Andor: "Aldhani", "The Axe Forgets", "The Eye"

Spoiler Alert: Spoilers for Episodes 4-6 of season one of Andor ahead! There shouldn’t be any spoilers from later on in the series, but there will be spoilers of other Star Wars movies and TV shows, so consider yourself warned about any Prequel or Original Trilogy spoilers!

“Everyone has their own rebellion.” - Vel Sartha, Andor – “The Axe Forgets”

One does not choose to become a revolutionary lightly. The odds of success are typically very bad, the cost of failure is often your life. The beds suck, the food is worse, and the people you fight aren’t always great company. And yet, throughout history, millions of people have made this choice. Why?

There’s not a single answer. For example, take the seven people brought together in “Aldhani” to commit a heist on the episode’s titular planet. For Cinta (Varada Sethu) and Arvel (Eben Moss-Bachrach, it appears to be vengeance against the Imperial war machine that massacred their loved ones.

Sometimes, however, instead of being oppressed, its those who have had enough of being the pawns of the oppressors. Take Taramyn Barcona (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr), a former stormtrooper who couldn’t abide what he did and switched sides. Also, see Imperial Lieutenant Gorn (Sule Rimi), the inside man at the Aldhani garrison. Both of them reached a point where the cruelty and the atrocities were too much, and they made the extremely brave decision to switch sides. 

Yes, yes, all of you Nemik-heads, I’m getting to Karis Nemik (Alex Lawther). He’s a true believer, a revolutionary who joined the cause because of his ideals. He’s not the strongest soldier, but he knows things and has ideas. In the rare moments of spare time in training for the heist amongst the Aldhani Space Sheep* he writes his revolutionary manifesto. You can’t build a revolution entirely off of Nemiks, but you absolutely need them, as they are the beating heart at the center of the revolution’s body. 

* Yes, I know they are called dray and/or ghoats “in-galaxy”, and that they are Hebridean sheep here on Earth. I don’t care, they are space sheep to me. SPACE SHEEP!

Now for Vel Sartha (Faye Marsay) we don’t have an answer for her motivations. We don’t know much about her, beyond that she is the leader of the heist and is in a relationship with Cinta. We’ll learn more about her over the rest of the series, but for now it’s enough to know she is the leader, committed to the cause, and is mad at Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård) that he foisted Clem on her at the last minute.

Who the heck is Clem? It’s Cassian (Diego Luna), of course! It’s the alias he chose at the direction of Luthen. His motivation is pretty simple: he’s getting paid. Luthen offers him 200,000 credits to help complete the heist, and then he’s free to go. Luthen gives him a rare crystal as a guarantee, to be returned upon completion. Cassian is not a permanent Rebel yet, just one on contract. Clem makes seven.

That’s the heist squad. But what about the heist? The target is the Imperial garrison on Aldhani, a planet close to nowhere but not too far from everywhere. Specifically a vault deep within the facility that houses an entire quadrant’s payroll worth of credits in hard currency. It’s a tall order, but the right place has the right time, thanks to The Eye, an impressive meteor shower that captures the attention of everyone on the planet, ties up Imperial soldiers at the garrison due to a ceremony outside the garrison, and grounds all air traffic. Once the heist is pulled, they will have to escape along the one safe path charted by Nemik through The Eye, and escape before it is finished. Remember the whole thing about long odds? Yeah, these are very long odds.

At least the team likes each oth…okay, they don’t really like each other. Vel and Cinta like each other a lot a lot. And everyone likes Nemik, and Nemik likes everyone. But Cinta has trust issues in general (for good reason), and nobody (except Nemik) really trusts Arvel. They all (except for, again, Nemik) resent Clem showing up out of nowhere, and they don’t trust him, especially at first. But though he may not be a committed Rebel, he does seem to believe in doing the job he is hired to do to the best of his ability. He does all the training he can in the short amount of time, and offers himself up to be pilot of the blocky freighter that will be their ticket off the planet. And as they move towards the jump off point for the heist, the truth of his mercenary status comes out and everything feels like it is crashing down. But Clem shows off his latent leadership ability, convincing everyone to get back to the work at hand. Because to pull off a revolution you don’t have to like your comrades. You just have to work with them to fight your shared enemy.

