Review: The Immeasurable Heaven by Caspar Geon

A woolly, wild space opera that boldly strides into high-octane multiverse space opera

When it comes to dealing with, and coming to terms with, books like Caspar Geon’s The Immeasurable Heaven, one has to immerse oneself in a text and a world that pushes the bounds of the comprehensible. I am going to discuss the book in those terms before trying to touch on anything else.

There is a theory of writing and reading genre fiction regarding how speculative a text can be before readers check out completely. You cannot, the theory says, provide too many shifts from reality before the average reader gets overloaded with the strangeness. Imaginations, in this theory, are not quite boundless. And I have found that I do love a sense of wonder in my SFF, and perhaps more than most, I have limits, too.

So where does The Immeasurable Heaven fit into this? Definitely into the deep end. Very much in the deep end.

We have big depths of time than the original series, with events that might, if I read the book right, take place in objective time over hundreds of millions of years in the baseline reality. We have vast numbers of solar systems in a distant galaxy in a far future where even supernovas have been engineered out of existence by a post-AI species that lives in stars, the Throlken. Oh, and the fabric of space itself is different now. The Throlken are basically the rulers of the galaxies, who live inside stars and enforce their laws remorselessly. They aren’t omnipotent or omniscient, although they are amazingly powerful. That’s a big enough canvas for most writers, but the author also makes this into a multiverse. For, you see, what I just described is the Surface, the base level of reality.¹ Below it are levels of reality called Phaslairs, created when choices are made and decisions split universes in a Everett-Wheeler-type formulation. These Phaslairs are always younger than the levels above. So the author provides us with a canvas not just of one large universe, but thousands of underlying levels of reality.

On this canvas with enormous potential, the story revolves around the Well, formerly known as the Inescapable Hole. While there are other ways to get down into the Phaslairs, the Well is a hole punched through realities and it’s the easiest way to head into universes below ours. These universes are younger, often very different, and while some of them are ruled, too, by the Throlken, some of them are “lawless” and most definitely are not. One other important thing to know about the Well and the Phaslairs is this: its a one-way trip in and down. Once you enter a younger universe deeper in, you can’t go back to an older upper one. Information, however, can and does pass up and down Phaslairs, but physical bodies and existences do not.

Or so it was thought.

The inciting incident for the book revolves around a Primal Scream that is captured by instruments at the Well. And, more importantly, the detection of someone, or something doing the impossible and ascending layers of reality. Who is it? What is it? And what are their intentions?

Three main characters are tied to this impossible event. Our major protagonist is Whira. Whira is an agent of Thelgald, an Alm (basically a monarch) under the aegis of the Throlken. Thelgald wants to know the provenance of the Scream, and so dispatches Whira on a very secret mission to the Well. (Thelgald is quite aware that the Throlken will not want them or any agent of theirs meddling and upsetting applecarts). Whira takes the slow path of traveling on a passenger ship, Gnumph, that really is a sentient, giant, spore-like creature that travelers live inside of, to head toward the Well and make a descent and investigate.

Our next point of view is Draebol. Draebol also works for Alm Thelgald, but has long since gone down into the Phaslairs. Draebol is a licensed surveyor/explorer/adventurer who lives down seventeen thousand levels of Phaslairs, busily sending data up and getting payments for it. So Draebol keeps on keeping on, creating a grand map of travels and adventures to eventually sell for a handsome profit. This relatively regular if exciting life is interrupted by a sudden rush of attacks and pursuits by various authorities. The knowledge that a seasoned surveyor has is very important when everyone is nervous about someone breaking the laws of reality...

Which brings us to our third major POV character: Yib’Wor. He was once a sorcerer king, and a tyrant at that, before the Throlken rose to power, so we are on the order of *hundreds of millions* of years. He was eventually overthrown and cast into the Inescapable Hole to fall forever. But he did not fall forever. And so he is the antagonist of the book, the one that demands action from everyone and everything else, as he slowly tries to climb back toward the Surface against all laws of reality. He is our inciter of the conflict. His is the only point of view that is in first person, and we really get into his head. I got a Miltonian Satan-like vibe from him (after all, consider the title, and consider the impossibility of climbing back up, that he is attempting to do).

There is a wealth of other worldbuilding details here. There are infraspheres, pocket dimensions for all sorts of sport and entertainment, including what is for all purposes a science fantasy MMORPG that can be accessed by beings across the galaxy and down into the Phaslairs, too. There is smart matter, strange tech and weaponry (including weaponry that can push you down a level of reality instead of hurting you), and much more.

There is one last bit of strangeness, which might be the part where the book teeters into the limits of what a reader can hold. And that is, none of these characters we meet are human, and most of them aren’t even bipedal with bilateral symmetry. And sometimes, going down into Phaslairs, one changes shape and form, too. So this book is populated entirely by creatures and sentients utterly alien.² The author makes it clear and impossible to miss that you aren't dealing with anyone or anything even vaguely human.

Put all this together, and add the author’s immersive and descriptive language, and I can’t help but wonder whether the book pushes that limit of how many dissociative genre elements a reader can reasonably hold in their head and still grok the book. I would never, ever, want to give this book to a new reader of science fiction. As it was, while I was reading it, I set aside the SF audiobook I was consuming at the time, because I did not want a gear clash in my brain between the far-future details and the kaleidoscopic worldbuilding of The Immeasurable Heaven.

Let me give you an extended quotation. This gives a sense of when the story decides to drop you headfirst into its world. Really, this is my final argument for the book. If you want to (or think you can handle) a text that is filled with passages like this, and the mental brainspace to keep the picture of it in your head, this book is for you.³

In the silt-suspended gloom something huge uncoiled. It scratched itself with a few lazy sweeps of its fins, scraping a peel of dead skin into the depths, before extending a tongue shaped like a fabulously intricate key and latching into the receiver. The apparatus glowed into life, startling a flitting ecosystem into the shadows and revealing the full, serpentine bulk of its user in a ghostly wash of light. The interior of the water-filled space lit up with every flicker and flash to reveal a cavern of gnarled, artificial stalactites and equipment that poked like instruments of torture into the creature’s lair.

The Translator, hundreds of meters from snout to tail, had never seen the galaxy with its own eyes, for it possessed none. It was likewise completely deaf, as most other species understood the term, relying instead on the single most sensitive organ for light-years around: a tongue equipped with twenty million pressure receptors per cubic centimetre, a tongue it had never seen.

