*Syril-related spoilers.*
Another Andor antagonist for the books. If Dedra is fascinating in a repellant kind of way, it’s compelling to watch Syril spiral over the course of season 1. This guy brings big Dwight Schrute energy to the world of Star Wars, while also being a fascist.
We first meet Syril when he’s working as a deputy inspector for Pre-Mor, the Empire’s security contractors charged with keeping the “peace” on low-priority planets (it’s a big galaxy, and apparently there aren’t enough Stormtroopers to go around.) From his very first scene, it’s evident that Syril has an incredibly high estimation of himself and is trying to will the prestige he aspires to into existence. His boss clocks that he’s altered his company-issued uniform, taking it in for “light tailoring” and adding piping and pockets; Syril has a vision for his life and where he wants to go with it, and he takes that very seriously.
Unfortunately for him, things go off the rails when Cassian Andor comes into his life. A report comes in of two Pre-Mor officers who are murdered in a seedy locale. His boss opts to cover it up, noting that an investigation would open them up to lots of questions about the officers’ corruption and numerous rule violations, but that doesn’t work for Syril. Whether he genuinely cares about the loss of life, he’s an incurable stickler for protocol, or he smells career advancement, he can’t let this go. While his boss is away, he sets all available resources to work on the case night and day, and when he leads a team of officers to Ferrix to apprehend Cassian, it blows up in his face very decisively.
The whole mess not only gets Syril, his boss, and his sergeant buddy fired from Pre-Mor. It also causes Pre-Mor to lose their imperial contract for that whole region. Syril’s self-righteous crusade was a major screw-up, and he’s left to move back in with his hypercritical mom and take a desk job his uncle hooks him up with. Oh, how the mighty have fallen, and he really wasn’t all that mighty to start with.
Seeing Syril humbled like this puts an interesting spin on his story. When Cassian evades his capture on Ferrix, at one point even getting the jump on Syril personally and tying him up, it sets the stage for a classic Valjean-Javert dynamic: Syril has basically sworn to bring Cassian Andor to justice if it’s the last thing he does. But because he’s now just lost his job, Syril has all of Javert’s anger and single-mindedness toward his vendetta but zero means to actually do something about it. He has no men at his command, no investigative apparatus at his disposal, no impressive uniform to force doors open. When he tries to dig into Cassian at his new job, no one listens to what he has to say, and he just gets in trouble for wasting company time and resources on unauthorized matters. And every day, he goes home to listen to his mom gripe about all the ways he doesn’t measure up.
As an officious little twerp with a modicum of power, Syril was dangerous but mostly ineffective. As an officious little twerp who’s lost what meager sense of authority he had, he’s a loose cannon, and that’s dangerous in a different way. He can’t make anyone’s life worse at a snap of his fingers, but in his powerless position, all his resentment is left to fester. He gloms onto Dedra the second he meets her, because he thinks he’s finally found someone who cares about catching Cassian as much as he does and sees her as his salvation against his pencil-pushing existence. He has nothing to do in his free time except stew over how wronged he is and imagine how he’s going to get even. Syril has been swimming in a toxic soup, and there’s no telling where that will take him in season 2.
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