Andor, Season 2, Week 1

(This was originally published as Implausipod Episode 44 on April 22nd, 2025.)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/17047980-e0045-star-wars-andor-season-2-week-1

We return to Star Wars Andor over the next 4 weeks, starting with first three episodes released on April 22, 2025, titled “One Year Later”, “Sagrona Teema” and “Harvest”. Join us for a recap of the three episodes, and commentary on the themes we see within, and that have carried over from Season 1 (which we recapped in Episode 44).


With Star Wars Andor returning for season two, we return to our coverage over the next four weeks, starting with the first three episodes released on April 22nd, 2025, titled “One Year Later”, “Sagrona Teema” and “Harvest”. Join us for a recap of those episodes and commentary on the themes that we’re seeing then have carried over from season one 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. I. One of my first impressions watching Star Wars Andor as I described early last episode, is it was the most cyber punky Star Wars had ever been. It captured the mood and feel that we saw in early cyberpunk movies like Blade Runner, and that’s held up and carried through in unique ways in the start of season two and old school cyberpunk fans from the eighties will likely know what I’m talking about.

We’ll get to that it shows up a little bit later, though. We start off with slightly advancing the timeline and firmly pinning down what occurs within the largest Star Wars cannon with a flash of BBY4 going across the screen, which I guess stands for before the Battle of Yavin. It took me a little bit to figure out what that extra B was for, but I guess we’re defining the ending of a new hope as the most singular canon event in the Star Wars universe and

I think that’s largely true.

So before we get started with “one year later”, or an episode that might be titled The Empire Sanction, which I’ll get into in a little bit. Let’s see what’s going on. We’ll do a quick round table with our players. We see a place called NAR Test Facility 73 in Cassian, and is doing spy type stuff, showing up as an imperial pilot working towards the extraction of a test fighter.

We’re taken to a farmhouse on a rather bucolic planet and we see a very creepy looking dude, which turns out to be Bix having a nightmare. We’re taken to a high society party of some sort, where Mon Mothma and the various other Coruscant players are engaged in some kind of party or perhaps a wedding. So while everybody’s spread all over the literal galactic map, they’re largely doing the kinds of things that they were doing before.

Their story arcs are progressing along the paths that we’d likely imagine. But the most critical point is where we’re introduced to a scene right out of a movie from the 1970s and given the release date of Star Wars and New Hope that that might not be by accident, we’re given an overhead shot of something called the Maltheen Divide, and it looks like a mountain fortress.

And my first thought is that this feels like the Eiger Sanction, or maybe if we’re gonna look at another Clint Eastwood film, maybe Where Eagles Dare, which to be honest, I always confuse with The Eagle Has Landed, which don’t, doesn’t really have the same plot. Both these films, much like Stallone’s Cliffhanger, and I don’t know, Inception several decades later, focus on the infiltration of a mountain fortress or perhaps having to risk things on the side of a mountain.

And I don’t know if that’s gonna play out later on in the season. Where Eagles Dare is really typical of a certain kind of big budget, sixties or seventies action movie, you know? A war movie set in World War II with a lot of spy type sequences as well. Drawing on that James Bond influence that was popular at the time.

The modern equivalent in the superhero era might be some of the scenes in Captain America First Avenger, where they’re fighting the Nazis in the fortress in the mountains. And that explicit link to the fascists is what maybe brings everything together. We’re brought into a conference with a number of high level imperial officers, a meeting that where they’re outlining a campaign they’re gonna have to undertake to destroy a planet in order to extract the minerals there.

They introduced us to a creature called a Ghorman spider, and I guess I’ll have to stop referring to Syril Karn as Lieutenant Gorman now, as it might get confusing. But this is also interesting is the Ghorman Front is something that was specifically mentioned by Saw Guerrera in season one. And here the Ghormans are being mentioned as a new target for the Empire.

So I don’t know if they were involved with the rebels before or after the events were seen here, but that was just a little confusing to me. In any event, what we’re seeing here with the Imperial planning session is something fascinating. It’s them drawing up the cassu belli for an action that they know that they need to take, in this case, to get the minerals for a power source for something large and figure out how they’re actually going to go about, for lack of a better term, manufacturing consent for the actions that they’re going to undertake.

And this is something we don’t normally think about when we look at the empire in the Star Wars universe. That there is a political wing to it and that the Empire needs to engage in propaganda as much as any of their real world analogs do. So it’s here where we’re introduced to two characters that are about as likable and sleazy as Burke from aliens.

You know, they give off that same kind of vibe and they spend some time riffing off. The potential scenarios that they could use to sell this war to the larger imperial populace. Also present at this meeting is Dedra the Imperial Officer, who we spent a lot of time with in the first season, and here she has an alternative take.

When pressed on it, you suggests that propaganda alone won’t get it done, and you may need some covert actors who can be trusted to do the wrong thing at the right time. I know there’s probably some other parallels that have been drawn forth about this planning session, but we’ll likely get into that in future episodes.

The other main element of this one year later episode is of course, Cassian Andor, who as we saw at the beginning, was, uh, posing as an imperial pilot in order to abscond with a prototype tie fighter, we can tell it’s not your normal tie fighter because in the ensuing chase, it bounces off the cliff walls a couple times and from every other Star Wars show I’ve ever seen, we know that a tie fighter would instantly explode if that happens.

So it must be something special. Don’t mean to mock it; the chase during his escape is actually pretty cool and I was invested in it. From there, he manages to escape and get to the rendezvous point at another planet where he is supposed to meet with his connect. But things have gone a little bit awry and we meet members of yet another rebel faction who we learn.

And a little bit later the Maya Pei Brigade, and again, this is another name that was mentioned by Saw Guerrera in season one and I, I like how they’re drawing all these elements together. It’s building up into a richer universe by the fact that there are these connects with what could be just a throwaway line in an earlier episode, in an earlier season, but it all builds to something much larger.

The other thing we learn is that the rebels may not necessarily be sending their best and brightest on this as the, my Pie Brigade has some internal issues, to say the least, but I think we’ll learn a little bit more about that in the other episodes. Hang tight.

And we return with episode two called Sagrona Teema, which I think stands for Coupling Coruscant style. Throughout this episode, we have a very clearly defined shift as we touch base with various characters. We had met originally in Andor season one, and see how they’ve paired up some in ways that were well known and some in ways that were only shipped about.

It’s at this point too where the shows started to feel very much like early seasons of Game of Thrones with adults in adult relationships, dealing with adult problems and accusations of marital infidelity and other interrelationships going on. It adds so much to the breadth of the Star Wars universe to be able to step away from space wizard power fantasies.

But it made the characters that we’ve come to know seem human and real and relatable despite living in a galaxy far, far away long, long ago. Of the three main threads we have, of course, the main one is the impending nuptials of Mon Mothma’s daughter. As well as the incipient threat of the forthcoming audit on the farm, and of course, our namesake character’s, predicament of being the prisoner in a tug of war between competing rebel factions.

But amongst all of these, I think one of the things that stood out the most, one of the couples that stood out the most was Syril Karn and Dedra. We see Syril Karn early, pumping himself up to the newer recruit, talking about how his particular actions a year earlier were crucial in helping fight against the rebel threat.

But. We of course, as the audience know the truth about the level of his involvement. It’s interesting that while he is suffering from a severe case of main character syndrome here, I mean the series isn’t called Karn after all, but rather his need to pump himself up to be his own hype man within the imperial hierarchy, I think speaks volumes to how things are actually run.

It also speaks to the character of the men that the Imperium appeals to. So now once again, we see Syril Karn with a small modicum of authority, start to use that in ways that we’ve witnessed before. The other interesting revelation with respect to Syril was us learning of the change of his living circumstances we’re again, treated to a walkthrough of a sparsely or severely decorated imperial apartment with appliances right out of a Braun catalog or something with a vaguely Swedish name from Ikea.

And as Deidre returns home from that conference, we find that Syril not expecting her to be there, has been ill prepared and has, and has basically gone feral, engaged in what we in 2025 would probably call “rotting”, not really looking after himself too much. It’s probably something he needs to spend a few moments of reflection on and actually like come to terms with, but that revelation may come at some later point in time.

