Andor: Reckoning

 "What have you done?"

The series is hotting up now, with this episode beting the finest so far. Syril Karn, Sergeant Mosk and their other soldiers arrive on the planet, and Cassian's future looks bleak as his home is ransacked, his adoptive family threatened, and poor Bix loses her lover, despite realising earlier that it was Timm who sold out Andor.

The episode is crammed with both tension and action. We can almost smell Andor's desperation. Meanwhile, the dynamic between Mosk- the person really in charge- and Karn, a young officer deeply out of his depth and ultimately humiliated, is extremely well done.

 So is the meeting between Kassian and the mysterious yet charismatic Luthen- Stellan Skarsgard is superb- as it becomes cleare that Luthen wants not merely Andor's goods but Andor himself; his talents for sneaking about have not gone unrecognised.

It's a;so a nice touch, in the flashback scenes, to see how Cassian came to be adopted by the Andors, and their departure by starship is paralleled in the present day.

This, I suspect, is where the prologue ends...

Andor: That Would Be Me

 "I messed up..."

I have to confess that, while this is an improvement, I'm still not really feeling this series. That's not to say there isn't a lot to like about it, of course. The whole episode consists of deepening paranoia as Kassian comes under suspicion and the net tightens and tightens. Suddenly, Kassian is in an awful lot of danger, and at this point he's still young and inexperienced.

There's more backstory; we learn that Kenarii is a polluted and abandoned world, and there are more childhood flashbacks. The mined out terracing vista is an awesome bit of CGI.

Then there's the characterisation. Andor and his mother. Lovers Bix and Tim casually lying to each other and failing to communicate. And Deputy Chief Inspector Kyle Soller falling deeper into the rabbit hole as a naive young officer who, like many a dim young officer, finds a grizzled old sergeant to manipulate him. The awkwardly bad speevh scene is brilliantly acted.

There's real potential here. But I'm waiting for it to really take off.