[Editor’s note: The recap of episode five publishes April 30.]

It’s worth remembering, from time to time, that the first thing we ever saw Cassian Andor do—both times we’ve been introduced to him, in fact—was decide to kill a man who was completely at his mercy. The first (last?) time, in the opening minutes of Rogue One, the decision seemed near-automatic: unreliable informant, no easy way to extract him without compromising the plan, a few soothing words, and blam! But I think a lot more about the second, earlier time we met this guy, when he was just a scared kid getting drenched while looking for his sister on Morlana One. The first kill in that scene from “Kassa” is unintentional, just murderously bad luck. But when I think about what Diego Luna does that’s special in this part, I think about Cass’ face as he holds the gun on that second security guard. He’s running the numbers, trying to figure out if there’s a way out of this that doesn’t leave two bodies in the street. And when he lands on the ugly answer, there’s not a lick of hesitation at all.

Not everyone’s built like that. Take Bix Caleen, who’s spent the last year trying to adapt to the killer Rebel mindset and who is falling apart more surely by the moment. (Welcome back to Andor, by the way. We’re now living in 3 BBY—which, for those of you less deeply nerdy, means three years before some cocky moisture farmer will become the galaxy’s hero by blowing up a giant planet-killing superweapon using plans Cassian Andor will die in obscurity to procure.) On paper, Bix and Cassian are in a good place, post-time-jump: They’re together, deeply in love, and even operating with a thin veneer of security, living anonymously in an apartment on Corcuscant while not busy doing jobs for Luthen. But Bix’s torture-based PTSD is only getting worse, now blending together with guilt over her own rising bodycount from her work as an Axis agent. She and Cassian are both trying to make it work, her reaching for whatever shreds of normalcy she can find (like trying to turn their safe house into an actual home), him encouraging her to be open about her pain. But one of the reasons Cassian is a good spy is that he’s spent his whole life living in a mindset where the lives of others are disposable, if it means protecting what he cares about. Bix isn’t there, and I suspect we’re going to spend the next two episodes watching that inability to adapt lead her to her death.

Things are, at least ostensibly, more cheerful on Ghorman, a planet so idyllically European that it seems to have even worked some of the stick from deep out of Syril Karn’s ass. (I didn’t buy it for a minute, mind you; Syril loves that stick.) If Andor is going to re-set the table every three episodes this season, I have to credit it for at least setting out an appealing tableau this time: The glimpses of Ghorman’s streets and people we get here resist the urge to go full Planet Of Hats while still feeling like a distinct place, with just enough real-world signifiers to make it clear what kind of Other we’re meant to view it as. Syril is now, to his mother’s dismay, the head of the local Bureau Of Standards office on the planet, where he’s careful to say, in very clear tones for the benefit of anybody listening, that “He Likes Ghorman!” and “The Emperor Is Being Too Hard On This Place!” It’s all a con, of course, as is his apparent separation from Meero, who’s now operating as his handler for an off-the-books effort to infiltrate the Ghorman Front. There are still tensions at play here—notably, Dedra shuts down efforts to bring Syril’s early findings to her bosses at the ISB, stifling his desperate need to Be Of Use. But I’m so enamored with Kyle Soller’s performance in this part that I can’t help but be delighted by this whole development: He’s such an unlikely, earnest little weirdo that it’ll be fascinating to see him play a spy, especially as the Front presents their very real grievances against Palpatine’s encroachments. Is there a conscience buried somewhere beneath the immaculate haircut, an ability to perceive a difference between Imperial policy and what’s actually right? I have no idea, and finding out is going to be an awful lot of fun.

Meero, meanwhile, is harder to get a read on, as usual. She’s stuck in the doghouse at the ISB, overlooked in meetings and watching her former subordinate Heert slowly botch the Axis investigation. We know it’s because she’s getting her pieces into place on Ghorman, ahead of Director Krennic’s plan to frack the planet to death. But it can be hard to tell how much of the frustration Denise Gough plays in the scenes where Meero is acting comes from a genuine place. The woman hates inefficiency, after all, and the ISB is rife with it at the moment, with arrests coming in too quickly for its hapless functionaries to process. (One of the many things I love about Andor is the way it captures the beige dread of this kind of meeting, a whole room full of adult children desperately praying that teacher doesn’t call on them.) Operating both here, and in our growing pantheon of unlikely superspies, meanwhile, is Supervisor/Secret Rebel Lonni Jung, who manages to ferret out that Dedra is secretly working the Ghorman beat, which he dutifully brings to Luthen. Speaking on their Windswept Walkway Of Portentous Monologues, neither man knows exactly what to make of the Emperor’s most bloodless bloodhound being assigned to the planet that makes the funny spider silk, but they know it’s not good: Luthen wastes no time assigning Cassian to go figure out what the fuck is going on. (“This will be clean work,” he tells him. I have a feeling it won’t be.)