In the meantime, Deidre still has much work to do with the Ghormans. She’s been somewhat reprimanded for the previous escapades with Andor. Told to catch them first, then make them famous. But she has been also advised that Ghorman is a gift and she can really make a name for herself if that plays out. So we see career moves and coupling moves, but in almost all these couples, we see issues of communications.

While there are some problems with communications at the wedding, there’s no place where the communications are worse. Then at the rebel standoff with Cassian Andor caught in the middle as a prisoner, Cassian’s predicament seems to be compounded by the fact that it doesn’t look like there’s anybody really in charge with the Maya Pei brigade that’s currently on planet.

Some of the brigadier will claim authority, but that can be largely contextual and is often ignored. They often devolve into like infighting between the various groups, and there’s a lot of negotiation going on. But the fascinating thing about the brigadeers is that despite this infighting, they’re still able to get things done, especially something that requires massive amounts of effort and a lot of time, witnessed them in their attempts to move the tie fighter across the surface of the forest.

Now they’re trying to do this so they can turn the fighter’s cannons on their rivals and blast them away, but that isn’t the point. Each collective pull on the ropes only moves the tie fighter a few centimeters.

It’s so slow that the opposing side can measure how long it’s going to take before they’re actually in position. And that’s gonna be hours. It’s like our ancient ancestors moving a huge stone into position as part of some monolith. It takes forever, and we wonder how it can get done. Slowly, but with determination.

So we’re witnessing this power of collective action, which is in complete contrast to the Imperial style, which is like a top down hierarchical format. There are hierarchies within the rebels. Of course, it is a rebel alliance, after all. But the other fascinating thing about the rebels trapped on the planet, aside from how hungry they are and their willingness to eat almost anything, is how they end up resolving their problem.

They have a face off where they drop everything and “everything means everything”. They’re referring of course to their weapons and some callback to Mad Max beyond Thunderdome, and as they set up for the dual or the face off, complete with seconds, no less. We find out that their negotiation is rather non-lethal.

It’s basically a game of roshambo, rock, paper, scissors, Spock and lizard are clearly absent as they belong in another universe. While this extended duel is taking place with everybody present and wrapped attention, it gives enough cover for Cassian Andor to finally make good on his escape. And I think it makes.

Since here to cut quickly to Bix and talk about what’s going on in the farming planet. The first thing that I found amusing, I guess, is the little detail of like, how do you make a farm seem space, age? And here we had the funky, like over complicated wells as well as the upside down silo that we see located around the area, and especially in those far away overhead shots.

I get it that if you have grav technology, it probably makes sense to lift the whole things up so you can funnel it down at the bottom. But I mean, humans have been storing grain for millennia and we have a few systems worked out for it. It just seemed so odd, like a signifier that this is again, “the future”, of sci-fi in some way with even like the tiniest little things.

It’s amazing. But the other thing going on on the farm, of course, is that the imperials have shown up with a lot of implicit threat that they’re going to be returning, and the full audit or accounting will be taking place. And there’s a lot of discussion about the legality of the presence of certain people.

And in 2025, that’s so on point that it seems almost unbelievable amidst all this discussion about the undocumented working the farm and people worried about how closely an inspection will look. We also have coupling as the young gentleman who looks much like Bruno Mars and the girl are out in the field further complicate things as the imperials show up ahead of schedule.

Stay tuned, and I think this bridges us in to our last set of coupling as well. There’s a lot going on with this impending marriage. Like I said, it hearkens back to some of what we saw in earlier shows, like a Game of Thrones. So we have groupings and alliances and whispers and glances, and. All of this is taking place amongst the level of intrigue that’s going on as some people are heavily involved in the Rebel Alliance and others not so, and great lengths must be gone to, to ensure that those involved, like Luthen and Mon Mothma maintain their safety and distance from those who may be less involved or perhaps not committed to the cause.

Some of this discussion takes place during a long hike up a mountainside, which resembles a pilgrimage in China or Europe. Perhaps it’s one of those, I know I’ve seen it before kind of things, but I’m not sure exactly where, but it’s part of their tradition. And this tradition also leads us to a ceremony where we get a speech by Mon Mothma’s husband, and I guess it’s high time I learned his name, which is Perrin Fertha and the speech is about the words, the title of the show, Sagrona Teema. Sagrona apparently just means welcome, whereas Sagrona Teemma in combination means a toast to your health. And in a comment, Perrin mentions how the language tends to add these depths of layers as more words are added to a phrase.

His toast is a bit of a callback to an earlier moment in season one where he asked Mon Mothma, why must everything be so sad? And I think we called that out in our previous episode. But here he goes on to state quote. “My hope is you learn from each pass through this constant cloud of sadness. I. Pleasure, Gaity Amusement.

These are the hidden things. The music buried beyond all this noise.” End quote. He’s talking about doing things with joy in the face of oppression, and that really stuck out back in January. Over on the blog, I made a post with a similar sentiment. It was done on January 26th titled Creativity in the Age of Strife.

I was responding to a video interview with Heather Cox Richardson, where her advice was to behave with joy as a means of resistance against an authoritarian government to quote, “do the things that matter to you and that you can bring to the people around you. That we can meet the moment and as scholars be honest, by doing the best scholarly work that we can to contribute back to humanity.”

I had made a comment there how doing media commentary seems like such a small thing, but as the my pipe brigade said before, they’re dual. Everything means everything.

And that joy takes us into episode three, titled Harvest, or perhaps “That’s not a scythe. This is a scythe,” but vague references to Crocodile Dundee and The Simpsons aside, there was a moment that was just pure joy for me. Right at the beginning of the episode, I mentioned part of what drew me into Andor was that it was one of the most cyber punky Star Wars shows we had ever seen.

The Dank and the rain and the neon lights of the first episode of the first season really kind of bringing that to the forefront. And there’s a moment here with Cassian where he is dealing with an intergalactic communication device where he plugs in the cord to the quarter inch jack, and that just sent me, it’s such like a eighties or early nineties sci-fi trope before various near field communication protocols like Bluetooth and wifi became prevalent in our computing devices.

We had that idea that you had to be like physically connected to be jacked in. We still see that in some places like the Matrix, but that notion of the trodes, whatever, being jacked in or connected physically to the computer was such a prevalent trope. It was like a signifier, right?

And seeing it here at the intersection of Star Wars and Shadowrun and synth enthusiasts and echoing back to the earliest days of telephone switchboards. Just it was a moment for me of just like pure joy. So I wanted to share that with you. Now, the joy was short lived as it’s a very dark episode, but. There’s other moments of joy as well, the harvest on the planet, the wedding day.

These are times of celebration as well. But we’ll stick with Cassian for just a quick second here because the one thing that really stuck out, aside from the quarter inch stereo jack, is the lack of opsec. Like there’s supposed to be speaking in code on a secure channel. He’s in a stolen imperial fighter, posing as an imperial test pilot for a rebel alliance where exposure would bean death.

And he’s been working with them for a year and he can’t even speak in basic coded phrases or language that, you know, they could write in a way that even we could understand as an audience. And it, it just struck me, it was frustrating. Like what kind of a, how are the rebels actually not like all lined up and dead?

And maybe that is reflective of the incompetence of the Imperials, but Oh, it was just like. Frustrating. That lack of OPSEC led to a further breakdown in discipline as he takes the stolen fighter heading into what was clearly defined as like an imperial blockade, like what’s he gonna do? But this is a Star Wars story. Of course. We’ll get back to that in a sec.

We also have another moment that could be joyous, but is often fraught with tension. And that’s meeting the parents of one’s partner. And that happens with Syril and Dedra. We show Syril neurotically going through great lengths to prepare the apartment to make it just perfect.

And then we see that his mother has finally arrived and met Dedra for the first time. Things don’t go perfectly during this weird fondue like meal, I guess. Stabbing things with a sharp object and cooking dinner in front of you has a really Imperial aesthetic to it, though. During the course of this, Syril’s mother manages to induce several of his neuroses, and while he nopes out for a bit, Nedra drops the hammer on Syril’s mom leaving in no uncertain terms how the relationship is going to continue going forward.

And while Dedra is definitely an antagonist in so much what goes on here, we can appreciate this insight into her competence here. Like I said, it’s the little things while the overall scenes between Syril and Nedra and Syril’s mom were cringe and a little tough to watch. The payoff was worth it.

