I watched the Andor Season 1 finale twice before I ever sat down to talk about it, and the second time was my own fault.

Mrs. Know-It-All is back on the show. She wasn’t feeling well, so I’ve been doing these without her, and out of habit I didn’t wake her up. I watched all of Episode 12, “Rix Road,” by myself, and as I’m coming back to the room to get dressed she goes, “What did you watch without me?” I’m sorry. I didn’t even think about it. So we watched it a second time, and I loved every second of it both times.

And believe me, we’ve got the receipts. Go back and watch. A lot of the things we predicted have come to pass, and a lot of them are things this wonderful lady predicted.

Everybody Lands on Ferrix at Once

Dedra Meero arrives on Ferrix, and you guys know I love me some Dedra Meero. She’s simply the best. From there, like last week, everything is rushing toward a head. Everyone is descending on Ferrix, and at one point Mrs. Know-It-All is sitting up in bed going, “Oh my God, the anxiety is just building. I can’t do this.” She was clutching her pearls.

Brasso runs into Xan, and the conversation with Cassian is out now among Cassian’s people. They know for a fact he’s coming. And there’s a guy standing there the whole time giving the side eye, and I’m like, oh, you’re dirty. That’s Nurchi. He comes off slimy right off the bat.

Shortly after that, Xan and Nurchi are having a drink, and Nurchi is like, man, it’s a real good thing Cassian doesn’t know what’s going on, because there’s no way he could know, right? Bro, can you fish any harder? He’s playing Xan with booze, and Xan as good as tells him without telling him. Then Nurchi even tries to play it off: hey, if you know something, keep it to yourself. He’s so dirty.

The episode actually starts before Meero arrives, with a kid we don’t know anything about. He’s soldering, he’s putting something together. About midway through, Mrs. Know-It-All goes, “Oh, that’s what’s-his-name’s kid, and that’s a bomb.” Yes it is. She called it, and I was like, right on.

Vel is on Ferrix. Cinta’s already there, because she’s been watching the people who are watching for Cassian. Luthen shows up. Luthen and Vel are obviously there to kill Cassian so he doesn’t get captured, because they’re worried that if the Empire gets him, the Empire makes him talk. My whole thing, before any of it goes down, is that y’all clearly don’t know who you’re dealing with. Legit.

Meero and one of her guys go out dressed as civilians and start scoping the place, and Mrs. Know-It-All was impressed with the way she’s trying to run this operation. She got out there on the streets herself, and Cinta followed her. That puts a little tension between Vel and Cinta, because, you know, you’re supposed to pick up your girlfriend from the airport and then you have to miss it because you’re following a spy. That old chestnut. It’s a weird relationship. I feel like Vel is trying really hard, at very inappropriate times, to say it’s okay, it’s okay, and Cinta is like, I’m working. Do you mind? I’m trying to do something.

Syril has arrived back on Ferrix too. No move felt wasted. As far as the writing goes, they did a really good job of building that tension. I put it in my notes: Ferrix is ready to pop.

Mon Mothma and the Smoke Screen

It’s funny, the Mon Mothma storyline takes a back seat in this episode, to the point where I forgot we were even following it.

She waits for her husband. He comes in, they say they need some privacy, and the driver is obviously listening in, because he’s totally a spy. And she says, you’re gambling again. I can’t tell if the gambling is something she’s actually upset about, or if it’s the excuse she’s using to justify the decision she’s about to make. You’re all familiar with this. You’ve got to break up with somebody, or do something that’s going to cause you some real trouble, so what do you do? You wait until you’re angry. You wait until they upset you, over something stupid, until you’re emotionally prepared to say I’m done.

Mrs. Know-It-All went somewhere else with it, and I think she’s right. The driver was listening, and Mon Mothma is trying to move money. So if the Empire hears her husband has a gambling problem, the moving of the money looks dirty, but it doesn’t look like rebellion. Oh, she’s moving money because her husband gambles. That’s rich people crap. It’s the equivalent of somebody today saying, man, that’s just some rich people nonsense. They might bring him in and fine him and tell him he’s doing illegal things, but they’re not going to get him or her for being the Rebellion. That’s a really good smoke screen they’re building.

For those of you paying attention to that scene, they name-drop Canto Bight, the casino planet from the sequel trilogy that we all loved to hate in Rian Johnson’s Star Wars movie. It took me a second. She tells him, if you have to, you go to Canto Bight and do what you’ve got to do there. You don’t bring that nonsense here. I thought that was so funny.

Later there’s a brief moment where we cut back to her. Her husband, her daughter in the middle, the daughter all dressed up in the Chandrilan outfit, and the doors open and there’s a young man, and there’s the mob guy. I guess she’s done thinking about it. I still think she got upset with her husband on purpose to help motivate this decision, but she’s going to take the guy’s help.

