In the Flesh: Andor S1E03: Reckoning (Patreon)

Yes, the first three episodes of Andor should have been edited together into a single longer episode, and yes, it would still have been a little soggy through the first third, but boy, I guess it’s got some legs under it after all. ‘Reckoning’, the series’ third installment, brings the sci-fi rubber of bureaucrat-cum-policemen and intergalactic smugglers into unforgiving contact with the pavement of reality, and the result is something like a comedy of errors that escalates past laughter, straight through violent chaos, and into dead-eyed horror. Timm (James McArdle), the lover and business partner of Cassian’s friend Bix (Adria Arjona) dimed Cassian to the feds. Karn and Mosk are rushing toward Ferrix on his tip, unaware that Cassian is meeting with Luthen Rael, a dangerous smuggler and member of the Rebel Alliance. Bix finds out Timm informed on Cassian and sets off to warn her friend. You can practically hear the jaws of the trap levering open notch by squealing notch, and then just as things seem poised to deflate into the aimless, stakes-less violence that has undercut so many previous Star Wars television shows, the thing snaps shut on the wrong ankle.

There’s good, solid character work behind the twist. Karn and Mosk make for a magnetic duo, with screen chemistry to spare, and their squad includes a number of recognizable faces with clearly evident personality traits. Nothing about the raid on Ferrix turning into a disaster feels forced or even unexplained, but it nonetheless feels inevitable solely in hindsight. The quiet act of sabotage by Cassian’s friend Brasso (Joplin Sitbain), Bix and Timm’s domestic problems, the quiet revelation that tough-as-nails Mosk might be drinking on the job; it all comes together with seamless finesse. Luthen and Cassian find their brief acquaintance rammed abruptly into a pressure cooker, with the former trying to recruit Cassian into the Rebel Alliance, while Karn finds himself face to face with the carnage resulting from his own orders. Disarmed, tied up, and thoroughly humiliated by his own incompetence, bad luck, and the ingenuity of his enemies, the zealous soldier goes nearly catatonic.

The blocking underpinning the extended raid on the abandoned factory where Luthen and Cassian is notably sharp. There’s a real sense for the scale of the surrounding city, for its elevation and makeup, so when a scout shuttle slamming into a distant superstructure is taken for a terrorist attack, it seems reasonable that the Pre-Mor officers think themselves surrounded. The amount of casual police violence on display is quite something for a Star Wars show, and the combination of stupidity, cruelty, and swaggering narcissism driving it gets a solid workout. There’s a clear connection drawn here between the Republic soldiers who crash land on Kenari, Cassian’s homeworld, and the Pre-Mor thugs storming Ferrix, an elementary but solid colonialist caste to the violence at work across the span of Cassian’s life. If Andor can keep it up, Star Wars might be off its losing streak.