There’s some other cringe moments that take place during the wedding as well. The introduction of the piece. Art, I just, this is a bit of a bugaboo for me. I guess. Whenever we see this, whether it’s in fantasy or s fiction or modern media in any form, the piece of art that they uncovered was supposedly 25,000 years old, and I just wanna state how long.

And ancient. That really is, I think sometimes these years get thrown around. I know when we’re talking about things like, uh, war Hammer 40 K and something from the 41st millennium, where we see it in the Dune universe as well. But the, a number of things that we have that have survived that length of time and would still be meaningful in some way to the audience.

Like here, there’s. 12 statues and they’ve recovered nine of them, uh, 25,000 years is a long, long time. And so to have this restored piece of artwork, I guess presented, speaks to again, the wealth and the dis wealth disparity that’s going on and what’s being shown. But also, I guess it just kind of throws me for a little bit.

You could say it’s 5,000 years and it would still be meaningful, but, um, sometimes it feels like the dates and timelines in these things are just thrown out just willy-nilly as this has moved away. We have cries of Tema from the previous episode and we drift into a dance. First dance, of course, as we often see in weddings, and then a much more joyous and celebratory.

One is everybody gets involved and Mon Mothma joins in and lets herself be carried away as she has to deal with the repercussions of what’s going on. Her friend, the banker, has been making inquiries that will have to be dealt with and the decision is being taken out of her hands. The scythe must fall. And that brings us, of course, to the harvest.

It struck me as interesting as we were introduced to it as the children were racing through the setup and we saw the various droids as assistants as well as a big beast and a few non-humans at the table, which has been rare. And, Andor usually we just saw a few dogs in Ferrix and I don’t know how many other non-humans we’ve seen total.

I haven’t really been keeping count, but I’m sure there’s some. It’s just, it seems so rare that it jumps out. When you think of that being something that’s really identifiable with the Star Wars universe, but right now it’s the humans are rebels that are hiding away, that are having the problems. There’s an incoming inspection and they’re getting some forged documents that would allow them to get away.

Again, things don’t go to plan and they have to bug out. This leads to one of the darker moments in the entire onscreen Star Wars Canon, and I say that with some context. Of course, there is a destruction of a planet at the hands of the Imperials, several times, the torture and subsequent imprisonment of Han Solo again by the Imperials, the murder of innocent children by Anakin Skywalker, working on behalf of the Imperials.

It’s a fairly dark universe, even if it isn’t fully war hammer or 40K grim dark, and we know who the baddies are, right? You can see that even in the imagery of some of the vehicles that’s evoked when they show up at the farm. The hover vehicles that are reminiscent of the half tracks used by Germany in World War II, the Volkswagen Kubelwagons, and the S-D-K-F-Z tens and elevens that were seen in so many of those movies that we mentioned at the start of this episode.

The Eagle has Landed, Where Eagles Dare, Force 10 from Navarone, the big budget action films of the sixties and seventies. So when they’re showing up here, when that design aesthetic is being used, it’s a clear indicator to us who the baddies are. And as the crisis unfolds on the ground, Cassian Andor is able to break through the blockade and arrive. The tie fighter, the Tie Avenger, becomes the scythe in his hands reaping through the Imperial forces, making short work of them, but sadly not quickly enough, as his longtime friend Brasso has fallen to a bolt from a storm trooper’s blaster.

So the joy in the episode is tempered by sorrow and loss felt by Cassian, and shared by Mon Mothma, driving her dance. And throughout the ending of the episode, we’ll see where this dance takes us as we look at future episodes of Andor season two next time on the Implausipod.

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 Creative Commons 4.0 ShareAlike license.

You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program and there’s no cost associated with the show. But it does grow from word of mouth of the community. So if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two and pass it along. There’s also a buy me a coffee link on each show@impplazapod.com, which will go to any hosting costs associated with the show.

Once again, thank you for joining us. Until next time, take care and have fun.

Andor, Season 1 recap

(This was originally published as Implausipod Episode 44 on April 22nd, 2025.)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/16983572-e0044-star-wars-andor-season-1

What can we learn about the Star Wars universe from the lives of its regular inhabitants? What is life like under an authoritarian Empire? How does the resistance form, and who is behind it? And how can a show that first aired in 2022 capture the current age in 2025? Join us for a recap of the first season of Andor as a refresher before the second one airs beginning on April 22, 2025.


On the eve of the launch of Star Wars Andor season two, we’re going to do a recap of the first season of the show and see if we can answer some of these questions. Over the next five weeks, we’ll be covering this show with a recap episode each week after it airs. So I hope you’ll join us as we take a deeper look inside the heart of the resistance and the empire in one of the greatest Star Wars stories ever told in these upcoming episodes of the ImplausiPod.

Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible, and as stated in this episode, we’ll be doing kind of a vibe recap of the entire first season of Andor. Back in 2024 after watching Star Wars Acolyte and thinking it was not too bad, kind of enjoying the story, a friend of the show suggested that I should check out Andor that it was quite fantastic television and I’m quite glad that I took them up on their suggestion Now, it did take me a little while to get through watching the show because

reasons, but there’s no time like the present. So let’s check it out. And if you are new or returning to this show and you haven’t been with me, as I do a recap before, well first of all, welcome. And again, this isn’t a point by point entry into each and every element of this show. This is more of a vibe recap.

It’s similar to the ones we did for Dr. Who in the recent seasons as seen in episode 40 with Dr. Who goes boom. So if you’re looking for a deep dive, this may not be the show for you. We’re looking more at the overall themes and meaning and the elements that stand out. So without further ado let’s get Into the Dank, which I believe is the title of the first episode, but it might also Bluedles or perhaps Casa, but why into the Dank?

Well, from the first scenes, this is perhaps the most Blade Runner esque I’ve ever seen a Star Wars property look like. It looks like it’s something right out of our cyberpunk primer if we are doing an Appendix C charting the rise of cyberpunk Andor would be included. And it’s totally capturing this feeling.

Sci-fi in the seventies and eighties seem to exist on this continuum between clean and gritty. Prior to that, it was almost all clean. Think of like Star Trek, the original series, or Kubrick’s 2001, and in the seventies it started getting messed up a little bit. You can think of this in shows like. The Starlost or the ruined space station, parts of Space:1999 or Star Wars itself, and things got even messier in the future as the seventies went on.

So we have this continuum of the two major properties. I think it was always Star Trek on one side, star Wars on the other, and then we had, I guess a third would probably be like the Aliens universe, the Weyland Yutani universe, which really kind of greased up the future and made space seem messy. From there, we got further into the eighties and the grim darks started to take hold of the science fiction imagination.

But we can think of all these properties existing as somewhere. On that continuum between clean and gritty, between shiny and greasy. And for some reason the grittier ends of the spectrum always had more of a cachet. They had a sense of authenticity. And that authenticity is something we’ll come back to a little bit later Andor has that authenticity in spades.

It feels like a lived-in universe. It feels credible and knowable and understandable, and we can relate to the characters, whether they’re humans, non-humans, or droids that we meet in the story. The other thing Andor has going forward is it’s very visually striking. Like the scene with the gloves on the wall and these patterns in the background and the shot later on of Bix climbing through a tube.

It’s really visually engaging in ways that I haven’t seen in a lot of the other Star Wars media. Granted, I haven’t seen everything, but I’ve bounced off a lot of the Star Wars media that’s been presented, and I think this is part of the reason why. Now, I’ll admit I’m not great with names. We’re introduced to a number of various characters as they flash around during an opening episode, which is kind of the way things work.

We meet Casa and Bix and Lieutenant Gorman and we have a flashback scene with some kids, which I’m assuming mean maybe Casa, but I don’t know. I hope that they don’t drag out this flashback thing for the entire season. Westworld, I’m looking at you, but if there is some kind of parallel flashback thing, I hope that they pay it off quick.

Don’t drag it out for more than you have to. And amidst all of this that’s going on, there’s one thing I really wanted to point out, and that’s the bluedles, which is probably not their official name, but I’m, I’m not gonna look up Wikipedia for anything here. It’s just not how I roll. The pointed is, is that the attention to detail, to the minutiae of daily life that the show owners have here in the Star Wars universe really shows there’s a lot of care that’s going into the production of the show. And that to me as a watcher means, okay, this bear’s checking this stuff out. ’cause if they’re putting that level of care into the making it, even if it’s an aside thing, like the bluedles, or maybe it was just a prop master having a joke or something like that, then there’s care going into the production of it.