Finally, the book is complete in one volume. We get a complete story here. (One thing that I appreciated, and in fact found necessary in the Amarathine Spectrum books was that in The Weight of the World and The Tropic of Eternity there were summaries of what had happened before. It would be triply necessary if this were the first in a series, but it is not.) It is a rich, complicated setting with non-human characters, and one of the widest canvases I’ve ever read in an SFF novel. As noted above, it’s not going to be for everyone, and not for readers who have not read science fiction before at all.⁴ The book teases that (if it does well in the eyes of the publisher, of course) the author could tell more stories in this vast universe. There are throwaway lines, references, allusions, and side notes that could be expanded into full novels. But there’s also ample space to tell entirely new stories.

Given the absolute trashfire that our world is lately, maybe you want an experience like few others, in a setting completely alien to our own. The Immeasurable Heaven is here for you. Coming out of this book is like emerging from a deep Phaslair into the Surface world, having experienced a realm (realms!) extraordinarily different from what you knew.

Highlights:

• Pushes the boundaries of comprehensibility in a SFF work. Requires careful attention due to overwhelming alienness and detail.
• Enormous canvas, one of the largest possible in science fiction—and makes very good use of it.
• Multiverse? Space opera? ¿Por qué no los dos?
• If you want to immersively escape the world, this book provides that in spades.

Reference: Geon, Caspar. The Immeasurable Heaven [Solaris, 2025].

¹ In theory, anyway. It is hypothesized that there are levels of reality, Phaslairs “above” the “Surface,” but that they are uninhabited by any life.
² The touchstone for this book, with its levels of reality, multiversal outlook, and the changing of bodies, is the recent Transmentation | Transience: Or, an Accession to the People’s Council for Nine Thousand Worlds by Darkly Lem. That book, too, with its enormous canvas and furious and fertile imagination, has a similar approach, where changing universes means changing bodies. That book mostly has its action on various planets or cities, although one universe has a long space-opera-verse chase scene involving spacecraft.
³ That makes me wonder and think. There are plenty of people who cannot visualize in their minds deeply. If I say “Picture an apple in your head,” some cannot see the apple, or see a very generic apple without detail, whereas there are people who can tell you what that apple smells and tastes like when you bite into it. I am moderately on that spectrum of sensory imagination, but know people who outrank me. Is this type of book harder for someone who is trying to handle all this detail? Or, conversely, are readers who can’t picture an apple the ones who would find the above easier, because they aren’t even trying to see the Translator’s lair?
⁴ I haven’t mentioned him to this point, but I think this is where Olaf Stapledon enters the chat, with vistas of time and space that this book dares to try. Stapledon’s is a much older and more compact style, and he would have told this story in a much shorter volume—but it would be just the ideas and not much of the meat. But that density of ideas and that vastness of time and space and willingness to really offer the reader that level of dissociation, that’s Stapledonian. This book follows proudly in that tradition even if its style is much more modern. But again: Stapledon is NOT for everyone. I daresay that if you don’t like Stapledon, this is not the book for you. The converse may also be true.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Film Review: Lilo & Stitch

If Disney live-action remakes were generally this good, they would still be making them

After the live-action Snow White bombed, Disney announced that it would be halting development on all future live-action remakes of its animated films. These live-action films were transparently cash grabs. Under capitalism, all commercially published art is a cash grab to somebody (not necessarily the artist); we know this, and for that reason, one of the greatest sins a film can make nowadays, in the age of digital reproduction à la Walter Benjamin, is to be an obvious cash grab. In that regard, the live-action remake of Lilo & Stitch is something of a zombie, the last shambling remnant of something that was vaguely abhorrent to begin with, and is clearly about to die. Even so, we are tempted to gawk at its remains, and even so, we go to see Lilo & Stitch in theaters.

When watching the opening scene on the Galactic Federation’s capital ship, the whole thing feels like it was made on a sugar high. It feels cartoonish, more so than the rest of the movie, as it is almost totally CGI, and more gallingly, the editing is extremely rushed. As soon as a line of dialogue ends, with a quip more often than not, the film cuts to the next shot. This is a persistent problem throughout the film, but it is most pronounced in the opening sequence. The camera, and by extension, the viewer, is given very little opportunity to breathe. Later in the movie, some shots could have been allowed to bask in the Hawaiian scenery, or have a moment of intimacy with any number of its characters. The film runs about 01:45, but after seeing this cut, I feel like another 15 to 20 minutes would have been justified so as to not feel like the film is running a sprint.

The plot, in broad strokes, is similar enough to the original for most of its runtime; it is the characters where there have been more substantive tweaks. I really liked Maia Kealoha as Lilo. She has superb comedic timing, without which several jokes simply would have crashed and burned in a manner not unlike the pod Stitch arrived in. She is also capable of great pathos, giving gravitas to the more sensitive moments, while still being a hellion as all children her age are (indeed, the way she gets back at Mertle in this film’s version of the beginning at the hula performance is, if anything, far more vicious than the original). She is a very good foil for this three-dimensional version of Stitch (a returning Chris Sanders, who provided his voice in the original film), who if anything is even more of a walking agent of chaos than before. It reminded me of James Mowry, protagonist of Eric Frank Russell’s 1958 novel Wasp, who is dropped on an alien planet with the express order of being a terrorist. Stitch, designed as a weapon, is something of an unwilling Mowry, but his orders, encoded in his DNA, manifest in his behavior anyway. He is also, fortunately, far more entertaining and far less goddamn irritating than the version of him seen riding a roller coaster in the previews at Regal cinemas.

This film changes the bumbling alien sidekicks Jumba and Pleakley from being obvious extraterrestrials in human clothing hunting for Stitch into technologically aided shapeshifters who don’t exactly understand how human beings behave. This change, I think, was ultimately for the best. There are bits in this movie where antics that would be funny in animation just look cartoonish (and not in a good way) in live action, but making these two characters apparent humans allows a new comedy of manners to enter the picture. I’m not entirely sure what to make of the fact that Pleakley, a male alien, is no longer in drag for his disguise in this film; I’m not sure how it could have been done tastefully to begin with.

Sydney Elizebeth Agudong portrays this film's version of Nani, who of the main characters is perhaps the most faithful to the original. She has the right balance of sharp adolescent wit, caustic fury at injustice, and deep, deep anxiety over her own fate that the role needed. But if her character is much the same, her arc is tinkered with, first subtly, then massively. One very good example of this is when the social worker says that she needs a new job or she will lose custody of her sister; in this incarnation, she finds a job doing something she loves, which is a key bit of support for her broader arc. It also recontextualizes one of the songs from the original movie, and in the best way possible.

