Nobody’s Getting Out – ‘Star Wars: Andor’ Episode 9 Easter Eggs
Episode 9 of Andor was bleak, dark, and cruel, and left us hoping for the revolution to start as soon as possible.
Episode 9 of Andor continues to build the tension and stakes for just about everybody in the cast. Unless you’re rooting for the ISB agents, it’s almost sure that your favorite character had a hard time of it this week. But we can also see where this season is going and what pieces are being put in place. And we’re excited about the coming payout. As always, we kept our eyes and ears open for all of the sneaky Easter Eggs and minor details this show has to throw at us.
In order to break down some of this week’s Easter Eggs, we may need to spoil large portions of this week’s episode. If you haven’t watched yet, proceed at your own risk.
Planet Name Drops
Every episode of Andor names a few places or people. Sometimes they’re new world-building (such as the Dizonite and their massacre, mentioned for the first time in this episode). But others they’re references to places and people we may have encountered before. Jondora and Kafrene fall into the latter category.
Jondora hasn’t really been around since Legends, but it homed an Imperial base that had weapons stolen and sold on the black market often enough for it to be a thing. We don’t know if this is true for our current canon’s version of Jondora, but there’s an interesting parallel back to the mission on Aldhani.
Kafrene is a mining colony on an asteroid belt. And it’s also where we first meet Cassian Andor in Rogue One as well as where he gets the first bit of information about the Death Star.
Torture Scene Right Out of Episode IV
This episode was bleak and full of war crimes. And one of them was using the screams of the now-extinct Dizonite children to inflict emotional damage on Bix in order to get information about Andor and “Axis.” Apparently, Dizonite cries had a unique ability to cause significant “emotional distress” to the point of making a ship crew put themselves into hiding and literally torturing information out of Bix. It’s a dark moment in a very dark episode.
But this scene is also a direct callback to events that will happen in just a few galactic years. The framing for the scene as the door shuts on Bix and the camera pans down to follow passing boots down the hall is identical to when Leia is tortured in Episode IV back in 1977. Hopefully, they will continue to have parallels in using this moment as a springboard info Rebel leadership.
The Family Rich-Girl Vel is Running From
In the last episode, Cinta made a comment that Vel was a rich girl, running from her family. Many of us thought nothing of it, there are many rich families in the galaxy. But this episode revealed that Vel’s rich family also has strong political connections with Coruscant as she is Mon Mothma‘s cousin.
The two cousins are clearly close and some of the only people the other is able to trust. And for just a moment it feels like Mon has somebody in her corner. So when Vel leaves at the end of the episode to go pretend to be a spoiled rich girl before returning to the Rebellion’s frontlines, it’s especially isolating and lonely for Mon Mothma. We know that she will likely be in this same spot for about three years though, not officially leaving the Imperial Senate for the Rebellion until after the Ghorman Massacre in 2BBY.
Space Sign Language
This isn’t an ‘Easter Egg’ as much as something we noticed in a previous episode and chalked up to good world-building. In the facility Andor is in, some prisoners have sign language that they use to communicate with prisoners in different groups and on different floors. At first, they seem to use this for general chit-chat, but this episode saw a time when real information needed to be spread fast.
We learn that nobody ever leaves Narkina, when your sentence is up you get transferred to another section and start over. But this time the guards messed up and word got out which resulted in a riot and the guards used all of the building’s power to kill all 100 people on the affected level at once.
But now that we, Andor, and Kino, all know what’s going on, we can hope for next week’s episode to be a much more exciting and hopefully uplifting jailbreak episode.
What did you think of this episode of Andor? How are you enjoying the season so far? What do you think is left in the season? Let us know in the comments!
May The Force Be With You, Adventurers!
