Kind of a Mess | Andor S1E6 | Dudes Daily
By the end of this episode, the midpoint of the season, I really don't know what the show is trying to do. Several of the most developed characters are dead, the rest are scattered, and the plot - at least where it intersects with Cassian, is dead in the water. If not for this project, this is the point I'd probably stop tuning in to the show.
The heist itself is kind of muddled; we're given a few details about how the plan is supposed to go, but not many, and it's not really clear where the fatal deviations occur. There seems to be something wrong with the jamming plan, but it's really unclear what failed, or if the plan was always contingent on blind hope that no one would come check the vault when comms went down. I don't need a full Danny Ocean treatment, but the pleasure of the heist, as Dia Lacina has written of stealth games, is in how things don't go to plan, and the chaos that follows.
The action of the hangar shootout is unsurprisingly hard to parse, but I thought it was mostly serviceable. That is, until reflecting later that I had no idea whether Lieutenant Gorn had lived or died in it. I had to revisit the episode to find the half-second clip, from an angle we've never seen before, of Gorn being unceremoniously shot with his back to us. Neither the camera nor the characters revisit him for the rest of the scene.
The decision to kill Nemik is disappointing but predictable, given the same kind of focus-tested Disney storytelling vibes I described last week. But he and Skeen have received most of the dedicated characterization over these three episodes, which now feel entirely wasted. Cinta remains a complete cipher, with Vel, Luthen and Mon Mothma being very thin despite their screen time.
Skeen's heel turn feels cheap, as does Cassian's immediate killing of him before he enacts any actual betrayal. My going assumption in the scene was that Skeen was testing Cassian's loyalty by suggesting they betray the cause, and I guess that reading remains viable given his immediate death without doing more than suggest it.
The combination of Skeen and Nemik's ends here leaves a particularly bad taste in my mouth, as the only two rebel characters with a detectable politics so far. Nemik's manifesto is still in play, so there's room for that to go somewhere besides the notes of dismissal we've gotten previously. But Skeen's family backstory in the previous episode was both thematically key (giving the episode title and resolving the crew's conflict) and showed the clearest site of real social issues that lead to rebellion. Its revelation as a total lie one episode later is not just a deflationary move for a show that cares about resistance, but also casts that resistance as a wholly individual struggle that one comes to from a tragic backstory.
I won't bother to spend words on Vel and Cinta until they do more than meaningfully pause and tender hand-touch at each other.