Some characters are either added or changed in a substantial manner that moves them out of the way. Gantu is, regrettably, gone. There is a new social worker (Tia Carrere), who gets some good lines and makes the authority of the state seem not quite so horribly bleak. Fortunately, a version of Cobra Bubbles is here (Courtney Vance doing a pretty good Leslie Nielsen impression). One of the great writing missteps was giving this film’s version of David (Kaipo Dudoit) not much to do beyond saying funny things at the designated times; the banter and flirting between him and Nani in the original is much reduced here. He is made up for, fortunately, by a new character: David’s grandmother Tūtū (Amy Hill), who is established as an old family friend and neighbor of Nani and Lilo.

Now, I am going to spoil the ending, because there has been a lot of discourse about it, and it is worth discussing in some depth. In the original movie, Nani succeeds in keeping custody of Lilo, and overall Nani’s arc is primarily about being a caregiver and secondly about David. Here, she is given more depth as to her aspirations for her future, such as initially turning down a full ride to a prominent university on the American mainland so she can take care of Lilo. This is what sets up the change that has ultimately been the most controversial, for at the end, Nani ends up forfeiting custody of Lilo to Tūtū, leaving Tūtū, Lilo, and David to share a house while Nani goes to the mainland for college to study marine biology.

This has understandably made many fans of the original upset. Much of the original’s thematic skeleton is the Hawaiian idea of 'ohana, where families stick together and nobody is left behind. The new sequence of events does, on its surface, look like an abandonment, but I think that is a simplistic reading. Much of the social media discourse around the ending frames it as the state government ‘taking’ Lilo away from Nani, but the film portrays it as a far more mutual process that is built up to, through a new thematic emphasis as well as through Nani’s new narrative arc.

Much of the new film’s thematic work is about the crushing weight of poverty. After their parents died, Nani and Lilo live in a dilapidated shack where the former has to work several dead-end, degrading jobs not just to survive, but to raise a child. You see near the beginning that their house does not have a lot of food, for one, and few luxuries, so nothing like tea (as a joke in that sequence calls attention to). To be poor in America is to have your life interfered with in a million small ways by society and the state; the social worker is consistently an irritant, but she rarely brings with her anything that could actually alleviate this family’s poverty. You can see the pain in Nani’s eyes as she throws her full-ride scholarship letter in the garbage, knowing that a potential way out of poverty will have to slip from her grasp because of the immediate demands of childcare.

This is where I will risk sounding callous: the ending of the original movie was essentially a sentence of lifelong poverty for both Lilo and Nani, if we are being realistic. As native Hawaiians, they are more likely to be impoverished by other inhabitants of that archipelago. The demands of childcare would mean Nani would not have many opportunities to upskill for several years at least, and any path to do so may risk crushing debt. Furthermore, it did what a lot of Disney animated films have unintentionally done by encouraging a sort of martyr complex among young girls, telling them that their only value is in the care they give to others. Care is good and valuable, yes, but girls and women can, and should be encouraged to, have their own passions and their own ambitions for their lives beyond the domestic.

Much of Nani’s new arc is about just how taxing her life is, having to deal with the travails of poverty, of raising a child, and of dealing with the new arrival in her life, namely a furry blue alien terror weapon (as well as those who would like to take him away, and will hurt her and those people she loves to do so). Her entire bearing through this film is one of exasperation and of downright exhaustion. She, rationally, wants a better life than this, and she is almost denied, quite cruelly, a way to a better life. This is why I object to the characterization of the state ‘taking’ Lilo, for it is more accurately described as Nani realizing, correctly, that as a nineteen-year-old orphan, she is in far over her head in her current situation, and that she can do better for Lilo in the long run.

The reason why this new ending works is partially due to Nani’s new arc, but also due to the new character of Tūtū. The latter is a grandmother figure to both Nani and Lilo, as well as being a literal grandmother to David. She is already a member of the broader chosen family by the beginning of the movie, and so there is now another person who could naturally (by narrative logic) take stewardship of Lilo. She is what a lot of online conversation in this film ignores, for she is really the character who makes the whole thing plausible. She is trusted and loved by Nani and Lilo and is blood family with their friend David. As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child, and Lilo accepting Tūtū’s help ultimately comes off to me as a very mature decision, as much as it hurts in the moment. As a message to a young audience, it shows that it is okay, good even, to ask for help, and to accept help, and to know when you are being overwhelmed, for that is kinder to both yourself and the people around you.

In the long run, I can’t help but think that the ending is the kinder one for Lilo. Sure, they may be physically separated, but with modern telecommunications they can talk regularly. Like many Hawaiians, Nani is going to the mainland to better her future, and with her new education she may well get a job where she can not only afford to live comfortably, but also care for Lilo far more effectively. If Lilo is six in this film, Nani will graduate when she is ten or eleven, which means that it is very possible that Nani will be able to provide her younger sister with an adolescence far more comfortable than her childhood. This is not nothing, given the brutality of poverty, as well as Hawaii’s current housing crisis. It is, I dare say, a great kindness.

I expected to write a brutally negative review of this movie. Walking out of the theater, I was surprised I didn’t hate it. The film ultimately ends up justifying its existence artistically (financially, I’m certain Disney is very happy right now, as this has already outgrossed Thunderbolts*) in a way many remakes simply don’t. Thematically, I would argue it is more adult. Visually, it takes advantage of both live-action and CGI to make Hawaii absolutely beautiful, and its performances provide an energy of their own. If all remakes Disney made were as good as this, they would still be making more of them, which is both great praise for this film, and great condemnation of Disney for getting into this mess in the first place.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Liveship Traders Book 3: Ship of Destiny

A magnificent tapestry of genius, marred by an unfortunate dog turd in the corner

Cover art by Stephen Youll

Robin Hobb is rightly acknowledged to be a wizard of characterization, and I have seen many people opine that The Liveship Traders is the best entry in the Realm of the Elderlings series. I agree with both statements. I cannot stress enough how much I agree with these statements. In fact, I agree with them so hard that I'm not actually going to go into much depth about characterization per se here, because they have already been discussed by everyone else with an ounce of sense and taste. Instead I'll talk about two other elements of this fantastic book, by this fantastic author, the culmination of this fantastic series. To wit, I'm going to poke at what I think underlies her fantastic characterization, and then also dissect why That One Thing about this book feels like such a betrayal of the otherwise untainted fantasticness. Be warned: this will include discussions of rape.

