Last night, Disney dropped three new episodes of Star Wars: Andor, its gritty, down-to-earth show about the formation of the Rebellion. "Messenger" was a little meh for me, but "Who Are You?" and "Welcome to the Rebellion" were the most exciting pieces of Star Wars content I'd seen in a very long time.
Let's start with "Welcome to the Rebellion," which picks up in the wake of the brutal Ghorman Massacre on the planet Ghorman, where Imperial soldiers lure protesters into an enclosed area and kill them en masse. Imperial senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly) decides that the time has come to take a stand. In front of the Senate, she makes a scorching speech calling out the Empire for what it has done, scandalizing her colleagues who were happy to parrot the party line about the Ghorman Massacre being about putting down an insurgency, rather than "an unprovoked genocide," as Mon Mothma calls it.
“I believe we are in crisis,” Mothma says. “The distance between what is said today and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest...And the monster screaming the loudest, that we helped create, the monster who will come for us all, soon enough, is Emperor Palpatine.”
With Cassian Andor's help, Mon Mothma is then able to leave the planet and join the Rebellion in earnest, since the Empire will never let keep her job after calling them out like that. Andor as a show takes itself very seriously and has a habit of taking the Star Wars universe to places it hasn't been before, and this speech was no exception. It also felt pretty relevant to our own time, with U.S. President Donald Trump long accused of being an aspiring autocrat who twists the concept of objective truth to the breaking point; we're still living in the "alternative facts" era.
But showrunner Tony Gilroy says he was going for something more timeless. “The really sorry truth about the about this question — and we get it a lot — is that peace and prosperity and calm are the rarities," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "Those are rarities throughout the last 6,000 years of recorded history. You could drop this show at any point in the last 6,000 years, and it would make sense to some people about what’s happening to them.”
“I mean, the control of truth has always been a scabbard of power," Gilroy continued. "Power dictates the narrative, and always has tried to always do that. Look at what the Empire does to Ghorman with their propaganda campaign. The very first scene [in the season] that Krennic has where he talks about Ghorman, that’s based on the Wannsee convention — the convention where the Nazis got together and planned the final solution over a business lunch. You could say all this about the Gulf of Tonkin — which got America into Vietnam — or you could say the burning of the Reichstag [which paved the way to the Nazi’s rise to power], or you could say the sinking of the Lusitania [which pushed America into World War I]. You go all the way through history, and power is the control of truth. So I think with that speech, we were looking to be timeless and classic.”
Alright, now let's turn to the Ghorman Massacre itself, which was staged in Episode 208, "Who Are You?" Beware MAJOR SPOILERS from here on out!
Syril Karn dies how he lived: Deluded, pathetic and beloved by fans
My favorite character in Andor is Syril Karn, played by Kyle Soller. I dunno what it is: there's just something very compellingly pitiful about him. He believes in the mission and might of the Empire even though he's always been ground under its boot. He's a cog in a machine. He has a nagging feeling that something is missing or not right, but he never quite comes around to seeing the truth: that living under his beloved Empire is crushing his soul, and the souls of everyone else it touches.
He comes close in his final episode, though. Syril has been working on the planet Ghorman for years, infiltrating rebel groups and feeding information about their plans to his Imperial officer girlfriend, Dedra Meero (Denise Gough). In spite of himself, he starts to sympathize with the rebels at least a little bit, and he gets pushed over the edge when he learns the truth: that the Empire plans to mine Ghorman for a precious mineral in a way that will destabilize the planet, killing everyone on it.
That's a bridge too far even for Syril — hell, it even gives the ice-cold Dedra pause, although she pushes through. Syril has a bit of a meltdown, wandering through the Ghorman Massacre where he spots Cassian Andor, whom he'd obsessively tracked for years. This leads to a fantastic knock-down, drag-out, one-on-one brawl. When Syril finally corners Cassian with a gun, Cassian says three simple words that take Syril apart: "Who are you?"...and then someone else shoots Syril in the head.
“It's so elementally Greek and dramatic that the thing that you've based your life on doesn't even recognize you,” Tony Gilroy told Entertainment Weekly. “Everything that he's constructed for himself doesn't even have any awareness of him. I think he's just stunned. He can't even breathe at that point. There's the guy that ruined my life that I was chasing for four years, and I'll be like this raccoon in a relentless fight, and I'll be able to kill him. And then, oh my God, he doesn't even know who I am! It seemed like the absolute essential summation of poor Syril's life.”
Paths not taken
Kyle Soller also weighed in on the worst day of Syril's life, which is saying something because he has nothing but bad days. "I thought it was a perfect ending for him," Soller told Variety. "It felt like just before something else could happen to Syril, it’s taken away. So much had been taken away from him within the last 10 minutes of his life, all these revelations and betrayals coming to light, the veil being lifted from all the truths he held to be right about the Empire and the choices in his life completely crumbling. Instead of having a redemption story, I think it was much stronger and much more real to life. For all of Syril’s vanity, romanticism and delusions of grandeur about himself, he’s just another cog in the wheel. He’s just another casualty of war."
I too was glad that Syril didn't get a redemption arc of some kind; I don't think it would have felt right. Soller has another idea for what would have happened had Syril survived the Massacre: "I don’t think he would have gone and joined either side in the fight. It’s like leaving a cult, or somebody telling you we just live in a hologram and you’re in the Matrix, I think he would have just spun out and wanted to go off alone somewhere. It’s really hard to imagine everything you held to be true is false, the people around you that you thought were your people have been dicking you over from day one and you’re just a pawn in this machine of war. I think he would have wandered off and opened up a blue milk stall somewhere on some distant mountain."
As for the one-on-one fight scene, Soller and actor Diego Luna spent around three days fighting it. The way Soller sees it, Syril had an extra burst of strength that day; his life was falling apart around him, and he poured a lifetime of frustrating into beating up Cassian, who was a convenient scapegoat. "[O]n any other day, Cassian would beat the shit out of Syril, no question," he said. "But Syril has this superpower released by everything that’s happened to him."
Finally, Soller reveals that they contemplated having Cassian say something else to Syril before his final moments: "It was a short list: 'You' and 'it’s you' and 'who are you?' It just completely cuts him in that moment. If Cassian had said 'it’s you,' would Syril have had more resolve to do something or would he still have lowered his gun? I don’t know, but in terms of Syril’s arc, it just perfectly completes the journey being used by powers that are bigger than you in this huge machine and mayhem of life. You think you’ve made a difference, but you haven’t."
I definitely think "Who are you?" was the right choice. The final three episodes of Star Wars: Andor will drop this upcoming Tuesday night on Disney+
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