In the Flesh: Andor s2e08 'Who Are You?'

Staring day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year at millions of people starving to death in real time, being shot and tortured and bombed, is enough to make you lose your mind. Everyone with a conscience understands this now, if they didn’t when the current savage escalation of Israel’s genocidal violence against Palestine began. We’ve been slowly going insane ever since the bombs began to fall, watching people beg for their lives and the lives of their children, giving what little money we have in a desperate attempt to keep the living alive. How is it that a Star Wars show is the first piece of American television I’ve seen to scream at the top of its lungs that this is wrong? Andor shows us a young woman, a Ghorman Rebel, beg the galaxy to watch what’s happening on her planet, to care about the calculated massacre of her people by the Imperial war machine. It shows us people we’ve come to know and care about dying so the Emperor can rip their planet apart, deport them all to probable imprisonment and hard labor, and leave Ghorman drifting lifeless in the dark.

It’s enough to derange even Syril, a lifelong believer in law and order, who assaults his lover Dedra when he realizes what she’s done, then flees the Imperial headquarters on Ghorman to wander numbly through the crowd of protestors outside. The scene in which he is shunted aside into a room where a double row of KX security droids wait patiently to be deployed against the crowd and slowly, finally begins to realize he’s part of something unimaginably terrible as one of the droids locks eyes with him feels like watching something awaken to sentience staring at its own reflection. Actor Kyle Soller has never been better, his big, expressive features alive with horror, his body language stiff, almost broken. But just a glimpse of Andor himself with a blaster trained on Dedra and it’s all gone in an instant. The two men grapple like animals, beating and strangling each other, until finally Cassian, beaten and dead to rights, asks Syril, “Who are you?”

It’s an echo of an earlier scene in which Syril, still clinging to his desperate belief that the Empire hasn’t been acting in bad faith, comes face to face with Ghorman Front leader Carro Rylanz (Richard Sammel), who asks him again and again, “What kind of being are you?” It’s Rylanz who puts a blaster bolt in Syril’s skull to close things out, answering a question Syril himself can’t quite answer, because to admit what he is would be to understand his own monstrosity, his role as a wrecker in Ghorman organizing, his complicity in mass murder over the Empire’s desire for Ghorman’s natural resources. As heartfelt patriotic songs give way to screams, as those same droids who waited, like Syril, in that bare little room rampage through the crowd killing armed and unarmed Ghorman citizens with terrifying ease, the show is asking us again and again, what kind of people are we? Are we going to look at where we’re standing and do something about the world around us, or like Syril, do we need to be put down to preserve what beauty and freedom remains in the world?