But first, let's revel in what works. My argument here is that the characters in this book sing so sweetly because they're all scaffolded by a thematically consistent structure: deal-making.  It's in the title, actually: The Liveship Traders. These people, the inhabitants of Bingtown, live and die by trading. They founded their city on a deal with the Satrap of Jamaillia; their current troubles originate in the Satrap's decision to renege on that deal; and as we find out, the solution to their troubles requires making new deals. Everything is deals. And every deal, in this book, is centered around a tripartite choice:

You can preserve your life. You can preserve your dignity. Or you can preserve your identity. Which do you concede, and which do you protect? Not every deal allows you to preserve all three.

Everyone comes up against this choice, at one point or another. And the decisions they make as they negotiate their way through the story forms the foundation of their character.

Let us start with Malta Vestrit, who finally reaches the apex of her arc in this book. We have already seen her first steps in deal-making in Mad Ship, most notably her negotiation with Tintaglia, the dragon. In that deal, she agreed to help free Tintaglia from her buried cocoon in return for Tintaglia's help rescuing her father (Kyle Haven, ptooey). In other words, Malta's first bargain is a straightforward trade: survival for survival.

But as her development proceeds, her deals become more complex, making use of the full tripartite structure of values. In the aftermath of the earthquake that indirectly frees Tintaglia, Malta has been flung together with the deeply pathetic and incompetent Satrap of Jamaillia, Cosgo; and throughout this final book she must make deals of increasing complexity, all of which require compromises between survival, dignity, and identity. First, when she and Cosgo are picked up by some Chalcedeans, the stakes are small and personal: she must swallow her own dignity and hide her identity, pretending to be Cosgo's slave girl, because only by propping up his own dignity can she ensure his survival. And only if he survives, and is recognized as the Satrap, can he have the power to protect her, ensuring her own survival. Later, when Cosgo meets Captain Red, one of Kennit's pirates, Malta again takes the lead in bargaining, this time not just for personal survival, but to enlist the aid of the pirates to return Cosgo to his throne. Cosgo is fully ignorant of this calculus. He fumes, "'This is degrading! You would reduce my life and the fate of the throne to the squabbling of merchants... But what else should I expect from a Trader's daughter? Your whole life has been buying and selling." Malta, taking no shit from him, returns, "Merchants broker goods. Satraps and nobles broker power. You, noble Magnadon, deceive yourself if you believe there is a great difference in these mechanisms" (pg. 580-581). She is a Bingtowner through and through in this moment: She recognizes that everything can be negotiated, at all levels, from personal survival to the fate of nations. Indeed, when Cosgo eventually meets Kennit, it is Malta who leads the negotiations for a treaty between the Pirate Isles and Jamaillia proper. She is magnificent. All hail Queen Malta!

We get the same tripartite deal structure with non-human characters. Consider the sea serpents, who we know now are baby dragons, on a desperate quest for their old spawning grounds. They eventually find their way to the liveship Vivacia, who, recall, is now under the control of Kennit, and also has a dead dragon in her. The serpents make a deal with this dead dragon, who calls herself Bolt. Bolt agrees to lead the serpents to their spawning grounds, if they lend their strength to Bolt's ends—which, at the moment, involve serving Kennit. Sea serpent armies are useful things for pirates on a mission, after all. But the serpents are uncertain that Bolt will be able to follow through on her end of the bargain, because, as one serpent says, "To help us, she will have to beg help of the humans. While she insists she is all dragon, I do not think she can humble herself to do that" (pg. 456). In other words, the serpents will make a deal that concedes their dignity and identity for survival, but they are not certain that Bolt can do the same. Bolt is already dead; Bolt does not stand to gain survival, so the serpents doubt that she would concede her identity and dignity as she must do to uphold her promise. She has nothing to gain by this bargain.

This tripartite structure of bargaining becomes more complex in Serilla's character arc. When we first met her in Book 2, she'd been envisioning a future for herself in Bingtown, that magical city that she'd studied from afar for so long. However, en route to Bingtown, she disagrees with Cosgo, and Cosgo responds by withdrawing his protection from her. She suffers exactly the fate that Malta negotiates so skillfully to avoid: without Cosgo's protection, there's nothing to prevent the ship's captain from kidnapping her, an unprotected woman, and holding her as a sex slave. (The captain is from Chalced—the super-duper sexist slaving bad nation. Not to be too ethnically essentialist about it, but boy does Chalced suck.) It's rough, and it leaves a mark. Even after Serilla manages to escape the captain's power and scrape together some sort of power for herself as the voice of the Satrap in Bingtown, she is haunted by what she had to endure. Yes, she survived, but she survived because she prioritized survival, and in so doing gave up her identity and dignity.

The Serilla who escapes the Chalcedean captain is no longer that same accomplished scholar and respected voice in Jamaillia's government—and that loss explains a lot of what she does in her brief period in power in Bingtown. She bargains with the wrong people, and makes the wrong deals. Rather than seeking to find a path for the good of Bingtown as a whole, smoothing over the roiled waters of New Trader against Old Trader, Satrap loyalists against conniving Jamaillian traitors, she instead makes deals that protect her position and status as the voice of the Satrap. She has survived, and is now scrabbling to recover dignity—but at the expense of her identity. Or maybe not! Whether she was ever the expert on Bingtown matters that she fancied herself to be is an open question, but after the Chalcedean captain was through with her, she is emphatically not that person anymore. Her character arc is about how she can regain an identity for herself, renegotiate it, in light of what she endured.

Serilla's arc, as well as the importance of being willing to renegotiate one's identity, is mirrored by Bingtown as a whole. Bingtown's original foundation was a concession of dignity and survival against identity: they agreed to crushing fees and tariffs owed to Jamaillia, and died early deaths for generations, in order to build the Bingtown that we now have. There's a lovely moment early in the book featuring a meeting of the Town Council, when it seems that Bingtown's troubles are purely internal. Ronica Vestrit arrives early at the neglected Traders' Concourse, whose upkeep was traditionally the responsibility of Trader families. It's fallen into disrepair, but Ronica begins cleaning it, and slowly other Traders arrive and begin to help her. When the meeting begins, Serilla expects to control matters (insisting on her dignity), but the Traders themselves don't quite realize that, and their old habits emerge: consensus-seeking, self-governance, shared responsibilities. Bingtown's core identity asserts itself, despite Serilla's attempts at control.