In case the above synopsis doesn’t make it clear, then, this episode is mostly a survey of “where we’re at,” as life in the Empire seemingly rests in another one of those “we’ve been sleeping” lulls that Maarva Andor warned so passionately against. Mon Mothma, for instance, is trapped in her own little dystopian version of The West Wing, desperately trying to wrangle senators to curtail just a tiny bit of Palpatine’s “emergency” powers. (I had to go back and refresh myself, but the measure she’s pushing against is the extension of the Public Order Resentencing Directive, which was issued after Cass robbed the base at Aldhani, and which then was invoked to lock him up indefinitely in Narkina 5.) Everyone—including the representative from Ghorman—tells her it’s “not a good time” to rile up the Emperor, failing to perceive that the right time to oppose an authoritarian is before he’s successfully seized enough power to, say, entirely dissolve the Galactic Senate in three years’ time. (It’s wild to remind myself that this season was being written years ago—not that any of the political parallels its drawing were exactly hard to predict, given the state of things post-2016.) The only people who seem to genuinely perceive what horrible danger everyone is in are guys who, themselves, might be horrible dangers to everyone around them: most notably Saw Gerrera, who the episode holds back for its last big reveal, giving Forest Whitaker a well-earned hero spot.

Saw is a fascinating guy. A refugee from George Lucas’ grandiose, ultimately aborted Star Wars: Underworld TV show, he’s infiltrated the wider Star Wars universe to answer a question this franchise has always been extremely reluctant to engage with: Is there such a thing as a “bad” Rebel? Here, he and Whitaker’s electrically off-kilter energy are deployed largely to make poor, hapless Wilmon’s life hell, as a simple mission to teach some fellow Rebels how to steal fuel turns into something more like getting press-ganged into the war’s most radical cell. His introduction is mostly a reminder that, for as low-key and sometimes even sleepy as this episode is, it’s ready to ignite catastrophically with the simplest mistake.

I haven’t been shy about expressing my reservations about the structure of Andor‘s second season; the stop-and-start momentum imposed by a time jump every three episodes still feels fraught with peril. This episode works, though, because it’s less concerned with plot motions than it is with working as a character study, less focused on who’s where when than on where their heads are at. Because it existed, for so long, solely in movies, Star Wars often had the feel of a sprint: We were always seeing these people, these places, in the moment of maximum excitement, maximum crisis. TV has opened the doors to more meditative pacing, and none so aggressively as Andor, which actually concerns itself with how people live in this universe on the days when planets and superweapons aren’t constantly blowing up. How do you live in the moments when everything’s fine now, but you can feel them starting to slip away beneath your feet? What do you spend to protect the things that matter? Star Wars has never asked itself these questions; it’s damn lucky it has a show like this that’s willing to investigate them now. More than a necessary launching point for the next big action set piece, this is a lovely portrait of Life In The Empire, and if this is what the first episode of each of these weekly blocks will be like, I’ll be happy to put my qualms about structure to rest.

Stray observations

• • No offense to actor Joshua James, but he really was perfectly cast as Bix’s personal, oddly cheerful boogeyman Dr. Gorst. The realization that her subconscious is using Gorst as a stand-in now for her and Cass’ own actions is an early indication of how bad this is all likely to get.
• • It’s a strong choice not to directly depict the mission where Cassian shot “the boy” for glimpsing Bix’s face. It makes the whole thing that extra awful kind of banal.
• • “Everyone has their own rebellion, right?”
• • Andor occasionally takes its references right up to the line of plausibility. See Syril telling his propagandized mom that “You are watching too much Imperial News.”
• • “Don’t become too much of an individual, Syril!”
• • The Ghorman resistance is thinly sketched, but effective, with a prominent local leader (played by Richard Sammel) pulling double duty as both the face of reasonable politics and the leadership of the growing insurgency.
• • Adria Arjona gives one of her best performances of the show here, trying to keep a brave face on Bix even as Cassian keeps slamming the cage doors of paranoia down around her.
• • “I don’t want to lose you again.” “That not up to us anymore.”
• • I’ve gushed about Anton Lesser’s performance as Major Partagaz before, but nobody purrs Tony Gilroy and Beau Willimon’s dialogue so well. “Who’s the ‘we’ at this bou-ffet of Rebel plunder?”
• • I would honestly watch an entire episode that never left the ISB offices.
• • “You’re confusing criminality and politics here.” I love all the cross-cutting during the Mon sequences, a nice way to break up the rest of the episode’s more domestic dramas.