Clem’s Stone

Cassian shows up and breaks into Bix’s place the way he always did, climbing over the wall. The junker guy is there, her boss, the one he was getting Imperial parts from back at the beginning of the season. And dude’s like, yeah, no, she’s been captured, bro. So Cassian finds out where she’s being held, and it’s the hotel, because the Empire took it.

Before that you get a really heartwarming moment when we first see he’s arrived. He goes by the wall and touches a stone. I mistakenly thought, is this Maarva’s stone already? It isn’t. It’s Clem’s stone. Clem is Maarva’s partner and Cassian’s adopted father, the man who taught him a lot of stuff.

To the untrained eye it feels like a random memory, there to show us Clem was someone important. Listen to what he’s saying. He’s giving Cassian advice about a part. You restore it, two minutes, no more, no less, and now you have this beautiful new thing you could sell for 500 credits. Everybody else will ignore it. You have to have your eyes always open, looking for the possibilities. And I’m like, bro, you’re seeing the building blocks of Cassian.

Sidebar. We haven’t heard boo about his sister again, or his search for her. It’s so conspicuously not being brought up that I believe they’ve established it as a thing, and come season two, or wherever the series goes from here, that storyline is coming back around. It doesn’t in this episode. It will.

Meero Dresses Down Her Boss

We cut back to ISB headquarters and find out the Anto Kreegyr mission has been completed off camera. That’s the whole thing we’ve been following, where Luthen is willing to give up Kreegyr and his 30 men in order to protect the Rebellion and protect Saw Gerrera.

One of my favorite parts: Dedra Meero calls back to base and finds out everybody’s dead, and she is dressing down her superior. Look, I need to be part of the conversation. Somebody needs to be in that room to say a dead person doesn’t help us. A dead body can’t talk. And her boss is like, it’s okay, just figure out this other thing. He basically says the Kreegyr mission was to clean the taste of Aldhani out of the Emperor’s mouth. So you’re feeling the presence of the bigger, darker, Empire-y things going on above her.

The Anvil, the Band and Maarva

Luthen walks right up to Vel with his hood on. She tells him it’s a couple hours away, listen for the anvil. No sooner does she say it than the anvil starts. He’s like, what’s going on? She’s like, I have no idea. And that’s everybody. The Imperial troops have no clue either, and they’re all scrambling.

What’s going on is the Daughters of Ferrix have moved ahead without the Empire’s permission. You’re supposed to have 30 people. Yeah, no. They’re all coming down the streets.

Mrs. Know-It-All said the music reminded her of a New Orleans funeral, and that’s a good call. They did what really good embedded needle drops do. The band is the source of the music, and as things escalate, the band’s music becomes the soundtrack for the scene. I want the soundtrack to this show. It’d be well worth having.

And they’re parading through the streets with her brick. Dude. I was getting emotional looking ahead in my notes, because I knew what was coming.

The Empire rushes to form up and tries to send people home. From above, Cassian sees everything. He sees Meero. Then he sees Luthen, and there’s a look that plays on his face, and I knew right then, oh, he knows what time it is. Cassian’s a pro. Whatever it is you have to have to be part of the Rebellion, he gets it.

Nurchi, the slimy punk, gets himself taken in on purpose, and he’s like, yeah, I found him, I want double my money. Meero and her people go to catch Cassian, and because he’s not stupid, he slips out the same way he met his brother cousin person, Brasso, before, down below the building. By now he’s got to realize everyone is looking for him, Luthen and the Empire and his own friends trying to warn him. So he does the intelligent thing and plays everybody against each other. He knows he’s got to get Bix, and he’s there to be present for his mother’s funeral.

Then B2 rolls out in the middle of everybody and plays Maarva’s last testament, a holo projected something like 50 feet in the air. You can tell she knew it would be, because she’s looking down at everybody. She says she almost feels like she can see it all, what’s happening right now. She says she’s been here before, at funerals, wanting to be lifted up, wanting somebody to inspire her, and she’s going to do her best to do that for all of them.

She says we’ve been asleep. They came, they gave us their money, we kept the trade routes, and when they left we forgot them. The Empire is a disease that thrives in the darkness, and it thrives on us being asleep. Fighting may seem scary, but if she had it all to do again, she’d wake up every single morning and fight those bastards.

The minute she says “bastards,” the head of the garrison is rushing in to shut it down. And when the words “fight the Empire” come out of her mouth, man, he loses it. He kicks B2 over. Dude, that’d be like kicking BB-8. B2’s little stutter is the most adorable thing ever, and you kicked him.

Ferrix Pops

It blows up, and it’s so awesome. Remember, the troops are under strict instructions not to kill. So they’re holding the line, some people are getting through, some are getting tased, if that’s what you want to call it, and the head of the garrison is getting trampled.