So, naturally, in proper Hobbian fashion, things promptly get worse. A Chalcedean fleet, allied with the conspirators who kidnapped the Satrap and set off the whole mess in the first place, arrives to besiege their waters. In the same way that Serilla was held captive by the Chalcedean captain, so too is Bingtown now besieged by the Chalced fleet; and in the same way that Serilla had to concede identity and dignity for survival, so too must Bingtown consider what it will give up in the face of Chalced and the conspirators' challenge.

Roed Caern, an Old Trader who allies with Serilla, suggests that preserving the 'real' Bingtown, the heart of Bingtown's identity, means preserving the Old Traders and only the Old Traders. The New Traders are not Bingtown, he says. They don't live in Bingtown, they don't die in Bingtown, they don't pay the price in survival and dignity that 'real' Bingtowners pay. They live in Chalced, they are loyal to Chalced. They do not deserve to remain in Bingtown—especially not now when Chalced is the aggressor! And given what we, the readers, have seen of the prices that Old Traders have paid—the plagues, the deformities, the early deaths—and given what we've seen of how horrible Chalced is, this is a persusasive argument. Until, of course, you hear Roed's proposal: gather together the New Traders, force them to leave, and slaughter them all if they refuse.

It's easy to tell a story about remaining true to one's identity in the face of challenges, as Bingtown did when they cleaned the Trader's Concourse; but what makes Hobb's take so much subtler is how she pokes at the underside of that platitude: what is one's identity, truly? What does it mean to be true to it? What kinds of atrocities can be condoned in defense of it?

Later, Ronica pursues an alternate course. She meets with the rest of the groups that live in and around Bingtown: the Rain Wild Traders, the Three Ships Immigrants, the Tattooed (i.e. enslaved people from Chalced who have been imported by New Traders). She makes a different deal with them: if they rally together to defend Bingtown against Chalced and claim its independence, in return the new Bingtown will be kinder to them. Slavery will be truly outlawed, not just relabeled 'indentured servitude,' and they will be able to own land and build their own lives. This alliance is the opposite of Roed Caern's offer: concede the idea of 'traditional' Bingtown identity, and in turn its people—all its people—gain dignity and survival.

But this is Robin Hobb, remember. Such a lovely conclusion would be too easy, so instead we get a dragon. Tintaglia has very different ideas about human dignity and identity from these Bingtowners. Humans are naturally subservient to dragons, thinks Tintaglia. Of course they must praise her and serve her and acknowledge her as their overlord. But wait a moment, think the Bingtowners, dragons can do useful things like chasing Chalcedean warships away from Bingtown harbour. So the Bingtowners decide, in inimitable Bingtown fashion, to Make A Deal. And in this deal, we see them concede their dignity, bowing down before Tintaglia, in favor of survival. And their identity, so newly renegotiated, doesn't survive untouched either. Bingtown may claim independence from Jamaillia, but its self-governance will not be complete, because now humans live in a world of dragons, who will always claim mastery over them. It is a bit of a blow to this new city-state, but they are Bingtowners still; and Bingtowners negotiate. And so they bargain with Tintaglia, and in so doing, they illuminate the core part of Bingtown identity that has been preserved: they are traders. They make deals.

Do you see? Do you see how it all ties together? Everything is bargains, negotiations, about what is conceded and what is defended. It structures the plots; it structures the characters. It is a web of intricacy and brilliance.

And because it is so intricate and brilliant and consistent and structured, I must now take a moment to talk about Kennit. Specifically, Kennit's decision to rape Althea towards the end of the book.

What?

Why?

First, it was entirely gratuitous. You can just feel how every scene involving the rape, the lead-up, and the aftermath could easily be chopped out of the book entirely. It sits very uneasily on top of this otherwise tightly woven tapestry of the narrative. It's like a dog turd on the carpet. It doesn't match, and it makes everything around it gross.

But second, it's wildly out of character for Kennit. Everyone says so. Althea says, "He raped me," and they say, "Kennit? He would never!" Yes, this is a whole Believe Women plot point, and yes, there is a place for such plots in books. But not, I maintain, in this particular book. Because I myself do not believe Kennit would do such a thing. I saw him do it on the page, and still I thought, "Kennit? No! He would never." It goes against everything about his character that we've come to know so well throughout the book.

(Arguably) Worse, it undermines the effectiveness of the end of his character arc. His journey, the secrets of his childhood, his bond with Paragon, his identity as a Ludluck, leading up to his eventual death—all that could be incredibly moving and powerful: the complicated legacy of a complicated man who died a complicated death. His fantastic character arc, as we discover, turns out to be built around his own negotiation of the foundational tripartite bargain structure: his childhood identity is erased so that he can survive; and his adult identity is built around a ferocious defense of dignity, because his survival came at such a cost. Even his bond with Paragon is core to that, because Paragon preserved all that remains of his identity, in keeping him alive during his horrific abuses at the hands of Igrot the pirate. Kennit dies in Paragon's arms. How can this not bring tears to your eyes?

Well, the instant Kennit becomes a rapist, I no longer care about it. Any of it. All that character work, wasted. I look at it and think, "Huh, what an incredibly skillful revelation of his motivations and backstory. Gosh, I really wish I cared." But I don't. Rapists don't deserve that from me.

And I just don't understand why it's there in the first place! If the goal here was to make him a villain, rather than just an antagonist, we've already got thematically consistent hints that he's a bad dude. First, he negotiates in bad faith. He does not intend to keep his bargains with Malta. Leave aside all the piracy and killing of people; a man's clearly a villain if he negotiates in bad faith with a Bingtowner! And, more subtlely, in re-inventing himself, he does not renegotiate an authentic identity, but builds an entirely new one, while insisting that Paragon, the only clue to his old name, must be destroyed. That's not cool. You don't get to sidestep a whole third of the tripartite foundation of this book's thematic structure! And you definitely shouldn't be killing a liveship. In a trilogy called The Liveship Traders, a person who kills liveships and does not trade honestly is pretty clearly the villain. He does not need to be a rapist.

