If Andor is the most cyberpunk version of the Star Wars universe that's ever been shown in media, then there's nowhere that that's more apparent than in week two of the second season of Andor. join us as we continue our look at the show with part three of our five parts series, recapping the three episodes released on April 29th, 2025, including "Ever been to Ghorman", "I have friends everywhere" and "what a festive evening". We'll draw some connections, follow some threads, and see how they weave together and see how Season two is starting to mirror the episode arc of season one, but doing so in some new and interesting ways in this episode of the ImplausiPod.

Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible. So what makes Andor cyberpunk Star Wars? it isn't just in the Blade Runner-esque city scenes, is the hover cars float toward the landing pad during episode six, but it's also that and has more to do with the swagger and the ethos, the vibe as things are being called today.

But there's other connections too. Way back in episode three when we gave a rundown of the Cyberpunk 1 0 1, we noted how cyberpunk wasn't just signified by the aesthetics, the Black leather and Chrome seen in countless movies in the 1990s, but it was also highlighted by ruthless mega corporations, income inequality, and the enduring influence of the heist film.

Star Wars is somewhat lacking on the mega-corp front, but perhaps the Imperials slide into that role well enough, and the income inequality has shone through. However, it's seen in many small ways in the dual lives of Mon Mothma and Luthen and the window into their worlds in the first season, and becoming much more apparent in the second season as well.

The cyberpunk connection to income inequality initially came as William Gibson was inspired by a book on the Victorian underworld and the differences across society during that gilded age. This vast gulf between the haves and have nots, the Star Wars universe comes screaming to the forefront in the second week of shows episodes four to six.

We'll keep an eye out for the examples that they show up during this week's episodes. The final connection making Andor cyberpunk Star Wars story is the role of the heist. Transmedia cyberpunk properties like Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020 and even archetypal novels like Neuromancer are about the run, the heist, the score.

We can see this in the first season where the run on the payroll by a small group of determined individuals is used to fund the rebellion. And we see it here in week two, where during this arc we have not only one, but three heists and some various other elements of spycraft as well. And six episodes in, we see how season two of Andor is mirroring season one.

We start with an inciting incident followed by a battle with the imperials where Andor gets away. In the first arc and in the second arc, it's all about the heist, that big score. Here, we see how the different factions of the Rebel Alliance can pull it off to varying degrees, but we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves.

Let's look at the episodes. As always, these comments are just my impressions of the episodes After they've aired, I'm not watching ahead or checking out the online discourse. And we start with episode four: "Ever been To Ghorman", AKA "De Berbs", where burbs may have more than one meaning. But first, a word on Ghorman.

I mentioned last episode, how I'll have to stop referring to Syril Karin by his nickname of Lieutenant Gorman due to their increased presence on the show. But it turns out that the Ghormans have been present in the Star Wars universe for a long, long time. And maybe we need to take a quick look at this before we get into the episode proper.

It might seem hard to believe in 2025, but Star Wars wasn't always this ever- present media giant with premium shows launching regularly and always available at the touch of a button with merchandising tie-ins available from High Street to Legoland, to Dollarama, to multiple books and comics and games and figures coming out on a monthly basis.

Back in the mid to late eighties, it was a different time following the recent Return of the Jedi in 1983, there was some popularity, sure. But things fell off. Aside from the remnant action figure sales, by 1987, there wasn't much interest at Star Wars at all, save for the hardcore fans. So when West End Games released the Star Wars role playing game that year, the market was smaller and not a lot of attention was paid to it. 

Tabletop roleplaying games like D and D were in a bit of fallow period as well, though there was a strong overlap between the audiences of the two. So West End Games got to producing material for the Star Wars universe to fill out the galaxy with stuff for the players to do.

They began with the original films and then some of the add-ons, the novelizations of the comic book series from Marvel, which was something but not a ton, not the way we think of media properties today. West End Games had to develop a lot of devices and droids and equipment and settings and plot elements and starships.

And the unique thing was that what they were developing was considered canon. It was still Star Wars all falling under the same umbrella. The distinction in types of media property wasn't paid as close attention to back in the 1980s. So Star Wars was one of the first places where we saw transmedia storytelling.

This is similar in some ways to what was done with other sci-fi franchises like Star Trek and Dr. Who, and maybe Conan too. On the fantasy side, transmedia storytelling could also be understood as multi-platform storytelling, where a single story is told across different platforms and media. The above franchises would have a continuous narrative going, jumping between the shows, films and comic books.

Transmedia storytelling is a little bit different than Adaptation where the same story is retold in different places, often with subtle differences to account for the media. So the Dr. Who books are subtly different than the shows, as are James Blish's novelizations of Star Trek, the original series, and Alan Dean Foster's work on the Star Wars books.