Brasso takes Maarva’s brick. One guy comes over to him, and what does he do with it? I loved it so much.

Right around then the young man from the beginning takes out the bomb. The switch on it is literally a light switch toggle. Mrs. Know-It-All said she’d be terrified to carry that in her purse. He turns it on and chucks it. It blows in the bottom windows of the hotel, and it also knocks over a munitions truck, so all the little bombies go off. Complete pandemonium. That’s when the head of the garrison says he’s not playing this anymore. Open fire. And the stormtroopers do.

One trooper gets sent up to stop the anvil guy, because the anvil is warning everybody else. Anvil guy kicks him off. It’s almost comedic. I half expected to hear the Wilhelm scream.

Meero has her blaster out and gets jumped by a mob. Think about it. She’s Empire, and she’s a woman in the middle of all these angry men. You can see the terror in her face as she’s clawing at the ground. Right as the first explosion went down, Syril had booked it, and we’re like, where’s he going? He shows up, drags her out and shoves her into a closet. And she’s immediately like, you?

It’s the only time this entire season we’ve seen her visibly shaken. She was so terrified of being trampled, and then they let the shock play. She says, “I should thank you,” like she’s trying to talk herself into calming down. We predicted that. We said Syril and her are going to get together, and one of us, I think it was Mrs. Know-It-All, said he’s going to save her life somehow. This show has done an amazing job of making us feel everyone’s motivations.

“Wasn’t She Great”

Cassian gets to Bix and kills the one guard watching her, because everybody else is outside by now. She tells him she dreamed he came. And then she says, “Maarva was here.” And Cassian, and he sounds very genuine, says, “Wasn’t she great?”

Look at the work on Bix’s face, because she could hear Maarva’s speech. I almost think she could see her too, with that hologram as huge as it was. It was a very emotional moment when they showed Bix listening to Maarva’s voice. Too much.

As everything breaks up, Brasso, a couple of the Daughters, the junker guy and B2 are getting ready to escape on a ship at the junkyard, and that’s when Cassian shows up with Bix. He gives very explicit instructions to the Daughter who’s going to pilot. Then he looks down at B2 and tells him he needs him to take care of Bix and the rest of them, and he’ll come back. The droid says you always say that. Cassian tells him he can’t always come back, and that he always counts on him. Oh my God, it’s so good.

Kill Me or Take Me In

The final moment of the show proper. Luthen is riding a speeder real fast back to his ship. He’s getting ready for departure, and he notices something’s not right. There’s nothing obvious about it. Something’s just off. He turns around, and there’s Cassian.

Cassian says, very frankly, you came to kill me, didn’t you. Luthen says, you don’t make it easy. And Cassian gestures and says, today I’ll make it easy for you. Luthen sees the gun and picks up the blaster and asks what game they’re playing. No game. Kill me or take me in.

There it is. And the biggest smile comes over Luthen’s face. He’s just watched one man do, with his help and on the bigger scheme, exactly what he wants done. Every time we saw Luthen in this episode he was looking around like, is this happening? Even while Maarva was talking he’s kind of somewhat smiling. He just saw Cassian be the flame that ignited the whole thing.

Mrs. Know-It-All put it best: one town went completely chaotic for one man. If Luthen didn’t realize what Cassian is worth before, he does now.

The Post-Credit Scene Proves Her Right

I’m going to let her have this one, because she earned it.

All season, even while she wasn’t on the reviews, we kept asking each other what they’re building in that prison. Why do you need 5,000 men for the star-shaped objects? You can say the Empire lied to those prisoners because the Empire is evil…but they were lied to because the work had to get done. So she made the assumption right away: they’re building the Death Star, or at the very least super important parts for it. She thought about it logically. Look at those five-pointed designs. You need that shape to make a sphere.

So what’s the post-credit scene? Little robots connecting those exact joint pieces into what’s eventually going to be one of the layers of, I think, the outside of the divot in the Death Star. Then they back us up and you see it. It’s this moon with a disc, and another disc, and all these pieces. The minute I saw it I said, she was right.

I didn’t know either, and when she said it, it made a lot of sense. Why else do you need 5,000 prisoners in three different spots killing themselves, literally? You needed slave labor. Her question is why that wasn’t a factory job somewhere, with machines doing the building. But if you’re the Empire, you want your boot on the neck of the people you’re trying to take over.

So there you go. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. You’re halfway to being a know-it-all yourself.

The Verdict

Andor Season 1 Episode 12, “Rix Road,” is a 10 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

Mrs. Know-It-All: “This is my 10. Let’s go.” I’ve got to give it a 10 also, and for me that’s the third 10 I’ve given in this series. It’s been firing on all cylinders this entire time, and the writing is amazing. I’d rewatch this one. I watched it twice this morning and I’d watch it a third time. I kind of want to rewatch the whole series straight through.

