I’d say by now Star Wars: Andor has pretty well established its pattern of setup, complications, and climax every three episodes (mimicking the typical plot structure of a movie, but split up across several installments), so it should come as no surprise that this week’s new episode, entitled “Announcement,” feels like the beginning of a new chapter in the story rather than the middle or an end.
That said, I think I’m always going to prefer the talkier episodes of this series to the action-oriented ones, so Andor episode seven is right up my alley.
“Announcement” begins on Coruscant, where news of the Aldhani heist has spread even to the apartment shared by our favorite sad-sack Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) and his mother Eedy (Kathryn Hunter). But nowhere is the impact of that incident felt more critically than in the offices of the Imperial Security Bureau, where Colonel Yularen (one of the first recognizable Star Wars characters to appear in this series outside of the main cast, played here by Malcolm Sinclair from 2006’s Casino Royale) briefs the officers about how the Empire is going to respond. Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) doesn’t agree with the strategy, but she keeps that to herself and her assistant Attendant Heert (Jacob James Beswick) as they go about their own investigation of the fledgling Rebellion. At Luthen Rael’s (Stellan Skarsgard) antique shop, Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) accuses the rebel recruiter of going too far too quickly in his aggressive efforts to steal from the Empire. Meanwhile Syril settles into his new job in the bureaucratic maze of the Bureau of Standards, which sounds like the perfect gig for him, though he’s intent on clearing his name with the corporate sector.
We see a meeting between Luthen’s right-hand woman Kleya Marki (Elizabeth Dulau) and rebel cell leader Vel Sartha (Faye Marsay), in which the former essentially orders the latter to hunt down and assassinate the titular Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) for being a loose end in their recent caper. But Cassian himself has snuck back home to Ferrix, where he tries and fails to convince his adoptive mother Maarva (Fiona Shaw) to leave the now Imperial-occupied planet with him, using the money he earned in the heist. And then we finally get to see one of those famous cocktail parties at the Mothma residence, during which Mon spills the beans about her involvement with the Rebel Alliance to her anti-Imperial childhood friend from Chandrila, Tay Kolma (V for Vendetta’s Ben Miles). Cassian seemingly has a final falling out with his ex-girlfriend Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona) before splitting Ferrix for good, and we also get some flashbacks to his youth on the planet during which he had to witness his surrogate father Clem Andor (Gary Beadle) being hung in the town square by some clone troopers. Next, Dedra has a good day in the ISB’s conference room, finally earning the respect and guidance of Major Partagaz (Anton Lesser), and we cut to a tropical beach resort planet called Niamos for the bulk of the episode’s remaining running time. Here Cassian, simply using his hard-earned credits to lay low with some female company, has an unfortunate run-in with a shoretrooper and a KX-series security droid (voiced by puppeteer Aidan Cook, not Alan Tudyk quite yet) who arrest him for basically being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It’s sad to watch Cassian get sentenced to six years in Imperial prison for a crime he didn’t commit– though we in the audience know he has been responsible for far worse, and we also know he’ll likely be out sooner rather than later. “Take it up with the Emperor,” the prosecutor says as Andor insists he’s just a tourist on Niamos. And the episode ends with a check-in on Syril, who occupies a prison of his own working in an endless honeycomb of office cubicles. Yep, this episode is mostly talking again, and it’s all pretty fantastic. I loved that Emperor Palpatine’s name got dropped a couple times, reminding us of the familiar universe this series inhabits, and I’m enjoying getting to see the wheels turning on all these different levels of society. But being the dork I am, nothing made me sit up with attention more than when that KX-series droid came up over the shorefront horizon. I know we’ve all been wondering just how and when K-2SO would come to be an ongoing part of Andor, and I don’t think that’s going to happen just yet (I’m really crossing my fingers that showrunner Tony Gilroy and the Lucasfilm Story Group have worked together to make this story fit into the already established canon of how Cassian and K2 first met), but it’s nice to see the creatives behind the show reminding us that they do indeed know what we’re all looking forward to. I can be patient until Tudyk joins the cast at some point later on, but I just adored how they threw that imagery at us this week. Boy, you’d think Cassian would have probably learned to steer clear of beach planets after this, but no…
New episodes of Star Wars: Andor are released Wednesdays, exclusively on Disney+.