In the Flesh: Andor s2e07 'Messenger'

“They have no shame, do they?” says Senator Oran (Raphael Roger Levy), discussing a staged terrorist attack on his home planet of Ghorman. “They don’t even bother to lie badly anymore.” It’s a sentiment every victim of social sadism and its hegemonic equivalent understands, to be subject to the power of gloating imbeciles who take pleasure in the obvious falsehood of their stories about your wickedness. They aren’t just ripping you limb from limb in public, they’re whimpering and cringing for the cameras like it’s you who holds power over them. Levy’s craggy, somber features — the man looks like a crumbling Roman statue — give added weight to his melancholic tone. He knows the game is lost, that it was rigged from the beginning, and all he has left is the bitter realization that he’s let himself be played. His attempts to appease the empire have only hastened the destruction of his homeworld and its people.

Elsewhere, though, a fight on a different scale and of a different nature is taking shape. From a muddy backwater where fractious Rebel cells kept busy fighting over moldy rations and killing one another, Yavin IV has grown into a genuine military base. New recruits are pouring in every day, so numerous that a bureaucracy has sprung up to serve them, that a hierarchy is in place. It’s the beginning of a power that could challenge the empire, and it signals the Rebellion outgrowing its days of infighting and strict isolation between cells. It’s a strange sort of victory, and hard for the people like Cassian, who have fought in strict and total secrecy for years on end, to swallow. Dealing with chronic pain from a shoulder injury, angrily interrogating Wilmon about his activities, bucking protocol and dodging Luthen, Cassian’s rebellion is in danger of outgrowing him.

It’s a quiet episode, by Andor standards. Things on Ghorman are rapidly coming undone, leaving even Syril unable to square the circle of his intelligence work on the planet. He’s nominally there to suss out “outside agitators”, but when he appeals to his Ghorman Front contact to give up whoever’s running the show in order to save her planet, she slaps him across the face for daring to say something so patently disconnected from reality out loud. He knows she’s right. His barely restrained panic as he begs Dedra to tell him what’s really happening is as disconcerting as her artless kiss to stop him asking questions she doesn’t want to answer is revolting. The centerpiece of ‘Messenger’ isn’t an action scene or another wire-taut espionage sequence, it’s a gentle little moment of worldbuilding in which Cassian meets a Force healer (Josie Walker), who sees what’s coming for him. She puts it kindly, she puts it hopefully, but the die is cast, and the day is coming closer. What she tells Cassian and Bix, what gives that doom a fragile kind of beauty, is that she sees that it will mean something. That it isn’t all in vain.