Main cast: Diego Luna (Cassian Andor), Stellan Skarsgård (Luthen Rael), Genevieve O’Reilly (Mon Mothma), Adria Arjona (Bix Caleen), Faye Marsay (Vel Sartha), Alan Tudyk (K-2SO), Benjamin Bratt (Bail Organa), Elizabeth Dulau (Kleya Marki), Muhannad Bhaier (Wilmon Paak), Alastair Mackenzie (Perrin Fertha), and Duncan Pow (Melshi)
Director: Janus Metz
The title smugly declares Welcome to the Rebellion, to which every sane viewer instinctively replies, “Where’s the nearest fire exit and can I hitch a ride with the nearest TIE fighter out of here?”
Shock of shocks, Andor actually does something! Yes, nine episodes into a show with his name on it, our broody, charisma-free protagonist finally manages to escort a woman to a limousine airspeeder. He kills a dude too! It’s like watching a toddler finally manage to use a spoon without flinging porridge onto the ceiling — heartwarming, if it weren’t so embarrassingly overdue.
Mon Mothma, meanwhile, finally earns her paycheck. Genevieve O’Reilly has spent eight episodes perfecting the art of wistful staring, and now, finally, she gets to scowl and deliver a speech! She’s mad because she’s realized the Empire is evil. Took long enough. What gave it away, Mon? The mass slaughter? The political oppression? The fact that every room is ominously lit like a funeral parlor?
Bonus: she also figures out she’s been played by Luthen Rael.
Sadly, Stellan Skarsgård continues to be criminally underused — they have one of Sweden’s finest actors and apparently hired him to lurk around dimly lit corridors and deliver one ominous line per week like some dystopian IKEA commercial narrator.
Then there’s Benjamin Bratt’s Bail Organa cameo. Which is essentially him standing around being generically concerned, like a guest star who wandered onto the wrong set and was too polite to leave. He does nothing, says nothing of value, and probably left the studio lot wondering if his paycheck was real.
Of course, Bix Carleen is back. Her role this episode is that she makes tea. Makes tea. In a rebellion. As Andor whines, scowls, and dramatically reconsiders his life choices again. (Spoiler: he’ll still be there next episode, sulking like a Sith Lord who got passed over for promotion.)
OH YES — how could we forget the sacred ritual of obligatory fanservice! Because nothing screams “trust us, this show matters!” like dragging K-2SO onto the stage for a five-second cameo designed to trigger the Pavlovian nostalgia drool from fans. It’s like the showrunners peeked at the script and thought, “You know what this inert pile of exposition soup needs? A character people actually liked from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story to wave at the audience!”
Except instead of the snarky, murder-happy Alan Tudyk version we loved, it’s just a blank-faced droid walking channeling “I too will die in a more emotionally competent movie.”
I mean, let’s be honest. If they’d dropped a CGI Peter Cushing waving from a balcony with a cup of space coffee, it wouldn’t have felt any more shameless.
The big issue here is that this show’s boxed itself in like a Jawa inside a sandcrawler with no off switch. It’s a prequel so no one can actually do anything impactful because the canon needs to stay intact — not that the other Star Wars shows have respected that, but hey, apparently this one’s clinging to that excuse like a dying Womp Rat.
So, what happens instead? Vague gestures, grand speeches that lead nowhere, characters introduced for ten seconds so people on X can scream “OMG it’s that guy from Rogue One!”, and the occasional explosion to distract the audience from the narrative void.
Anyway, one more down, gods help us, one less to go. The sooner this thing’s over, the sooner we can all pretend it never happened.
