Who's Your Dragon?

As last night's House of the Dragon began, I wondered how Alicent's faction were going to deal with Rhaenyra taking the throne. By the end, I felt foolish for even thinking this was ever a possible scenario. And it mostly came off as very credible, giving us another nice episode that made me immediately want to watch a production of Richard III afterward.

Alicent finds, to her evident shock, that most of the small council has already been plotting how to install Aegon as King in the event of Viserys' death. Ser Christon the Unaging unceremoniously murders the one dissenter (whether or not it was on purpose, I'm not sure).

Watching the gears turn throughout the keep and the city as the machine slowly turned Aegon from the Royal Fuck Up to the Sure Thing was fascinating.

Last week, when Alicent misunderstood Viserys' dying words to mean he wanted Aegon to be heir, I wasn't sure if I liked the plot twist. Now I'm sure I don't because it doesn't make sense for Alicent, despite clearly having misgivings about replacing Rhaenyra with Aegon, to so doggedly support Aegon for the role. Realistically, I think she'd be questioning at this point if she really did understand Viserys or, even more likely, if he was really of sound mind when he said it. It just doesn't add up, with how much effort Viserys clearly expended to support Rhaenyra's claim in the previous episode.

I liked the focus on the common people of King's Landing in this episode. That was always a complaint I had about Game of Thrones, that we never had a clear sense of who the common people were or what they thought. It does make sense, in a way, because the show is from the point of view of the wealthy families and even the most broad minded among them are pretty disconnected. A good example is shown at the end of the episode when Princess Rhaenys crashes her dragon through a hall crowded with civilians, apparently little concerned that she's obviously killing and injuring dozens. At first I thought, well, these are the first casualties of the civil war. But then Rhaenys marched her dragon up to the assembled Alicent, her kids, and Ser Otto . . . and didn't kill them. It's sort of absurd. It's like Sir Lancelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, running in and slaughtering everyone, but then stopping at the most prominent villain and saying, "Behold, I am merciful!" Clearly, Rhaenys thought the civilians to be just so many koopa troopers. It was silly. I'm not sure it was intended to be.

At any rate, the show is still mostly brilliant and I'm looking forward to next week's finale.

House of the Dragon is available on HBOMax.

The Unkempt Keep

Maybe you have certain expectations for a movie about Nazis commandeering a Romanian castle holding an eldritch superbeing prisoner. You can throw those expectations out the window because 1983's The Keep is a fascinating splatter of cinema. This fantasy horror film from Michael Mann, of all people, stars Scott Glen, Gabriel Byrne, Jurgen Prochnow, and Ian McKellen. It's part engrossing, Lovecraftian spectacle, and part absolute mess, due to production problems. But even its messiness is kind of intriguing, giving it the quality of a partially destroyed old document. I'd like to think this movie is haunted.

During World War II, a unit of German soldiers takes over the mysterious keep in a remote Romanian village. Despite warnings from the people of the mountains, who seem right out of Tod Browning's Dracula, Captain Woermann (Jurgen Prochnow) aims to make the keep his HQ.

But even he notices strange things about the place. Like how the construction suggests it's trying to keep something in rather than keep anyone out. And there's a mysterious, massive, central chamber, sealed with peculiar silver crosses. When soldiers start dying in weird, grotesque ways, Woermann petitions for a transfer. Instead, the SS show up, headed by a man named Kaempffer (Gabriel Byrne).

He wants to torture everyone in the village for information. But eventually the Nazis are told that there's an expert in the pertinent arcane lore in one of their own concentration camps, Dr. Cuza (Ian McKellen). He's promptly brought to the keep along with his beautiful daughter Eva (Alberta Watson), whose purpose in the movie alternates between being eye candy and vulnerable person needing protection. Then the final player shows up with no explanation, a superbeing called Glaeken (Scott Glenn).

Wikipedia covers the film's numerous problems in production pretty well, the biggest problem being the death of the special effects supervisor, Wally Veevers, before his effects could be implemented but after the raw footage for them had been shot. Resulting in most of that footage having to be abandoned or reshot. Despite this, the movie was eventually finished in a more than three hour cut which first Mann cut down to two hours and then Paramount cut down to even less. The result is a movie with a third act that makes very little sense, with main characters disappearing or appearing with little explanation. Mann seems to have tried to smooth it all out by having Tangerine Dream put a repetitive, very loud score over it all. It has a hypnotic quality, I'll say that, and I'll admit I actually fell asleep. But the movie was intriguing enough that I went back and finished it properly the next day.