And that means to me like, okay, this is worth paying attention to. It should pay off down the road. Not necessarily as. Chekhov’s bowl of noodles. Not everything has to have a deep significance, but it’s a signifier, right? It shows that they’re putting in the effort. It’s like the M and M’s test that Van Halen used to put in their contract riders.

If the producers are taking care of that level of detail, it means they’re also taking care of the lighting and the sound equipment and all the other stage setup stuff. So you look at the small details that show that attention to care is being paid. And so, yeah, with the. We have an overall great first impression, so let’s do this.

We’ve got a murder, we’ve got a mystery. We’ve got a Q 36 space modulator, and we’ve got a plot going on. Let’s get into the show and see how it goes.

Well, we talked about how sci-fi can be either grit or shiny, and Star Wars tends towards the gritty. Sometimes it can be very shiny. Indeed. And I think that’s my favorite part of Star Wars Andor episode two, which is titled, is that you Mr. Johnson? Or it might be That would be Me. But either way, it’s that Wild Bell at the beginning of the episode.

I guess this is a tubular bell of some kind, but regardless, it’s got layers to it. And some of those layers we talked about just a few moments ago with respect to episode one, that authenticity and attention to details, a signifier of quality, but it’s also that those layers have nothing necessarily to do with, you know,

the Force or Jedi, or all the sci-fi stuff, they’re just part of daily life. The fabric of the daily life for the people on this planet. And that’s one of the things we glossed over in a review of the previous episode, that the Imperials were treating this planet where the incident was taking place as a real backwater planet, you know, really on the periphery of the empire, which is why they didn’t have much of a presence there.

So they’re dealing with this other firm where we’re seeing the security guards from. Things are done a little bit differently here, and for a lot of the Star Wars shows or movies, that doesn’t necessarily seem to be the case. It almost echoes all the way back to the first movie to episode four, A New Hope where tattooing was just like way out in the middle of nowhere.

And then all the events took place more in the core. So we have that linkage to like early versions of the Star Wars universe and it really gives it some weight. And I like how it ties in with the mining themes and the stuff that we’re seeing as well with the guys. Sitting here striking the bell, we can see that it’s kind of been worn and bent in by years and years of use.

And again, it’s those visually striking set pieces that are jumping out at me. But if we look at the other main event from this episode, it’s the appearance of Mr. Johnson, in this case portrayed by Stella Skarsgard. We have this wonderful establishing shot where it looks out. Over the scenery in the town where this is all taking place.

And that’s amazing. And obviously I’m referring to him as Mr. Johnson because if Andor as a cyber punky Star Wars, then there clearly must be one mr. Johnson here, right? I have, again, only seen two episodes and I have no idea where this is going, but that remains to be seen. We know how the Mr. Johnson plot plays out and.

That’s the reason why I’m calling our Mr. Johnson by the actor’s real name Stellan Skarsgard, is that challenge that comes when you have a lot of those “Hey, it’s that guy” character actors, right? I find it’s really hard for myself at least, to separate the appearance of an actor that’s recognizable from having a role in the show, right?

You can see that with a lot of. I think it happens with HBO shows as well as Law And Order and other serialized shows on television where if somebody recognizable shows up, you know they’re gonna have an impact on the plot just by the dent of them showing up in that position. So sometimes it can be a bit of a giveaway.

Right? That we’re hinting that there’s more going on taking place with this character than we’re originally suspecting. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and I’m not suggesting by any means that Stellan Skarsgard should stop acting, but just, you know, I wish we had some more of those kind of actors that we can spread it around a little bit.

And these are. Incredibly trivial quibbles, right? We have amazing actors in key roles with strong attention to detail, playing to the background elements, and it’s gonna be fantastic, I think. What more could we ask for as fans? Really the second episode of Andor is one where we’re introduced to more characters and there’s more moving parts kind of happening, but we’re starting to see where that’s gonna go, but we don’t necessarily know yet.

This is one of those moving pieces that introduces a nuance to the board, so we’ll stick with it. We’ve also got the backstory with the kids going on as well, and a few other things I haven’t touched on, but we’ll see what’s up in episode three.

And in episode three, the hammering continues of those tubular bells, which is titled, I think 38 Simulated with Lieutenant Gorman featured heavily here, but it might actually be called The Reckoning. So I’ll let you cue up a tune by, except in the background, or we talk about this guy, Syril Karn. Now, I haven’t mentioned his name up to this point, even though he is featured heavily in the show.

When I do a review, I usually don’t refer to anything else I don’t like. Trailers are spoilers and I don’t look at other sites. I don’t check other reviews. I’m just going on the text of the film, or in this case show as presented and seeing what it brings to me and drawing those associations for myself.

I’m terrible with names. I’ll admit and I’ll catch on eventually, but I’ve been referring to Lieutenant Gorman here as Lieutenant Gorman because of that association that name has, with another text. In this case, the genre defining film. Aliens, which I hope to be talking about in depth later on this year when we look at the Weyland Yutani cinematic universe.

But in that, Lieutenant Gorman was an iconic character that had a lot of the same newbie energy that we see here with Syril Karn, especially in the drop scene. Referring to 38 simulated drops, but no live action. So when we use another character as a reference, that referent the thing that’s being referred to, brings all their associations and tropes and stereotypes and everything else with them.

So we kind of overload that operator by using that name. There’s a whole lot more there to unpack and there’s a lot going on here with serial carn as well. We can think of the role of the Imperials and the junior officer here who’s not imperial, but related to it, uh, with their first big assignment. But the one thing that really stood out and.

There’s a lot to like here. The one thing that really stood out is those tubular bells, or rather it’s the cultural practice of the hammering that we saw in the beginning of episode two that came through from the miners and the workers in the previous episode. It’s kind of like a line through all of these episodes that we see in the local practices for the people, but.

How the imperials or imperial adjacent, uh, security officers react to it. And as they’re walking through the streets and reacting to the hammering of the populace on the wind chimes and pieces of metal, they think that it’s all intimidation, which is. Absolutely the wrong take, right? The Imperials as a colonial administrative force absolutely misread this situation with arrogance on the level of some of Rick Martel’s best heel work, but also something that’s going to cost the Imperials dearly.

Yeah, so for Lieutenant Gorman or Cyril Karn, we have that moment where their arrogance comes back to bite them. Not that that ever happened to Rick Martel either, but all these references, all these associations can come to add more layers to the story, not just internally like we saw with the hammers.

Bells carrying through from episode one to the next, but also the external associations as we draw on the tropes of other characters. And that makes it something really interesting as viewing, not just from a Star Wars perspective, but you know the story that they’re trying to tell. But there’s a lot going on in episode three and 14 minutes into this podcast.

We haven’t really even talked much about Cassian Andor himself. So let’s get into that because we see him here as a child and. Oh my child. Can you leave your family behind? Can you travel the darkest road? That quote is what’s running through my mind. As we look at Cassie and Andor and flashback, we see that mirroring the juxtaposition between Andor, and the past and the present.

The mirror between the corporation and the rebels, or the. Rebels in the different worlds that we see colliding. The main point of the reckoning of, uh, episode three of the series that is, is about Cassie and Andor and the impact that he as a character has on those around him and the lives that are impacted by the decisions that he makes.

Sometimes those decisions are very centered on the self, even though from. Outward appearances, they may seem to align with another cause. We can see that with him smashing the imperial tech as a child in this, in the crash spaceship, and then the juxtaposition of that, the scrap yards in the part of the episode.

It might look like it aligns, but the path that Cassian Andor is on is rather different. That bit that I quoted a few moments ago is paraphrased from an almost 40-year-old novel by Guy Gavriel Kay. It’s book three of the Fionavar Tapestry called the Darkest Road. It’s a pretty good fantasy series if you’ve never read it.

I guess nowadays we’d call it a Isakai novel or something where there’s a blending of real world people within a kind of melange of Arturian and Fantasy mythos. Kay was a Tolkien scholar at the time, so there’s a lot of those really classic fantasy tropes within that novel. It’s, uh, good. Check it out.