So: Kennit-the-rapist was a very unfortunate decision. It is so wildly unfortunate, and so clearly uncomfortable with everything else in the whole-ass trilogy, that I have decided in my head-canon that perhaps it's not Hobb's fault. Maybe the publishers didn't trust Hobb or her readers, and wanted to force her to shove in some gratuitous on-the-nose signal that Kennit is a villain, because heaven forbid a book written in the 90s not have a rape scene in it; and goodness knows we can't trust readers to pick up on who the villain is if we don't bonk them over the head with it. And it is out of the question for a book to have a complicated antagonist instead of a villain! Hence the rape. Thusly I have decided in my revisionist-head-history.

So I shall step around this turd on the carpet, and instead admire the colours, the pattern, the wool, and the complexity of the design that make up the rest of this book. The master-weaver Robin Hobb cannot be held responsible for the leavings of an incontinent dog.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Ship of Destiny [Bantam, 2000].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social

Andor and the Reimagining of Star Wars

Star Wars, as a franchise, is almost 50 years old. It remains extraordinarily popular—as much or more than any other cinematic universe. At the same time, nearly all Star Wars properties are divisive in some way.

As I noted in the introduction to our special series Star Wars Subjectivities:

...search around the internet and you'll find many a lengthy opinion piece on which Star Wars properties are good and which ones are bad. Some will be Original Trilogy fanatics like me, others will tell you how secretly great the Prequels are. Others still will opine on how The Last Jedi is really a Top 3 Star Wars film sandwiched between two cinematic commercials for Disney theme park rides.

This is not only true for the films, but also for the various television shows, animated series, video games, books and comics that bear the Star Wars logo. Except Andor. I have yet to meet someone who loves Star Wars but dislikes Andor. Sure, I've met people who found the first season a bit dry and joyless (as I did, at the time), but not one fan who thinks it's bad. Nearly everyone—fans and critics alike—agree that it's good. Many think it's the best Star Wars property ever made.

I'm too heavily invested in the Original Trilogy to go that far—after all, it did change the way we think about movies. But after the masterpiece that is season 2, I think there's a serious case to be made for Andor. I want to delve deeper into why this show is so compelling to so many people—and, in the spirit of Star Wars Subjectivities, why it is so compelling to me.

(Before getting started, I'd like to note that Phoebe has written extensively on the show, including a great review of Andor Season 1, as well as an essay for Star Wars Subjectivities on Andor as community action—and is currently running a weekly review series breaking down each episode (ep 1, ep 2, ep 3, ep 4, ep 5). All are must reads, if you ask me. This will be a complementary take.)

Andor is a grown-up story for grown-ups

Star Wars has always tried to thread the needle between its two core audiences: adults and children. I discovered the Original Trilogy as a boy—and it captivated me the way media only can when you are that age. But the genius of the Original Trilogy is that it continues to captivate as you grow older. However, when George Lucas launched the prequel trilogy in 1999, it was obvious to all of us who were now teenagers or adults that these films were not aimed at us, but at a new generation of children. At Cannes in 2024, Lucas said that people like me were just grumpy because we weren't looking at the films through 10-year old eyes.

It's true that I never saw the prequels through 10-year old eyes, but I have consumed a metric ton of children's media over the years—as an adult—and can say with confidence that The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones are not good, not even by the relaxed standards of children's media. As I wrote about The Phantom Menace:

The writing is bad. The acting is bad. The direction is bad. The production is bad. The pacing is bad. The design is bad. The effects are bad. The characters are bad. The plot is bad. The concept is... well... okay, maybe this could have actually been a good movie, in theory, but unfortunately... the execution is, in a word, bad. Like, bad on a very basic, fundamental level.

Or as Vance more succinctly put it in his piece on Attack of the Clones:

Of all the millions of stories that could exist in that galaxy far, far away, Lucas picked the wrong ones to tell in these prequels.

Nearly everyone, including yours truly, agrees that Revenge of the Sith is a much better film. The story is actually interesting—and highly political, weaving the tragedy of Anakin's turn to the dark side alongside the broader tragedy of the Republic's dissolution and the death of democracy. It has its cringe kid content moments ("Nooooooooo!"), but ultimately Revenge of the Sith aspires to be a serious film for whoever is watching, regardless of age. Like the Original Trilogy, Revenge of the Sith successfully threads the needle between its core audiences.

Most Star Wars content since has attempted the same feat. In the Disney era, this has worked sometimes (e.g. Mandalorian, Ahsoka) but more often not (e.g. Solo, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan). You could argue that success just boils down to quality, but the fact is that designing content for the broadest possible audience usually leads to bland, mediocre fare that is passable to everyone but not great to anyone.

Perhaps for this reason, Disney has recently grown more and started to develop properties specifically for each audience. I'm focusing on Andor here, but Skeleton Crew is also worth mentioning—it's a true kids' show designed for parents to watch with their little ones. And it's good!

Meanwhile, Andor is a mature show written for adults, a complex political drama set against a dark background, featuring hard-boiled characters who shoot first and don't fight according to Queensbury rules. There are no adorable creatures, no comic relief characters and no Jedi. Instead, there are real people struggling against very real oppression, making tough choices that don't always work out—and which almost always come at a high cost. Yet it is also a moving, sensitive and stirring portrayal of those people and the terrible world they were born into. I'm still astonished that this is a Star Wars story—and that it is almost the exact Star Wars story I've long wanted to see told.

The best Star Wars stories enhance the Original Trilogy; the worst cheapen it

This is something I've been chewing on since we ran Star Wars Subjectivities back in 2023. The Original Trilogy is the keystone for the Star Wars universe. All subsequent works—whether in film, television or other media—are essentially contextualizing those films. More precisely, they try to either (a) help you understand why things happen the way they do in the Original Trilogy; or (b) explore the aftereffects and consequences of what happens in the Original Trilogy. The good stuff adds richness, depth and gratifying exposition to a story with a lot of whitespace, or render something silly, well, less silly—in all cases enhancing the Original Trilogy.

Consider this example: In A New Hope, we learn that rebel spies managed to obtain plans for the Empire's Death Star. When Darth Vader boards the Tantive IV, he is specifically looking for those plans—which Princess Leia gives to the droid R2D2, with instructions to hand them over to the Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi. The plans demonstrate a fundamental weakness in the Death Star's design, which the Rebel Alliance hopes to exploit, thus winning a first major victory in their rebellion against the Empire.

Rogue One tells the story of how those rebel spies obtain the plans and transfer them to the Tantive IV. Andor then gives us the backstory for one of its main characters, Cassian Andor. But it doesn't only do that. We get a deep dive into Mon Mothma, the political leader of the Rebel Alliance—who has a small but compelling role in Return of the Jedi. And we get to see the Rebellion—and the Empire—from a range of perspectives, from Senators to regular people (none of whom, I'll note, are lightsaber-wielding Force sensitives of destiny).

