In the Flesh: Andor s2e05 'I Have Friends Everywhere'

“I can’t believe you had me followed,” says Syril, his eyes alight with sick arousal as he locks eyes with his lover, ISB agent Dedra. It’s clear he’s weak in the knees at the knowledge that with a single order his girlfriend could have a blaster bolt placed dead-center in the back of his skull. Everyone has their own method of coping with the stress of imperial hegemony, I suppose. The alternatives are life in the camp of rebel hardliner Saw Gerrera, a pressure cooker of paranoid violence and constant doubletalk, or Bix’s self-annihilating retreat into drug abuse. Even Luthen is feeling the pressure, giving Kleya an undeserved earful over his own inability to keep all the lies and strategies clear in his mind. “We’re drowning,” he growls, and for the first time you can hear the terror in his voice, the control freak’s panic at watching this shadow movement he’s built on blood and sweat and fear begin to outgrow him.

‘I Have Friends Everywhere’ has a particular focus on hands and the complex, delicate tasks they perform, even under tremendous pressure. Kleya’s (Elizabeth Dulau) expert manipulation of her comms array, Wil’s mastery of the fuel extraction machine requested by Gerrera’s band of partisans. The camera lingers on these painstaking procedures, at once beautiful and agonizingly tense. The final sequence, in which Wil steals fuel while Saw monologues about his nightmarish childhood moving highly corrosive fuel at a Republic base, cuts back and forth between Wil’s trembling fingers, Saw’s borderline manic rant, which plays like one of Marlon Brando’s demented monologues from Apocalypse Now, and the exposed workings of the extractor itself. The tension is almost unbearable. The man. The past. The machine. It’s all interpenetrated, all tangled together, twisted tighter with each revolution.

Lean in, like Saw? Fade out, like Bix? Try, like Luthen, to master what cannot be mastered, to add plate after plate to the trick until something inevitably falls and shatters? There’s no right answer. There’s no clear path through. You have to do everything, do it perfectly, do it again, and keep it all secret the whole time. The alternative is surrender to a government whose number two man, Grand Moff Tarkin, thinks nothing of landing a battlecruiser on a crowd of five hundred people, a terrifying invocation of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Cassian’s gentle questioning of his bellhop to ferret out the details leads to a chilling disclosure that the man, as a boy of twelve, was there, and watched his father die saving his life. As murky and self-destructive as rebellion is, the cruelty of empire is equally clear and undeniable. To fight it demands everything that anyone can give.