Andor shows us the quiet before the storm in its best episode yet
"The Axe Forgets" is focused, tightly-plotted, and all the better for it
TV Reviews Andor
So far I’ve been pretty critical of Andor’s title character. Yes, Diego Luna is a delight, but Andor himself has felt thinly-sketched, even by the standards of someone still figuring their shit out. “The Axe Forgets” is, in many ways, the quietest Andor installment yet. In other ways, it’s the show’s most revealing and tightly-plotted, and Andor himself shines in the center of a very good episode of television which asks: Who are we without a true cause?
Truth is the theme of the week, subtly but excellently highlighted by the continuing strife within the Mothma family. Mon and Perrin’s daughter, Leida (Bronte Carmichael), comes into the fold this week. Star Wars has never dealt with childhood angst particularly well (lookin’ at you, prequels) but the heartbreaking thing here, as Leida favors her glad-handing, publicly apolitical father and questions her mother’s commitment to anything other than outside appearances, is that she’s sort of right! As is her mother. Mon is in an impossible position in trying to look like just another politician, and that requires a lot of work and not much “picking up from school.” Of course this is a necessary front for her vital participation in the rebellion. But is a noble goal any better than actually being a staunch careerist, when the effect on her alienated daughter is the same?
Over on Aldhani, “Clem” is quickly ingratiating himself with the hardline rebels. He makes headway with Skeen (Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who has had like four breakout roles this year alone). Skeen’s a direct victim of the Empire’s cruelty, disclosing the tattoos he got under Imperial captivity. What’s more, his brother died by suicide after an Imperial Prefect flooded his land and killed his farm. We get a little backstory to the rest of the clan, too. Nemik (Alex Lawther) is a “true believer” who likes to futz with old, pre-Imperial tech. Cinta is “stone cold” and, Skeen is quick to tell him, “she’s already sharing a blanket.” Clem’s nervous that plenty of this risky plan hinges on the loyalties of Lieutenant Gorn, who apparently lost his taste for the Empire after he took an Aldhani lover, whom he promptly “lost.” (Fill in the gaps here yourself.) “Everyone has their own rebellion,” Skeen tells Andor who, for the first time, starts to truly understand why these people have foraged and planned for years at the cost of, well, everything else.
Someone still trying to work out their own rebellion is delightful sadsack Syril Karn. Kyle Soller has already been wonderful as a high-minded villain, and his gear-switch into “sore loser living with his mom” has just the right level of pathos and levity to make for a genuinely fascinating longterm story. Will his festering self-pity turn into something uglier? His mom, Eedy (Kathryn Hunter), doesn’t help much. She chides him for slouching as he nurses what looks like the saddest bowl of space cereal of all time. “You might as well wear a sign that says ‘I promise to disappoint you,’” she says matter-of-factly. She decides to call in the “family favor” to one Uncle Harlo (apologies if he’s been mentioned before but I have no idea who this is) to find Syril a new purpose. That might be hard, given that Syril stays up at night fixating on a hologram of Cassian Andor, the one that got away.
Andor, meanwhile, has impressed on Aldhani. He’s helpful, observant, and points out a few key details which may very well help the plan run a little more smoothly. Skeen throws a brief spanner in the works by discovering Cassian’s Kyber Crystal, wondering angrily why someone would bring treasure to a heist. Now truly wanting to be a part of the mission, Cassian comes clean: He’s being paid to be here, and they can either deal with it or he can leave them to it. He’s already gone a long way to earning Vel’s respect by adapting quickly to the conditions and spikily insisting on flying the freighter during their escape. It’s the first time Cassian’s shown true anger and commitment, and I’m excited about where he goes from here.
And just like that, it’s the night of the heist. The rebels have one final drink together and make for the supply hub, which is being guarded by a skeleton crew after Gorn grants the other officers permission to see “the eye,” That one-of-a-kind celestial event we’ve heard so much about. Even better, Gorn tricked the officers into thinking it was their idea to leave essential staff only in the hub. I respect this man’s wiles! I called last week’s episode a “table-setting” installment and, quicker than I expected, the robbery is moments away. Next week, it’s time to sit down and eat.
Stray observations
- No Maarva or Bix yet again, but with Blevin overseeing the Imperial occupation of Ferrix, it’s only a matter of time before we get back to everyone’s new favorite desert/scrap metal planet.
- Even Luthen gets shunted to the sidelines this week, appearing only briefly at the end of the episode while he nervously waits on news from Aldhani.
- That’s a “Krayt Head” tattoo on Skeen, not to be confused with Crait, the cool-ass salt planet from Episode VIII.
- I shouted this out last week but, god, TIE fighters hit different this close to the ground. They swoop down like wailing banshees. A true threat and the furthest thing from the cannon fodder we’ve gotten used to them being in the films. Later on, we get a show of the iconic three-winged Imperial Shuttle gliding across Aldhani’s horizon. It’s intimate and sinister all at once.