The night before the heist, they all stop to camp above the dam that houses the Imperial garrison. It’s a restless night, as they get ready to make a real mark against the Empire, and secure some much needed cash for the cause. Dawn takes forever to come, and comes all too quickly. The heist is on, and we’ll be back. But for now, we must go to another theater of the growing conflict.

Meanwhile, on Coruscant, the Capital Planet of the Empire….

Contrary to pretty much all of its contemporary Star Wars TV shows, there aren’t a lot of crossover characters in Andor. Yes, there are a whole lot of characters from Rogue One, but that makes sense as this is a direct prequel to that movie. And there are a handful of characters that originated in the Expanded Universe or were seen in other TV shows or the prequels, like Saw Gerrera and Bail Organa. But there are only two Original Trilogy characters that show up. One is a very minor character we’ll meet in next week’s episodes. The other is Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly). 

I first saw Mon Mothma in Return of the Jedi, as the calm and stately leader of the Rebel Alliance**. Though she’s only in one scene, her calm confidence and clear sense of the cost of the war was compelling. She's a favorite character of mine, her major role in Andor made me excited for the series.

** In Return of the Jedi, Mon Mothma was played by Caroline Blakiston. O’Reilly was first cast as Mon Mothma in Revenge of the Sith, as a young senator allied to Padmé Amidala and Bail Organa in the waning days of the Galactic Republic. She was left on the cutting room floor. Later she was brought back to play Mon Mothma, first as her voice in The Clone Wars and Rebels, and then in live action for Rogue One.

When we meet her, she’s plenty composed, but not what I would call confident. She’s introduced making a call on Luthen and his lieutenant Kleya Marki (Elizabeth Dulau). They run a fine antiquities shop catering to the rich and powerful, a great cover for their Rebel intelligence and coordination operations. In the Senate, Mothma is part of the beleaguered opposition to Emperor Palpatine. But secretly, she’s been funneling cash to Luthen’s operation. However, heightened surveillance from the Empire has made pulling funds from her own wealth too risky, and she has to look elsewhere for more cash. Luthen is not happy, as more parties being involved means more chances for detection and destruction.

This introductory scene is so great, because it shows us that Luthen isn’t like that just to his junior operatives like Vel, he also is like that to a sitting Senator who just by meeting with him puts her in a very precarious situation. He’s not the leader of the Rebellion, as there is no single leader at this time. But he is the axis upon which the disparate Rebels revolve. 

As for Mothma, the scene conveys that she’s not at the point of being an open rebel yet. The money issue is stressful, but it isn’t the only source of stress. The Senate is its usual disappointing place, a dying institution where the best she can ever hope for is a rearguard action of delay, or perhaps a toothless commission to study the efficacy of the Emperor’s latest outrage. She’s hated by the Imperial loyalists, and if there was a Blue Sky in the Galaxy Far, Far, Away, she’d be called a traitor for not doing enough to stop Palpatine.

And her home life? Not great, Bob. Her marriage to Perrin Fertha (Alistair Mackenzie) is not what I would call love filled, as he appears to concern himself solely with managing her social calendar and seeking pleasures. As for her daughter Leida (Bronte Carmichael), the best way to describe their relationship is that there’s no there there. Leida is a gender-flipped Alex P. Keaton, a trad-wife wannabe who flummoxes her liberal mom. Is this all a genuine belief of Leida, the act of a teenage girl chosen to maximally piss off her mom, or just the result of peer pressure of girls growing up knowing nothing but the Empire? Yes.

