In the Flesh: Andor s2e12 'Jedha, Kyber, Erso'

Freedom is a pure idea. So said Nemik, the young Rebel soldier crushed to death in a tragic turn of fate during the long-ago heist on Aldhani. His words live on. A broken Major Partagaz listens to a recording of Nemik’s manifesto in the room where he spent his career trying to do every frantic, monstrous thing the young ideologue points out as the natural weaknesses of fascist oppression. “It just keeps spreading,” he says almost absently to Supervisor Lagret (Michael Jenn), who joins him with dire news. Partagaz has been summoned to answer for his agency’s failure to contain intel related to the still incomplete Death Star project. He opts instead to take his own life, more confused and lost than dignified. The system he served so diligently and with such flair mulches him without so much as a second thought, because it has no other answer to disorder, no ability to understand that it is tearing itself apart. Cue Dedra’s broken sobs as she ends her dazzling career, and her life, in the bowels of an Imperial prison facility exactly like the one in which Cassian manufactured Death Star parts in the show’s first season.

The dead-eyed sons of bitches who have made immiserating the galaxy their business wind up, like all fascists, getting a taste of what they’ve been forcing down everyone else’s throats, and they may be able to dish it out, but they sure can’t take it. Even Krennic rings out the series looking proudly at the superweapon his conniving boss, Grand Moff Tarkin, will use to no-scope him off the top of a communications tower within the year. It’s not just that these mutants are all shooting at each other in a frenzy of panicked totalitarian crackdown fever, either. The Rebellion is up and moving, though not without growing pains. When Cassian and company return to the base on Yavin IV, having successfully spirited an injured Kleya away from the Empire’s goons, they run straight into the General Draven and an armed welcoming committee. Even knowing how this story ends, it’s hard not to pull out your hair in frustrated anxiety as the cautious, moderate politicians who have pushed out the Saws and the Luthens hem and haw and delude themselves into thinking all this Death Star business is hot air.

And then, miraculously, just as it seems the Rebellion has taken its first step toward calcifying into the kind of rigid, blustering empty gestures and willful ignorance we watched bring down the Republic in Lucas’s prequel films, its luminaries change their minds. These aren’t cowering, spineless dullards. If they’re overcautious, it’s inexperience and fear of overwhelming odds. If they’re moderate, it’s because they’ve been trying to hide behind that exact facade of well-intentioned uselessness for decades under threat of death. It’s hesitation, not stagnation. We end on Cassian shipping out for Kafrene, off chasing the rumor that will unite him with Jyn Erso and ultimately furnish the Rebellion with the Death Star plans, enabling their first tide-turning victory over the Imperial war machine. As he walks to his U-Wing we see glimpses of the people he’s met along the way, of Vel and Mon eating in the mess hall, of Wilmon and his girlfriend Dreena in domestic bliss, of B2EMO playing tag with a droid friend, of Saw contemplating the cruiser over Jedha City, and finally of Bix, back on the rolling plains of Mina Rau, with Cassian’s baby in her arms.

Because that’s what this is for. It’s for Kleya’s hesitant smile as she watches the Rebellion she helped to shape and arm unfold around her, for her quiet realization that she can be a part of a world she thought she’d never live to see. It’s for laughter and children and playing cards with friends. It’s for a galaxy without a gigantic, pointless apparatus for inflicting suffering and fear throttling it like a parasitic strangler fig. Beautifully shot and exquisitely paced from its opening action scene in a Coruscant apartment block like something out of The Raid or Dredd to Cassian’s dream of his long-lost sister standing framed by the verdant jungle of Kenari like a sad-eyed figure in a Henri Rousseau painting, ‘Jedha, Kyber, Erso’ is a restrained — excepting the viscerally satisfying scene in which K2-SO (Alan Tudyk) uses Supervisor Heert’s (Jacob James Beswick) dead body as a meat shield to soak up blaster fire while advancing like death incarnate on a swaggering, macho ISB trooper reduced to shrieking panic — and thoughtful ending to one of the greatest television shows ever made. Art may not be enough to change the world, but it can show us where we’re standing, and it can tell us that it’s not too late to look up, to take our anger and frustration and our helpless, exhausted misery and point it where it belongs: at the heart of tyranny.