The cast all give good performances. Mann's trademark, deliberately artificial lighting makes it look like television but even that somehow adds to the mystique of the film.

The Keep is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1632

The clouds disperse before the blackened dream.
A floating laugh arose above the tide.
A boiled gut absorbed excessive cream.
Beyond the gates awaits a restless ride.
The ring of rocks was trouble worse than smokes.
Compassion trained the tired man to love,
The servant's back and carries close some cokes.
Mistakes were made to call the place a dove.
A chicken shrank before the mighty cat.
To play a sport, gorillas carry gloves.
The turtle's lunch occurred beneath the hat.
The heavy blimp was filled with leaden loves.
The slimy stones surround a purple fight.
The monster fell below an optic light.

Did You Ever Just Sit Down and Talk with the Werewolf?

Shapeshifters will complicate any crime scene. 1981's Wolfen finds Albert Finney as a New York police detective on the trail of some Native American werewolf serial killers. If you imagine there'll be an awkward political message by the end, you imagined correctly. There's also some really dodgy forensics science thrown in but I like the atmosphere of the film. Finney is really good in his role and Edward James Olmos is good as a leader among the wolf men.

The film begins with a rich couple, wandering drunk in a park, after a party. The woman is really beautiful and it occurred to me she doesn't look dated at all somehow.

After they're savagely murdered, the coroner, played by Gregory Hines, says her death in particular is a damned shame. I have to agree.

Finney's Detective Wilson is pulled out of retirement for this job. He seems a lot like Harrison Ford in Blade Runner except the only person he's killed was an accident. Detective Rebecca Neff is assigned to him basically as his girlfriend, which is how she winds up functioning in the plot. It's so transparent it's kind of cute.

Over the course of the investigation, various trails leading to political activists turn out to be dead ends. But there's definitely something political going on here, or the movie decides there is in the final act. As a motive, it doesn't actually make any sense if you think back to the circumstances of some of the murders that occurred throughout the film.

A lot of the film was shot in the Bronx. And wow, I had no idea just how bad the Bronx was at that time. It looks like something from one of the Fallout games.

It's easily the most striking part of the film but some of the wolf effects are good, too. I like how they're kept to the shadows for most of the film and I'm glad they didn't have guys jumping around in monkey makeup.

Wolfen is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Rings of Battery Power

The first season of The Rings of Power concluded last night. I thought it was very bad. A few people I respect have said some positive things about it, though, so I've been trying to figure why. The visuals are nice and I've grown to appreciate some of the Pre-Raphaelite inspired stuff more. I liked the orange and blue in this scene with the Palantir.

Maybe if I didn't know Halbrand was going to be Sauron and the bearded stranger was going to be Gandalf I'd have enjoyed the finale more. It seemed like everyone on the internet knew by the third episode that this was the state of things. Gandalf looked like Gandalf so I don't even know how that was supposed to be a secret. But in any case, the driving force behind the final episode seems like it was meant to be the question, "Who's Sauron?" Generally, even if the secret is very well concealed and cleverly revealed, I don't think this is a good peg for a story to hang its hat on. Especially not something with a lavish production which should hopefully encourage people to rewatch it. It can be interesting if you're using the obscure identities to explore an idea. There does seem to be some attempt at that. Gandalf believes he's "peril" and Nori gives him a speech about how he decides, with his actions, what he truly is, not someone else putting a name to him. Which is true, and something everyone knows to be a right moral answer. The aim of a story in presenting an idea, though, should be to show it in action, not just have a character directly state it to us. Even a simple idea like this could be interesting if there had been some genuine ambiguity. But Gandalf's only cause for concern is that he killed some fireflies, he accidentally knocked down a tree, and some scary looking strangers called him Sauron. It's a bit of a softball to say the least.

