In the Flesh: Andor s2e04 'Ever Been to Ghorman?'

The soft pastels and jewel tones of the Mothma estate, the tawny wheat fields, the deep greens and browns of the jungles of Yavin IV, that’s all in the past now. Ghorman is gray. The drab little Coruscant apartment where Cassian and Bix live between missions is gray. Gray offices. Gray streets. Gray little corner stores and gray arcades. It’s like something out of Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy adaptation, a symphony of whites and grays, tans and blacks. The shift comes in concert with a shift in tone, a natural progression from 1-percenter decadence and rough-riding galactic adventure to tense, grimy espionage. Syril’s trailing his coat for Ghorman Front partisans, using his calls home to his mother, Eedy, as a convenient way of making sure he has a convincing source of bigotry so that his doubts and prevarication don’t seem forced. Bix and Cassian wait for a light to go on across the plaza from their window, dreading and needing their next mission, snatching shreds of romantic normalcy in between death-defying descents into nightmare.

To call this episode’s political material timely would be underselling it by an order of magnitude. You have the creation of criminals via bullshit authoritarian legislation as an excuse to flood prisons with valuable labor, the churning out of propaganda to manufacture consent for genocide, the ineffectual liberal establishment trying to hold ground that’s eroding under their very feet in the deluded belief they can avoid angering their tyrannical emperor. It feels like a brutally honest rundown of the average American news cycle. Watching Mon Mothma try to wheedle votes out of her fellow liberals as they demur and demur, mistaking their own cowardice and lack of principle for pragmatism, is so maddeningly close to home it feels like having splintered bamboo rammed under your fingernails, though there are plenty of beautiful sets, CGI backdrops, and a handful of delightful alien designs to take your mind off it.

The town hall scene on Ghorman, aside from being beautifully lit and blocked and a showcase for a variety of fascinating faces, brings to the forefront one of the series’ great strengths: its ability to quickly sketch convincing marginalia for alien cultures. The forearm grip everyone in the hall recognizes instantly as a revolutionary symbol, Cassian and Bix stroking each other’s lifelines before holding hands in what must be a common gesture among lovers on Ferrix, the various fleeting hand gestures of greeting and farewell among the Ghormans — the show’s cast carries this stuff off as naturally as you or I might shoot one another the finger guns or flip someone the bird. Like the corner store where the charming old cashier knows Bix by sight, it all makes the world of Andor feel like something you can reach out and touch, real and fully human in a way no other story set in this universe has ever approached.