How do you make storylines come together when the characters are worlds apart?
That was the challenge facing the first arc of “Andor” Season 2 — specifically the last 15 minutes of Episode 3, “Harvest,” where Cassian (Diego Luna) swoops onto the Mina-Rau grassland in a stolen tie-fighter to rescue Bix (Adria Arjona), Wilmon (Muhannad Bhaier), and Brasso (Joplin Sibtain) while Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) loses herself on the dance floor of her daughter Leida’s (Bronte Carmichael) wedding party, knowing that spymaster Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) is about kill her childhood friend Tay Kolma (Ben Miles) before he reveals their rebellious activities. The two storylines couldn’t look more different, but the despair that the characters feel in this moment is exactly the same.
As has been the case throughout his career, showrunner Tony Gilroy relied on his editor and brother John Gilroy to bring the end pieces of Episode 3 together as something that feels like one ending, even though they’re spread throughout the Star Wars galaxy. “We built a lot of these, I don’t even know what you call it — these rondelle, multiple character action sequences over the years,” said Tony, when he was a guest on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. When they work, they’re glorious. But if you don’t execute them correctly, you lose people.
“If people feel like we went away from this conversation for too long, and we come back, you feel like the same amount of time hasn’t passed. And if you cheat, that doesn’t work. If you don’t have a good sense of geometry, if the audience isn’t oriented spatially — [these scenes] are really, really complicated and very technical to put together,” Tony Gilroy said.
The Gilroy brothers have also found that it’s important for the conclusions of “Andor” arcs to “take attendance” and make sure that no one gets left behind (as long as they’re still alive, RIP Brasso) — because an awkward reappearance of characters can be jarring for viewers. The ending of “Harvest” is fairly light on the number of characters that the show needs to check in with, but it has a different challenge: Music.
“The song is ‘Niamos!’ that Nic Britell wrote,” said editor and executive producer John Gilroy. “It has to do with the planet Niamos where Cassian goes to relax before he’s arrested. And so our conceit is that it’s like a Top 40 song in the galaxy. And something you always play at a wedding, like ‘Macarena.’ All the young girls jump on the dance floor as soon as they hear it.”
Added Tony, “There was a lot of doubt about whether it would work out, and that piece of music would carry. The funeral march was a gimme, we knew that was going to work, but this time I’m adding music that’s not easily indicated by the other sequences [in the episode] and saying, ’Okay, we need this EDM dance mix we’re going use that as our bed for 15 minutes at the end of this thing.”
John Gilroy, though, believed the dance mix would work as a way to knit together the episode’s ending. The editor, showrunner, and the rest of the “Andor” filmmaking team put in the work to create a proof of concept for the music as the sequence’s connective tissue. They built different versions, mocked them up with iPhone video, and storyboarded until the sequence found its feet. The party dance mix sharpens an already pointed sense of dramatic irony both Mon and the viewer have in this moment, and John Gilroy came to set in order to see the frivolity and happiness of the wedding [turn] against her.
“I’m not on the set very often,” John said, “but I came up for the dance, and I got to see [O’Reilly] really throw herself into it. She’s acting all the things out. She knows that she’s probably killed her dear childhood friend. And she channels that into her dancing. It was just fantastic.”
Mon’s desire in the moment to forget the pain and sacrifice of the rebellion contrasts sharply with the thousand-yard stares of Cassian, Bix, and Wilmon as they flee off planet, into an unknown future. The contrasting emotional intensity of Mon’s desperation with Bix and Wilmon’s numb, haunted grief, makes John Gilroy’s judicious cuts back and forth between them hit all the harder. The contrast between the stillness of figures in the tie cockpit and the frenzy of Mon’s movement on the dance floor also emphasizes the emotional toll of the rebellion. No matter the circumstances, the rebels are surrounded by death.
John Gilroy told IndieWire that he can’t think of an episode of the series that channels as much as “Harvest” does, emotionally. “That’s one I really had to put together before I knew it would work. It was really thought out, it’s serious stuff,” Gilroy said. “The situations you see, I think people can relate to them,” he added about the series overall. “We all sometimes compromise, we may have to make a choice that’s not always black-and-white. Even the villains are human in our show. Everyone’s under pressure.”