For the season, and I’m not averaging our scores here, she says a 9, in a heartbeat. Some of that is how much she loves Star Wars, but she didn’t miss a week. She never had to double up, because whether she was doing the show with me or not, she wanted to keep up so we could talk. I feel like I can’t give it a 10 without actually averaging my scores, so I’m going nine and a half.

Part of it is the storytelling. We’re learning things about the Rebellion we never knew. Another commentator I watch, Marc Bernardin, said they’ve never shown us the actual cost. What does it take to start a rebellion? It takes dedication and heart, which we’ve all seen, and it takes money. We’re seeing both sides of that. Luthen is the one building up the people, going to this organization and that one and pulling them together. Mon Mothma is the one paying for everything: the ships, the weapons, the money you need to move forward. That’s why I feel like this is Star Wars’ version of Game of Thrones. You’re seeing the machinations and the inside work.

We only ever knew the Rebellion existed. When we first saw Rogue One, we said this isn’t going to have a happy ending. Now we know how they got there. I have to watch Rogue One all over again.

There’s some talk online that critics love it and the viewership isn’t there. Anybody who knows anything about anything knows the first season of most TV shows is never the one. Seinfeld, they thought it was going to be canceled until season three. Game of Thrones wasn’t the sweetheart darling in season one that everybody remembers. People had begun to come around by the end of it, it started building into season two, and by the end of season two there was this crazed fandom. Same thing here. We’re definitely getting season two, and I think people are going to see a big difference.

Where Season Two Goes

I don’t believe you’ll get five seasons, one for every year, even though we’re five years out from Rogue One. We already thought this season would run more like 24 or 26 episodes. When I found out this was the finale, I went online to see if I’d gotten my numbers wrong. Apparently season two is going to have a part one and a part two, 12 episodes each. That’s where the 24 came from, and it’s another reason it’s going to take two years. We don’t get season two until 2024.

Mrs. Know-It-All has already pictured the wrath Dedra is walking into the minute she steps onto some huge spaceship. She’s going to have to answer for some things, because the Empire doesn’t take failure well. In her head, Dedra herself pulls the gun on several people, especially the guy who said open fire. He jumped so quickly. This is one of those times where you sit here and go, God, they really are Space Nazis. Who doesn’t realize this is a town in pain, in mourning? That’s all emotion, and getting them angry is the least productive thing you can do. Wait till the next day. But I don’t think they were ever going to get the chance, because Maarva’s holo was always going to happen.

My predictions. We’ll get more missions, but I believe we’re going to see much more of the concerted build toward the formalized Rebellion. I believe we’ll see the Rebel Alliance come together, and its headquarters posted on Yavin 4. Maybe not next season, but in the series, and this is a stupid little one, I believe we’ll see Saw Gerrera find Bor Gullet, the mind-reading alien thing he used on the pilot in Rogue One. I believe we’ll see Saw get even more hurt and damaged.

I also believe we get a time jump. I don’t think we pick up right where he left off. I think it’s a few months or a year down the road, with Cassian established with them, and I could even see season two ending with the first unofficial meeting of the Rebel Alliance and its various leaders.

And I believe we’re going to see the Mon Calamari, because they’re conspicuously not involved this season, and they’re such a strong friend and member of the Rebel Alliance. I’m down to see some squiddies. If you can give me a slightly younger Ackbar, before he’s Admiral, when he’s a senator or a leader or a president, and he’s the one saying it’s time to go, we have to fight them? Oh my God. If you’re going to show me this stage, show me all the players that go into it.

Mrs. Know-It-All thinks we open right on the heels of this one, maybe for the first episode, because we need to find out what happened with Dedra, and then we get the time jump. Thinking as a writer, I could see us starting with Meero disgraced. She hasn’t been fired, but she’s trying to re-earn her place, and I think she’ll have brought Syril on. You’re going to see Syril in the ISB white, as a subordinate of hers. They’re simpatico now. Cassian is responsible for his worst failure, and Cassian is now responsible for Meero’s worst failure.

She wants the actual Rebel Alliance formed by the end of the season, with Mon Mothma installed. If that first meeting lands at the end of part one, then part two gets to show information moving to and from the Alliance, and there are more stories there. Maybe part one is the formal building of the Alliance, and all the nonsense in between. There’s plenty of nonsense that can happen.

The second time through I didn’t have to take the notes that help me do these recaps, so I could really dig in and watch everything. We’re sitting in the bed and I’m going, look, look, oh my gosh, this is happening. I enjoyed it. She did too, and she’s sad it’s over.

Your turn. What do you think is coming in season two, and who do you want to see show up? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above. And never forget: everyone loves a know-it-all.