I think the deal with the prisoners not being really released is something like this:
People get sentenced to this prison, which is based around the prisoners doing skilled labor. They have the carrot of their eventual release to keep them in line and ensure that they don’t slack off on their work, which is important to the Empire for some reason. When the sentence is up, they’re taken from that prison, and moved to an entirely different prison, presumably filled with prisoners who were supposed to have been released already. I’m guessing the new prison is for some harsher, deadlier, but less skilled labor. Mining radioactive ore, or something like that, where there’s no effective way of fooling the prisoners into thinking they’ll ever get out. The prisoner that led to floor two being wiped out wasn’t supposed to have been reassigned to the same prison, but someone fucked up his transfer and he ended up back where he came from.
I think the sheer size of the galaxy answers that. Cassian is one guy out of literally trillions and trillions of Imperial citizens, spread across thousands and thousands of planets. The ISB’s list of fugitive murderers alone is going to have millions of entries. Unless he’s specifically at the planet where he committed a crime, nobody’s going to just recognize his face.
The new bill doubled existing sentences, it didn’t extend them indefinitely. I think the Empire is breaking its own laws here. I also suspect that this isn’t standard operating procedure for the Imperial prison system. I think they’re doing this specifically at this prison (and a few select others), so released prisoners can’t tell people what they were making in the factory. Which probably means it was Death Star parts.
It’s in the nature of a corrupt bureaucracy to execute regulations to the limit of the enabling law, and beyond if possible. I find it easy to believe that Imperial Corrections decided that the “spirit” of the Public Order Resentencing Directive was “life imprisonment”, not merely doubling sentences. We’ve already had an explicit example of how the letter of the law was less important than the heavyhandedness of its execution: Andor would have been sentence to 6 months before the PORD, and the post-directive sentence was not a mere doubling but a 12-fold increase.
Mon Mothma’s marriage was arranged, and that seems to be some sort of cultural norm for her background, which she doesn’t have a high opinion of, especially given how sour her own marriage turned out.
The mob guy was definitely hoping she would be open to something similar to unite their kids, based on her background. But he’s willing to compromise, he’s basically saying, just introduce them - being two lonely horny teenagers with similar wealthy class angst will do the rest naturally.
I think he also mentioned he’d met her husband, which is interesting, and she nods at it without giving him any more bait (but she clenches her jaw). Genevieve O’Reilly is really doing a bang-up job. There’s so much subtle face-acting (if that’s a thing) going on here.
Oh yes. He’d have been great in a show like this. And it Just occurred to me we’ve only just seen a lot of aliens in this episode when we visit the depths of coruscant. I wonder if that was deliberate.
My wife and I watched the first episode and it didn’t pull us in. After hearing others talk about it, I watched more as she wasn’t interested. I personally found the first two episodes to be a waste. I’m glad people liked them! To me, everything I needed about his background was in ep3. I like this thread because I wasn’t sure who had landed on the planet and don’t remember if I caught his mom say it was the alliance. After that, the episodes have been great. Long enough to set the scene but not so long it got old.
I found the ISB meetings and politics fascinating! (More than anything in ep1 and ep2, again for me personally.) I could watch a show from that side of it. I agree that at that level, without someone like Vader, it’s politics and the top officer is trying to have small squabbles among his people but not kill them.
I agree acting has been Stellan, er stellar among all of those involved. I really like Meero, Mon Mothma, and Bix.
I agree that we are seeing good characterization of how Cassian thinks, how he realizes what must be done, and how he is willing to do it. It reminds me of the Operative in that I think Cassian has realized what he is good at but also knows he will never fit in the society he’s fighting for. He just knows that oppression of any kind is terrible.
This. So much this! Between this, BoBF, and Mando, lots of good information on what everyone else is doing and how I could run a game.
I also just finished Jedi Fallen Order for the first time and even that has some good ideas of daily life in the opening sequences.
Okay, but what does “In the event of the loss of water pressure, junior members of the crew will be expected to keep pressure with the hand pump” have to do with anything?
Just want to add that I’ve been loving this series and think it’s got to be some of the best Star Wars ever. I also happened to catch an episode of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour last week about it and thought it was worth sharing here:
I noticed at the beginning of Ep. 8 (around the 7:30 mark) the overhead shot of the prison showed multiple identical facilities in the same body of water. Possible after a sentence is complete they are just flown over to another similar facility with others who were duped.
Quite possible that they’re not even moved off the planet. But the second and subsequent facilities would have to be staffed entirely of prisoners who were already resigned to their life sentence to avoid the unpleasantness of what happened on the second floor of Andor’s facility.
What they’re doing there isn’t something you can do twice.
So Episode 11 is out. If you haven’t seen it, spoilers below.
Man, Saw is just an anarchist, isn’t he? He may be a great tactical fighter with a band of fanatical followers, but his view of the Rebellion is almost Randian - let’s tear down the system so I can get mine.
Was that a lightsaber taken from Luthen when he went to meet Saw?
Vel is as cold-blooded as they come. She’s at least as cold as Luthen and probably better at the small details that make a conspiracy this size work.
This is the first time we’ve seen Mon Mothma really vulnerable and O’Reilly KILLED it. I truly haven’t seen a bad performance from any of the actors in this.
Poor Bix. That was a heart-breaking look at someone who is cracked, but not yet broken.
Not enough Dedra in this episode. Love me some, Denise Gough.
The little robot (bee?) was so sad. Like a small child or a dog - he just wants Mama back.
This is an utterly fantastic series and as is discussed on the podcast linked above, the focus on the individual aspects of a fascist empire on the rise is both sobering and educating.
I didn’t even think about that possibility at the time–I thought it looked like a telescope. But now I’m thinking yes. And that kyber crystal that he was so hesitant to give up and so insistant to have returned was more than decorative.
I didn’t understand what happened with the Aliens. Were they just messing with them and always going to let them go or did Andor actually convince them to let them go?
That’s what I thought at first, but it seemed to me that the rod somehow morphed into the pistol he threatened Saw with—like, to me, it seemed that he reached for it and then had a gun in his hand. So I thought maybe it was just a disguised firearm. But I’m not sure I caught this right, will rewatch later.
EDIT: Ok, I took a quick look at the scene—it’s actually just Two-Tubes’ gun he grabs. So yeah, plausibly a lightsaber!
