I know that this show is largely about very upsetting things, but every moment of Cassian and Melshi is a treasure.
Recap
Cassian and Melshi are hanging off the side of a cliff face, waiting for a patrol ship to vanish (which it thankfully does). Maarva Andor has died and Brasso is asking B2 if he wants a moment alone to say goodbye to her. The Daughters of Ferrix take Maarva’s body from the home. Cassian and Melshi come across two native Narkinians and an old ship, but Melshi jumps the gun and runs for the vessel without doing any recon, so he and Cassian are promptly caught in nets. The prefect of Ferrix gets in touch with Dedra Meero to let her know about Maarva’s death and the funeral rights on Ferrix—people are turned into brick dust and laid in a wall to become part of the planet. Meero tells the prefect to give the people their permit for the funeral, but tightly control the area.
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The Narkinians consider turning Cassian and Melshi over for a reward, but they hate the Empire—it destroyed their oceans, making it much harder to find food. They ask where the two of them want to run, and Cassian suggests Niamos. The two laugh, but give them a ride. Vel comes into Luthen’s shop demanding to speak to him, which Kleya tells her off for; Vel lets her know that Cassian’s mother has died. On Ferrix, Cinta is working at a coffee shop across the way from Maarva’s home and being asked questions by a customer who’s an Imperial operative. Brasso means to take B2 home with him, but he doesn’t want to leave, so Brasso agrees to stay one night in the Andor home. Bix is shown an image of Anto Kreegyr by her Imperial captors and asked if he’s the man she introduced Cassian to.
Vel comes to the Mothma residence to find Leida and her friends chanting, old words meant to prepare them for their arranged marriages. Vel is shocked that Mon is agreeing to this practice, but she explains that it’s neither her influence nor Perrin’s—this is very popular among young Chandrilan girls on Coruscant, even more so than at home. Mon explains the financial difficulties she’s having to Vel, and lets her know that she’s found a solution to the problem, looking to her daughter.
Syril Karn is woken in the night by his mother; there’s a call for him. It’s from Mosk, who lets him know that Cassian’s mother is dead. His message shorts out before Syril can properly ask him questions. The next day, he takes money from his mother’s safe and leaves home. Cassian has arrived on Niamos, and sneaks back into the room he’d been staying in to retrieve his possessions and money. Luthen Rael heads back to talk to Saw Gererra, who has changed his mind and is now eager to join Anto Kreegyr’s raid on Spellhaus. This forces Luthen’s hand, and he has to tell Saw not to join Kreegyr because they’re going to be giving the group up to keep his Imperial contact intact. Saw is immediately suspicious, wondering if Rael hasn’t been ISB all along. Luthen has to pull a blaster on him to get him to pause and think and listen. Saw finally agrees that letting Spellhaus go forward as planned is better for the war.
Rael is in orbit, talking to Kyela in code about whether or not he should come home or try to obtain another “item” for their store, but he’s suddenly cut off; an Imperial vessel has jammed his transmissions, and put a tractor beam on him. Luthen uses all the secret armaments and tech his ship has at its disposal, throwing off the tractor beam, destroying the cruiser’s dish, gunning down a couple of TIE fighters, and jumping quickly into hyperspace. Cassian calls home to give a message to his mother only to find out she’s dead. He goes to Melshi and gives him his blaster for safety. Melshi thinks they need to split up to ensure that one of them gets word out about Imperial prison conditions. They go their separate ways.
Commentary
It matters so much that Star Wars spends the amount of time it does on droid feelings.
I’m sure not everyone agrees with that sentiment because the time Star Wars spends on droid feelings is time it could be spending on human emotions, and given how unbalanced the attention to human emotions has been in the past—western fiction historically tends to zero in on the emotions of white men ahead of all others, and Star Wars has only recently even begun to attempt some semblance of parity in that regard—droid feelings might seem like a trivial piece in the grand scheme of things.
But they aren’t. And it’s so important that they’re not.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll probably never stop saying it: It’s relevant that in Star Wars, only decent folks care about non-organic life. It’s hardly surprising given the Empire’s stance toward all non-human life in general, and it’s not as though droids are never abused by people on the “right side”—they’re still owned most of the time, after all, and the regularity with which people snap at C-3PO for his extremely valid concerns will always be a sore spot for me personally. This doesn’t change the fact that the Empire is regularly brought low for treating droids as tools rather than beings. The number of times that the Ghost crew manage to infiltrate and obtain the Empire’s data by painting Chopper in Imperial colors is comical in the extreme in large part because that’s often all it takes.
Has science fiction programmed me from an early age to be more responsive to the emotions of robots? Obviously, but I don’t really see that as a negative—empathy is empathy, and cultivating it however you can is paramount. It just so happens that I learned early on to care very much about robot feelings.