We’ll see a whole lot more of Mothma and her family, as well as Luthen and Kleya, in episodes to come. For now, let’s move to the Imperial side of town. Syril (Kyle Soller) is back in town, bunking down in his clone trooper action figure filled room where he lives with his mother Eedy (Kathryn Hunter). He’s plotting his next move back to be the heroic cop he’s always wanted to be, while being fed Space Kix by his mom. Meanwhile, she is doing the overbearing mom thing and simultaneously taking care of him and needling at him. Perhaps Uncle Harlo (who is not a criminal, don’t even suggest that) will help Syril land on his feet?

As for other Imperials, it’s time to meet our last major POV character, at least for a while. That’s right, I’m talking about Lieutenant Inspector Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) of the Imperial Security Bureau. She’s introduced to us in a big meeting of all of her fellow inspectors led by Major Lio Partagaz (Anton Lesser). This meeting tells us what the ISB is: A state within the state that roots out rebels and other threats as quickly as possible. It also tells us that Dedra is an ambitious workaholic, the kind who can recite the mission statement of the ISB word for word. In other words, she never stops working, and she is not very popular with a whole lot of her colleagues. 

Dedra, instead of doing the mundane work of being an inspector for two sectors, is more concerned with the pattern she sees emerging across the galaxy. It appears to her that there is a burgeoning list of attacks and heists that may be the work of a group, an alliance perhaps, of rebels. It’s made clear she is picking up on the work of Luthen’s operation, including the recent events that happened on Ferrix. However, Ferrix is not in her jurisdiction, and she doesn’t have any concrete proof to bring to Partagaz. It doesn’t stop her from working, along with her assistant Heert (James Jacob Beswick) to find that proof. If only the rebels had something in the works that would reverberate all the way up to the Emperor that could really kick start her investigation. But an event propelling our characters on all sides of the conflict into the future would be ridiculous, right?

Back to the Aldhani Heist….

The heist on Aldhani takes up the bulk of “The Eye”, the final episode of the trio I’ve talked about. And it’s a great episode of TV. Not only because of the heist itself, which is tense and well realized in its action. But because we get a view into exactly how the Empire uses its power to destroy societies and wring planets dry of their resources. Oppression comes in many different flavors, and not all of them involve bands of Stormtroopers massacring civilians. Sometimes it’s more about relocation than extermination. Because you can’t get labor out of dead bodies, right?

On Aldhani, the Empire relocated the people who lived in the valleys where they built their garrison. They established “enterprise zones” and put them all to work there for the good of the Empire. They dammed up their sacred river to build the Garrison. They haven’t banned their traditional trek to their sacred temple for the ceremony celebrating the return of The Eye. However, they have manipulated the people using various means to artificially deflate the turnout. This is all to give them grounds to cancel the trek after this last ceremony, in favor of official watch parties down in the Enterprise zones. The sixty or so die-hard Aldhani pilgrims show clear contempt for the Imperial forces. The Imperials respond to that contempt with bored condescension. 

Why does the Empire go to all of this trouble? For one, because they don’t have the troops to massacre the population. The garrison only has forty troops in all, including Lieutenant Gorn. It’s why the heist is happening. The Empire is huge, and totalitarianism takes work. You have to occupy the territory to control it, and some places are going to be stretched thin.

But also, always hitting everyone who doesn’t like you with a giant hammer is a terrible way to control the population. It will cause some to fear you, sure, but it also will convince a lot of people that if they are going to die, better to die on your feet than on your knees. It’s a truism that has plenty of examples throughout our own history, which Tony Gilroy and the rest of the writers are drawing on. The Empire is violent, sure, but what makes it truly dangerous is that it sometimes knows how to wield their power without violence. This distinction is important, because it makes the Empire feel more fleshed out. It’s an honest to god authoritarian project, and not just a gang that can’t shoot straight led by a cackling old wizard and his lieutenant, the ghastly Project Manager from Hell.****** I’ll have more to say about how silly it feels (but not terminally so) that Palpatine and Vader are in the same continuity as Andor in a later issue. This newsletter is already too long.