And a lot of that series is really about fate and destiny. And that brings us back to our main character Andor, and the path that they’re on, the choices that they make, and those that are left behind that cannot accompany the character on their full journey. Well, some of the characters will come back during the course of the show.

Like I said, it’s, I’m going in pretty spoiler free here, so I don’t know, but I’m just making assumptions based on how traditional storytelling, which, if it’s told as anything, is that likely some of these characters will show up again, but this feels like it’s all been prelude that the first. Two and a half episodes has all been getting us to this point.

This has been act one and the episodes that we’ve seen to this point are all connected and it’s been fantastic.

As we close off episode three, we shift into the next set of episodes, but there’s one last part I’d like to bring up with respect to episode three, kind of a bridging element, and I think this applies to Star Wars as a whole as well, and it’s the role of droids within the Star Wars universe. In other episodes of the podcast, we’ve really been looking at, uh, the nature of artificial intelligence in a lot of ways.

And in episode 29 and 30, we talked about that idea of the Butlerian Jihad and the roles that robots have within society. And we talked a little bit about that in episode 39 on the California ideology as well. What triggered this for me was that appearance of that stairs droid that greeted tel scars guard as his land, or came into the station and allowed him to disembark from the craft that he was traveling on.

It reminded me so much of the butter robot from within Rick and Morty, whose only purpose was to pass the butter. It had the same energy and it kept me up that night and I, I know there’s a lot going on and. We all have different priorities, but it continued on into episode four. It’s that question of what’s the difference between embodied intelligence and embedded intelligence as as playing spot the droid in episode four, I was thinking that this is one of the few times that we actually saw one within Star Wars.

We normally think of droids as these various. Ambulatory devices, right, that they’re ais that are embodied within robots or other machines. And here we saw a different form, one that’s more akin to Jarvis from the Avengers or the computer and Star Trek, or Hal 9000, a computer that’s embedded within a particular installation,

but can use all the facilities that it has around it. And it got me thinking to the nature of Stellan Skarsgards character Luthen, within the show and the roles that he plays, how would he go about trusting that in particular, embedded intelligence, one that would have. All the flight logs, all the communication, all the video of everything that takes place in and around that ship, especially with him going back to Coruscant and having these various roles that they, he takes on having seen only up to episode four.

I think this ties back to a conversation we were having over on the blog and in other episodes about the idea of trust in search engines. You know, the idea of a credence good, but this relationship that.

Luthen has, in this case, with an embedded intelligence and everything that it has going on within it.

Yeah. Who do you trust? The man or the machine? I. It’s a fantastic question and it’s one that Luthen must have on an answer to and absolute trust and faith in the reliability of that answer. As we follow Luthen back to Coruscant, we’ve become much more aware of how involved he is in the risk that he is at, and the greater depth of the story and the reach that this story has as we travel into the heart of the empire.

Episode four is called Aldhani, but it could is easily be called Architecture of Oppression, because this is what really sticks out to me, is reviewing that episode. There’s a quote early on in the episode from Mon Motha’s husband, where he says “must everything be boring and sad?” yeah, that’s a vibe, isn’t it?

It captures the reality of daily life under the empire, and in an episode that’s a recentering episode. It’s still full of those elements of daily life that we looked at earlier, those key things like the bluedles or the droids or what have you, and. In this episode, one of the things that they really use to convey those elements of daily life is the architecture.

We see that in this brutalist imperial building and in some of the other buildings too, like the apartment complexes, I can’t tell if they’re real buildings from our world. There’s something that’s just all digitally composited into the show, but it still gives us. Ominous feeling of dread, just looking at it right, like that bit too, with Cyril Karn returning to his mother’s apartment, and it’s an apartment complex, but it has this sense of awfulness to it. We mentioned earlier that there’s this attention to detail in the show, and in this case it’s an intentional lack of detail, like this minimalist aesthetic or this brutalist aesthetic that’s.

Everywhere within the civilized, quote unquote parts of the Star Wars universe. And it’s a kind of fascinating contrast. And this show is all about those contrasts, those dualities, right? Like it introduces us to four different women within different positions. We see Imperial versus Rebel, high culture versus Highlands.

We get these contrasting positions to always kind of. Emphasize the difference of them, and it’s not really subtle, but it really does come across, and this jumped out to me as well. One of the other things that jumped out to me in this episode was the quotes after we’re walked into the shiny but brutal security bureau I.

At the round table we have this interaction. We are here to further security objectives by collecting intelligence, providing useful analysis, and conducting effective covert action, sir. End quote, to which the commander there responds, quote, very good, dear that is verbatim from the ISB mission statement.

And wrong. Security is an illusion. You want security called the Navy launch a regiment of troopers. We are healthcare providers. We treat sickness, end quote, and that’s amazing, right? That cultural aspect of it. The rationalization of what they do, they go onto state quote, whether they arise from within or have come from the outside.

The longer we wait to identify a disorder, the harder it is to treat the disease. End. Quote. It’s like their attitude is. The disease and I’m the cure. And apparently Officer Cobretti got his line from a galaxy far, far away. And these parallels that we keep seeing again and again in media from, uh, Renegade eighties cop to the Imperials of Star Wars, to Agent Smith and the matrix regards humanity as a virus.

We keep seeing these again and again and again. In that scene in the ISV, we get our first real introduction to Deidre, whose ambition is recognized, and she’s told to steady the ladder before she starts climbing and not to look down. And we’re also introduced to her direct opposite the contrasting character of Vel.

The leader of the Rebel op, and it’s this subtext and the dialectic between the various characters and the positions that they occupy that I hope will continue through the show. But we see this massive internal shift within episode four, and I think the show is amazing for it.

And one of the things that makes this show so amazing is that it was released in 2022 under the Star Wars umbrella owned by Disney. It was appointed about the 12 minute mark of episode five, an episode titled The Axe Forgets, where a character by the name of Nemik, a rebel in Training, hiding out in the Aldhani Highlands, along with, Andor goes off on a bit of a rant.

I mean. It’s also confusing. Isn’t it so much going wrong, so much to say, and all of it happening so quickly. The pace of repression outstrips our ability to understand it, and that is the real trick of the imperial thought machine. It’s easier to hide behind 40 atrocities than a single incident. End quote those 13 seconds and the minute before and the minute after.

It’s part of an ongoing discussion Anyways, that message rarely gets through. It’s part of the ongoing critique of the empire in Star Wars. It’s taking place within the show, but like we mentioned with episode four, that critique is a dialectic showing two sides of the coin. And we also see part of that critique through the lens of Syril Karn.

Here he is shown still staying within his mother’s apartment, still looking for work and being somewhat discarded by the imperial system. And as we get a panning shot of a sparsely decorated apartment, we see the action figures on the shelf over to the side, representing various heroes of the empire as aspirational figures, we marketed to young men.

It reminds me of nothing less than Dark Helmet playing with action figures about halfway through the movie SpaceBalls. So once again, it’s the intentionality of the placement of the little things in this show that matter. I know some people will be quick to dismiss pop cultures being not that deep, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be, as we’ve discussed before, and are episode on the Old Man in the River, and we see that depth too here in the little details like the Blue Milk in a bowl of cereal.

As Karn eats it, we see that the little sugar bowls look like planets. And for Kane, the world is not enough, or even a bowl full of worlds like the Galaxy. There’s volumes contained in some of these little details, but when we open up the cover, we might not like what we find inside. One of those volumes is Jordan Carroll’s “Speculative Whiteness”.

You mentioned this a little bit in our previous episode, Terminus Est the book came out in 2024, but it parallels with what we’re seeing and we’re talking about when it comes to Warhammer 40,000, and Warhammer 40K shares a lot of cultural DNA with Star Wars. What we find in both Caroll’s book and in Star Wars Andor is the appeal that the Empire and Star Wars has for a recently unemployed young men like Syril Karn.

But for other young men, the rebellion is more attractive. As Nemik mentions later on in the episode, everyone has their own rebellion. And while the ax forgets, the tree remembers it’s all part of the process.

The challenge that we see in Andor for Luthen is how do you trust the process when you don’t know what the process is? We hear trust the process often when you’re. Starting a new project or watching a tutorial on YouTube, trust the process and you start off and the first couple steps, it looks like hot garbage, and then you’re like working at it and working at it, and eventually it starts to come into focus.

