In the Flesh: Andor s2e02 'Sagrona Teema'

Titled after the first two elements of a traditional Chandrilian wedding toast, ‘Sagrona Teema’ is as engrossing as it is beautiful, so preposterously better than anything else Disney has done with Star Wars it might as well be an entirely different medium, like one of the Jim Henson Workshop’s marvelous Skeksis in a world of those plastic monster finger puppets with the floppy little arms. Take for example Mon Mothma’s husband Perrin’s toast at his daughter’s wedding. Everything we’ve seen of this guy so far has shown him to be a spoiled, apolitical aristocrat with little interest in his wife and none in her principles, but we’ve also seen that his easygoing nature has given him a closer relationship with their daughter, Leida. Cue his genuinely moving father-of-the-bride speech, a gently charismatic expression of both his disappointment and disillusionment with his own marriage and his sincere hopes for Leida’s happiness. There’s an appeal to hedonism and burying one’s head in the sand in there, Perrin being Perrin, but it’s a genuinely beautiful speech. 

Much like The Sopranos and the other great shows of its ilk, Andor has such strong writing and such a committed cast that it can dip into the inner lives of its minor characters and imbue them with the full depth and feeling of any of its core players. Perrin’s speech, Syril with his groceries — everything has more English on it that it needs to, strictly speaking. As much as any one thing can be, that’s a definitive mark of great art. It does more than it has to. The stranded Rebels trying to shift a TIE fighter they can't fly on its axis so that they can use its guns to blow away the one guy who CAN fly it, the hilariously elaborate made-up spacer version of Rock-Paper-Scissors, the subtly fascist trappings of aristocratic Chandrilan wedding ceremonies-- there's color everywhere.

It’s a remarkable achievement to make four visually and contextually divergent storylines play smoothly alongside one another, much less to find repeated ways to rhyme them thematically and visually. Cuts from wedding guests at the palatial Mothma estate to starving rebels rationing out moldy meal replacement bars, Dedra's peaceful homecoming to her obviously fanatically loyal one-time stalker Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) to the sinister implications behind an Imperial census officer’s advances on Bix — everything is arranged not just for maximum impact, but to enrich each individual thread. In creating a world filled with living, breathing people with recognizable complexes and needs and hopes, Andor hasn’t just outshone the rest of Star Wars, it’s thrown itself into the running with the heights of the Golden Age of television. This is as good as it gets, man.