Episode five of Andor – ‘The Axe Forgets’ – seemingly marks the calm before the storm; a moment’s breath before the rebel heist spearheaded by Skarsgård’s Luthen, but executed by the undercover rebels we met for the first time alongside Cassian last week. In disguise as ‘Clem’, Cassian integrates himself into the rebel gang even further, rehearsing the plan for the heist whilst learning the ins-and-outs of the outsider life they find themselves leading in the fight against the Empire. We learn more about this pack of renegades and the reasons behind their decision to join the rebellion, be it revolutionary manifestos, personal disillusionment with the Empire, or outright revenge.
The show’s continuing interrogation of what makes an invididual/group fight back against systematic and institutional oppression is once again at the core of episode five, with the most notable treatise on the need to fight for freedom from the Empire’s authoritarian violence given to the softly spoken Nemik (Alex Lawther), who warns Cassian that ‘the pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it, and that is the real trick of the Imperial thought machine’. Orwellian in its scope and cynicism, this moment fully announces Andor as a show with a clear political and philosophical perspective, one that looks back across the franchise history of Star Wars and brings to the forefront what has, for the most part, only ever been an implicit, underlying strand of the space-opera saga.
Rather than being reduced to a simplistic binary between right and wrong – pantomime ‘baddies’ with ambitions of world domination, the consequences of the Empire’s total grip upon the galaxy present a strikingly familar catalogue of injustice dealt towards the working classes and ‘othered’ populations. More than a caricatural version of the ‘Nazis in space’ antagonists we see in other iterations of the franchise, Andor‘s Imperial forces pillage, manipulate, exploit and destroy local populations, natives and cultural heritage, all whilst being orchestrated by a bureaucratic organisation which cares only for cold hard data and monthly progress reports. Native workers are left bankrupt and emotionally desitute, whilst racial difference (in Star Wars, the Empire is inherently driven by a human-supremacist ideology, to the detriment of the non-human species – wookies, jawas, togrutas – that populate the galaxy) is made hierarchical.
Gearing up for what I expect is a more action-oriented episode next week, ‘The Axe Forgets’ takes time to plunder the philosophical ramifications of the franchise as a whole, a real sense of Star Wars speaking for an intellectually progressive 21st century, whilst still paying homage to its Buck Rogers, serial adventure roots. This is modern Star Wars done right.
Notes from the Multiplex 