- Luthen hinted there may be someone in the rebel cell not to be trusted. Any bets for next week?
67 Comments
Andor is THE SHITmy analysis
Was that just a straight-up Polaroid Land Camera standing in for Nemik’s interstellar sextant?
Ha! Thought the exact same thing!
Hell yes it was. Star Wars practical effects out of everyday items are back, baby! It’s 1999 and I’m seeing my mom’s razor standing in for Qui-Gonn’s communicator all over again.
I absolutely love that, instead of creating some CGI alien sheep, they just saw that Scottish Hebridean Sheep look weird as hell with their four horns so just left them alone.
The squad was also using straight up AK-47s which I’ve never seen in SW before.
That was as old-school as Star Wars props get – huge callback to the original movie and the repurposing of all sorts of everyday items.Also, Syril Karn is definitely eating the Empire’s version of “Oops! All Berries!”
“Your tongue cannot repel flavor of this magnitude!”
They should complete the product placement ouroboros by having Syril Karn’s impending Imperial superior officer be named Captain Krrunch.
If this is a cereal ship, where are the crunch berries? Commander, tear this ship apart until you’ve found those Lucky Charms, and bring me Snap, Crackle, and Pop. I want them alive!
So much for “a long, long time ago” 😉
Bit of a horrifyingly expensive piece of kit to use as a prop! It looked barely modified so tho maybe nothing was lost
Yes! I was coming here to point it out. Loved seeing that.
Luthen was not only worried if the mission was going to be a success or not, but also, if the mission fails, about the two people who might implicate him if captured. (Vel and Cassian)Also, I’m not sure how Cassian is into the rebellion, but he’s definitely invested into the mission succeeding (and him not dying in it and getting paid), so obviously he’s going to get emotional about the plan having big holes in it or the crew squabbling over who they should trust.
I dug how stressed Luthen and Mon Mothma were. It gave a sense that this isn’t just another Rebel mission … it’s the first one of this size. The show has slowly built in a feeling of history about to be made – like we’re coming up on the Star Wars equivalent of the first shots at Fort Sumter, or the Boston Tea Party, or something (these might be bad examples). Unless the heist goes horribly wrong, of course.
This is the first Star Wars property that has made the TIE fighter as awesome and fear-inducing as it was back in 1977, in my opinion. Too many movies and shows have made the TIE into easily-dispatched cannon fodder. But in Andor, they’re loud, they’re fast, they’re frightening, and just glorious.Five episodes in, and this is turning into my favorite Star Wars show ever.
It’s an amazing thing, especially after the films and all the games where the basic TIE fighters are incredibly easy to shoot down (TIE Interceptors less so).The way I like to think about it is how terrifying most of those craft would be from the ground. Having even the most basic Star Wars craft coming for you would be absolutely terrifying.
The Mandalorian did a great job of this with the AT-AT. They seemed way less theatening in RotJ when Ewoks were taking them out with logs, but it seemed (believably) like an unstoppable demon when faced from ground level.Basically, if you’re going to rip something off to make something seem threatening and create a fantastic sense of tension, you can do a lot worse than borrowing from the cornfield scene from North by Northwest.
AT-STThe AT-ATs are the 4 legged beasties.
Mixing up AT-STs and AT-ATs, not a great look.
The only time I felt a real fear at seeing an AT-AT was in Rogue One when they come out of the woods in the climax. Maybe it was just the way that scene was shot but I got a real “Oh no it’s something to be scared of” feeling I never had before in any other AT-AT appearances.
Forget Star Wars TV shows, which have been fairly unimpressive so far. It’s turning out to be one of my favorite pieces of SW content, period.
Same here. I don’t want to jinx it by admitting it, but as of this moment it’s everything I ever wanted the Star Wars universe to be.
Same here. I know that for many people Star Wars=Jedi & The Force and there’s nothing wrong with that.But I’d be perfectly fine if we never saw another Force user again if SW was this good. There are plenty of Jedi stories out there already.
Honestly, I think Rise of Skywalker just about killed any interest I ever had in The Force. Between that and the fact that with every passing day my interest in any sort of religion gets smaller and smaller, I’m with you – let the Jedi die, and let’s get back to what made Star Wars great: a believable, lived-in, unlimited universe where almost any story can live.
One of the Rise of Skywalker’s worst sins (among countless ones) was ruining Palpatine. He’s appearance was just so fucking awful and pointless and dumb. He was just about the only thing that came out unscathed in the prequels and those movies actually did right by him. But it took hackmeister JJ Abrams to drag him down to his level. Alas.That said, I certainly love the Jedi when they’re used well. But I agree with you, the universe is vast, let’s put them on the back burner (at least) for now. I have zero interest in the upcoming “Tales of the Jedi” anthology. More Filoni content is not what I’m looking for. At all.
