Except in the Special Edition, where Skeen will fire (missing from point-blank range) and tell “maclunky!”.
If he can pare the crew down to just him and the pilot, he can force the pilot to take him where ever he wants at gun point. His plan was probably to look for opportunities to thin them out without drawing suspicion (like his half-assed “cover” for the Imperial officer) until there’s few enough people he can control through brute force. I think if Andor had been slower on the draw, Skeen would have killed him, and told Val that he caught Andor betraying them and had to kill him to protect the mission. At some point, when they’re back on the ship plotting co-ordinates to take them to meet Stellan Skaarsgard, he puts a gun to her head and makes her take them to some place he can launder the credits.
My guess is that the season ends with Andor whacking Mon Mothma’s dickhead husband.
That escalated quickly!
The husband doesn’t strike me as evil but you can certainly see him in love with the lifestyle and I can’t imagine him following his wife deep into the rebellion.
Which will make him a huge security risk. Although because Andor and Mon are still the good guys, I suppose that first he’ll say something about alerting the authorities “for her own good”. Mon won’t give the order - in fact, she’ll be horrified - but she’ll later accept that it had to be done, and Andor will become her must trusted operative as a result.
Certainly plausible. The daughter character is an added complication as well. She has to be accounted for.
Great series though.
I watched The Rings of Power and couldn’t really care less about any of the characters, they all feel very one-dimensional. But Andor is jam-packed full of people who feel like real humans (or aliens) and I want to know more about them, that’s the quality of the writing I guess.
I liked how the Imperial engineer seemed to actually care about the boy they were holding hostage. As has been said before, everyone has depth here.
It’s Star Wars, but they’ve replaced all the light saber battles with dysfunctional families being passive aggressive at each other around a dining room table.
You can tell his evil by his banality.
And his ponytail.
Also zero stormtroopers, every bad guy is a real person.
Even the TIE pilots were just guys doing their jobs. One small question-I didn’t see any female personnel at the Aldhani base. If Cinta gets away, how will she blend in? Fake being from the main installation, I guess?
(All of this is making me itch for a Star Wars RP.)
Good point.
Even the infantry troopers at the Aldhani depot had maskless helmets. All humanized. Even if they were cannon fodder, they weren’t faceless.
The exception being the TIE pilots, but that part wasn’t really about the pilots at all. The spacecraft were the threat. (And the gorgeous and deadly environment. The Star Wars trope of the good guys outflying the bad guys and getting maneuver kills continues unabated.)
Even them we saw helmet less as they ran to board their ships.
I think this entire aspect of humanizing Imperials is in keeping with a major theme of Andor: in the dirty low-level wetwork of war, it’s very personal. You’re not pulling a lever and exploding a planet and its billions of anonymous inhabitants. You’re shooting someone at danger-close range. You’re cutting their throat and listening to their last breath. Even if you’re killing someone at range (sniper), your scope brings them close.
Special operations must exact a toll on the soul.
She was leaving the installation. Uniform to be ditched and blend in with the natives.
Unfortunately, unless she killed all the hostages (and she may have) they know that one did not leave with the ship and is on planet and what she looked like. I’d expect the Imperial forces to threaten to start killing natives one to then two to then … at a time until she was given up.
But she probably did kill all the hostages. Possibly without a second’s hesitation.
I can accept that: the choice at the point he was at was to either kill Andor and bet that she would not refuse (assuming she knew how to pilot, we never heard who the pilot was going to originally be I don’t think), or offer him a chance to join the plan (and kill him later). He bet wrong?
Still I’d have expected someone wanting to do this plan would have connived to having have himself taught enough basic piloting skills during the down time to serve as back up if the one or two with the skills were incapacitated or killed. They obviously had been aware of the need of critical redundancies.
Except in this case it was for good reason - “good guys” were prepared for flying through the Eye (the settings Nemik was giving, without which Andor would be “flying blind”); the TIE fighters not.
I’m assuming Val must have been the original pilot, since Andor leaves her with the ship and takes off with his cut. If she can’t fly it, he just stranded her there instead of finishing the job.
Good point!
Yeah the Imperials were humans but they were also planning to bulldoze the natives’ holy site and bar them from it so, yeah, they can cram it with walnuts.
On Mr Mothma. Hubby dearest has so many flashing neon signs saying “don’t trust him” that this being a Gilroy production I think he will end up being the hero of the piece, he will have contacts inside the ISB through his “regimental friend” who will alert him that’ the Imperials are coming for Mon and he will probably buy the farm in helping her escape, giving her some real personal motivation for hating the Empire.
As far as Stormtroopers are concerned, they are the analogue of the Royal Marines. Serving on ships, guarding Naval posts and airbases, but separate from the Army. We have seen the regulars in the OT, Veers walkers were Army in ESB.