Transmedia storytelling is something that was seen in media. It was something originally looked at by Henry Jenkins. We talked about some of his work back in episode 16 on Spreadable Media. 

This brings us back to Ghorman and the Ghorman front. Like I said a little while ago, Ghorman has a long history with the Star Wars Media at first showed up, as I mentioned, in either the role-playing game from West End Games or in the X-Wing video game from 1993.

This was an early space flight simulator where you could Dog fight in outer space and fly other fighters from the Star Wars universe. I was able to confirm the appearance of Ghorman in the 1993 video game via Wookiepedia, but the appearance within the West End games wasn't something that I could confirm directly vi. 

A quick 

look through my own books. Didn't really see anything there. But then again, I didn't have the complete set in either case. Ghorman, the Planet and the Rebel Group has been part of Star Wars for quite some time, given that it's been around this long. Let me ask you. Have you ever been to Ghorman?

It's a good question. And what did we get an answer to early is the vibe here is definitely different with round windows and slanted buildings in a different colour palette. One that feels right out of a Wes Anderson movie. Right along with the diegetic sounds as Syril walks across the square, this is in stark contrast to the brutalist tenements we've seen on Coruscant earlier.

Following Syril around, we learned some of the lay of the land, similar in some ways to ferric where he was stationed earlier and yet. Unique. These similarities can be seen in the dirt roads and I wonder if they're there for a reason. Maybe like cost savings or something. Or if the grab chucks that we see in the background leaving mean that paving is unnecessary.

And as Syril goes about his business in town, we see some more of what Ghorman is like. Syril has picked up a bit of trade craft, it seems, using floss to check of his residence is broken into. And his love for action figures continues with some spiders now on the shelves in his apartment. He walks back to his office and we see some berbs, real berbs actually, despite how strange they look.

These are pigeons, an English breed called powders. I had to go and check this into this one for sure. But that's wild to see the burbs moving around. It gives it a real lived in feel. This. Walk that Syril has taken is overlaid with a conversation with his mother, with protestors in the background, protestors, chanting, stop the building, stop the empire.

Join us. This is all shown in subtitles. Syril's mother is worried, thinking he's making the wrong choice, thinking the job on croissant was better, but here he seems to be thriving and he's better able to deal with his mother. We don't quite get Syril car as Michael Scott, though. I'm sure Disney could milk a few spinoff seasons out of that if they wanted to.

But is Syril bugged? It looks like someone is listening in and Syril's mother is worried, but he advised her that what she's hearing about Ghorman is propaganda where they may have to have loyalty oaths just to keep their jobs and in 2025 Andor the whiplash effect is still in full force. Syril's mom tells him: “don't become too much of an individual”, and whoa. 

Syril's mom repeats the core imperial ideology for its citizens like. To fit in and go along, and this is an empire that thought the solution to building an army was to clone them. After all they want unity of thought. I wonder where Syril's mother got the line. It feels like a catchphrase that you'd see on a billboard in John Carpenter's “They Live”.

I'm literally shook. Syril takes it in stride though. But while Syril has a better handle on dealing with his mother, at least at a galactic distance, the spies who are listening in find are terrifying. But despite their fear, they decide that Syril might make a good candidate to contact for their cause to quote action him before he is replaced.

So Syril is a target and he's approached by a spider vendor in the plaza, and I thought these were action figures, but they're actually dried versions of the spiders from the video. In the first episode, I assumed that they were huge, perhaps like Sheila sized, but I realized that that's part of the propaganda pitch and probably what were being shown to imperial citizens, like Syril's mother as part of the propaganda campaign too.

Anyways, Syril unravels the message and then sneaks back into the office, but he's bait. He's undergone some imperial trade craft crash course over the last year and is actually using his quote unquote real job as a front to try and make contact with the Ghorman resistance and what's going on. He shows up at the meeting as a civilian and watches what's going on.

It feels more like a union hall, and we're witness to an. Ongoing dialogue where the citizens are airing complaints about imperial trade interference, regulations, tariffs and certainty, and oof. This might be another example of the biter mean H effect or the frequency er illusion where. You know, we see something and now we're exposed to it everywhere, or we start seeing it everywhere.

But seeing this here now hits home hard. The audience in the trade hall is interesting. A lot of 'em have this white shirt, black vest combo going on. Not all of them though. And I'm wondering if there's some connection to a certain Corellian pilot that we're gonna come to meet in Andor season four.

We'll put a pin on that for later. The audience, one that Karn was asked he gives a rather weak the strength of feeling response. Like what does he feel there? It's this strength of feeling like, what does that even mean? But the audience is incense. There's a long history here, going back to about 16 years ago, and Grand Moff Tarkin killed five un 500 unarmed Ghormans in the plaza, and I guess that will link up to season four of Andor as well.