In every way possible, Andor fleshes out the story and world presented in the Original Trilogy, enhancing our understanding of what happens, why it happens and who is important to the story it tells.

Contrast this with the Disney-era Sequel Trilogy. In The Force Awakens, director JJ Abrams eschews the opportunity to explore the New Republic's struggles to govern under the power vacuum left by the Empire's dissolution (which all of us who participated in this roundtable were keen on), in favor of... just remaking A New Hope with new, less interesting characters and cheaper-looking sets. As Haley put it, Abrams remade A New Hope for Gen Z. And that's probably the nicest way to put it.

The Last Jedi is more daring, but its aspirations are weighed down by inconsistent writing and direction, plot holes and—again—the misguided urge to just remake a film that everyone already loves (in this case, The Empire Strikes Back). As I wrote in a (fairly grumpy) review back in 2017:

This brings us to the on-going Disney trilogy, which so far has presented a vision of... the exact same one as the Original Trilogy. Actually, there is a mild subversion of the original trilogy’s meta-narrative, but one so mild that it's barely a critique. Once again, we have a ragtag group of plucky individuals who confront immense power and (are sure to) triumph against all odds. And the films hit you over the head with the referential frying pan. Starkiller Base from The Force Awakens is the Death Star, but bigger! Kylo Ren is Darth Vader, but emo! Luke’s island is Dagobah, salt planet is Hoth, casino planet is Cloud City and so forth and so on. It's the same old same old, only with crappier design and little romance—the kind of thing dreamed up by corporate executives with checklists in hand and theme park rides in mind.*

So how does the Sequel Trilogy function as Star Wars canon? Not well—and especially not well when the big reveal occurs in Rise of Skywalker (which all of us in the Disney Star Wars roundtable agreed is the worst of the three). All it achieves is to make the Original Trilogy less consequential in terms of canon, while rendering the few redeeming bits of The Last Jedi null and void in favor of insipid fan service that didn't even appeal to the fans who complained about The Last Jedi. I can say one good thing about it, though: it features such an unsatisfying ending that this instantly rendered all those contrarian critiques of Return of the Jedi null and void. After all, why would anyone complain about that ending when there's another one that's so drab, colorless and utterly devoid of life?

We finally see the Empire for what it really is

Back to Andor, this is the first major piece of Star Wars media where we truly see the Empire for what it is. And I don't mean that we get a quantitatively higher level of grimdark badness (the Empire destroys a planet in A New Hope, after all, and it's hard to get much worse than that). What I mean is this: in Andor, we get to see how Imperial rule is experienced by noncombatants; we get to see what animates the Imperial project; and we come to understand why the Empire behaves the way it does.

These are not zealots of the 20th-century grimoire, animated by nationalistic hatreds, a radically remade society or a murderous desire for purity. Rather, the Empire is more or less a traditional empire. It is a fundamentally extractive enterprise, the way Dutch colonialism was fundamentally extractive in present-day Indonesia—that is to say, the Empire is motivated by the straightforward desire to take and hoard.

For example, in Season 2, we learn that Director Krennic needs a mineral called kalkite for his top secret Death Star project; a rich source of the mineral exists beneath the crust of the planet Ghorman, a sparsely populated colony world whose leadership had backed the Separatists during the Clone Wars, but mining the kalkite from Ghorman would render the planet unstable—and unsuitable for habitation. Krennic gathers a council of officials from the various military branches, directorates of the Imperial bureaucracy and, of course, the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB) to discuss their options. The meeting is straightforwardly designed to evoke the 1942 Wannsee Conference, where a group of 15 Nazi officials decided to exterminate Europe's Jewish population (as Tony Gilroy himself has stated).

But while there's no doubt that the Empire will commit genocide, if it decides that doing so will further its goals, the Empire isn't motivated by any specific hatred for the people of Ghorman. Rather, the people of Ghorman are an inconvenience, as is the need for their removal—so the conspirators decide to look for alternatives, but ready a plan to reduce any blowback they might face if they ultimately decide to commit genocide and the mass ethnic cleansing of the planet.

Despite the aesthetic similarities between the Empire and Nazi Germany, this is not at all like the Holocaust, which was the culmination of several decades of consistent, ideological antisemitism from a political party founded on the premise that Jews were to blame for just about everything. It is, I'd argue, much more like the atrocities committed by both land-based and seafaring empires: there was something the empire wanted, there were people in the way—and if there was no more expedient way to take it, they would deploy extreme levels of violence to get it. This is bad, by the way—very bad; just not bad in the specific way the Nazis were bad, or as consistently bad as the Nazis were.

For me this as a refreshing take. Popular media routinely ignores 95% of human history while obsessing over a few historical cases, relating anything and everything to said cases. But there is a lot more material to draw on, and the fact that Andor steps out from the shadow of the ever-present Nazi analogy to portray the Empire in ways that evoke other things is, to me, one of the things that give the show depth.

Andor is about people making difficult choices

One of the show's main subplots focuses on the radicalization of Mon Mothma, who by Return of the Jedi has become the leader of the Rebel Alliance. But when we are introduced to Mon Mothma, she is if anything a beneficiary of the Empire. That is not to say she supports the Empire (we know she does not), but that her class privilege—being a wealthy, connected human from the core worlds—gives her the option to pretend the evil isn't happening and keep living her life of luxury. She does not, but we see, by the end, most members of her social circle will choose to follow the path of least resistance.

This contrasts with life outside the core worlds, where societies are mixed (human and non-human), few people are rich, life is harsh and the decision to rebel is more often imposed than chosen. As it is for Cassian Andor. Resistance, though, comes in many forms—and requires many kinds of sacrifices.

Andor portrays a range of resistance fighters—from the patrician senators Mon Mothma and Bail Organa to art dealer turned spymaster Luthen Rael and his indefatigable protégé Kleya Marki (played by a scene-stealing Elizabeth Dulau); from the hard-boiled Cassian Andor and Lezine to Supervisor Jung, Luthen's mole within the ISB. None are "chosen," none are Force sensitives; all are simply people trying to do the right thing as best they can under terrible circumstances. These are heroes every resistance movement can claim, from the mighty to the ordinary. All play their part, at great cost, because they cannot simply stand by.