Similarly, the show tries to introduce tension about Sauron by having him throw back at Galadriel her statement about how anyone can atone for their past evils. I saw a quote from a producer on the show who said that, going forward, Sauron will be modelled on the Tony Soprano or Walter White anti-hero type. I can't see that working going forward unless the writers make even more significant changes to Tolkien's lore than they already have. Tony Soprano and Walter White both have clear, tangible, complex motives for doing what they do. Sauron says he wants to unite Middle Earth, with Galadriel by his side, under their rule. But Middle Earth isn't at war. The only physical conflicts have been with the orcs that Sauron himself created. And what's Sauron's motivation for this rhetoric? At this point, it just seems like he's trying to get in Galadriel's pants.

This is where the writing falls below the level of the Star Wars prequels. In Attack of the Clones, when Anakin has that interesting, foreboding bit of dialogue about how he thinks the government should be run--how people should be made to do the right thing--makes perfect sense coming from him. He's spent a lot of time fighting Separatists and dealing with a sluggish Republic bureaucracy and out of touch Jedi Order (admittedly, fleshing out from The Clone Wars series buttresses this dialogue considerably). All we know from this show is that Sauron was Morgoth's apprentice and they were trying to conquer the world. Maybe season two will catch up and give us valuable character development but with over nine hours of expensively produced episodes in the bag, it seems like this is something the writers should have been on top of already.

So those are the weakly delivered big ideas. What of the small matters? Elrond refers to "all of elfdom" at some point, which sounded lame. Galadriel investigating Halbrand by looking at a family tree on an old scroll hardly seems like the final, damning proof both she and Sauron act like it is. All of the emotional partings among the Harfoots were really empty because the series never got around to developing the characters.

I don't know. I'm trying hard, really, but I still don't see how this show is any better than a Transformers movie, or why I shouldn't feel sick and sad that this will be the first impression of The Lord of the Rings for millions of people.

The Rings of Power is available on Amazon Prime.

She Hulk Smash Wall

Last night's She-Hulk, the season finale, informed me it was a creative triumph. Which is certainly not something I would have picked up on otherwise. Headwriter Jessica Gao returns to write the finale, the third episode she's written in the series overall, after the first two episodes. I still think the first two episodes are pretty good but this final episode just felt like Gao didn't want to be doing this anymore.

Full disclosure time again: I'm not a fan of sitcoms and I'm not a fan of fourth wall breaks. So, if you've seen the episode, you already know the main reasons I wasn't a big fan. Fourth wall breaking is a hallmark of postmodernism--art that achieves its effect by commenting on other art or on itself. I can appreciate it at times, particularly in the French New Wave, when it felt like the filmmakers were really using it to say something. But I feel breaking the fourth wall for sake of breaking the fourth wall is way too far past novel to be funny. So Jen marching through Disney to get to K.E.V.I.N. was not funny in itself for me and went on far too long.

I also don't think the show significantly explained why this was supposed to be better, or more artistically substantial, than Tod transforming into a Hulk and Titania and Bruce showing up. Titania and Bruce were obviously over the top on purpose, but a conflict between Tod, Emil, and Jen could have been a good action scene. Though then Titania would have been a loose thread. Having some explanation for her involvement would have been nice, and it really wouldn't have been so strange for her to use Intelligencia as a tool to take down Jen.

The show claims that it's ditching this in favour of resolving the plot about Jen coming to terms with her new dual identity. But that really hasn't been a prominent aspect of the series. It feels like the writers are lamenting the fact that this whole show is not a different show. It just leaves me with the question of, "Why didn't you write it differently then?" Maybe this is their admission that they couldn't, that they really don't like themselves or what they do. I can't jump on that hate train. It seems cowardly. I'd rather see the show go down on a noble effort than on this cop out.

The end of the episode sets up some things for the MCU as a whole, probably directives from the real Kevin (Feige). I'm not really into the whole "everyone has a kid now" theme so I'm not too interested in Bruce's kid. But it's also frustrating because it feels like there were a series of Hulk movies that happened off screen that we'll never see thanks to Universal holding onto the rights.

It was nice to see Daredevil come back. And Jen brought him to meet her family. That certainly seems more in line with the devout Catholic Matt Murdoch than a one night stand. I wonder how long their official coupledom will last. It would be nice to see her turn up on Daredevil with a more competent writing staff.

She-Hulk is available on Disney+.

Getting the Money and Flying

What an incredible episode of Andor last night, and a very good pay-off to some wonderful buildup.

