There’s a scene in the ninth episode of Andor‘s second season where Vel Sartha, inspecting a table full of requisitioned weaponry at the Rebellion’s Yavin base, picks up a blaster and asks whose it is. Except, that’s not what she asks, raising the pistol into the air in front of a crowd of new recruits. What she actually says is “Who belongs to this?”
I was thinking a lot about that line an episode later, when, as she infiltrates a hospital in a desperate attempt to end the life of the man who saved hers as a child, Kleya Marki, one of Andor‘s standout characters, slips a tiny blaster with one hell of a kick out of her purloined nurse’s scrubs and calmly executes an ISB tactical officer. And then does it again. And again. It’s the climactic, tense moment of an episode that builds up to this singular moment of emotional and dramatic release as she tearfully turns off Luthen’s life support. In many ways, Kleya’s whole life, one torn apart by the Empire, and rebuilt out of her hatred of it, is leading to this moment, and this moment of infiltration and execution is just the final flourish.
The scene is incredible beyond the slickness of Kleya’s mission, but in the week since Andor came to an end I find myself drawn back to that blaster. Or really, it’s just a gun. Not in the way that those terms are particularly a differentiator, in Star Wars the former is far more common, but they are interchangeable. Star Wars is famous for having many of its most iconic blasters have origins in real-world weaponry—not just inspired by but literally being actual guns that just have bits greebled on or lopped off and shifted around. Kleya’s pistol feels less like that approach of Star Wars design. Sure, what little we see of it there is a little acquiescence to sci-fi beyond the fact it shoots energy clean through a Stormtrooper’s skull, like a little light on the side. But it’s the Star Wars blaster that’s just looked the most like a regular gun that I’ve seen in a while, it almost looks like a derringer with its stacked barrels and the small grip. It almost doesn’t feel like a blaster.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen that kind of design philosophy inverted on Andor—the Aldhani heist crew in season one, before they purloined more Star Wars-y weapons from the base, were essentially running around with AK-74s. But being stripped of so much of the Star Wars artifice in that way feels like a parallel to how Kleya handles it and herself alike. It’s telling that this scene is actually the first time we see her wielding a weapon in Andor; up to this point Kleya has been a coordinator, a go-between for Luthen, and her tools of resistance have been her comms system and icy looks in equal measure. And yet that little blaster is still thoroughly her. There’s no frills, there’s nothing more than what it needs to do: point, pull the trigger, put a bolt through someone.
If Cassian’s Bryar pistol reflected his own sense of character in that characteristic little whirring sound whenever he primed it, it’s that simplicity that makes Kleya’s reflect her. It’s not elegant in its simplicity, it’s almost brutal even, because the blaster isn’t meant to be grand or say something about her character in that regard. It’s not even meant to be iconic, even if the scenes of her using it have quickly become since the episode aired. It’s a tool that puts people who are in her way down, and that’s all it needs to be.
It all comes back, again, to that scene with Vel. The story of Andor is, in some ways, the story of that blaster she picks up: it’s Syril’s pistol from when he came to arrest Cassian on Ferrix, which Cassian then stole, took with him to Niamos, then he gifted it to Melshi after their Narkina 5 breakout, and now it’s made its way to the heart of the Rebel Alliance. Do Andor‘s characters belong to their weapons, once they’ve chosen to pick them up? Are they defined by that choice, the symbolic gesture of their resistance to the Imperial regime?
Sometimes they are. Or sometimes a gun is just a gun, no more, no less. In Kleya’s case, it can be a bit of both. After all, that in-between is where she’s always worked best.
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