I love Jedi stories, they just don’t all need to be Jedi stories. We’ve had nine main movies, two secondary movies, four animated series, and four live-action series, and this is the only one that hasn’t included at least one lightsaber (so far). (Except maybe Star Wars: Resistance. But that show sucked for entirely different reasons, so I’m not going to check to make sure.)So yeah, we can let the Jedi rest for a minute and tell a few of the infinitude of other stories that don’t involve space wizards.
The sound of a TIE fighter is a classic. The Nazis put sirens on their Stuka dive bombers as a terror inducer. Sounds ike the same thing with TIE fighters.
I agree with your sentiments… this is the first Star Wars media set pre-original trilogy that jives with how I always pictured things being. To be honest, the Empire forming and the fall of the Jedi occurring 20 years before A New Hope never *really* made a ton of sense to me, based on what we see and hear in the original trilogy. So Andor effectively deciding to focus so narrowly on common people to the point of shutting out all the noise really works for me. For once it feels like a real, living galaxy that isn’t just lightsabers of various colors waving around.
Between this and The Bear, Ebon Moss-Bachrach is getting oddly typecast as someone dealing with the suicide of a close friend/family member.
I look forward to him being in Mos Eisley cantina at 5am with Bill Murray
More blue milk!
I’d totally buy that blue milk and cereal if they sold it in stores
Blue milk ain’t nothin but regular milk, Windex, and a little ingenuity (which is sadly missing from the dairy aisle).
/Peter Foley has entered the chat
You mean you don’t already put blue curacao in your Cocoa Puffs?
I sometimes put a few Cocoa Puffs into my blue curaçao, if that’s what you mean.
Another brilliantly written episode with masterful character work and
some moments of real tension. That TIE strafing run was terrifying.
As much as I am in love with this show, I can empathize at least a
little with those who might be advocating a slightly faster pace.
No one’s stories actually advanced in terms of plot this week.
I think the structure of 2 episodes of set up followed by one episode of
action needs to be mixed up a little bit. I hope the show’s broad
strokes don’t remain so predictable going forward. That said, I was certainly never remotely bored.
It’s a tough balance. Too fast and you get complaints about lack of character development. I haven’t seen this episode yet, but based on this review it seems we’re at least getting some of that.
This episode is 100% character development.
Kathryn Hunter is mesmerizing as Syril’s mom. You don’t get mesmerizing actors too often in SW.
Not to take anything away from her, but this series has a pretty deep bench of terrific actors in it. Fiona Shaw was (predictably) wonderful.
The Harry Potter/Star Wars crossover crew.
Not everyone can be Ahmed Best.
If anyone felt like she was familiar, she’s that Squib who lived down the block from Harry Potter his whole life.
It’s a 12 episode series, there are plenty of episodes left.
Unless by “series” you mean “season” (pfft, British English ;), it’s a 24-episode series. Indeed, lots of episodes left. They didn’t by chance film all 24 of them at the same time, did they? I really am not going to want to wait a normal amount of time between seasons.
Yeah, I think we just need to get used to the rhythm of the show. Ep 1 introduces story and stakes, Ep 2 takes time to breathe and develop the characters, relationships, and personal stakes, Ep 3 is the fireworks factory, Then reset and do it all over again.
If someone in the Aldhani crew turns out to screw them over, it’s gotta be Cinta, who, thus far, doesn’t really have much going on in terms of her character or storyline.
That would explain why Vel, who she seems closest to, never divulged information about Andor being paid.
I don’t understand the lament of Andor being thinly sketched. It ignores what seems to be his one driving passion to that point (finding his sister). But even if you want to look past that, people who are radicalized to fight in ideological wars are often times shiftless/lacking in any sort of animating belief. It’s what allows them to get to the point of a buy-in where you’ll end up doing things you’d never have thought because you believe in a thing, maybe for the first time in your life.
I’ve liked every episode of Andor so far and yet I keep expected it to make a detour like every other Star Wars show.
This show is f-cking awesome.
A highly underrated part of the original Star Wars trilogy is the literal ‘Wars’ part of the title and its execution within the series. Regardless of all the derring-do and space wizards, the battles in the OT felt grounded, tense and cribbed well from history. The comms chatter and WW2 dogfight formations in the Battle of Yavin, the build-up to and palpable tension of the Battle of Hoth, even the damn guerilla warfare of the Ewoks wasn’t all completely absurd. These battles helped sell the idea of this massive galactic war going on, and juxtaposed well and even contributed to the feel of the soap drama of Luke and co.
