The Superb, Horrible Delirium of Mon Mothma’s Liberating Andor Second

We open Andor‘s second season with, amongst different issues, Mon Mothma in disaster. The second she had been dreading since her cope with the satan in season one—the marriage of her daughter Leida to scoundrel financier Davo Sculden’s son—has arrived, a reminder of what the price of funding the rise up means to her, and the previous traumas of Chandrilan tradition, made manifest. However on the climax of all of it we and Mon Mothma alike discover out simply how worst it may possibly get for her to decide to this path, and what it is going to take to actually make Mon a insurgent.

It’s not her speech denouncing the Ghorman Massacre—not less than, not but. We all know that’s to come. As a substitute, Mon seals her path within the climax of season two’s three-episode first act with a easy, stunning, horrible act… a dance.

The ultimate third of Andor season two’s third episode, “TK TITLE,” comes as Mon has a frosty dialog with wedding ceremony visitor and longtime rebellious affiliate Luthen Rael. Over the course of the three-day conventional wedding ceremony ceremony that Mon has anxiously labored by, her outdated buddy and confidant Tay Kolma has develop into more and more and, to Mon and Luthen alike, disturbingly, unreliable. Going through stresses which have ruined his marriage and threaten to bankrupt him, it turns into clear over the course of the ceremony with every encounter Kolma has with Mon that he’s cozying as much as Sculden, and with that partnership, gaining leverage within the potential of unveiling the back-end dealings of Mon’s “charitable foundations” set as much as cowl her insurgent financing. Mon needs to do what Mon does greatest: speak, negotiate, appease Tay with no matter value he asks for. Luthen needs his personal perennial different: Tay Kolma must die.

“We’d be weak endlessly. You want to be protected,” Luthen growls at Mon amidst the bustle of the marriage’s last celebrations.

“I’m unsure what you’re saying,” Mon snaps again.

“How good of you,” comes Luthen’s reply as he walks away… and out of the blue, the refined quiet of the haughty, overwrought Chandrilan ceremonies is shattered by discordant, rhythmic noise.

A DJ droid comes bursting into the room, and the power activates a dime. The music is just not what you’d anticipate from every little thing we’ve seen of the Chandrilan wedding ceremony rites throughout these three episodes, we’ve simply seen Luthen placing on airs to reward Leida and Stekan an historical Chandrilan cultural statue thought misplaced to time. It blares synthy trills and thrumming beats, a sister piece to Nicholas Britell’s similarly hypnotic track “Niamos!” from season one. The gang goes wild, spinning in circles, arms swinging, cheering and whooping.

The sequence turns into minimize all through the remainder of the ultimate act of the episode, as we rotate between the occasions on Chandrila and Mina-Rau. Bix’s tried rape by the hands of an Imperial officer, Stormtroopers closing in on Brasso, Cassian’s return with experimental TIE in hand, as he makes an attempt to rescue them, even Vel seeing Cinta from afar because it turns into clear she’s there to assassinate Tay on Luthen’s behalf—the result already determined nicely earlier than his chat with Mon. All these moments intertwined are every little thing about what it takes to be a part of the resistance to the Empire’s fascist grasp: the terrors that system’s abuse of energy permits, the energy to defy it, the heroism of turning the percentages, and the bloody-handed willingness to do what it takes to maintain the motion alive. This is the rise up that Mon Mothma has backed, that is what she and her cash has helped make.

And each time we return to her, that music drowning all of it out, the crowds swirling round her, enclosing on her, the extra Mon loses herself to the second and the reality of what she has constructed. It’s an unbelievable tonal discordance to the occasions that weave by it, however in Mon’s gradual slip into an almost-trance, we parallel her embrace of what she now could be too actually a part of. A drink turns into two, an awkwardness as she first enters the dance circle—alone in a sea of many—offers approach to circulation, to confidence, and as we minimize away from Cassian, Bix, and Wilmon one final time, fleeing away from Mina-Rau after dropping Brasso, it turns into this hypnotic elation. Mon is one with the group, at its very heart, because the digital camera whips and and makes disorienting spins round her, and hastily it’s her arms likewise whipping round within the air above her extra intensely than anybody else.

The episode ends on the price of rise up: Brasso’s useless physique as Cassian’s purloined TIE pulls away from Mina-Rau, its grieving crew silent with tear slicked faces. Cinta taking Tay Kolma to his doom as Vel collapses away from the bustle of the celebration, reckoning along with her likelihood encounter. However the music retains enjoying. Mon Mothma retains dancing.

On this sweeping second of ecstatic delirium, she embraces what she has develop into. It’s not how anybody might need imagined that Andor would possibly provoke its fascinating political figurehead as we race in direction of the Rebel Alliance’s formal birth, however the distinction of the claustrophobic, virtually hedonistic high quality of Mon’s dancing with the tragedies unfolding round her is a fittingly symbolic second for the present’s resistance. Now it’s up for us to see what Mon Mothma is actually able to when the beat stops enjoying.

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