And one thing that Star Wars has been particularly great about is giving droids the full spectrum of experience and emotion. Chopper displays clinical signs of PTSD from the Clone Wars. C-3PO is laden with neuroses, some rational, some not. And here we watch B2EMO display genuine, palpable grief over the passing of someone he loves. He closes down when he doesn’t like what people say to him. He refuses to leave. He admits that the only thing he wants is to have Maarva back. And everything about these scenes prioritize this grief—not just the reactions of Brasso and their neighbors, but the way the camera frames Bee-two by Maarva’s empty chair, the lingering closeups of his “eye” sensor. They could choose to make this laughable or cutesy, but they don’t. It holds equal weight to Cassian’s reaction when he finds out about her death.
Having said all this, my earlier complaints about not showing us what Maarva Andor was doing to help the Rebellion come back tenfold now that she’s died and we’ve seen nothing of her before it happened. Maarva is a deeply flawed and fascinating character—she’s against the Empire and wants to aid the Rebellion, but she kidnapped the child she adopted and has been actively discouraging him from seeking the only blood relative he has left. She deserved more screentime, and the idea that you would cast an actor as brilliant as Fiona Shaw and only barely use her is baffling.
We’re getting another window into the horrifying Chandrilan teen marriage racket, with the added detail that there’s been a resurgence among the Chandrilan girls who are living on Coruscant specifically, an attempt to reconnect with their home via an antiquated system that they don’t actually have much experience observing for themselves. It’s particularly notable that Mon’s daughter wants this for herself given her own awareness of her parents’ strained marriage. My assumption is that Leida believes the tension between her mother and father is entirely Mon’s fault, and that she will be a much “better” wife than her mother is.
Presuming that the Elder is a document that gives instruction on these rites and traditions, the chanting itself is also deeply cringe-worthy: “Tethered in permanence, yielding in acceptance” has the same vibe as purity rhetoric you get from fundamentalist and evangelical sects, where the woman must always be the yielding/giving party. Of course, we don’t know if there’s a religious aspect to the Chandrilan Elder because Star Wars tends to be pretty vague on religions that don’t root themselves in knowledge of the Force. I’d be very interested in more information on this, but I suspect it’s something that will only get fleshed out in fine detail on the novels side of things.
Luthen’s absolutely stunning escape aside, his role in the episode is mostly down to that awkward meeting with Saw Gerrera. Misgivings over their initial scene being what it was, I do appreciate Whitaker going out of his way to show how mercurial Saw is, and how that effects everyone in his orbit. We don’t see nearly enough of his men, however, which is a mistake to my mind because they are devoted to him in a manner that transcends causes like the Rebellion and its ilk. There are stories about terrible acts committed by Saw’s forces, and that is down to their extremism and belief in him as a leader. We can see what Saw brings to that equation by the sheer magnetism that Forest Whitaker always leaves on the table, but now I want to see more of what that builds around him.
We’re still waiting on the payoff for both Cinta and Bix’s arcs in this story, which had better be something after how these characters have been some measure of horrifically tortured or ignored. Of course, if Bix told the Empire that Kreegyr was the guy she introduced Cassian to (and I suspect she did, or at least tried to), that will solve quite a few problems for Rael and the rebels going forward, since Kreegyr’s likely about to die.
In all honesty, I can’t imagine how this season is going to wrap up in a single episode. I know we’re getting another full season, but I assumed it would be less of a continuation than its own contained second story. There’s so much here that needs attending to, I can’t imagine how they’ll find a solid endpoint for everything we’ve seen thus far. One thing’s for sure, though—Maarva’s funeral is the only place in the galaxy to be.
Bits and Asides:
- Things promptly get heavier because the show’s subject matter is anything but light fare, but I cannot overstate how much I appreciated that small moment at the beginning where Melshi needs Cassian to know that he can’t keep going, his hands won’t do it, and Cassian just keeps gentling him through it and promising that their pursuers are leaving. My whole heart.
- Again, not sure how they constructed those bits of conlang for the Narkinians, and I dearly hope it wasn’t just gibberish. I do, however, love the term “squigglies” for food you fish from the water.
- The little easter eggs that one can spot in Rael’s shop are numerous, but the one I keep coming back to is Padmé’s metal traveling headdress from Episode II. Every time we’re in the shop, my eyes go right to it.
- Niamos sure is Space Florida if Cassian can break into his old room and all his stuff is still in the safe? The idea that the room wouldn’t be cleaned out once the current occupant vacated is hilariously nonsensical. On an entirely different note, I really liked Melshi’s shirt there.
Next week is it, friends. Brace yourselves.