The closest I have to complaints are two little things. I wish the Aldhani had been aliens and I wish Rael had waited to hear if the attack had been successful before he started laughing. But I can understand if budget considerations prevented there being alien Aldhani and maybe Rael's celebratory reaction was meant to indicate that the very fact that an attack occurred, whether successful or not, was an achievement. At any rate, it was a fascinating moment, after a heist of such complicated feelings and loss of life.

But, wow, the last twenty minutes of this episode were captivating. The Eye was the amazing light show we'd been promised all that time--I loved the Imperial soldier whining, "But we'll miss the Eye!" when he's ordered down into the base. But it's twice as amazing because it becomes wrapped up in the tension of this heist. There was never a moment when you didn't feel these Rebels were in terrible danger.

The Commandant was a brilliant piece of writing. We unexpectedly meet his family which morally complicates the situation in a way the show doesn't overplay. And when he's trying to put on his belt it's hard not to think of Cassian's early line about how the Imperials are "so fat and satisfied". It distracts you from even thinking of the possibility that he'll have a heart attack at a crucial moment--not that you'd ever expect to see something like that in Star Wars. But it worked, and was just another reminder from this show that rendering a complicated galaxy can be about more than locations and costumes.

And as great as the TIE Fighter chase through the atmosphere was, the big moment was the snap moral decision Cassian had to make. You could argue quite a bit about whether he did the right thing or not, but prolonging the debate in his head could very well have been the thing that got him killed and killed the Rebellion on the spot. It also definitely showed Cassian's heart is in this more than he's quite ready to own up to.

Andor is available on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet #1631

The double pallid face could see the glass.
Another inch of rust defined the drain.
A mark denotes exams the eyes'll pass.
A curving wing collects the landed sane.
A tipsy gnome discussed a cane with birds.
Decisions rest behind the bark of trees.
We ate a basket poor with wicker words.
The angel pod was full of devil peas.
A nickel cross rewards the flying man.
Beneath a fragile glass the fish await.
A pretty sky diverts the useful tan.
A bigger fish perceived a plastic bait.
The green of tying ghosts pursued the whale.
A heavy thing disrupts the drifting sail.

Angela Lansbury

Angela Lansbury has been around so long I don't remember contemplating the possibility of her death. But to-day she's dead at 96.

She shined in memorable leading roles, in the television series Murder She Wrote, in the film Bedknobs and Broomsticks, but it's as a supporting performer that she maintained a presence as part of a bedrock of the film industry. Her presence added texture and atmosphere to many great fantasy films. Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves (1984) partly achieved its air of fantasy with her presence. In The Court Jester (1956) she was beautiful, inviting, vicious, and funny.

Her long film career is peppered with legendary films, beginning with 1944's Gaslight. But as great as her live action career was, one could argue it's in voice roles that she truly shaped the industry. As the wicked Mommy Fortuna in The Last Unicorn (1982), as Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast (1991), and dozens of others. With so many supporting roles, she created a presence in cinema greater than many leading stars. She was great.

The Flowers and Birds of Autumn

Here are some of this year's higanbana, aka red spider lily, growing near my apartment. I also saw a few white ones this year:

They're a sign of early autumn in Japan but they're all just about withered now. The weather changed kind of abruptly this past weekend and it's already starting to feel a little like winter.

Did you know most languages treat doves and pigeons as the same animal? I learned this when I was observing an ESL class a year before I came to Japan and the instructor, from Russia, told the class that pigeons were a symbol of peace in America. Japanese also doesn't distinguish between crows and ravens, calling both karasu. Pigeons and doves are called hato.

Twitter Sonnet #1630

The bees of summer talked of spinning ice.
My knitted friends await a true response.
We split the house to settle nervous mice.
The cheese sufficed for urgent needs and wants.
Her dropping lids concealed her cake.
A special day was etched on iv'ry keys.
With brick and jam they built a silly lake.
But certain girls can talk to kindly bees.
The flying wolf was paid to build a bridge.
Successful mods returned the mind to scratch.
Reacting crowds observe along the ridge.
The numbers built with each successive patch.
Suggestive furs were found about the scene.
A broken city grew from tortured bean.

The Throne Sharpens

What an incredible and heartbreaking episode of House of the Dragon. The eighth episode, "The Lord of the Tides", made us all sure this brewing civil war is more than a team sport, but a deeply personal drama with the whole civilised world at stake.