It’s that idea that you have actually have to work through it to get to those step where it starts to look like an end result. And that’s as true for Luthen and, Andor as it is for myself and for you, the listeners of this podcast, because when I say trust the process, it means that this episode is going to be about Star Wars and, Andor, and planning and economics and communication.

And we’ve touched on much of that, but we’ve also barely gotten started. We’re 27 minutes in and we’re only halfway through the season. But for Luthen and Andor, they’re trusting the process in something that is long range. And as we’ve reviewed the episodes of this season, one of Andor, the process for myself has been to find those little things that make something jump out.

And sometimes that happens and sometimes it takes a little bit, you gotta kind of stew on it episode by episode, think it through, and then it’ll pop. And you can see those connections and. When I was originally reviewing this, I was struggling with episode six to try and see those little things, but then it struck me that what we were looking for wasn’t really in episode six at all.

This is at the end of episode five. What we’re seeing, the plans that Luther had put into motion were starting to come to fruition, and at that point, at the end of episode five. He doesn’t know. There’s a lot of moving parts and potentials and contingencies and things that could go wrong with a very complex and ambitious plan, and we will see that in a moment here.

But right now, at the moment, halfway between episode five and episode six, there’s something taking place halfway across the galaxy, and there’s no way for him to impact the outcome. It’s effectively out of his control. One of the conceits of Star Wars universe has always been that hyperspace travel, the FTL travel that allows from passage from point A to point B relatively quickly compared to at least the laws of physics that we’ve encountered in our own universe here.

This is the one big lie of most science fiction, right? The bit of hand WA that makes all the stories go round and round. We see it in Star Trek and Star Wars and Warhammer and so many other places because without it, the stories would be very long and very boring. If we were looking at actual Interstellar travel or Interstellar trade or Interstellar communication at relativistic speeds, you know what?

We actually have to the best of our scientific knowledge. They’d be very different stories. Very slow, very boring, but still interesting. However, people have studied this, right? One person who studied this is famously is former New York Times columnist, uh, Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman in an economics paper titled The Theory of Interstellar Trade that he.

Published back in 1978 when he was a lowly assistant professor at Yale. Krugman theorized that when dealing with interstellar trade time is relative to the people doing the investment, not necessarily the people on the ship who are usually our point of reference characters, which we see in Star Wars and much other sci-fi media.

But here in Andor we see Luthen is the person doing the investment and he’s the one observing this and unable to impact the outcome at all. So he has to trust the process. This is true of almost any form of asynchronous communication as well, right? A lot of economics boils down to communication information problems, so asynchronous communications, even something like posting on the internet, like.

This podcast, I don’t know if you, the audience are going to hear this or see this or when, or even if you’ll ever hear it, given how the algorithms work. So we together as creator and audience, have to trust the process as well. How Luthen finds out is revealed in episode six, or a customer in the shop asks.

“Got anything from Aldhani?” “Excuse me?” “Aldhani, a big rebel attack last night.” We, as the audience have already learned what’s happened, but Luthen’s trust in the process is finally born fruit. Some of what’s aided Luthen’s plan is more than just a little bit of luck, and I. Also that contingency that he put in place of having an Andor on the team.

And that third thing that we noted back in episode three is the arrogance of the empire. As noted early in the episode, the empire doesn’t play by the rules. They don’t care enough to learn because they don’t have to. The imperial plans for the Alani are much like what author James C. Scott talks about in his book Seeing Like a State.

There’s an imperial plan of rationalization and homogenization that takes place that ignores the local differences in local knowledge and the ignorance of that. Local knowledge is something that the rebels are able to exploit as they carry out their heist. The eye is one of the few points in this series so far that we’ve seen a classic Star Wars element of a space battle, and it is fantastic and.

Much more tense than we see with the Jedi Normally being involved, Cassian Andor as a pilot also has to learn how to trust the process to allow for the rebels to make their escape.

And here we’ve reached the halfway point of the season and the show feels like it’s just getting started. It keeps surprising me ways that I can’t even believe it really hits the mark. But how do you hit the mark when you shoot your shot three years in the past? I mean, we think of so much speculative fiction as being predictive, but it’s not.

There’s something else at work. You kind of take a look at current trends and you extrapolate on that a little bit. You know, you crank it up a notch or three and put the dial all the way to 11 to just, you know, heighten the drama or the tension. Then you let reality catch up and sometimes you’re amazingly on target, you hit the bullseye from miles away.

And that’s what we’re seeing here with, Andor it’s capturing the current moment in 2025 in a spectacular way. But first off, the foreshadowing in this episode is amazing. If I wasn’t aware of the title, um, I think it was called collared or the cut of your Jib. That’s if jib means collar because early on in the episode, we.

Return again and again to tailoring. We see Dera putting on her ISB uniform with a focus on the tailoring and a closeup of the collar. We see another ISB officer at about the 14 minute mark with his tunic collar askew. We see Cyril Karn in the apartment that he’s in that’s not much bigger than a prison cell.

Looking out at the oppressive brutalist architecture beyond. And then we see him again later as he is taken to his new workstation, which is part of some open concept from heck. And it’s here that the story really shifts. Even though the series is ostensibly about Cassie Andor he is referred to as a loose end, we come to understand that the story is really dominated by six women.

The tale of Teema and Marva, and Dedra, and Vel, and Cinta and Klaire, who are active and engaged in the resistance or the rebellion. Dedra excepted, of course. We’re still talking about Star Wars, of course, here within the context of the show Andor the women are the ones getting everything done. They’re the ones doing the work behind the scenes, pushing and prodding the men within the show to actually, you know, move things along and stay on target when necessary.

This is painfully obvious by episode four as more characters were introduced, and since then it’s become more about. But what happens to Cassian Andor is still a crucial part of episode seven, the announcement it takes place later in the episode as he is queried on the beach of the vacation planet.

Niamos, a storm trooper asks him a set of leading questions. He ends up being the wrong guy at the wrong time with the assistance of an imperial droid, something that may not respond to Cassian’s attempt to negotiation. All that foreshadowing comes together. And Cassie and himself becomes collared.

We’ve spoken before about the idea of robots out of control and the Butlerian Jihad, and I think this two minute sequence really gets the heart of what all that other robot content has been about. It’s about the way we interact with them and the way that might be beyond our control or under the control of somebody else.

It’s such a pivotal moment in television, the three minute sequence, one where Cassian is arrested, that I really wanted to highlight it. You could write a dissertation or a paper on it, I’m sure, but there’s so much encapsulated in that moment and about our current moment and how we’re dealing with robots or droids in this instance, and how they take commands from users.

And it might not necessarily be what we expect or the outcomes of those commands might not. Be what we expect. I’ve said again and again that science fiction isn’t necessarily predictive, but here it shows how it can be used to discuss something collectively with a shared imagination. In this case, what robots would look like if they’re used by a police force from an imperial state.

And as Cassian ends up being collared, we have yet another shift in the series.

There’s a scene early in Andor season one, episode eight, where we see just how fractured the quote unquote rebel Alliance really is. Saw Guerrera played by Forrest Whitaker asks, aren’t you tired of playing behind the scenes? Luthen? To which Luthen replies, aren’t you tired of fighting with people who agree with you?

And Ooh, that’s gonna burn. Apparently the circular firing squad originated long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. It seems that whenever you’re working against Empire, you need to have a big tent and, well, star Wars is no exception. Saw Guerrera later highlights the problems, though. Quote, “Krieger’s, a separatist. MyPai is a Neo-Republican. The Gorman front, the Partisan Alliance Sectorists, human Cultists, Galaxy Partitionists end quote. And then like a young Jedi and a smuggler, and a Wookie, and some other folks join later on. But right now it’s a Motley Crewe. The point is that it could be difficult to align all these fractious forces into working towards the same goal, even if it’s one that they’d all ultimately benefit from.

So the challenge is to keep everybody on the same page, or at least have an idea of what the page looks like and try not to, you know. Shoot each other in the foot too much while that’s happening. But while much of episode eight, as well as nine and 10 focuses on Luthen and the other major players of the rebellion like mamma, and the collective action that is required, the plight of Cassian Andor trapped in an imperial prison comes to the fore.

