In the Flesh: Andor s2e06 'What a Festive Evening'

“You will carry her with you everywhere,” says Vel to the sniveling wannabe revolutionary who accidentally shot her lover, Cinta. “This is like skin now.” The message is clear. There’s no escaping our mistakes, no taking back the worst moments of our lives. Cinta is gone, killed for nothing by a stupid, feckless man who will take her ghost with him forever, who will — in the absolute best-case scenario — die trying and failing to make up for what he did in a moment of pointless machismo. It’s so guttingly unfair, so cruelly close on the heels of Vel and Cinta’s tearful reunion and resumption of their relationship, it feels like an act of cosmic punishment for daring to imagine someone could get out of this mess with anything approaching a happy life waiting for them on the other side. That last night together is all they had, and when Vel rips into Cinta's killer, she's talking to herself as well. She's going to carry Cinta with her forever, skin to skin, their mouths hungry, their bodies trembling with desperate need and disbelief that something so good could really happen to them.

‘What a Festive Evening’ is nightmarishly tense almost from beginning to end. Its final act, in which two very different heists run side by side, is as fine a piece of suspense TV as anything since Walter White and Jesse Pinkman robbed that train. Kleya dragooning ISB agent and rebel infiltrator Lonni Jung (Robert Emms) into blocking the line of sight of some of the empire’s most dangerous officials as she stealthily removes a listening device from a priceless work of art in the midst of Davo Sculdun’s party is so delicately balanced it feels like passing a razor over the skin of your throat, right on the edge of cutting. Slowly, painstakingly, she uses a hand tool to extract the device as she provides Lonni with the piece’s heartbreaking story. It’s a book from a culture in which blindness was seen as a gift, written in Braille-like patterns of raised symbols between rings of lovingly shaped stone. A whole world trapped in stone and metal, frozen forever beneath the ice of a dead language.

And across the room, Orson Krennic (Ben Mendehlson) sneers about how revolutionary movements lie about Imperial genocides for the good press it brings them. Mon Mothma listens, staring at the man as though she’d like nothing better than to slit his throat and pull his tongue out through the hole. On the way out of the party, Luthen jokes that he and Kleya should have killed Krennic while they had the chance, but as Cassian lectured the Ghorman Front last episode, it’s not committing the crime, it’s walking away after. That’s the hard part. A whole galaxy standing right in front of the people ruining their lives and killing them out of perverse tyrannical compulsions, staring them in the eyes, hating them, wanting to murder them just to make it all stop, but you only get one shot, and it has to count. That Bix and Cassian get away with their out-of-nowhere assassination of Dr. Gorst (Joshua James) and demolition of his office feels like a minor miracle, but nothing’s over until it’s over, and there’s a long way still to go.