The heist itself is a blast. They kidnap Commandant Jayhold Beehaz (Stanley Townsend), take the command center officers hostage, and get Beehaz to open up the vault. Then they use the Imperial servicemen and Beehaz to load the freighter with the credits. It all goes well until it doesn’t, and a firefight ensues. Two of the heist team, Lt. Gorn and Taramyn, give the last full measure of their devotion to the Rebel cause. Vel, Nemik, Arvel, and Clem escape with the credits into the beautifully rendered meteor shower****.

**** Cinta was not with them, as she was keeping the Imperial staff in the command center of the garrison prisoner during the heist. She walked out in an Imperial uniform and was extracted from Aldhani by another unseen method. She will return.

Unfortunately Nemik is crushed by loose credits as the freighter bounces around as Clem avoids hitting both meteors and laser blasts from chasing TIE fighters. He is badly wounded, but some pain medicine keeps him lucid enough to chart the safe course through the meteor shower, and the gang gets away with their amazing haul. What an episode!

But it’s not over. Clem pilots the freighter to a discrete doctor named Dr. Quadpaws***** to try to save Nemik’s life. Waiting outside the operating room, Clem and Arvel start talking, and Arvel reveals his true colors. He’s only in this for the money, and the story about his brother was made up. As he tries to get Clem to split the haul 50/50, and leave Vel and Nemik in the lurch, Clem shoots him in disgust.

***** Does he have four arms? You bet he does!

A lesser show would have made this the point Cassian becomes a Rebel. He takes care of the guy who was lying about not being in it for the money, Nemik is saved by Dr. Quadpaw, and they all go off to fight the good fight. But that’s not Andor.

You see, Cassian didn’t kill Arvel because he’s come all the way around to the Rebel cause. He does believe in doing the job he was hired to do, and he admires Nemik for his idealism. It disgusts Cassian that Arvel would lie just to rip off the Rebels. He is not yet a Rebel, but he’s not going to screw them over either. It’s an important step for him down the road to Scarif, but it’s not the final one.

Sadly, Nemik died while Cassian was taking care of Arvel. But he had a last request, for Vel to give his manifesto to Cassian. Reluctantly, Cassian takes it, because, c’mon. Who’s going to say no to Nemik?

Away Cassian goes, off to who knows where. He’ll get back on the Rebel road someday, but not today. The fickle winds of fate are not done with him yet.

Across the galaxy on Coruscant, the news of Aldhani breaks hard as ISB headquarters. This is one of the biggest hits the Empire has taken in a while, and the urgency of the situation is conveyed through Partagaz to the inspectors he commands. It looks like Dedra has her work cut out for her. Of course, that is if her colleagues don’t stand in her way and stop her from doing what she needs to do. It is the most important work in the Empire, after all.

Across town Luthen is showing some artifacts to a wealthy woman, playing the part of the cheerful expert so well. A man, looking for something to talk about because he is bored, makes a joke about Luthen having Aldhani artifacts. The news of Aldhani has hit the media. Luthen excuses himself to go back to the private area of the shop. Here he does something rare: he smiles a genuine smile and laughs. This was how he found out his team had made the big score. The Rebellion lives to fight another day. 

Next Week: Cassian takes a well-earned vacation. It…it doesn’t go as planned.

Amy Wren Says What? is a newsletter that (ideally) comes out at least once a week. In it I talk about television shows, books, video games, and other topics. Right now I'm running a series of posts about the Star Wars Television show Andor, which will go live every Thursday for eight editions.

Have something to say about this newsletter? Leave a comment! Or if you want have even more conversations about what I write about on here, consider supporting The Great Amy Ride. For free over there, you get access to all of my writing about movies, and paid members get access to the official Discord of me, Amy Wren, as well as other neat perks!

As always, I thank you all for your support.