“THE DEAD SPEAK!!”
So began the final episode of A More Civilized Age‘s mini-season of Andor coverage, recapping and responding to the season finale of Lucasfilm’s finest achievement in the Disney era*. Since about twelve hours after I got back from Egypt, I having been devouring this podcast ravenously. I’ve had cause to reflect, in the past few weeks, that Andor has had me doing three things I never thought I’d do, even a couple of months ago: retweeting dril; caring about the weakly-drawn male lead from Rogue One (almost) as much as any other Star Wars character; and getting deeply, deeply into podcasts.
*Ok, do I like Andor more than The Last Jedi? Grading on pure narrative craft and thematic accomplishment, absolutely. Emotionally? Probably not. Rey has a near-permanent, odds-on advantage in my heart; and the more I contemplate Ferrix, the more I really wish she and Cassian could have hung out there.
AMCA is podcasting done the way I wish I could have done it myself, and never felt like I did. It’s deeply insightful. It’s effortlessly cool, and effortlessly funny. The hosts — Rob Zacny, Natalie Watson, Ali Acompora and Austin Walker — are there to be serious about it (“it” being Star Wars) without being assholes about it. There is no level of snark they can level at anything in George Lucas’ legendarium that does not come from a place of deep, abiding interest in what this legendarium means. They do the work of all great cultural criticism, which is that they unravel and unfurl and unwrap the text, interrogating it politically, conceptually, as entertainment, as story, as meaning. They do something which is, not to be too smug about it, fucking difficult in the Year of Our Lord 2022: they add depth and nuance to my understanding of, and interest in, Star Wars. And they’ve been doing it for eight straight weeks.
But that’s Andor as well, isn’t it? The text itself is so fruitful, so bizarrely and refreshingly thought-out and interconnected, so intentional in its approach to character and theme and story, that it would have been a proton torpedo to the heart of the thermal exhaust port that is my love for this entire saga, with or without AMCA. What AMCA is masterful at, is batting cleanup on the stuff in the text — it is, after all, a very dense one — that I never would have put together without their relentless, almost fetishistic, interest in gathering the threads.
So, in typical style, they hit on something in the season finale that I haven’t seen reflected in much of the other responses to the piece, which they bring forward via the line that opens their episode: a reference to one of the worst things Star Wars has done in living memory, which — perfectly on-brand for this podcast — is their way of exposing that this Star Wars is (unrelatedly) taking that horrible idea and making something deeply meaningful out of it. Namely: that throughout “Rix Road,” the Andor finale, the dead are indeed speaking to Cassian. Naturally, the episode works multi-modally here; there is nary a Force-ghost (or insane clone of Palpatine) in sight, and the reminder is also therefore that Force-ghosts are not the only, or even the most interesting, means by which those whom our characters have loved continue to reveberate in their lives. (Back to AMCA: Force-ghosts are a metaphor. We’d almost forgotten.)
Clem speaks to Cassian in flashback; Nemik speaks to him in audiobook (ha!); Maarva speaks to him through Brasso; and then Maarva herself takes up the mic for the episode’s iconic mic-drop, when she gives her own eulogy to the entire town (and inadvertently, or more likely advertently, starts an uprising). As an aside: it’s incredible that a series that posted not one, but two, of the most absorbing monologues ever recited in Star Wars (not a long list, but, go with me) within ten minutes of each other in the episode “One Way Out,” decided to put four more on the board just two weeks later. At this point the only character who hasn’t had an epoch-definining soliloquy at the hands of showrunner Tony Gilroy is terse, action-oriented Cassian himself. Give it time.
