Andor Recap: Domestic Bliss
For a series purporting to be in large part about fathers and sons, domestic life and its attendant ceremonies have never gotten much play in Star Wars. Anakin and Padmé had a secret wedding and secret marriage. The lion’s share of Han and Leia’s multi-decade relationship took place off-screen. This has held true even after five years of existing primarily as episodic TV, which typically has more time for those sorts of stories; by design, you’re not getting a lot of episodes about the Mandalorian taking Grogu to his cousin’s first Communion. So it’s particularly striking that the third episode of Andor’s second season, the final installment of its first “chapter” arc, focuses so intently on weaving domestic matters into the increasing tension of mounting a rebellion against fascism. It’s fitting, then, that Cassian Andor — the kind of driven main character who doesn’t tend to have a lot of time for social niceties — has about five minutes of screen time altogether.
Three very different forms of domestic life are in play here: the wedding of Mon Mothma’s teenage daughter, Leida, to local oligarch-spawned twerp Stekan Sculdun; Dedra and Syril hosting Syril’s mom, Eedy (Kathryn Hunter), for a tense meal; and, most tenuous, the day-to-day increasing stresses of undocumented rebel workers on Mina-Rau as Imperial inspection looms.
Naturally, the fascists have more time for purely domestic matters: Dedra practices de-sneering her face in the mirror while Syril’s anxiety makes him inch ever closer to resembling Crispin Glover playing Willard in the movie of the same name. Eedy arrives armed to confound. “You look nothing like I expected,” she tells Dedra straightaway. (It’s still unclear whether Dedra and Syril are joined in matrimony, but we have to assume not, if only because Eedy would be making a much bigger deal about not being invited to a wedding even if it was just an Anakin-Padme-style droid-witnesses-only affair.) Over what looks like a combination of fondue and vodka sauce, Dedra attempts to hold steady as Syril quavers, encapsulated by Eedy’s characterization of her son growing up as “a young, delicate boy with only a mother’s love and determination,” followed by a perfect rack focus to Syril’s face barely containing its minor-key horror.
Dedra, we learn, has no real use or affinity for these kinds of parental games. Her parents were criminals (or were they early rebels? Hard to tell when it’s told in Imperial terms), killed when she was 3, resulting in her being raised in an Imperial Kinderblock. Eedy tries to offer some pity; Dedra takes none of it and threatens to have even less: When Syril excuses himself to lie down in waking horror (my then-preschool-age daughter once called this practice “dark minutes”), Dedra lays out her non-optional “plan.” She promises regular visits and calls from Syril — not, pointedly, from the two of them as a couple — but warns that his engagement with Eedy will be “inversely proportional” to the amount of anxiety she causes. For some people, this is an unspoken and common agreement. For Eedy, it needs to be spelled out, and she seems to respect the spelling-out process. Syril returns to the table to find a more relaxed mood has taken over. Dedra handles shit.
Mon’s attempt to lay it all out doesn’t go as well. Just before Leida enters the wedding ceremony, Mon tells her straight up: She does not have to go through with this wedding, not right now. (Maybe she’s inspired, in a weird way, by Tay Kolma’s quiet demands for more money — pray I don’t alter it further, things of that nature.) Leida, who seems to resist her mother’s discomfort with this semi-arranged marriage out of a misguided sense of rebellion, brushes her off; she tells her mother she wishes she had taken the approach of Mon’s own mother on her wedding day and simply gotten drunk. After that bit of cruelty, it’s on with the ceremony.
More bad news awaits from star wedding guest Luthen Rael — or rather, he comes bearing an obvious solution to Tay’s demands that Mon hasn’t wanted to face. It does not involve, as Mon keeps saying, coming up with a number. It involves, well, a substitute driver to pick up Tay from the wedding; that would be Cinta, who shares a glance with her ex-ish lover Vel before holding the door for Tay’s presumed doom. There’s a nicely bitter sliver of irony in Cinta and Vel having a silent not-quite-reunion at a wedding that does not exactly overflow with genuine passion. (Recall that earlier in this arc, Leida was upset about Stekan not so much as holding her hand. Presumably, he also has the galactic equivalent of Doritos breath.) Faced with Luthen’s truth bomb about a weak man who is nevertheless her lifelong friend, Mon follows her mother’s and daughter’s advice simultaneously and gets drunk. She also attempts to dance herself clean, which I don’t think is something any viewer of Return of the Jedi expected to see in 1983. Genevieve O’Reilly really sells the hell out of Mon’s dilemmas; she’s obviously not the most immediately imperiled member of the rebellion, but the writing and direction are precisely calibrated to catch the emotions roiling beneath her poised senatorial surface.
The obvious pairing here is Mon and Dedra-Syril addressing their own mother issues amid bigger-picture goings-on, but as the episode continues, the crosscutting jumps back and forth between the Mothma estate and Mina-Rau, which has this installment’s briefest and saddest imitation of domestic bliss: pretty much just a communal meal before a hasty plan must take shape for Bix, Wilmon, and Brasso to scram during the coming Imperial inspection. None of the three, still anxiously awaiting Cassian’s return, is able to make it out in time, and the Imperial lieutenant who previously took an obvious interest in Bix comes back, reveals that he knows the group is undocumented, and offers her a revolting opportunity to smooth things over.
She resists, and he assaults her — and is Bix’s description of this attempted rape the first time that word has been used in Star Wars? In any event, in the process of fighting him off, Bix kills the guy, while Brasso, apprehended elsewhere, attempts to escape in the chaos. Cassian finally arrives in his stolen TIE fighter to blast some stormtroopers and even the score, but he’s too late to save Brasso’s life; he scoops up Bix and Wilmon, and they leave Mina-Rau, rattled and mournful. Suddenly, the cutting between this sequence and the wedding feels more appropriate. There’s no hollow ritual for Cassian, Bix & Co. to retreat into. There’s only forging ahead into the next mission — with another yearlong time-jump just around the corner.
Rebel Yells
• Mina-Rau is a low-profile little planet with a bunch of wheat fields, populated by at least a few scrappy members of the rebellion, almost like some kind of … Rebel Moon?
• Speaking of which, congrats to this episode for establishing a fresh way of offing stormtroopers: smothering them in grain!
• Also on Mina-Rau, a brief B2EMO following shot reveals him essentially serving as a babysitter-playmate for some local children; later in the episode, when Brasso prepares to duck out of the Imperial inspection, he talks to the droid exactly as you’d talk to a child you’re leaving with a sitter. He then experiences every babysat child’s worst nightmare when Cassian and Bix leave and never come back.
• I’m not loving Bix experiencing the trauma of having to defend herself from rape happening not long (in show terms; obviously, in-world it has been a year) after the haunting trauma of physical torture. It’s probably realistic, but in the context of a show in which she’s supposed to be Cassian’s partner, it’s a little … unpleasantly familiar.
• I’m sorry, I know they are bad people willingly working for bad people, but I love Dedra and Syril. Any relationship with Dedra is going to feel at least a little bit like an arranged marriage, but seeing her crisply protect her soft boy is still hugely satisfying.
• Leida’s wedding ceremony includes the symbolic slicing of a braid (gross). Star Wars is very into braid-centric hierarchies.
• I can’t tell if using what sounds like a sped-up version of “Niamos!” from last season as the music that causes the Mothma wedding to lose its goddamn mind is an adorable in-joke or the kind of nerdy sci-fi-creator thing where it’s hard for them to imagine more than one upbeat pop track. As with hack wedding-playlist decisions here on Earth, probably best to just let them have this one.