This is where we learned that the backup title for a eight could be on program, as the prisoners are forced to halt and raise their hands at the command of their imperial captors. Their prison itself is mostly clean and gives the impression of a tightly controlled, well kept facility. But the reality is somewhat different and time passes somewhat differently in the pit as well.

The void of natural light saved when the prisoners are herded through the hamster like hammer trails from the dormitories to the factories on their never ending 12 on 12 off ships. It’s a 24 7 prison. And the most shocking thing about the prison depicted here is how it pales in comparison to the prisons we have on earth.

Reading Jonathan Crary’s work of the same title 24 7, which is a work on sleep and light and acceleration and capitalism. In the early pages of it, he goes into the use of illumination for the purses of sleep deprivation in the prison system. It’s chilling. Read about the rationalization for its use, how the illumination induces a state of abject.

Compliance in its subjects and its harrowing. So the Imperial Prison in Narkina five has all the hallmarks of that modern system, and the episode that follows episode nine and 10 feel like a hole, like a single Star Wars movie about a prison break that could have been made combined with the first two arcs.

There’s enough here in the series for an Andor trilogy or Quad Trilogy even is, it definitely feels like several movies worth of content. So I want to tackle them together. We find out through the tracking of shifts, that time is passing rapidly here, that the story is advancing through the actions of the rest of the cast of Luthen and of Dedra and Cyril.

But we as the audience, are also caught in a weird fugue state waiting for the outcome of casting’s time in prison. Part of this waiting is because there is no action on the part of the other characters to find them, say for perhaps Cyril. But it’s odd to think that a rescue effort would come from that direction.

So we as the audience must assume that Cassian’s hopeful escape comes at his own hand. And sure enough, we’re soon given the glimpse that Cassian is trying to exploit the system, working stealthily to test the limits of the cage, defines himself trapped in he continual argues with the supervisor Keno Loy, portrayed by Andy Serkis about trying to take more direct action.

But Keno is head down and focused on his own release counting down the shifts. Cassian recognizes that despite the over show of strength by the Imperial Guards, that this is a paper garrison maintaining order via fear with lower numbers than expected, and that nobody is listening. In episode nine, it’s remarked that the prisoners are.

Cheaper than droids and easier to replace end quote, much like we talked about in episode 39 with the California ideology, which sought out robots to replace human workers. Here we see the opposite effect that much of the power in the empire is a fuko, biopower, and the labor derived from those trapped by the empire.

It takes an extreme event to motivate keno and the rest of the prisoners into action. When news of a lockdown in different prison block due to a riot reaches them, and that the entire shift was put down due to the fact that a prisoner that was thought to be released was simply taken to a different cell block, and that there is no true escape from narkina five.

The entire unit of prisoners comes on board with the escape attempt.

And this leads us to episode 10, titled Up and at them, or perhaps one way out, if Wikipedia is to be believed, and it seems odd to have less to say about an action packed prison break episode than the quieter, more reflective episodes that led up. To it. But I think that’s part and parcel of the style of storytelling that we’re seeing here, that the action delivers its own narrative and there isn’t much to describe.

So much of what we see within action movies relies on tropes that are firmly established within the genre and the prison break genre, as well as established all on its own. So we see much here that’s been replicated in other media many, many times before The heroic sacrifice and the Valiant Escape attempt narrow escapes and success against long odds.

The acts of daring and eventually releasing other prisoners to join in and overtake the entire facility. And all this plays out in an enthralling rapid fire fashion. Two chief takeaways from the episode, again, a dialectic showing opposites within the Star Wars universe are the loss of varied individuals along the escape, but the success of collective action.

It’s a powerful message, once again, delivered in a story set in the Star Wars universe, but a story that’s absent Jedi and forced powers and all the other sci-fi trappings that we’ve come to expect within a Star Wars story Andor is ultimately a human level story without the power fantasies that suffuse the other tales within the franchise.

Or if there are power fantasies that are a much lower level than the ones we’ve come to expect. As the escape takes place and we see which prisoners are able to make it out. Much fewer than we expected, but at least some, including our namesake character, Cassian Andor. We take a trip with Luthen back to the dank, cyberpunk underbelly of the Star Wars universe where we started the series.

Here we learn of a spy within the ISB in the setting of a trap for some of the rebels. Here we learn that Luthen faces a difficult, almost impossible choice to warn an ally and potentially reveal the existence of a spy, or to save the spy and risk a potential bloodbath. And Luthen, whoever the pragmatist chooses to save the spy.

It speaks to the calculus that he employs, the amount of resources that must go into getting one spy deep within the system and the difficult calculations that he’s constantly making.

And in the final two episodes, we see how those calculations of all come together. Much like we did with the prison episodes. We’ll take episodes 11 and 12, daughter of Ferric and Rick’s Road together as a whole with the first we see how the death of Marva Andor, Cassian Andor’s adoptive mother, the ones who rescued him from that imperial ship.

So long ago as a child is the incident that draws in all the players from across the galaxy as they learn of what has happened through various means and channels, which says much of the various strengths and weaknesses of the communication networks that are employed by the various actors, whether they’re Imperial, rebel or other.

Each of the major players has ways of finding out the information about Marva’s death. Though they each recognize independently that this could be the one thing that would bring. Cassian out into the light long enough for them to act either seize or slay or otherwise tie up loose ends and to bring our story to a close.

So we have this scene setting that rearranges the players on the chessboard, bringing them all into one corner for that final act. And so much of what we see is callbacks to those little things, those facts that were established earlier on in the story. This is what brings so much weight to the final episode.

As a daughter of ferret has afforded the opportunity for a proper. A funeral ceremony. This is undertaken by the daughters of Ferrix who are respected and the Imperials allow some local customs to be observed, lest their full suppression lead to a larger uprising. Again, we see Foucaultian Biopower in play, but there are limits to the extent of that Biopower, and we see them in the final episode in Rick’s Road.

And the various competing groups here start getting in each other’s way, and things get wildly out of control. This gives Andor the opportunity he needs to rescue Bicks from imprisonment and torture. But the streets of Rix Road are up in violence, but within the violence there’s some fantastic quotes.

Much of it comes from Marva whose speech as a hologram, given as a eulogy is what motivates the citizenry to action as she states. “Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously without instruction.” “The imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural,” and this gets to the heart of the fight between the rebellion and the empire.

After the riot, we see many of the characters make their escapes and Luthen retreats to a ship, uh, ship that has design cues much in common with the Millennium Falcon. And there he learns that he has a. Stowaway on board that Cassian Andor has joined him, offering him a choice to either kill him or recruit him, to which I suspect we already know the answer.

And finally, as we end, we pan out to see the labor of the prisoners of Narkina five worked into the surface of the Death Star as it is assembled. We as an audience are left knowing that there is more to this story. But not quite sure how it yet connects.

So what happens next? Well, we’re not quite at Rogue One. We still have season two of Andor which begins. Now as this podcast episode is being released Andor season two has just begun airing with three episodes a week. So for the following four weeks, join us as we do our best to recap the previous three episodes before the next one’s there.

These should be coming out on Sunday evenings or Monday mornings, depending on your time zone. So this is your first time joining us. Feel free to subscribe on the podcast player that you heard us on. We’re not available everywhere, but we are happy you’re with us. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible@implausipod.com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows@impplazapod.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 Creative Commons 4.0 ShareAlike license.

You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program and there’s no cost associated with the show. But it does grow from word of mouth of the community. So if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two and pass it along. There’s also a buy me a coffee link on each show@impplazapod.com, which will go to any hosting costs associated with the show.

You can also find us over on the blog as well as a few social media sites, including Blue Sky and Mastodon. Until next time, hopefully just a short week away. Take care and have fun.

Implausi-Tube

And furthering our reach on the POSSE, we have started a small hosted Peertube instance through fedihost.co

Welcome to the Implausi-Tube!

For now, this is just mirroring our videos that are currently on YouTube (which are themselves just there because Google shut down Google Podcasts and migrated everything there). So if you want the original material, you can always get it my subscribing to the ImplausiPod, available on select podcast services.

But we recognize that not everyone likes or has access to YouTube, or consumes media in the same way, so we’ll make it available here as well.

As we get a little better with the video editing, this will be the first site for original video content. Hope to bring you more here soon as well.

