The Tragedies of Ghorman

 I remember as a teenager, when I first saw Macbeth, I was puzzled as to why it was considered a "tragedy," because the title character is a villain protagonist, guilty of murder and tyranny. It's a tragedy with a happy ending, sort of.

Of course, my sense of what it means for things to be tragic grew more nuanced with my processing of that play - that the genre is more about the doom that is set in a character's fate, through flaws in their character that are not remedied in time. If a hero must overcome their flaws to emerge victorious in a happy ending, a tragic figure is one who fails to evolve.

I've been a bit cavalier about spoilers with Andor's second season - a season that was spoiled for me a year ago by endless flagrant spoilers posted on social media. So, these events didn't come as a surprise to me, but I'm going to try to exercise better propriety here.

Spoilers ahead.

Syril Karn is a fascinating character. I'd say he goes out not with a bang, but with a whimper, but he does literally go out with a bang as Carro Rylanz shoots him in the head with a blaster. So, how did the one-time rent-a-cop wind up getting himself killed in the middle of a massacre? Oddly, it didn't really have much to do with the politics of the moment. Instead, it was Karn's failure to shed his Javert-like obsession with tracking down the person he thinks is the bad guy, the criminal Cassian Andor, who killed two cops and got away with it.

Karn is the most sympathetic person we meet within the Imperial power structure, but that sets a low bar. On a deep and fundamental level, he's pathetic. He aspires to prove himself useful to the powers that be, and only understands in the last hour of his life just how miserably evil the powers he has served are.

One could imagine, perhaps in a less fearless show, a redemption arc for Syril, where he works through his weird mommy issues and decides to stand up to the Empire. But ultimately, his authoritarian ethos is never allowed to die. Even as he sees the horrors of what a regime like the Empire truly means as Ghorman citizens are gunned down in the streets all around him, his chance to escape to safety is short-circuited by the overriding impulse to chase down a criminal who got away from him years earlier.

In the midst of death and destruction and chaos, Syril tackles Andor and tries to strangle him, beat him to death, whatever he can do to best this person who has become a symbol for all of his failings. And truthfully, he has Cassian dead to rights, but a single question, which gives the episode its title, causes him to hesitate - a hesitation that ultimately gets him killed.

"Who are you?"

Andor asks him this because, despite the fact that we are aware of the relationship between these two and have been since the show's start, Andor has never even heard of Syril. (EDIT: Actually, no. I forgot that he had met Syril in the first season. But it was such a footnote of an interaction for Andor that he's forgotten about Syril just as I had forgotten about this first interaction, when Andor humiliated him and took his gun.) The number of people who want him dead is so large. It's just a little confusing that this one guy who is not in an Imperial uniform is so passionately trying to kill him. It's a genuine question, and one that Andor never gets answered.

But for Syril, you can understand why he pauses when he's asked this. Who is Syril Karn anyway? All this time, he's been a willing and eager cog in the Imperial machine, based on the premise that the order enforced by the Empire should lead to stability, order, and therefore safety. Maybe, maybe, in that last second of his life, he truly understand that the evil happening all around him is because of people like him. But he never has a chance to make anything right. He's just one body among many, and even his extremely toxic romantic partner is likely to draw the wrong conclusions: that he was one of the many victims of the massacre she engineered.

We're given one last shot of Eedy Karn, his absolutely terrible mother, watching the news with her friends. The news, as we know, is all propaganda, and frames it all as an unprovoked insurrection. But we see her in tears, presumably worrying for her son.

And boy, I felt mixed feelings there. On one hand, any parent losing a child is really horrible. It's not supposed to go in that order. On the other, though, Eedy is just such a nasty person whose terrible parenting instilled within Syril his tragic traits. Like... there's a universal human empathy I can feel, but she, too, is part of that Imperial machine as part of the complicit and credulous citizenry.

But it does lend a little more tragedy to the affair: when Dedra and Syril have her over for dinner, we find ourselves kind of rooting for Dedra to put Eedy in her place. But Eedy is the one who keeps asking Syril to come home to Coruscant and pursue his dull but reliable and safe career. It's Dedra who weaponizes her partner as an intelligence asset, downplaying the stakes of the mission to keep him eager to continue.

Syril believes that he's infiltrating the Ghorman Front to root out outside Rebel agitators: it plays into a narrative he's sure to believe that the Rebels are the "other" and are coming from the outside to exploit fine Imperial citizens who would happily live under the regime if not for this agitation. When he recognizes that the Imperial forces are kettling the protestors, he realizes the truth: the Ghorman Front is those good, fine people who literally just don't want their planet to be destroyed.

It's interesting: Dedra is using Syril, but she's doing so because he practically begged her to. And honestly, I think that's part of their worldview: that there's a hierarchical element to all relationships, and that there is no difference between someone being emotionally important to you and someone being useful to you.

