Favorite Characters: Bix Caleen (Andor)

*Bix-related spoilers.*

Yes, another Favorite Characters post from Andor, and yes, the label continues to be 100% valid. One double-edged sword about Andor is the way the mini-arcs of the season move—while I love every story the show gives us, each with its own collection of great characters, it means that many of them are only in a handful of episodes, and I want so much more! That definitely applies to Bix.

First off, she’s a mechanic with her own salvage yard, respect. (Side note: Peli Motto says hi to all female mechanics in Star Wars!) Like a lot of Cassian’s friends on Ferrix, her life is a lot more on-track than his. While Cassian drifts and lets his pain get him into trouble, Bix runs a business and is in a steady romantic relationship (even if Timm turns out to be insecure and shifty.) Like Brasso, like Maarva, like B2EMO, she worries about Cassian and wants him to get his act together, but she doesn’t stop caring about him through his screwups.

Just because she’s got her life together, that doesn’t mean everything about Bix is squeaky clean. She accesses a secret transmitter to communicate with contacts for off-the-book purchases, stolen Empire tech and black-market goods. When Cassian is desperate for cash and a ticket out of town, he persuades her to call in Luthen to buy a valuable piece of tech he lifted. She seems to exist on the fringes of his less-than-legal activities, making calls and arranging meetings but not generally wading any deeper into getting her hands dirty.

Still, Bix is no great friend of the Empire. When Pre-Mor corpos swarm Ferrix looking for Cassian, she immediately does everything she can to warn him and keep him out of Pre-Mor hands. And she pays dearly for the help she offers. She’s detained by corpos and then Timm is shot in front of her. Later, when Dedra comes to investigate in Ferrix, she’s taken in and endures horrific psychological torture as part of her interrogation.

I like that Bix doesn’t brush off these things. She’s devastated when Timm is killed, although he’s the one who informed on Cassian in the first place. She’s deeply upset by all the harm caused during Cassian’s escape and the Imperial crackdown on Ferrix that follows. And when she’s tortured, it breaks her. She doesn’t maintain a stiff upper lip, she doesn’t spit out blood and ask, “Is that all you’ve got?” She is damaged by this experience in crucial ways, and she’ll probably never be who she was before this happened to her.

In the midst of all this, she gets very rightfully angry with Cassian. When he sneaks back into town after the Aldhani heist, she confronts him about all the damage left in his wake, and even though she knows none of it was his intention, she wants him to reckon with the fallout from his reckless actions. But as angry as she is, she still wants him to be safe, and she looks after Maarva when her runs again.

I don’t know what’s next for Bix. Like I said, the end of season 1 really messed her up, and it’s not the sort of thing she can bounce back quickly from. But away from Ferrix, I hope she’s able to start finding a bit of peace, beginning to heal even as she carries the scars left by the wounds.

Other Doctor Lives: DuckTales: Season 2, Episode 17 – “Whatever Happened to Donald Duck?!” (2019)

*Spoilers for “The Golden Spear!”, and season 2 arc spoilers.*

One of the many things to love about DuckTales is the fact that it’s given me a genuine appreciation for Donald Duck. Without sacrificing one bit of his ridiculousness, the show makes him a real character within the series, and this episode is a fine showcase for him.

At the end of “The Golden Spear!”, when Della flew her rocket back to Earth, Donald found it and unwittingly launched himself to the moon. Now, the people of the moon are holding him prisoner, spurred on by leader Lunaris’s claims that they were betrayed by Della. Back in Duckburg, Dewey and Webby are jonesing for a new mystery and decide to investigate why Donald hasn’t written to them after going off on a “relaxing cruise.”

In Della’s interactions with the moon folks, she was initially welcomed by Lunaris and regarded suspiciously by Penumbra. Over the course of her time with them, Penumbra was just starting to come around on her, only for it to be revealed that Lunaris was playing a long game, inventing this false “betrayal” to get his people’s backing for a war against Earth. That means that, in Donald’s predicament, Penumbra is his unlikely ally.

It's really fun to have Donald off on his own adventure on the moon. There are the usual jokes at the expense of his speech—as Lunaris is presenting him to the moon people as a dangerous spy, the very confused Donald is just trying to figure out what’s going on. When someone calls out, “What did he say?”, Lunaris answers, “…He said, ‘Death to the moon!’” And there’s some fantastic physical comedy, such as Donald trying to escape his prison cell by literally banging his head against the wall, along with a terrific wordless sequence of him trying to sneak through the soldiers’ barracks without waking any of them. At the same time, though, the episode culminates in a neat climax that gives added context and an in-story purpose behind Donald’s classic tantrums. I like that.