Andor isn't just great Star Wars; it's great science fiction

If it isn't clear already, I see Andor as a triumph. It is—easily, in my view—the best Star Wars story since the Original Trilogy. It achieves this feat by taking bigger, bolder risks than any other film or series since Return of the Jedi hit theaters in 1983.

But it isn't only one of the best Star Wars stories ever told—it is also one of the best science fiction stories ever developed for television. Indeed, if you were to swap out all the Star Wars content and replace it with standard space opera content, it would be just as effective a story. This is rarely true, even for the Star Wars stories I love. It is very difficult for me to see, to cite one example, how The Mandalorian would work outside a Star Wars context—and I love The Mandalorian.

Hats off, then, to Tony and Dan Gilroy, to Diego Luna, Stellan Skarsgård, Genevieve O'Reilly, Elizabeth Dulau, and to everyone else involved in the making of this absolute masterpiece.

***

(My view is not an institutional one. There are other ways of looking at all these films and shows, which are well represented across our flock. Haley loves the prequels—all the prequels. Paul enjoyed The Force Awakens—even I did the first time around, as did Joe. Arturo has argued that The Last Jedi is significant, in that it redefines what it means to be a Jedi—and then poses a novel theory, that the film is about the meaning of fandom. It's definitely an interesting theory, one worth engaging with.) 

***

POSTED BY: The G—purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a Feather  founder/administrator, since 2012.

Rebellions Are Built on Hope: Andor S2E5

 Disaster is around every corner for Cassian and his comrades

In episode four, “I Have Friends Everywhere,” Cassian goes off to Ghorman undercover as a fashion designer while Syril plays double agent with the Ghorman Front. Meanwhile, Wilmon is working with Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) as an engineer to help him steal fuel, his position becoming more precarious as Saw considers killing him. Luthen and Kleya are also in trouble as they realize one of their listening devices is in danger of being found, and they must extract it at a party that will include high-ranking Imperial officers.

In the middle episode of this arc primarily focused on Ghorman, we get to see what makes Cassian one of Luthen’s prized agents as he goes undercover as an excited, young fashion designer on a rite-of-passage trip to the famous Ghorman, but in reality, he’s assessing the Ghorman Front for Luthen. Diego Luna’s acting brilliance is on full display as Cassian turns on and off his cover character and uses the disarming personality of Varian Skye to encourage information from the bellhop, for instance, who was present at the Tarkan Massacre as a youth and recounts the experience of people filling the square outside the hotel’s windows: “We thought there was safety in numbers.” Even as the square filled with people, including children, Tarkan still landed his ship, massacring the protestors.

This moment is a theme of the episode in some ways—a naiveté about the Empire and what lengths they will go to. This idea is repeated when the leader of the Ghorman Front, Carro Rylanz, still can’t accept that what is happening to Ghorman is being done purposefully, and even suggests to Syril: “Many of us believe the Emperor has no idea what’s being done on his behalf.” Again, showrunner Tony Gilroy and his team hit on a real feeling under occupation, especially for someone like Carro Rylanz, a wealthy business owner and politician. He cannot accept that the pain being caused is by design.

In the last episode, viewers were primed to see the Ghorman Front as inexperienced as they welcomed Syril into their group a little too quickly, which is confirmed by Cassian. In a wonderfully acted scene, he sits in a café in character as Varian Skye, and Carro’s daughter Enza (Alaïs Lawson) walks up to him, welcoming him to the Ghorman, and invites herself to sit. Once some other people nearby leave, Cassian breaks character and says she just risked everyone she loves on the assumption that he is who he says he is, pointing out her inexperience and hurry. He says, “People die rushing.” To which she responds, “It’s hard to be patient when your world is falling apart.”

I’ve already seen people posting about the power of this line, but almost nobody has pointed to Cassian’s line, which is the more important concept. In moments of struggle, there’s a great surge of energy, which we are seeing right now in the U.S. and in different parts of the world, and often, this new burst of energy is from the inexperienced. With this new energy also comes urgency over the issue that inspired people to get involved, but without listening to those who have been doing the work, that urgency can be dangerous, whether it’s breaking security protocols or trying to do too much and causing burnout. In Cassian’s case, there are operational security concerns if the Ghorman Front is captured, that could lead back to Luthen and the Axis network. Cassian ultimately discourages them from their plan to attack transports carrying weapons to the armory they believe is being built in town, because it would endanger the group, which prompts the leader Carro to say, “You’re not much of a revolutionary, are you?” Cassian agrees, and in some ways, it’s true. He’s not their version of what they want out of revolution, which is Ghorman safe. Cassian has a longer and larger battle in mind. Ghorman may be part of that, but currently, their goals do not align.

This discussion of revolution contrasts with one of the great monologues of the show. Much like in season one, Gilroy and his team still manage to seamlessly work in monologues or speeches that are beautifully written and manage to stick in my head, whether it’s Nemik’s speech (“Freedom is a pure idea…”) or, in this episode, Saw Guerra’s story about becoming addicted to huffing fuel fumes.

During this arc, we have an extended look at Saw Guerra and his loyal band. While in contrast with the carefully quaffed Luthen, Saw’s band is intensely loyal to the point they don’t blink when he kills an Imperial spy in their midst and provides proof of his treachery. At first, Wilmon seems offput by their intensity, but he still helps them steal fuel, even if he is being threatened to some degree.

The device used to steal the fuel takes intense concentration to run, and while Wilmon is sweating over the variations, Saw waits, monologuing in the background about his childhood, when he was forced to work a labor camp. Wilmon, wearing protective equipment, successfully opens up the pipeline, and when the fuel fumes smoke out, Saw breathes them in, to Wilmon’s horror, which prompts Saw to say one of the most memorable lines of the show: “Revolution is not for the sane.”

Saw goes on to say that he essentially knows and believes that he will die trying to overthrow the Empire, and that sense of being alive in this moment, ready to burn for the revolution, is vital. In his own way, Luthen expressed a similar sentiment earlier in the episode when trying to encourage Bix, saying he would win or die trying. For Luthen and Saw, and their followers, they know the revolution extends beyond their lifetimes. This sense of scale and purpose is what the Ghorman Front lacks. For them, this is a blip, a disturbance they are fighting against so they can go back to their normal lives. They cannot see that, as long as the Empire stands, there will never be a normal for Ghorman.

POSTED BY: Phoebe Wagner (she/they) is an author, editor, and academic writing and living at the intersection of speculative fiction and environmentalism.