The prequels removed any tension by making it scores of nameless clones versus droids, and the sequels threw out any semblance of tense grounded warfare/galaxy world building bar potentially the opening of TLJ and focused all in on the soap drama to negative effect.
Rogue One went the opposite and went all in on the war, but pulled it off admirably with the Imperials seeming terrifying again and characters like Chirrut still upholding the magical realism side of things. I feel it retroactively made the Battle of Yavin even more tense. Andor so far is now retroactively enriching Rogue One and the OT as a whole, and I’m loving it.
“The prequels removed any tension by making it scores of nameless clones versus droids, and the sequels threw out any semblance of tense grounded warfare/galaxy world building bar potentially the opening of TLJ and focused all in on the soap drama to negative effect.”
This is the most succinct, spot-on analysis I’ve read of the problems with each.
Thank you.
I’m not sure a spot-on analysis of the prequels’ problems *can* be succinct. They had more than one.
The OT was, of course, fantastic, but in retrospect they were hampered a bit by the kinds of movies they were and the absolute, 100% bulletproof plot armor our leads had. It’s unavoidable, but when a smuggler, a farmboy, a princess, and a Wookie can run around the freakin’ Death Star unscathed and ultimately escape, it unavoidably degrades the threat. It wasn’t until Rogue One that we got to see the Empire be truly scary and threatening and oppressive. When that AT-AT crashes through the trees on Scariff, it’s a great “holy SHIT!” moment. That (and this show’s use of the TIE fighter) show why the Empire uses these impractical machines. They’re not weapons of war, they’re weapons of intimidation and fear. It shows why it took a full twenty years for a real rebellion to form. It’s showing how monumentally dangerous and daunting the idea of fighting the Empire truly is, and in doing (as you said) retroactively makes the achievements of the Rebel Alliance in the OT that much more impressive.
This show is so great. The little whiffs of the Star Wars we know is enough to keep you in the universe, and the rest is so impeccably done.Also, Mr. Mothma looks like a British Will Forte.
He looks like Will Forte and Jeff Fahey had a baby
The Mon Mothma at home scenes and the security guard guy and his overbearing mother scenes should have laugh tracks. All I can think about during the scenes with the mother and security guard are George and Estelle Costanza.
This is why they should have capped the Skywalker saga at ROTJ and not made the ridiculous sequels. The Rebellion is such a great story, and even side stories featuring doomed characters like this show can apparently add to the aura of the tale. But the sequels basically relegate the Rebellion to Round 1 of the fight against Palpatine…yeah, the Rebellion won, but the Resistance REALLY finished the job. Stupid. Fucking JJ Abrams. Unoriginal hack.
So many fans lost their minds over Rian Johnson’s seeming heresy, making Rey a nobody. There’s no reason she HAD to be related to any other SW families, & it was way more interesting having her just be one of the many heretofore-nameless Force-sensitive beings in the galaxy. I would much rather have followed that character on her journey of self-discovery in that context than find out she’s—EXTREMELY improbably—a Palpatine. Even worse, her journey of self-discovery ends with her erasure of who she really is, & just becoming another fucking Skywalker.I was fine with how the sequel trilogy handled Luke & Leia—I’m not knee-jerk anti-Skywalker. And it’s a bummer that Carrie Fisher died when she did, or Leia could have gotten a worthy wrap-up like Luke did. The Palpatine stuff was so out-of-nowhere, & even worse—dumb & boring. The SW universe missed a real chance to take the saga in an interesting direction.
Space cereal. LOL.“No, don’t get that, get Boo-Berry.” – Peter Griffin
There are a lot of other noteworthy things about the show, but what stands out to me is just how snappy, sharp, nuanced and downright good the dialog is — especially compared to any of the Star Wars films.
Check out Tony Gilroy’s appearance on Maron’s WTF recently. It really gives you an insight into his approach.Every perspective is valid.All of these characters have something to say, even the usually lifeless Imperial bureaucrats. They all have reasons and experiences that give them life.You know what this reminds me of? The Americans. The Wire. Breaking Bad. Complex character-based dramas that aren’t simple Campbellian hero’s journey. As a middle-aged adult who literally grew up with Star Wars, while I can enjoy the simple morality plays that are 99% of all Star Wars, this is exciting and adventurous, and exactly the show I wanted from this universe.
Yeah. Making your villains as interesting and relatable as your protagonists is a really great way to get a nice, complex narrative going. I wouldn’t put Andor (so far) in the same league as the three shows you named, but it’s damn fine so far. My one complaint would be in agreement with the reviewer, that Cassian himself isn’t all that interesting of a character, but he serves well enough as an audience surrogate for the more interesting stories of everyone else. Fittingly enough that the show’s title, Andor, isn’t even his real name.
Did anyone else notice this episode (and possibly the next) share the same plot with Force Ten From Navarone? Which featured Harrison Ford.