One of the more vocal union members does some kind of elbows up gesture and they are not happy about the building that the imperials are doing. The one that's taking place right now. And of course, Syril flips us all back to Dedra on the quick. She's busy. Meetings in the ISB boardroom, and they're struggling with processing all the arrests they're taking in.

There's machinations going on here. Wheels within wheels and cliques and factions meet after the boardroom meeting. It's like Succession or Severance, but with blasters overall, I'm impressed with how many of the officers have stuck around since the first season because I was under the impression that Imperial turnover was higher, to be quite honest.

But Dedra is doing more than it seems as Luthen soon finds out his plant. Lonnie takes the express elevator to heck to meet with Luthen, who is all business, and he lets him know what's going on in the ISB quote “The smear campaign is an opening move, not an end game” end quote. And Dedra is running Ghorman in secret, even from other members of the ISB.

Luthen's got a lot of irons in the fire and we're taken to what looks like a rebel base and meet Saw Gerrera and his crew again, taking delivery of tech from Luthen, some specialized equipment that does something fancy, I'm sure.

Meanwhile, Mon Mothma is working the Imperial angle, fulfilling her role as a senator, of course, trying to build a coalition, willing to vote against the actions being taken against Ghorman.

We see many of the senators she's talking to are like aliens of various forms after the Star Wars fashion, of course, but we haven't seen many. Overall. I'm left with an impression of like colonialism here, but I'm not sure if that's the right word for it. I just wanted to put a pin into like. The appearance and the prevalence or not of the aliens that we're seeing within the Star Wars universe, through the lens of Andor, one of the politicos or one of the other politicos that she's speaking with, tells her that “she's confusing criminality and politics here”, to which she responds.

“Why, are we finding criminals are making them?” So the demonizing and manufacturing of consent that began in episode one. The last episode we talked about, it continues here as well. And of course, we open. The episode. This episode with Bix having another bad dream, something straight out of synth-tok with big buttons at a fader visible in the foreground or whatever machine was in her dream, she wakes into another nightmare where we hear again that “everyone has their own rebellion:, and Cassian makes the save. Bix is struggling with guilt and Cassian is struggling with being normal, getting Bix to tell him that the mission is dinner. I like this touch of normalcy from them, for them though that at its heart Andor as a show about the lives of regular citizens in the empire, but it's not easy, and Bix struggles. 

Highlight a key point quote: “If I'm giving up everything I want to win, we have to!” end quote. So when Luthen shows up to ask Cassian a question, the titular question of the episode, he's kinda gotta.

Which leads us right into episode five titled “I Have Friends Everywhere” or maybe “Caught in a three-way dance, just like Gordon Lightfoot sang”. In either event, Cassian gets to walk through Ghorman as a fashion designer, seeing some of the sites that we've already been introduced to, but perhaps oblivious to some of the significance of them.

It's kind of cool, but there was a moment at about the 8 45 mark that threw me for a loop at, as I think the exact same set or building rather, was used in bong June hose Mickey 17, with the circular stair. One of the few bits of pre-release coverage for Andor season two I caught by accident was that Tony Gilroy had mentioned how doing Andor was like filming four movies back to back and that they use practical sets for the most part as opposed to the volume used in other Star Wars shows like the Mandalorian.

So it's not surprising that a vaguely futuristic real world shows up twice. It's just surprising that I saw it twice within about a month. The other thing I found kind of jarring was at about the 28, 30 minute mark where. There's a TV show playing on a monitor while Bix is kind of zoned out. This is new to my knowledge within the Star Wars universe.

We don't see much in the way of other media or television specifically, or branding or advertisements, really. It's one of the things that set it apart from other cyberpunk shows, and again, thinking of like Blade Runner here and the neon signs and billboards everywhere, that idea of a Diegetic TV show, one serving as an entertainment, has largely been absent in a show about the Wars. Naturally, I guess. 

Overall Cassian isn't too impressed by what he sees out of the Ghormans and soon gets a pickup from Luthen and I kind of popped when we see him setting up for and cruising into hyperspace. It's assumed to exist in the setting, but it's kind of a treat when we don't see it much.

Luthen's got some problems and Cassian not doing his job is only one of them. For Luthen, one of the bugs planted in a forged piece of art might be discovered when an audit has done of the work. So he has one chance to get it out. And meanwhile Saw Gerrera, in between shouting “comrades” after killing a traitor and shouting “revolution is not for the sane” has plans to switch targets on a different heist.

And of course, the Ghormans are being led into going through with their heist too. Despite Cassian's misgivings, they are of course being baited into it by Nedra from afar, telling your commander that “they need to see what winning feels like”. So we have a triple heist coming together in the final episode.

