Disclaimer: This post contains spoilers for Andor. If you do not wish to be spoiled, please feel free to turnabout and leave the page. It will still be here after you've caught up, if you so wish to return (and we do hope you do).
I gotta admit, as much as I hate the discourse around Andor, it really is a different beast than what has come before it. Star Wars is a fantasy space western with magical samurai, after all. It tends to lean towards the campy side of things... Not so with this installlment, though. Andor has been hitting hard with it's commentary on social issues. It isn't toeing the line of these (for whatever reason) controversial subjects, it is waltzing them right into your brain.
The show has given us political oppression, police overreach and brutality, genocide, environmental devastation, torture. If it's a shitty thing in a fascist society, you best believe Andor is going to serve it to you on a beskar platter.
(And yet there are people still denying Star Wars is political. Go figure...)
One thing it has also given us is a bit of a reality shock in the realm of death. It isn't like death is a new concept in Star Wars. One of the first losses we face are the charred remains of Owen and Beru Lars, after all, but death in the franchise has generally been either pretty fantastical (such as death by lightsaber or planetary destruction) or we are removed from the act and/or the characters (not seeing the Lars' deaths, for instance, or it being the loss of secondary characters during dogfights in space).
Andor, in fact, makes it personal and almost mundane in its reality, starting with Timm being murdered by the very police force he called to report Cassian to. (As much as an absolute dickwaffle him reporting Cass made him, Timm didn't deserve to be gunned down in an alley and left like that. He would have, however, absolutely deserved a good fonging... And if you don't get that reference, please go watch A Knight's Tale, thanks.)
The first demise that left an impression with me, though, was that of Nemik. Don't get me wrong, I knew it was going to happen. I had already read somewhere that Tony Gilroy had said the show wasn't going to shy away from the cost of rebellion, and, frankly, Nemik was way too idealistic to survive. He had hope. Beliefs. A manifesto meant to be a guide for a better government, a better society, a better galaxy. If Game of Thrones has taught me anything, it was that Nemik was too wholesome to survive.
No matter how I thought I had steeled myself for it, it still felt like a punch in the gut. It makes it all the worse that Nemik didn't fall in battle. He didn't suffer for the greater good. Karis Nemik died because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Karis Nemik died because after he was caught between those racks of credits, his crew mates freaked the fuck out and tugged him out, pumped him full of some adrenaline type whatever (assumingly), and kept fucking moving him. I am not exaggerating, I was fussing out loud to my TV at Vel, shouting at her not to move him. Don't move him. Don't fucking move him, you'll make it worse!
Nemik died on an operating table from injuries he didn't have to sustain and possibly could have survived had he had proper treatment. Just like so many other people who get in car crashes or fall off ladders or slip on the ice accumulated on their stoop or whatever else fate might have in store for someone.
And then we get to Ulaf, the next heart-wrenching death in the series. How Ulaf was ever deemed fit for hard labour, I have no idea, but there he was on Narkina 5 with the rest, working as hard as he could so that he wouldn't be the weak link that got their table electrocuted at the end of the workday. It wasn't hard to get attached to him, either, being the little old man he was, especially with the caring, compassionate way that Cass took to him. How the rest of his team worked to hold him up. How Kino, such a hardass, obviously had a soft spot for him. So when he had a sudden lost of cognition and collapsed, well...
Ulaf's death from a stroke, such a normal, real life ailment that it almost seemed out of place to hear it said out loud in a Star Wars series (right as they find out that no one was ever actually getting out of the prison, no less), was not heart-breaking. It was heart-shattering. This was anyone's grandfather, their father, their uncle or their cousin... He was anyone you've known and cared for, loved and lost because of a stroke or a heart attack or some bloody cancer or any of the other 'mundane' causes of death that take loved ones from the world every damned day.
Andor has made the show's deaths intimate, after all. They are meant to remind us, I think, that these are things that happen.
Episode 11 lead in with a death I saw coming since she refused to leave with Cass (though I think maybe there were signs even before that point): Maarva Andor. The scene where she told Cassian that she wasn't leaving is the last we see of her, but her death is foreshadowed in bits of conversation we overhear from people who care about her. She's been antagonising Stormtroopers in the square. She's stopped taking her meds... She passed away quietly in her sleep.
I saw (in passing) someone on Twitter complain that her dying off screen was rude (basically), but I find it pretty poignant. Maarva passes while Cass is lightyears away, stuck unjustly in an Imperial prison/work camp. I feel like it would have been almost an intrusion if we had been able to witness her death when Cass, due to circumstance, could not.
Instead we are told her passing through the mourning of those around her, namely B2EMO, who has now lost his whole family (because no one knows where Cass is or how to get in touch with him), and Brasso, who is trying to handle her arrangements in Cass' stead (along with the Daughters of Ferrix) while also taking care of Bee and deal with his own grief.
The episode started with her death, but it wasn't really until Cass heard the news that it properly hit. Diego Luna should get all the props for his acting there, because it was such a subtle change in his countenance when he received the news, but Cassian's entire vibe just shifted. Cass learning of his mother's passing was where her death, despite being a major topic of the episode, finally solidified in the narrative for me. It was there that she 'died'.
Wednesday is going to give us the final episode of the season. Everyone and their brother now knows that Maarva Andor has passed away, and those who have nefarious plans for her son are planning to use her funeral as a trap. I suspect it's going to be a pretty fucking intense episode... And one hell of a cliffhanger. And all I can say to this prospect is, 'bring it on, yo'.
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