‘Andor’ Episode 10 Recap: Escapism

Star Wars means a lot to me. The original film is the first movie I can remember watching, a copy taped off of CBS by my father, who carefully paused the recording to cut out the commercial breaks. I remember seeing Return of the Jedi in the theater at age 5. I had all the action figures I could get my hands on. My Millennium Falcon hangs from the ceiling in my children’s bedroom; my AT-AT passed into the possession of my niece. During my adolescence and teenage years, when nerd culture was a complete non-starter, I kept that love alive like a secret fire, wolfing down the Expanded Universe novels. When the characters in Clerks had that conversation about contractors on the Death Star I nearly lost my mind. At age 18 I got my first tattoo, the Rebel Alliance insignia. I waited on line overnight for the Special Edition theatrical re-releases, and for the first prequel. (I’m a prequels guy, for the record.) Once I had children of my own I took my daughter to every new Disney Star Wars movie, though admittedly I tapped out on The Rise of Skywalker; better for her not to sully the memories with that thing. So yeah, Star Wars means a lot to me. 

But nothing in any of the Star Wars media I’ve consumed over the years ever brought me to tears, until now.

Andor’s tenth episode is a staggering achievement, to me anyway. Its desperate prison break, in which inmates are mowed down indiscriminately and guards are killed in cold blood and a man who can’t swim leads his comrades to freedom by jumping into the ocean and swimming for their lives, makes real all of the franchise’s talk of rebellion against tyranny. Not against the cool, Dark Side, planet-detonating side of the Empire, either, but the workaday tyranny of incarceration, prison labor, police violence, the insistence that everyone is just an interchangeable cog in the wheel of productivity, made to work until they break and new parts are brought in to replace them. It’s a last-ditch battle against the forces of dehumanization that plague us all, is what it is.

And it’s inspiring in large part because of the performance of Andy Serkis as the prison riot’s reluctant leader, Kino Loy. Finally on board with the plan of Andor and his fellow conspirators, he’s valuable to the escape attempt because everyone’s used to following his orders, and his voice has the unmistakeable air of command even to prisoners who’ve never heard it before. But he has to be persuaded to use it, and that’s where Andor comes in. 

After their frantic flight from the factory floor where the riot began, the two men make their way to the command post, execute an officer to show they mean business, and force the commander to deactivate the electric floors. It’s now up to Kino to get on the PA and tell the facility’s prisoners what’s going on…but he freezes. You can see the pain, the fear, the years of rage and resignation, all in Serkis’s marvelously convex eyes. And you can feel Andor’s deep well of respect for this man in his insistence that it must be Kino, not Andor himself, who tells the people what to do.

Which is what he does. He tells them they have no hope of escape anymore, that they’re all being imprisoned for life, unless they escape, right here and right now. He tells them to run, to climb, to kill. He tells them to help each other, to aid those who are confused or lost or panicked. He leads them in a chant: “ONE WAY OUT!”

And in the end, he’s one of the lost. That “one way out” is a leap into the ocean far below, and he can’t swim. Andor is stampeded over the edge by other prisoners, and that’s the last glimpse we get of Kino Loy. The scene then shifts to a breathtaking shot of white-clad prisoners swimming through the water below, fanning out, like a burst of air from a punctured tire. A gorgeous image, at a moment of intense mixed emotions. Expert, knockout filmmaking.
And throughout, I found myself choking up. It was the cold-hot thrill of watching people with literally nothing left to lose rise up and say no more, collectively, that did it. Watching Kino struggle got me. Watching the prisoners swim for freedom got me. Andor got me, and it got me good.

Other things happen as well, and in some ways they’re just as harsh. Mon Mothma greets Davo Skuldun (Richard Dillane), the shady banker from her home world Chandrila. He says he can get her the money she wants for her “charity,” if she’ll entertain the idea of an arranged marriage between his 14-year-old son and her 13-year-old daughter. Actor Genevieve O’Reilly’s face looks like it may burst apart from tension during this scene, as her political ideals come into direct conflict: She despises both the Empire and the practice of arranged child marriages, and now she must decide whether she’d rather her daughter live in a world governed by the Emperor or in a loveless marriage like her own.

Meanwhile, an ambitious young ISB officer, Lonni Jung (Robert Emms), suggests to his superior Dedra Meero that the Empire examine the captured Rebel ship they’re feeding back to the Rebellion in order to gain intel. It’s a smart move, but it’s also a smokescreen: Lonni is a Rebel agent himself, a defector who’s been working alone for years, leading a double life with no support. But he has a daughter now, and he wants out.

Not so fast, says his contact, Luthen Rael. Standing on one of those classic Star Wars metal bridges down a classic Star Wars shaft someplace, he looks like a Sith lord in his dark cape, and he sounds not unlike one too. He won’t let Lonni out — the man is far too valuable. In fact, he rejects the intelligence Lonni is giving him about the surefire slaughter into which Rebel leader Anto Kreegyr is walking, telling Lonni that saving Kreegyr’s men would blow Lonni’s cover; Lonni is more valuable to the Rebellion than the fifty men who are marching to their deaths.

Lonni, frightened and outraged in equal measure, demands to know what Luthen has sacrificed for the Rebellion. In a speech reminiscent of Garrett Dillahunt’s “past surprise” monologue from Deadwood Season 2, he lists his sacrifices: “Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago for which there’s only one conclusion: I’m damned for what I do.” He goes on, lost in self-recrimination, realizing his soul is too hardened to be salvageable anymore. “I burned my life to make a sunrise I will never see,” he says, before concluding by stating unequivocally what he’s sacrificed: “Everything.”

Ian Kershaw, the great historian of Nazi Germany, wrote of those who plotted to assassinate Hitler:

“Beyond ethical considerations, there was the existential fear of the awesome consequences — for the families as well as for the individuals themselves — of discovery of any complicity in a plot to remove the head of state and instigate a coup d’état. This was certainly enough to deter many who were sympathetic to the aims of the plotters but unwilling to become involved. Nor was it just the constant dangers of discovery and physical risks that acted as a deterrent. There was also the isolation of resistance. To enter into, even to flirt with, the conspiracy against Hitler meant acknowledging an inner distance from friends, colleagues, comrades, entry into a twilight world of immense peril, and of social, ideological, even moral isolation.”

I never expected a Star Wars project to remind me of these words. But then, I never expected Andor.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.