Last week on my Star Wars podcast “Who’s the Bossk?” I complained that the sections of Star Wars: Andor Episode 4 that dealt with the rebel cell’s inability to accept Cassian as one of their own felt like filler. Well, today’s new installment, entitled “The Axe Forgets,” called me out on that criticism and turned what I thought was a minor flaw into a major feature of the series.
But Episode 5 begins by checking in on Andor’s de facto villain Syril Karn (played by Kyle Soller), who has moved back in with his overbearing mother (Rome’s Kathryn Hunter, who also wowed as the witches in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth last year) in her Coruscant apartment after being unceremoniously fired from his corporate security job. Syril peers out his childhood bedroom window at the planet’s sun peeking through the skyscrapers and cries, and then while eating blue cereal at breakfast his mother complains that the young man has no prospects.
I still like where Star Wars: Andor series creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy is going with the Syril Karn character, though I feel like I should probably be personally insulted that the would-be fascist has action figures lined up along his bedroom shelf. We’ll have to wait until next week to find out what Karn’s uncle has planned for him, because the bulk of this episode is spent on the planet Aldhani, where Cassian (Diego Luna) is still struggling to get along with his other team members on the Imperial heist. He shirks off authority from Taramyn (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr), flirts dangerously with Cinta (Verada Sethu), and clashes with Skeen (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). The only member of the crew he seems to get along with is the youthful Nemik (Alex Lawther), who shares his love for outdated technology with Cassian. We also check back in with Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) and her eternally unhappy house husband Perrin (Alastair Mackenzie), who– like their daughter Leida (Bronte Carmichael from Disney’s Christopher Robin)– can’t stand to be in her presence for very long. It’s a tough, exhausting life for a senator who’s secretly leading the Rebel Alliance, and we watch helplessly as Mon tries, but fails to make peace with her immediate family.
Other scenes update us on the progress of dedicated-but-inexperienced ISB agent Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) and her surly supervisor Blevin (Ben Bailey Smith), who has traveled to Ferrix to set up an Imperial headquarters, but a good 80% of this episode’s 40-minute running time is spent with the team on Aldhani. The crew trains at their camp– which is cleverly set up as a scale miniature of their target Imperial stronghold– then tears it down as they begin their hike across the countryside after a scare from a low-flying TIE fighter. On the day before the heist is set to occur, Skeen discovers Cassian’s hidden kyber crystal and demands to know how he came to be part of the clandestine mission. This leads to more revelations about the characters’ pasts while highlighting the strengths of the cast’s performances and Dan Gilroy’s dialogue– it’s incredibly impressive to me that the Gilroys were permitted by Disney to make a live-action Star Wars series that can have entire episodes go by with almost no action whatsoever. But what’s even more amazing is how taut and suspenseful everything feels, despite the fact that this installment is once again mostly made up of various people talking. Considering that next week’s episode is likely to cap off this arc of Andor with an action-heavy payoff to the Aldhani operation, I love that this is a show that is willing to take its time letting us get to know the people involved first.
New episodes of Star Wars: Andor are released Wednesdays, exclusively via Disney+.