If you say something often enough that it becomes a catch phrase, you might have been memory-wiped.
Recap
The ship comes out of hyperspace orbiting a planet with satellites. As they move closer, the planet starts up an auto-landing sequence, but SM-33 pulls them out of it and lands the ship. The kids exit the ship and find a great deal of destruction and fog: This isn’t home. They go investigate and tells SM-33 to look after Jod—33 puts on his “babysitting” protocol, and Jod investigates the kid’s belongings, finding the Republic credits. SM-33 attacks him, getting Jod confused for an intruder. When he comes to, 33 apologizes, claiming that At Achrann is messing with his memory circuits. He’s been here before and know it well. But when Jod asks about At Attin, SM-33 rotely replies, “Can’t say I remember no At Attin…”
The kids runs across a girl named Hayna (Hala Finley) from the Troik tribe, who fight against the Hattan. She helps them take cover when the Hattan show up on patrol. Hayna takes them to a building that looks just like their school, but is being used as a base for the Troik. Her father, General Strix (Mathieu Kassovitz), is introduced as the “true ruler” of At Achrann, and he asks the children what they can offer to the tribe: They treat their children as adults, as soldiers. Fern asks if he knows the way to their home, but Strix isn’t interested in off world matters. Hayna mentions that the “Fallen Sanctum” has carvings that might show the way to their home, but it’s a dangerous trek to get there. The kids must train with Troik warriors to prove their worthiness.
Jod takes SM-33 outside to help jog his memory circuits, hoping he’ll remember where the treasure is. They’re quickly surrounded by the Hattan patrol, and Jod tells them to just shoot him. The kids are learning to shoot blaster rifles, but Neel balks at the tests, uninterested in fighting. Hayna takes him outside to get his daily rations and tells him that the Hattan stole their eopie, and that they’ll have to fight again to get them back. When she takes over for her father, she plans to crush the Hattan. Neel gives his rations to two children who look hungry, and Hayna shows Neel the Troik big gun that defend their compound. Neel is dismayed that they’re at war all the time, and talks of their world where there is peace. Hayna thinks that he must be from a very weak clan, but Neel is sure that fighting is bad. Hayna is intrigued.
General Strix tells the kids they will honor the tribe by leading them into battle. Fern tries to get them out of it, but they are forced to comply and lead the Troiks into a battle zone, told to scout ahead—Hayna joins them, wanting to bolster Neel. When they meet the enemy, it turns out to be Jod and SM-33, who have the Troik’s eopies; Jod bought them with Wim’s credits. Strix asks what they can give Jod in return and he asks for the kids. Hayna points out that they’ve proven their bravery, and volunteers to lead them to the Fallen Sanctum. She parts from them before they enter, despite Neel pleading with her to come with them. Hayna promises to remember him, and tells him that his weakness makes him kind.
The Fallen Sanctum contains pillars with coordinates to all the Lost Jewels of the Republic, but the pillar for At Attin has the coordinates blasted off. SM-33 admits that he did it; his old captain ordered him to. He gets puzzled when Fern asks him to explain, repeating “Can’t say I remember no At Attin.” Fern rushes off in angry tears and Wim tries to talk to her. She admits that she doesn’t know what she’s doing, but Wim insists that she’s better at being captain than he would’ve been. Fern insists that he can’t make her figure out the answer to their problems just by telling her she’s good at things… but it gives her an idea. She overrides SM-33’s previous programming as his current captain, and they learn that the former captain ordered SM-33 to erase everything about the planet’s location, including the crew’s knowledge of it. He was ordered to pull apart anyone who asked about it, and goes into a fugue, attacking the kids. Neel throws rocks at SM-33, telling him to leave his friends alone. As SM-33 stalks closer, Jod flips the off switch. 33 lands on top of Neel, who faints from fright.
Commentary
As always, I’m wishing these episodes were longer. We just start to get into things and suddenly we’re done. Also, I was so excited that The Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) were going to be directing this episode, but I don’t feel too much of their influence here? Obviously everything you make as a director isn’t going to be Everything Everywhere All At Once, but I was expecting a little something to tip me off.
The development happening with kids here is great, though. The first episodes were more reserved for Wim, last week’s focused in on KB, and this week we’re getting moments with Neel and Fern. On Neel’s end, we’ve got this endless font of compassion and genuine confusion around the need for violence. Hayna’s not exactly in a place to accept it—this is the only life she’s ever known—but she connects with him on a deeper level than she means to. It’s written in such a way that this could be a cute kids’ crush or the start of an abiding friendship, and either way it’s meaningful. Neel is finding his own kind of courage and it feels more real as a result.
On Fern’s end, the conversation she has with Wim… oof. That is the conversation every competent little girl wishes she’d had with everyone who told her she was smart or “on top of things” or amazing. There’s a thing that tweaked at me from the start when Fern assumed command of the ship—the inclination is to assume “bossy little girl” without ever getting into the reasons why girls feel the need to take charge in those situations. I was worried the show wouldn’t address it, but we’re getting close here. Fern doesn’t want to be in charge because she thinks she’s better; she’s just used to having to solve her own problems, has been “parentified” in her own upbringing, and doesn’t feel she can trust anyone to do these things as well as she can. Her aggravation with Wim is less about him than it is about the things she clearly wishes she could say to her mother. It’s exhausting being this kid, and we finally get a moment to see it.
But the culture we get with the Troik tribe is pretty silly in terms of giving an excuse to train all these kids as soldiers. It’s kind of an irresponsible move storytelling-wise, for my money; it’s Star Wars, so of course we need our child protagonists to be able to use deadly weapons! Let’s create a culture where this is normal to make that easy to achieve! I’m with Neel—let’s not, maybe?
There’s another thing that is bugging me, which is—I mean, did Jod kill the Hattan patrol? Because if not, we’ve got abundant worldbuilding issues here. Jod claims he’s able to buy the eopie from the Hattans because they were excited at the prospect of getting Republic credits. (There’s another issue here, being how would be know to get the eopie back for the Troik when he has no idea what happened to the kids or who any of these people are… unless he does? But even then, how would be know they’d stolen those animals—it just happened.) There is no way that this world has a functioning economy, so why would the Hattans care about credits? They’re literally stealing livestock to survive.
It’s cute when he saves the kids, though. So I’ll give him that.
The big mysteries are now aligned around who captained the ship previously and programmed SM-33 to keep the planet’s location a secret. Presumably the captain of that ship still lives on At Attin? It doesn’t make much sense for SM-33 to have crashed there all alone. Not at the moment, at least.
Spanners and Sabers
- Eopie are pretty common beasts of burden throughout Star Wars, and we get introduced to them in Episode I. The thing is, as far as I know, they’re native to Tatooine? Which makes seeing them on worlds with a completely different climate a little baffling.
- The Hattan tank looks a lot like a Separatist Armored Assault Tank tank from the Clone Wars, but maybe it’s an earlier model? Or maybe it’s less armored? Either way, it begs some questions about the timeline on when these worlds were cut off again.
- The design parallels here are also interesting; if At Achrann has all the same building designs as At Attin, were all these “Jewel” worlds designed by the same person/group? Are they even real worlds at all in the traditional sense?
- The concept of the droid “off switch” has always been a weird one in Star Wars. If it’s that easy to shut down a complex being, you’d think it would be a harder switch to locate and flip, or you’d be doing it accidentally all the time. Anyone could do it and foil your plans.
We’re halfway through, so we should be hitting a turning point soon methinks…[End-mark]