How exciting. This is where the Gordon Lightfoot reference comes in. It's time for the party.

And a party it is indeed, with episode six titled “What a Festive Evening”, AKA “Calibrate Your Enthusiasm” and when that line was uttered by the ISB leader, Major Partagaz, I nearly lost it. It was something right out of Demolition Man, where Wesley Snipes was asked, “what's your boggle”? but does this connection make any sense? I don't think so. Maybe only to me, but I chortled heartily and my enthusiasm was set to the max. 

We've got multiple heists going on and a party happening too, so let's get into it. This is where we get that lovely Blade Runner-esque shot of Coruscant with the flying cars coming in for a landing at the top of the building, touching down and departing, and the wealth disparity is clearly on display.

The party is mostly for the elite, though not all of them may be enjoying it. Showing that politics is pretty much the same everywhere, earlier on in the episode, Pen Firtha tells us that it's going to be “hard to stuff a whole year's worth of insincerity into three nights”. But Mon Mothma tells him, “he'll figure it out”.

We cut to the Senate with some aliens making a speech. And if you had told me in 2004 that I would pop for the Imperial Senate to show up in a Star Wars Show again, I might have given you a bit of a side eye. But it does happen. And again, later when the party actually takes place, we see Senator Organa and I kind of pop for that too.

Seeing this episode on the same night as the 2025 Met Gala, I was getting kick out of seeing the party and the distinction wasn't lost. That dualism that we're seeing throughout the show in both season one and two, the high life and the low life, and what it is like for the elites and then the regular citizens of the Empire and these regular citizens are sometimes.

Imperial officers as well. It holds true for them too. As several of the officers who end up in the attendance realize this isn't really a regular occurrence and they may never be back and they should enjoy the festivities. They're there by dint of their position and is for the most part, an upper class party.

Not everyone is in attendance at the party; Cassian is sitting this one out. Luthen calls him out explicitly telling him “This fury, this lack of control is violating every protocol we live by”. Luthen thinks Cassian needs to think like a leader with respect to the Ghorman, something that he is definitely not doing.

And so the heists take place without him. In his place on Ghorman are Vel and Cinta, the very capable lovers from the heist arc we saw in episodes four to six of season one. So we have that mirror once again. Their reunion is touching, but it starts to feel like a Top Gun level of foreshadowing like Danny Glover saying he's getting too old for this and is set to retire.

I haven't seen Top Gun however, so my reference was actually Lieutenant Junior Grade Pete “Dead Meat” Thompson from Hot Shots. Instead, mentally I kept thinking he was portrayed by John Cryer, but he played Wash Out instead. 

Vel is sent to help the Ghorman's with the prep, but as they state during the planning sessions, “that prep is useless if you can't follow orders”, and this is feeling like a rejected Batman lecture to Robin on prep time or just some more foreshadowing.

We return to the party when Luthen's assistant Kleya is getting the job done. She's a little bit ruthless, and she's working on “the Book of the Blind” end quote, to remove the bug. There's some symbolism there of the bug embedded in that particular book. And while this is happening, we have a sighting of one of the Imperial big boys, and this, again, feels like a parallel to our own planet, where the high ranking elites of the Imperials move through the party with ease and are accustomed to this life of luxury.

Krennic is talking about quote: “how insurgencies have a long history of puffing up their failures and. Criminals love to lie. Who wants to die for lawless ineptitude?” and the show goes right out to state it. I think it was Luthen who said: “My rebel is your terrorist. Something like that.” Obiwan is here in spirit, even though he is very much alive on Tatoonine in this timeline, but you know, letting us know it's all about the point of view. 

Kleya gets the job done just in time, and the other heist is going off relatively smoothly too, though the imperials are monitoring things via Syril, who's on a bridge with a pair of goggles, and for the most part are just letting things proceed.

The only hitch is in the Ghormans themselves. As the line about prep comes home to roost, then they either wander off due to a lack of discipline or interfere, and in the confusion, Cinta gets shot with a blaster. A blaster that wasn't supposed to be there, and the Ghorman heist becomes a pyrrhic victory. 

We finish off with Bix going into the revenge business against Inigo Montoya's advice, and she tracks down her torture and locks him into his own device if only for a moment.  Her attempt to leave was slowed down for about as long as Indiana Jones facing a swordsman in a marketplace takes, and Cassian helps with the explosive finish as we get the Robert Rodriguez slow-walk away from an explosion for the closer, but it feels cyberpunk as heck. Now we've gotta wait a year to find out what happens next.

Once again, thank you for joining us on the ImplausiPod. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at Dr implausible@implausipod.com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows@implausipod.com as well. I'm responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 ShareAlike license.

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