You'd have to be pretty heartless to watch unmoved Viserys walking into the throne room one last time. You can tell how amazing this show is that it makes you cheer when Daemon suddenly kills a guy who happened to be absolutely right in his claim to inheritance.

But, alas for him, his brother was quite right when he said that history remembers names and not blood. The reality of the whole system is the game of thrones, not the story of peaceful negotiations and birthright floating thinly on top of it.

You could say this show belabours a point that a monarchical dynasty is no way to run a country, that it requires so much violence and delusion to make function. But, in a world where the truth is hard to see, people do need something to believe. How could they know this isn't their best option?

I was surprised Viserys was still alive at the beginning of this episode, which takes place six years after the previous, when he was already looking pretty bad, to put it lightly.

Now he's a horror show, which makes it even more painful watching him try to make this system work that he's never had a great knack for. Watching Alicent and Rhaenyra make a fragile little peace over the table--by the way, a beautifully laid supper--was all the more powerful because it was genuine and obviously doomed. But at least the old man got one last happy supper with the family. This show about a ruthless dragon family really does render a painfully honest portrait of the human condition.

House of the Dragon is available on HBOMax.

Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Hypnotised

Teenagers randomly being stabbed to death certainly qualifies as strange behaviour in my book. So 1981's Strange Behavior is aptly titled (though it also goes by the equally apt Dead Kids). This New Zealand movie about murder, hypnosis, and confusing revenge is set in a small American town for some reason, though it was filmed in Auckland. It's not bad. It has good cinematography and it establishes its characters and setting in that nice, slow, messy '70s/early '80s way.

Pete (Dan Shor) is the son of local cop John Brady (Michael Murphy). Pete's feeling restless and is secretly attending a college psychology class without his father's knowledge.

This class is taught via video recordings of the sinister, deceased Dr. Le Sange, who demonstrates that he can still hypnotise a chicken from beyond the grave.

Does he have anything to do with the formerly normal teens suddenly going on murder sprees? Yes. Sorry, spoiler (well, the movie doesn't really try to keep the secret).

I suppose it's saying something about the malevolent influence of higher education on the innocent country kids. Not something cogent but something. It's put together with a nice, low key energy with some lovely sunset cinematography of New Zealand countryside. The recently deceased Louise Fletcher gets second billing despite appearing only three or four times. But she's pretty good.

Strange Behavior is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Recurring Wolf Problem

Last night brought the first MCU Halloween special, Werewolf by Night. It was a cute little thing, a potentially decent beginning of something, which makes it a little puzzling that it's a one-shot.

The writing isn't great. Various monster hunters gather to decide who will inherit the Bloodstone, a magical device used to hunt monsters. The heiress by blood is Elsa Bloodstone (Laura Donnelly), but it's implied she's been disinherited for choosing some kind of vague, alternative teachings. We're meant to take all the monster hunters, and Elsa's stepmother (Harriet Sansom Harris), as simplistically evil villains, to help justify the use of extravagant, bloody violence in the special. It leads to a similar problem endemic to The Boys--the show has to constantly side-step the question of whether or not these corrupt superbeings actually ever do help people. It's a worse problem on The Boys but it also makes for a weak foundation in Werewolf by Night. If we know these people help others in the course of their career, even if they also end up hurting innocent monsters, it complicates the question of whether or not they deserve to die. If the hunters have never helped anyone with their actions, it makes them cartoonishly delusional and cheap. The writers are too cowardly to deal with either problem so they just keep things vague.

Elsa and Jack (Gael Garcia Bernal) have a nice, sweet, meetcute in the cemetery. Jack has nice rapport with the cgi Man-Thing.

The special was directed by Michael Giacchino, best known as a composer for films. I respect his attempt to emulate the style of classic Universal monster movies but it's all undermined by the fact that he shot on digital. This really needed to be shot on film to get the right look.

I'm also not a big fan of the "ape-man" style werewolf. I know there are a lot of filmmakers and aficionados who have a hard on for the Lon Chaney, Jr. movie, who like having an actual human actor's expression on the beast. But I like my werewolves to look like wolves, not one of the monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. At best, Jack just looks as good as Seth Green on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Werewolf by Night is available on Disney+.

Beset by Devils

Last night's She-Hulk wasn't as good as last week's but it wasn't altogether bad. It made me realise one of the assets of last week's episode is it didn't have that terrible rushed quality that diminishes most of the MCU shows.