The dead don’t speak in “Rix Road” as a means to jerry-rig emotional leverage (though that occurs naturally), and certainly not as a cheesy shortcut to clapping-monkey nostalgia. Rather, each piece of these touchpoints with the past — themselves building on the current-state expressions of personal damnation espoused by Kino and Luthen in the prior episode — assembles a summary argument that is both general and specific, communal and personal. Maarva telling Cassian, in my pick for the most moving line in the episode, that he already “knows everything he needs to know and feels everything he needs to feel,” is more than just a benediction for one man’s journey from shiftless rogue to impassioned rebel; it is a homily for every other person like him, inside and outside the show. Nemik’s reminder that the battle lines of resistance are everywhere and that every single act moves them ever inward on the enemy, concluding with one very un-Yoda exhortation — “try” — locates and assuages the anxiety of not being able to see the big picture and needing to believe that one’s onward movement has value anyway. Maarva, Fiona Shaw, sinks every single one of her teeth into her admission that if she had it all to do over, she’d “wake up early” rather than sleeping through the creeping advance of fascism. And Clem — Cassian’s father — is nothing but sunshine and love, the sheer joy of being alive, when he is remembered instructing his son: “Eyes open. Opportunities everywhere.”
Ah, to do it all over. Maarva, like most people in the final act of life, is looking at the arc of her experience as a completed piece; she can see all the parts of it. (Ferrix is a world of parts, scrapped and recovered; its town is a town of bricks, some of which we now know contain the dead.) Not for nothing does this final episode of this very November-y show arrive in the last week of a very November-y November, as my sister and I have been managing some elder care of the non-serious kind, but the kind that underlines for you in no uncertain terms that yes, that arc is on its way to closing; that sooner rather than later, there will be one less chair at the dining table and one more brick in the wall. Not for nothing, am I aware that barring a miracle, I am many steps into the second half myself; and that’s if I’m lucky. For all I know, I’m in the third third, or the fourth quarter.
From the very depths of my soul I assure you, none of this comes from any sense of morbidity, except literally. It’s oddly comforting to at last be a member of the semi-exclusive human club, all of whose members are those of us who have gone past our young, hubristic sense of immortality. Seeing the end of the arc gives shape to the whole thing; and provided I’m not swept off the earth by a random bullet or passing virus, it would be nice to get to the end, record the hologram for my own funeral (because you know that is happening now, no matter what), and step off the end of the dock just as the boat is departing, the way I’ve always wanted to do. I think looking away from death for as long as I have has robbed me of the calm space at the centre of it; which is made worse by the fact that I skipped about half the other stations of the cross on my way here. I’ve never been married, never had children. I’ve yet to bury a parent. These thresholds aren’t good or bad or indifferent, just human. They subconsiously and metaphysically instruct the self on where one is, in the travel along the arc. I think a lot about how my particular family skipped the grandchildren step and thereby remained frozen in a kind of extended adolescent phase; I think a lot about the fact that I’m here, banging away on a keyboard about Star Wars — even if it is, in this case, exceedingly good Star Wars, with more things to say about being alive and being human than I ever thought Star Wars could safely contain.
Aging is also about a more piercing awareness of what does and does not have deep value in one’s life, and bearing down only on the things that do. I started this post with some sass about podcasts which, generally, reflects my stance for ten or more years, most of which were during the time I was actively a creator of such things. It is with great humility that I repeat: if I had known that there could be, or believed that I was capable of doing, podcasts as worthwhile as AMCA, I might have felt differently about the whole enterprise. (If I had known that Andor was out there, I would have checked out of The Mandalorian after 2 episodes.) (I’ll regret not walking out of that first screening of The Rise of Skywalker for the rest of my life, won’t I?) There just isn’t enough time for… forget about “crap,” there isn’t even enough time for “acceptable” or “adequate” or “fine.” If it’s not working for you, walk the fuck out. It is bracing, terrifying, and soul-lifting all at the same time when a few things come together in a moment to remind you what really feeling it really feels like. Speeder bikes in the first row balcony of the University when I was seven, with my best friend Geoff. The vertigo of being in love for real, after you had been wholly convinced that you had been already. Natalie gasping “I can’t breathe!!” in the watchalong episode of AMCA for “Rix Road,” after Syril and Dedra have… that moment. The sight of a small body, brave under hospital sheets. The weight of the bricks. The height of the wall.