Andor [Disney+]

Episode 10 after a brief pause, and wow, so cathartic. The prison break a great moment of liberty, even if you kinda sense for many it'll be brief - not least for poor Kino and his face when seeing the sheer drop into the ocean. Undone by an inability to swim, his goodbye with Andor halted by the clumsy interruption of someone else.

And I sense this might be the scene Stellan Skarsgard really savoured, what a monologue. The man who knows his purpose is to be the Necessary Evil to fight the larger badness, that he'll never know peace or the world he's trying to shape. As he said he sacrificed everything, abandoned his core decency so he could use the tools of Empire against them.

10 episodes in and I cannot fathom how this was allowed to exist, and how we have been lucky enough to have it in our lives. A Star Wars show about what fascism actually means, what it's cost is and how it effects people.

Bumping this thread for no other reason than sharing what was, in my humble, the finest monologues and speeches in any TV drama in 2022; still thinking about it, still dwelling on how well it can work if character just says how they feel, when it's pitched & acted this well.

Imagine if this was the face of the rebellion Luke met after fleeing the Death Star, lol.

Episode 12, finished up and left wanting more. Such a simple structure for a season finale, being the straightforward - if somewhat doomed - catharsis of watching Ferrix decide Fúck This, and responding to Maarva's stirring call to action. God bless Fiona Shaw; she wasn't in this a lot, but by god she sold every single scene she was given. All the actors knocked it out of the park but the particularly venerable ones like Shaw or Skarsgard really upped their game.

“There is a wound that won’t heal at the centre of the galaxy; it’s here and it’s not visiting anymore. If I could do it again, I’d wake up early and fight the bastards from the start. Fight the Empire!”

You know. Looking back on this as a whole: Star Wars was always very anti-fascist, but only in a very superficial sense through its blatant Nazi stand-ins and iconography; iconography sometimes a little too fond of looking cool and enticing. It wanted to play with toy Nazis rather than examine what that actually meant.

This show has frequently, and quite openly, raged as an intentional polemic against the realities of fascism; that slow drip of authoritarianism and its reliance on mass complacency to persist. Or for good people to shrug and say what can I do?. As the posthumous recording from Karis noted: fascism is an entirely unnatural concept, requiring constant vigilance and oppression to work, but crumbles the moment people push back even a little.