Recap of Season 2, Episode 3 of ‘Andor’: Dancing Solo

All she desires is to dance, but dancing is all she is capable of. Mon Mothma, an Imperial senator, finds herself trapped at her daughter’s child wedding to the heir of a corrupt business magnate. She views this tradition as barbaric, reluctantly agreeing to it solely for the financial support it provides from the tycoon. This money is crucial in concealing her embezzlement from her family’s wealth, which she channels into backing the emerging Rebellion against the Empire.

Her long-time friend, the once supportive banker Tay Kolma, now blackmails her, threatening to expose everything unless he receives a payment to secure his silence. Mon’s comrade, Rebel leader Luthen Rael, deems this situation a dangerous vulnerability for the Rebellion. Tay’s volatile nature and heavy drinking make him untrustworthy. Consequently, Luthen enlists Cinta (Varada Sethu) – the former girlfriend of Mon’s cousin Vel, now serving as a henchwoman for Luthen – to resolve this issue.

During the lively dance music at the wedding reception, Mon seizes the opportunity to disappear into the crowd, moving with the music’s rhythm. Despite her graceful movements, her expression betrays a sense of anguish rather than the joy and freedom typically associated with dance. Internally, she grapples with the sacrifices she has made: her child, her friend, all for a rebellion that may never materialize. As she loses herself in the music, it becomes apparent that she has no desire to be found again.

That’s very nearly the fate that befalls both Cassian Andor and his friends from back home. Andor is stuck in an enemy spacecraft he only kinda sorta knows how to operate; one wrong move and he spends a couple days upside down in deep space. But when he finally gets Luthen’s assistant, Kleya, on the horn, he learns the bad news about his buddies Brasso, Bix, Wilmon (Muhannad Bhaier), and the droid B2EMO (Dave Chapman). The Empire is searching the farms where they’ve been working as mechanics for undocumented immigrants, and if you’re found without a visa…well, they never quite say what happens to the people the Empire catches, but we learned last season that for the Empire, prison is forever. 

So Cassian races home in the TIE fighter he stole, against Kleya’s wishes. He makes it just in time. The group has been sold out by Kellen, the local who’d purported to protect them. (Brasso accuses him of deliberately using them, stealing their labor and then handing them over to the Imperials.) The Emperor’s men on Mina-Rau are led by the odious Lieutenant Krole, who sexually assaults Bix until she brains him so bad with a wrench that he collapses, hits his head on the way down, and dies. Brasso, meanwhile, tries to make a getaway on a speeder bike. Wilmon, who’d been saying his tearful goodbyes to the farmgirl Beela (Laura Marcus), races to help on foot.

But it’s Andor and the TIE fighter that tip the scales. Boy, do they ever. In an unbelievably cathartic scene if, for whatever reason, you’d like to watch a bunch of hapless fascists die, Cassian slaughters the entire squad of stormtroopers and officers before scooping up Bix and Wilmon and making a getaway. Not Brasso, though: The stormtroopers shot him to death while he tried to escape. (Unless I missed it, no B2EMO either, which is very hard to deal with considering how openly the droid misses and worries about his human friend.) The episode ends by crosscutting between Mon dancing in emotional agony and Cassian staring into the distance with glassy-eyed grief and fury. To paraphrase Luthen, they’re burning their lives for a sunlight they may never see.

And now for something completely different: the continuing adventures of Dedra Meero and Syril Karn, young fascists in love. This week we learn the the duo enjoy a full yuppie lifestyle, listening to smooth jazz and cooking fondue while trying on various outfits — in Dedra’s case, that includes practicing smiling, Luthen Rael–style — before settling on the ones that look most like what you’d expect Imperial creeps to wear in their off hours. Their guest of honor at this big dinner party, of course, is Syril’s mother Eedy, a perfect nightmare of passive aggression. At every given opportunity she takes a big pair of psychological scissors and snaps her son’s emotional achilles tendons in two. Eventually even he can’t deal with it anymore and storms away from the table…to lie in a quasi-fetal position on his bed rather than endure her abuse any longer.

If you suspected Dedra would not put up with this, you were correct. No, the woman who’s colluding with the head of the Death Star project to paper over the death of hundreds of thousands of people isn’t all that intimidated by an old woman, no matter how creepy she sounds when she says “Hell-o-o-o-o!” Dedra tells Eedy in no uncertain terms that if she expects to have any contact with her son again she’ll stop kicking him in the balls all the time, or else her next insult of him will be the last she ever says to him in person. 

By the time Syril recovers, he’s hearing an out-and-out jolly conversation between the two women in the kitchen. Dedra is praising his achievements at his job, and his mother is actually listening, rather than dismissing them. Syril Karn does not strike me as the kind of person who’s going to look too deeply into how this happened — looking deeply into how things happen is not a quality generally rewarded when living under fascism — but he’s certainly grateful.

My one complaint about all this is that I’d like to see more color, and no, I don’t mean in Dedra and Syril’s monochromatic yuppie lair. I mean in the splendid palaces of Chandrila and the sweeping grain fields of Mina-Rau, both of which rely on the same played-out, color-graded, teal-and-apricot, blue-and-gold, aquamarine-and-orange color palette as seemingly half the shows and movies on streaming. There’s more than one way to complement a color than with, well, its complementary color, its direct opposite on the color wheel. Surely some red and green jewel tones would have livened things up at that wedding reception? And a few swatches of red flannel instead of blue denim would have really popped against all that golden grain. 

But that’s it. That’s my one complaint. For the most part, my reaction to this episode of Andor can be characterized as follows: Holy shit. Or perhaps even better, What the fuck? 

All three storylines showed me things I never, ever thought I’d see in the Star Wars universe. Genevieve O’Reilly’s Mon Mothma absolutely losing it on the dance floor because her life is falling apart? This is stuff your underemployed friends are supposed to do, not the saintly matriarch of the Rebellion that we first met in Return of the Jedi. An Imperial officer attempting rape, and his intended victim calling it out by name, using the word “rape” in a Star Wars project? I can’t even imagine how hard showrunner Tony Gilroy had to fight for this, but it’s vital if you want to be honest about the menace of authoritarianism, how it empowers bullies and sadists and predators up and down the ladder of society as they follow the example of the man at the top. (Not for nothing, but the sitting President of the United State of America is an adjudicated rapist, so once again science fiction is, if anything, insufficiently bleak.)

On what appears to be a lighter note, there’s also Syril and Dedra listening to Sade and Chris Isaak or their intergalactic equivalents as they steel themselves for meeting Syril’s mom. I didn’t not expect this couple to get together. Even if they did, I didn’t expect them to have a more or less normal partnership. Even if they did, I didn’t expect their lifestyle to be such a vicious swipe at the moneyed agents of empire and commerce in our own reality. (I also didn’t expect multiple scenes of Dedra trying on different beautiful outfits; as a fan of severe, patrician women on television, between this and the Mon Mothma dancing stuff I got a lot for my money.)

Andor feels designed to prove that the Star Wars setting can do anything any other science fiction can do. If it’s ugly, if it’s sexy, if it’s violent, if it’s pathetic, if it’s human, it can be done way out there just as surely as it can be done down here. The Star Wars branding is just plausible deniability. This isn’t a show about the Empire and the Rebellion. It’s a show about us, because we’re both.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.