*Episode 10 spoilers.*
I’ve spent plenty of time over the years talking about my love for penultimate episodes and how they’re often the best in the season for delivering tension and excitement. The penultimate episode for Andor’s first season, in contrast, is a tiny bit of a breather, maneuvering the pieces into place for everything to go down in the finale next week. (Side note: season finale next week! What am I supposed to do with myself after that??)
After last week’s epic prison riot/escape, Cassian and his fellow inmate Melshi are on the run, trying to find a way off Narkina 5 so they can think through their next steps. Back on Ferrix, the Empire is gearing up for what they hope will be a trap to spring on Cassian, exploiting a sad development for their personal gain. And on the rebel side of things, both Luthen and Mon Mothma are trying in their own way to hold everything together so it doesn’t fall apart.
First of all, this episode just has feels all over the place. I don’t want to get too much into plot details, but there are all kinds of scenes that are out here quietly wrecking me. What the Empire has done to Bix is monstrous. Mon Mothma is at the end of her rope, facing a horrible choice in order to keep her activities from being discovered, and although Vel comes at the Rebellion from a very different place, she feels for Mon in her dilemma. There’s a great scene between Luthen and Saw Gerrera that really highlights the notes of tragic in Saw’s character, the paranoia that pushes him further and further away from the rest of the Rebellion. And poor little B2EMO absolutely breaks my heart—I was 100% crying over that droid.
At the same time that the episode delivers all of these emotional character moments, it also ups the tension in relatively understated ways as it lays the groundwork for the finale. We can see the different threads being gathered up to be woven together next week, and while not as outright stressful to watch as some episodes, this one still kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time.
Today’s character of the week is Melshi, played by Duncan Pow. I wasn’t eagle eyed enough to notice this when he first appeared, but Melshi is a character from Rogue One, a Rebel who joins the climactic mission to Scarif. Luckily, folks on Twitter were a lot quicker on the draw than I was, so I got filled in and was able to fully appreciate Melshi’s dynamic with Cassian throughout the Narkina 5 arc. While we’ve seen Cassian’s character journey playing out across the whole season, Melshi goes through a similar journey in just a few episodes, going from someone who’s lost all hope in prison to someone who backs up Cassian in the escape plan and is ready to do anything to survive. The two characters have some really nice moments together in this episode.
This is a fairly Cassian-lite episode overall. After the intensity of the prison break last week, he’s mainly just reorienting as he prepares to make his next move, giving the episode space to get the rest of the characters where they need to be ahead of the finale. Altogether, he’s probably only in four or five scenes.
And yet, Diego Luna still crushes it. It’s been such a pleasure to watch Cassian grow over the course of the season, and we see some of the fruits of that in his scenes with Melshi. And there’s a scene near the end where I swear Luna packs a whole episode’s worth of excellence into just a few minutes. I love the subtlety of it, Cassian struggling not to show everything that’s going through his mind. I’m nervous about where the finale is going to take him, but I know Luna will play it beautifully.
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