression that these are true bureaucrats, who aren’t lazy or dumb or exactly complacent, but still so wholly involved in the realm of the workplace that they have no perspective whatsoever on the context. The deputy isn’t like “fuck yeah I’ll work even harder for the space nazi regime”, but he isn’t dragging himself into it either. He’s just… on the on-call schedule that week and he didn’t have any plans. I don’t know why that struck me so hard, but it made the guy a character even though we’ll probably see him for one more scene if that. Which is, as you suggest, really weird for Star Wars generally and this era of it in particular. Tony Goldwyn has a lifetime pass from me via the Michael Clayton script and there’s so much of that potency in this show.
