Up to half of the first episode of AndorThe second season, the young Rebell Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) has a complication in his latest mission: a group of rebel soldiers who consider him more threat than an ally. In fact, they seem to see almost everything as a threat: the living beings in the extensive jungle around them, all outsiders over which they run, even the other members of their own group. From the very first moment, Cassian is already loud with each other – with a gun held up, in a mass confrontation – to catch it.
We have never seen this fragile, incompetent group – but thanks to some small references in Andor In season 1 we know a few things about who they are and possibly how they are stranded at Cassian's droppings. Here is how these loud, striking guests fit AndorThe continuity – and how they fit into the overarching topic of this season.
[Ed. note: Minor spoilers ahead for episodes 1 and 2 of Andor season 2, and for a small subplot in season 1.]
After capturing the rebel group Cassian, she argues with each other about where they could go next, provided they can either learn to use Cassians stolen experimental ties -Abger or to persuade him to transport them. It is clear that you not only have an agreed guide in the group, but also have no headquarters or a clear goal. We also know from the arguments that they are on the planet for two days, with minimal food and supplies. Cassian learns from a member that they are members of the Maya Pei Brigade, one of the rebel groups that his sponsor/handler Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) supports.
Who is Maya Pei, the rebel leader?
We have never seen Maya Pei either AndorBut she was mentioned a few times by SAW GERERA (Forest Whitaker), which she brings in a joke about various anti-competitor rebel fractions, which he despises as “lost” because they lack his “clarity of the purpose”. In a scene in the first season “Narcina 5” he mocks at Luten that he would not work with Maya Pei because she is a “neo-republican”. (Luten on his part describes Saw as an anarchist, although he is still still ready to work.)
She gets another quick mention of Dedra Meer (Denise Gough) in an ISB meeting in season 1 – Luthen's attempt to buy one Imperial Starpath Unit Apparently came from Cassian in season 1 “in a safe connected by a rebel cell in connection with Maya Pei”. However, while the ISB is aware of its existence, it never becomes a significant part of AndorStory; It is only a background detail, the head of a rebel groups Luten operated independently of one another helps the supply and sometimes coordinates.
Oddly enough, the collapse of the Maya Pei-Brigade in season 1 seems to be reflected, which happens with another of Luthen's Splitter rebellion projects: that of Anto Kreegr, who is sold-out in season 1 in order to protect one of his information. A Particularly complicated piece of spycraft-against-spycraft that color and fake Luten leads to sacrificing Kreygr and his group so that they can carry out a guerrilla attack on a imperial power plant without warning that one of their pilots has been caught and interrogated, and the empire has laid a trap for them.
Maya Peis Group says that something similar happened to them – “We attacked! We lost six ships, 40 fighters!” One of them tells Cassian. Maya herself was apparently caught in the crossfire, although the group is divided whether it is dead and what exactly happened in the fight.
How does the Maya Pei Brigade fit in Andor's history?
What is more important about the decomposing remains of the Maya Pei Brigade is how this group of survivors contributes to taking some of the greatest ideas that played throughout the show – the many, many fragments in a fractionalized rebellion and how difficult it is to endure a uniform totalitarian rule. This topic plays through in a variety of ways AndorThe two seasons of Mon Motma's elderly of political rebellion in the Senate and secret financing efforts outside of it to Luthen's plans, Cassians adventures and the big ISB project in season 2.
Here, however, the topic works particularly small and particularly passionate. Maya's surviving forces do not agree on their goals or how to pursue them, who should lead the group or what their organizer would have wanted. You don't even agree on what happened to you or your leader. Her suspicion against each other and against everyone else is a danger to itself and for another part of the rebellion that touches them. And as long as you maintain this suspicious, chaotic reaction to the collapse of your own fraction, you are not able to see an ally when he appears. (It does not help that Cassian tries to maintain the basic operational security by not explaining or admitting his mission to whom he reports.)
Image: Lucasfilm/Disney
Your internal group reflects the greater conflict that we have seen in season 1, as shown by Sawgerera's contemptuous attitude to other rebel groups: Theoretically, all organizations that he mentions in his rant are on the same side together with Luthen. They all want an end to the empire, with its oppression and exceeding. But they do not agree philosophically how they should pursue their goals or what the empire could replace in their ideal galaxy. SAW releases them all as “separatists” without realizing that he too is part of the problem – the assessment of other fractions of rebels as unworthy, and refuses to work with them.
All of this shows a tension between different crucial aspects of the rebellion. It is necessary that all these small splinter groups work as far as possible independently of each other in order to obtain segregation and denial for information. But there is a limit of how much of them can reach a small group of people who are more dedicated to a certain guide and close philosophy than the cause that combines them.
And all of this forms up to the rest of the campaign in season 2, since the scattered, fragmented rebellion becomes inconsistent insights into the first more functional, more committed organization Rogue one And the original George Lucas Star Wars trilogy. Where the greatest image history in Andor The first season dealt with Cassian's transformation of head-in-the-sand cynic to committed freedom fighters. Season 2 accepts some larger ideas about how individual members of an uprising different Clarity of the purpose, such as sawing or no clarity at all.
