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 take care of 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 riot 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 well get for her to decide to this path, and what it’s going to take to really make Mon a insurgent.

It’s not her speech denouncing the Ghorman Massacre—at the least, not but. We all know that’s to come. As an alternative, Mon seals her path within the climax of season two’s three-episode first act with a easy, lovely, 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 previous good friend and confidant Tay Kolma has turn out to be more and more and, to Mon and Luthen alike, disturbingly, unreliable. Dealing with 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 desires to do what Mon does finest: discuss, negotiate, appease Tay with no matter worth he asks for. Luthen desires his personal perennial different: Tay Kolma must die.

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

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

“How good of you,” comes Luthen’s reply as he walks away… and all of a sudden, 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 vitality activates a dime. The music is just not what you’d count on from every 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 historic 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 lower 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 end result already determined effectively earlier than his chat with Mon. All these moments intertwined are every 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 chances, and the bloody-handed willingness to do what it takes to maintain the motion alive. This is the riot 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’s 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 technique to circulate, to confidence, and as we lower 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 digicam whips and and makes disorienting spins round her, and abruptly it’s her arms likewise whipping round within the air above her extra intensely than anybody else.

The episode ends on the price of riot: 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 social gathering, reckoning along with her probability encounter. However the music retains enjoying. Mon Mothma retains dancing.

On this sweeping second of ecstatic delirium, she embraces what she has turn out to be. It’s not how anybody may need imagined that Andor would possibly impress 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 absolutely able to when the beat stops enjoying.

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