Again, common human empathy makes us feel a little bad that Dedra's arranged for the circumstances that ultimately get Syril killed (well, even if that's not technically true,) but the intentional choices she has made - orchestrating a massacre as a pretext for genocide - rob her of any sympathy we might otherwise feel. Dedra is a monster. But like Macbeth, she's a monster who has set in motion the events that will come back to harm her. Her nature has led her down a path that can only lead to this devastation. And villain or no, that's tragic.

More sympathetically tragic is the fate of Ghorman. The Ghorman Front was right to think that the Empire meant them harm, and to oppose them as best they could. But it just wasn't enough. Even with the weapons they stole, they just cannot stand up to the Imperial forces, especially when they break out the KX battle droids. We're forced to witness the terror of these droids from Enze Rylanz's perspective, knocked down in the chaos and then picked up an hurled thirty feet to die simply from the impact on the pavement. It's a brutal and fairly non-sci-fi way to die (you know, other than the fact that it's a robot who does it).

The Empire has a penchant for investing in this sort of terror weapon - from these black-hulled droids with faces that look vaguely skull-like to the giant spherical space station with a laser that can vaporize an entire planet.

In the aftermath of Ghorman, Mon Mothma has to make a move: she plans to make a speech at the Imperial Senate countering the narrative that other, complicit senators, are parroting (also interesting to me that most of the compliant senators are non-human. Andor looks a lot at the way fascism works, but sidesteps the racial politics in some ways). She basically puts a giant target on her back in doing so, and the moment she's done with her speech, Andor is there to exfiltrate her. It's tense - especially because Mothma fears that Luthen might have her killed before she's arrested to avoid letting the Empire find out about him. "I have friends everywhere" is meant to be a friendly code phrase, but when Andor says it to her with every intention to get her to safety, she fears she's just met the triggerman who will be putting her down.

As far as we know, Mothma's fate won't be a tragic one (though I think her family is not going to have a great time now that their matriarch is a fugitive from the Empire) ultimately appearing un-named in a single scene in Return of the Jedi to brief the forces before the Battle of Endor. So there's that at least.

But let's talk about Bix.

Andor has now been doing this clandestine work for the Rebellion for years. He's become one of Luthen's most reliable agents. And after Ghorman in particular, it's just too many close calls with death. He wants to have some semblance of a normal life with his partner.

Indeed, Bix even seems to be doing a lot better after getting some much-needed catharsis by assassinating Doctor Gorst, her one-time torturer. (Boy, is there a more satisfying moment than Bix and Andor walking away from Gorst's building as Andor hits the remote detonator? Cool people never look back at explosions.) It's even strategically useful given that the Empire wants to have Gorst create an entire torture program for them.

But when Andor announces that he's given his two-week notice and is pulling out of this whole Rebellion thing, she makes a bold decision: she leaves Yavin, ghosting Andor in the middle of the night but for a recorded video message, where she explains that she can't in good conscience stay if she's going to pull Andor away from the Rebellion. She knows how important he is to the effort, and promises to wait for him so that they can be together again after the war is over.

We know, given the ending of Rogue One, that that's not going to happen. Andor dies on Scarif along with everyone else in the Rogue One group to secure the Death Star plans. It's a crucial mission that saves the Rebellion. So, in this sense, in an act of love, sacrificing her relationship with him in the name of a higher purpose, that Bix actually sets Andor on the course that will lead to his death.

It's a tragedy whose ending we've already seen.

But unlike the ultimate meaninglessness of Syril Karn's death, in Andor's case, his life buys countless others.

    Weirdly enough, I think this is what wound up tasting so sour with the sequel trilogy. In an effort to give us the same underdog tale fighting against a formidable foe, the New Republic gets wiped out by the First Order. As far as I know, there aren't yet any Star Wars properties that take place after the sequel trilogy, so we don't know how quickly or easily the Resistance is able to re-establish the Republic.

But perhaps that lends a retroactive sense of tragedy to the entire original trilogy - where everything accomplished, including the death of the Emperor, is walked back. Personally, I find the choice to structure the story that way really frustrating, and something I lay primarily at the feet of J.J. Abrams, who seems allergic to originality. (Having been a fan of Abrams in my 20s, I now have to wonder if I'd like, for example, Super 8 upon a second watch given how much of a pastiche of Spielberg it was. Maybe we can just watch E.T. instead?)

Anyway, I know some of the plot beats of the last couple episodes of the series - I think probably the major ones at least. Once again, I'm so delighted that a show like this was allowed to be made. It's such a cool take on the nearly-50-year-old franchise, and I hope that as Disney continues to steward this brand, we'll see other tonal experiments that are willing to address mature themes in a smart way (I'm totally fine with popcorn adventure too! Just make sure it's good as well.)