The Earth plot is good, too. Dewey and Webby might be the best one-on-one screen partners among the kids, because both are ridiculously enthusiastic but with completely different sensibilities. It’s a hoot watching them work themselves into a frenzy as they try to invent conspiracies to solve. At one point, Dewey goes on a long ramble that ends with the fact that Mrs. Beakley hasn’t been buying peppers. Webby gasps, “Ghost peppers!”, to which Dewey responds, “It’s all connected!” Once they launch onto their Donald investigation, they both get super into it. Dewey styles himself as a noir detective while Webby wears a deerstalker, and during an interrogation, they explain, “We’re both bad cop.”

It's a great episode, but it’s fairly light on Scrooge. On the Earth side of things, he basically bookends the story, first frustrated by Dewey and Webby’s attempts to manufacture an adventure, then showing up at the end when their sleuthing takes them too far down a rabbit hole. Still, it’s fun, and I get a kick out of him building a money bin in a bottle.

As such, there’s not a ton of David Tennant here, but he gets a few good line readings in. I enjoy his exhausted pragmatism in the face of Dewey and Webby’s hyperactivity. And I especially like the line, “Hang on! An adventure has to call to you. You cannae just go around making up mysteries.”

Relationship Spotlight: Shiori’anma & Bushi’an Takkan (Six Crimson Cranes)

In lieu of screencaps (please, someone make a movie of these books!), have this artwork made by FlourishingFables--available on Etsy!

*Spoilers.*

Oh, how I love Shiori and Takkan. Shipping isn’t usually my go-to instinct with stories I consume, but when a pairing works for me, they really work. These two are a delight on the page from the jump.

Shiori meets Takkan under incredible circumstances, to say the least. Both are pretending to be someone other than they are. Oh yeah, and Shiori is under a curse; a wooden bowl on her head obscures her face, and she can’t speak, having been told that one of her brothers will die for every sound she utters. Thrown from the palace, she’s posing as a poor girl named Lina, working in the kitchen of an inn. Takkan stays overnight with some of the other sentinels, a brief pause in their search for the missing princess and princes, Shiori and her brothers.

One of the first and strongest signs that Shiori and Takkan’s strands of fate are knotted together is the fact that he’s able to understand her gestures and mouthed words. Many don’t have the patience or the temperament to understand her, but nearly from the beginning, Takkan has entire conversations with Shiori, and not one-sided ones, either. He’s kind to her and doesn’t look down on her for seemingly being poor and mute or fear her as a demon (which is what many who encounter her in her cursed state believe.)

Shiori doesn’t learn who Takkan really is until the second time they meet. That’s a fairly loaded matter, since they’ve actually been betrothed for years (shades of Aurora and Phillip from Sleeping Beauty.) In fact, the book begins with Shiori running out on officially meeting him at court. By the time she discovers the truth, she’s been taken to his home in Iro, again working in the kitchens. When Takkan is gravely injured, she’s able to coax him to eat with the same radish soup she’d made back at the inn, at which point his family regards her with gratitude rather than suspicion.

Another major sign for these two is the fact that Takkan’s beloved little sister Megari takes an immediate liking to Shiori. Bright and inquisitive, Megari is also unbothered by Shiori’s curse and seeks to foster an eager friendship with her, one that only deepens after Takkan recovers.

I love that Takkan is warm and creative and follows his own masculinity instead of conforming to what he’s “supposed” to be. I love that he woos Shiori, in an understated fashion, by telling her stories. And I love that, as their lives only get more and more complicated, he rolls with her no matter what.

I love that Shiori is impulsive and goodhearted and stubborn in the best ways. I love that she’s charmed by Takkan’s occasional shyness and his unself-conscious love for Iro, seeing his home through his eyes. And I love that, even when she’s offered a life wed to the dragon prince Seryu in the second book, she only has eyes for her sentinel back on the surface.

Both books test the two of them greatly. As Shiori wrestles with the mighty tasks placed upon her, she doubts herself even as she presses on the best she can. Throughout, Takkan is beside her every chance he gets, doing anything to help and protect her even to his own detriment.

It’s just so lovely. It’s wonderful to see their relationship form amid curses and threats, to be nurtured by stories and bowls of soup, and to persist through separations and trials. Theirs is a love so unbreakable that not even a goddess could deny it, which is every bit as it should be.