1x09 Nobody's Listening!

Well, the fuse is lit and I expect there will be an explosion of sorts next week.

The tension and build up is again what keeps the ball rolling. You are given just enough to be on the edge yet don't get bored. The acting was really great. You could see the doubt rising in Kino about what will happen once you reach the end of your sentence. We saw a very dark side of Dedra interrogating Bix. And Syril is about to break (with that mother, who could blame him ?). He will be a major player in the story I think. And the result could be devastating.

We discover that Val is Mon's cousin. Not a huge surprise but I still found it interesting how the connections are revealed. I found the scene in the Senat Chamber with Mon especially depressing as it shows again a connection to our time. I'm not used seeing that from Star Wars but they are doing it right and I like that. And althought it was different in a way, it reminded me of Padmé speaking in that same Chambers:

"So this is how liberty dies...with thunderous applause."

which I think is one of the best quotes out of Star Wars. And the scene now seems to be picking up on that liberty is now really dead.

I wonder when they will discover that they already have Andor in custody. Probably after the break. But it makes sense that in a system like the Empire such details get lost in the amount of information at hand. Althought I found the reference "he was shaven and had money and the rebels on Adhani were shaven, too" a bit ridiculous.

[7.6/10] The prison story here is my favorite for a simple reason -- it’s ultimately a character story, and about someone you might not expect. Yes, it’s Andor instigating the doubts and trying to find a way to break out of this shithole of a factory. But it’s ultimately a story about convincing Kino, who’s become so institutionalized that he buys the company line entirely, that the people promising him his freedom if he flies on the straight and narrow are not only full of crap, they don’t even care about him or any of the prisoners to begin with.

I appreciate that about the progression here. Kino is banking on playing the game. He is a prisoner, but he’s a tool of the guards. He has a little bit of power, and maybe some extra treatment and privileges because of it, so he does their bidding. Andor is an agitator. He’s cutting lines in the bathroom, conspiring with other prisoners to figure out where the floor isn’t electrified, and asking about how many guards are stationed on the floor.

Kino won’t actively punish him, maybe just because the foreman still needs a good worker like Cassian to help keep his shift’s stats up. But he won’t help either. He won’t give up that information. Because he believes in the central idea of this place. If you just stay on the right side of the line and do your job, eventually you’ll get out of here. He tells that to Ulaf, noting that he’s the “short timer” on the floor, with only a handful more shifts until he’s out of there.

And then the lie starts breaking down. Rumors start flying about everyone being deliberately fried on the second level. It’s whispered about at first, but eventually it’s confirmed. One hundred lives, snuffed out in a wave of electricity and burnt flesh. And for what? Because some of them were maybe acting up a bit, some guards thought. That’s it. That’s all it took. All of them gone.

So the lie goes up in smoke. So it turns out the trouble starts when someone who “got out” of level 4 showed up in level 2, and was a walking example of what a canard the idea that you can make it out of here. So Ulaf, who is so close to being free, is worked together and gets euthanized instead of helped when he starts to run into his own limitations. As another inmate says, they’re not men to their captor. They are a part of the machine, cheaper than droids and easier to replace. Kino finally realizes that, in the grim terms of seeing his comrades killed over nothing and his chances to get out evaporate. So his moment of aiding Andor, giving him the details he needs to start planning an escape, are strangely triumphant from someone who was an unquestioning part of that machine to this point.

The whole thing is a searing indictment of the prison industrial complex, taken through the lens of abstraction that speculative fiction provides, but no less piercing in its criticisms of how those who are vulnerable and stripped of their rights are treated in captivity. It’s one of the strongest stories Andor has told this season, which is saying something.

The other material in “Nobody’s Listening” is good, but can’t quite compare. I appreciate the reveal that Cinta’s “rich girl running away from her family” jab at Vel meant more than we thought. It turns out she’s Mon Mothma’s sister, and the two speak in hushed tones about their mutual activities. I like the idea that they’re both working for the Rebellion in different ways, a familial example of how it takes many hands to make this sort of thing happen.
The scene of Meero torturing Bix is suitbly tough to watch. Adria Arjona does a superb job at selling the slowly escalating horror of what she’s being subjected to until its bursts out in a crescendo of pain. The story of the Empire exterminating a planet’s worth of people to install a shipping port, only to weaponize the dying screams of their children, is wholly chilling. But it all does a good job of reinforcing why the Empire is so awful, why Bix would give up this information, and why Meero is not good, even if she’s good at her job.

Again, that’s the cognitive dissonance of this show. Meero is 100% the bad guy, but she’s so good at how she achieves all this, even boosting her assistant in a key moment as she rightly identifies the scheme of the Rebellion and the best way to smoke it out, that you can’t help but be impressed. Karn’s stalker with a crush routine is creepy as hell, especially when he’s yet again mixing up what he attributes to high minded ideals with his personal interests. But you can also get why someone who wants to be Meero, with what she accomplishes for the Empire and how expertly she does it, would mix up those feelings of aspiration with affection. It’s not so easy for the audience, who sees her torturing someone with the debilitating sounds of a people who’ve suffered a genocide.

Overall though, a quality episode that moves a number of interesting pieces in place for the convergence of these different characters and storylines, while also telling a strong individual story of what would provoke someone who’s been indoctrinated to the institutional point of view to have a change of heart.