I was looking forward to seeing Daredevil again and he kind of feels like the same character. Charlie Cox deserves a lot of credit. Matt Murdoch in court was the first time it felt like I was seeing a real lawyer on the show even if the writing still wasn't up to average television courtroom drama standards. The action scenes were surprisingly good, particularly the fight between Jen and Daredevil.

Supposedly there's a separate action crew at Marvel who comes in and directs the action scenes sometimes for directors who don't have the knack for it and I wondered if that was the case here.

I liked the idea of Jen and Matt flirting but them sleeping together just felt odd. Daredevil's "walk of shame" afterwards seemed out of character, though I understand they're deliberately trying to make him lighter than he was previously on TV. I really don't feel like that's worth doing. That feels like an obvious thing to say at this point as it seems like most people are unhappy with the MCU's decreasing willingness to take itself seriously or maintain a consistent tone.

I liked Jen's super suit. Purple works for her, but that's no surprise. I was thinking burgundy might be a good alternative to distinguish herself from Bruce.

The end of the episode was a nice enough setup for the finale. The "Female Lawyer of the Year" ceremony was extremely cringe, which I think was at least partially intentional but seemed a bit over the top.

She-Hulk is available on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet #1629

The bargain point was rather dull at last.
In even light the life was drained of spark.
A little death was smaller than the past.
The newer money sucked the license park.
Suspicious eyes could sort the hands about.
The ready rebels crest a dreary hill.
Deceptive eggs were hid to mark the route.
Events coverge to trap a heedless will.
The shirt was weighed against the heavy ice.
An extra word distorts the language base.
The people counted two and named them twice.
And next the written word defined a face.
Humility remained beyond the gate.
Again the woods deliver wooden fate.

Everyone's Rebellion

If only last night's Andor wasn't so short! I get it, though, they're doing this three episode arc structure. I wish Disney had just decided to release three episodes at a time in perpetuity. But make no mistake, I thought last night's episode was brilliant. I'm going to talk about it by listing some of the best moments.

Karn's Horrible Mother

You can't help feeling for the guy as she pitilessly cuts him down with a constant, passive aggressive barrage. And you can tell from his sullen attitude that he's been dealing with it all his life.

The Imperial Who Would be Prelate

This is a very small moment but I love the Imperial officer getting offered a hotel as his HQ and then he immediately asks for a title that comes with no additional pay. It's a detail that felt so real world, like occupying Nazi forces or any number of other military glutting on their power over newly conquered territory.

Cassian Knowing Hands

In practicing their soldier march, Cassian remarks on how soldiers should be placed with regards to whether or not their right or left handed. Vel interrupts and quizzes Cassian to find he knows the dominant hand of every member of the Rebel group. Once again, we see Cassian's keen eye at work. This time it earns him some more respect from his new comrades. It also shows Vel is a capable leader because she's able to operate from a perspective of the bigger picture--she sees what's important about what Cassian just said beyond its immediate relation to the task at hand. I saw one critic remark about episode three that it's redundant to show that Cassian is perceptive and clever again and again but I would argue that perceptive and clever people don't stop being perceptive and clever just because you know they are. This is Cassian's superpower and what's the fun of a superpower that doesn't get regular exercise?

Mon Mothma's Whole Family Hates Her

Poor Mon Mothma. Her husband has evidently turned their daughter against her. The teenage girl's arguments about her mother being hateful and selfish aren't really logical but they're the kind of thing a rebellious teen might say who's been steered subtly to a certain faction.

Some people might say all the focus on family drama is not like Star Wars. But I'd say this show is more Star Wars than Star Wars has been in a long time. Take yourself back to the first time you saw A New Hope, If you managed to avoid spoilers on Luke's parentage, he was just a teenager on Tatooine who hated the Empire but didn't see how he could get involved. His surrogate parents were overly protective and he chaffed against it. Then one day he came home and found their charred corpses on the ground, courtesy of the Empire. It's a powerful moment that substantially fuels his motivation going forward. And yet, in all the Star Wars media that came afterward, we rarely got anything like it. Now we have someone like Karis whose backstory involves a brother whose lands were taken by the Empire, who killed himself. As Vel says, everyone has their own Rebellion. It's all personal for these people.

Andor is available on Disney+.