Terminus Est

(this was originally published as Implausipod Episode 43 on February 5th, 2025)

Terminus Est (as seen on the cover of The Shadow of the Torturer, (Wolfe, 1980))

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/16530739-e0043-appendix-w-99-terminus-est

In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, some things come to and end. Join us as we look at the impact of the Appendix W on real world events through a look at one of the most iconic blades in fiction: Severian’s Terminus Est from Gene Wolfe’s 1980 novel The Shadow of the Torturer.  But much like the blade, there is much, much more hidden below the surface of this episode.


In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, some things come to an end. So too with Appendix W, as we have reached the final episode, where we take a look back at what has come before. Since the launch of this podcast, real world events have disturbingly breached through from the chaos of the warp into this reality.

We will look at the root causes of why, in this Appendix W episode, The Implausipod. Welcome to The Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And in this special Appendix W episode, I wanted to get to the end point of what Appendix W is all about, because since we started it, I’ve always known where the end point is going to be.

There’s a line I remember from my childhood, from the theme from Mahogany. Not the original song by Diana Ross, but a cover out of Europe. Do you know where you’re going to? When it came to Appendix W, the answer was an emphatic yes. I had a good idea at the outset where this would lead since the initial post back in 2021.

This comes with the benefit of hindsight and experience, where one can develop a good idea of the feasibility of a project at the point of inception. However, while you may have a destination in mind when you start a project, the place you may wind up at may be wildly different, or at least the path may be more circuitous than expected.

So if I didn’t discover anything new along the way, it would have been fine project, but I would have been a little disappointed. And we did uncover some new things, and that’s been fantastic. Of course, anyone familiar with that rather famous song knows the next verse starts with, did you get what you’re hoping for?

And the answer to that is, not quite. So in this penultimate episode of season one, and I say penultimate with the biggest bunny ears possible, we’ll get into the whys, wherefores, and what we learned along the way. The original endpoints of this project can be seen in some of the sections that we started with.

The descriptions of technology, the methods of travel, the aliens encountered, all overarching aesthetic elements by which we classify something as sci fi. And while we were off hunting for the origins of things, we began to weigh how much these tales had directly influenced their descendant that they had heavily inspired.

That inspiration can be seen directly in how some of those aesthetic elements were portrayed by their modern descendant, Warhammer 40, 000. But there’s more to it than just the aesthetic dimension, as the beliefs and ideologies of those authors were also embedded in the fiction they wrote as well.

Sometimes explicit, as seen in Starship Troopers or The Forever War. Sometimes more tacit or obfuscated. These beliefs were those of the post war era, in tales written by men who often served or came of age during World War II. Their science fiction reflects that era. We see large militaries and bureaucracies, hierarchies and authoritarianism.

Of the belief in the rightness of one’s cause, of being on the winning side. Sometimes this is questioned, as in Dune, and sometimes it is exaggerated to the point of satire, as in Judge Dredd. But regardless, they were common enough that the tropes and stereotypes begin to be repeated. I’m looking at you.

So, part of our original goal with Appendix W was to see how the impact of these ideologies can be traced as well. That line that follows through fiction throughout the decades. The continuous feedback loops between fiction and the real world. And this is still one of the goals. But, the real world has funny ways of moving faster than you might like, and real world events are starting to see the manifestation of these ideologies in ways that it wasn’t thought possible.

While real world events were perhaps the main reason that Appendix W wasn’t quite what I was hoping for, those real world events also offer us an opportunity to frame and focus our story, and to understand why we’ve come to the end. Terminus Est Why Terminus Est? Well, in Latin it quite literally means, It’s the end.

But it means something rather different in the context of science fiction and Warhammer 40k. In sci fi, it is one of the great swords of fiction, in a pantheon of named blades along with Stormbringer and Dragnipur and many others. Terminus Est was the sword of the executioner Severian in Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun.

We mentioned it in passing when we talked about that book back in episode 24 of Appendix W. You can see an image of it from the cover of the paperback edition of the book in the thumbnail episode of the show. It is from this iconic presentation that all of its other manifestations flow, whether in Castlevania and Path of Exile, to the manga of Blade Dance, to all of the other ridiculously oversized two handed swords and daiclaves that show up in anime, D& D, and Exalted, to an appearance in Warhammer 40, 000 itself as the name of the flagship of the Death Guards we’ve covered before.

The aesthetics of Gene Wolfe’s work in the Book of the New Sun, the imagery and use of language can be seen redolent throughout the lore of 40k. That idea of a fallen humanity long in the future dealing with technology that they no longer understand is seen throughout the work. Perhaps we can best show this in how Terminus Est is introduced to the readers on page 106 of the Timescape edition from 1980.

Quote, the sword herself. I shall not bore you with a catalogue of her virtues and beauties. You would have to see her and hold her to judge her justly. Her bitter blade was an L in length, straight and square pointed, as such as swords should be. Man edge and woman edge could part a hair to within a span of the guard.

Which was of thick silver with a carven head at either end. Her grip was onyx bound with silver bands, two spans long and terminated with an opal. Art had been lavished upon her. But it is the function of art to render attractive and significant those things that without it would not be so. And so Art had nothing to give her.

The words Terminus Est had been engraved upon her blade in curious and beautiful letters. And I had learned enough of ancient languages since leaving the Atrium of Time to know that they meant, This is the line of division. End quote But Terminus Est is an unusual blade, and she holds some secrets within her.

Quote, There’s a channel in the spine of her blade, and in it runs a river of hydrogyrum, a metal heavier than iron, though it flows like water. Thus the balance is shifted towards the hands when the blade is high, but to the tip when it falls. So, light to raise, weighty to descend, as we hear so often throughout the series.

And, if this is to be the end, then there is no more fitting artifact to focus on for this episode. So let’s take a moment to look back at Appendix W through the lens of the Executioner’s Blade.

While we’ve covered an incredible amount in the previous 98 episodes of the series, I’d like to mention some of the highlights for me. Of course, whenever channels look at the influence of 40k, there is a focus on the obvious ones. Dune, Starship Troopers, and Judge Dredd. And we did touch on all those, but for me.

The delight was in finding and uncovering those hidden little gems that found their way into the lore. Star Trek isn’t generally mentioned as a direct influence on Warhammer 40, 000 in the way that those other titles are, mostly due to the more utopic view of the future that that series held, though the 40k orcs have a lot of parallels to the Klingons.

It was the revelation of the origins of the Terran Empire that surprised me the most, that Alternate universe version of Star Trek, first seen in the episode Mirror Mirror, where Spock famously wore a goatee, so you knew he was one of the baddies. The agonizers and the punishment that has become staples of both the Imperials and Dark Eldar in the Warhammer 40, 000 universe showing up there was a nice touch, and I’m glad we spent several episodes going through our deep dive on the original series.

These small influences showed up again in our very first episode, where we saw the enslavers from the Rogue Trader rulebook appear as they did on screen in an episode of Space 1999 in the episode titled Dragon’s Domain. This is sci fi with a more British feel than Star Trek, and this difference can be seen when we looked at Blake’s 7 back in episode 17.

Yeah, I know it would have worked out better if I had planned that one ahead, but I enjoyed our further look at the instrumentality in Episode 7 instead. That same instrumentality played a huge part of our review, as we spent three episodes on it throughout the series. The amount of influence that Cordwainer Smith’s writing had on Warhammer 40, 000 was perhaps understated, and he indirectly impacted Dune as well, but this gave us birth to so much of the day to day of the Imperium, the warp, the mechanicum, and the relationship they have to technology.

It was a real pleasure to share that with you. Of course, Smith’s work was a very American, West Coast view of sci fi, as was Herbert’s, and Gene Wolfe’s too, who we looked at as we reviewed each of the four books of the Book of the New Sun, and here again in this episode with the Blade, Terminus Est. All three of these series, the Instrumentality, Dune, and the New Sun, touched on the themes of the Earth in the distant future, of the dying Earth genre, though we only spent a little bit of time on Jack Vance’s work of the same name.

Deep Time appeared repeatedly as seen in Foundation series we did back in episode 50, though I’ll admit it was hard to separate the book from the TV adaptation on Apple. And here we can see some of the commonalities of the authors of the early influential science fiction as Asimov, Heinlein, Smith, and Vance all worked for the U.

S. military in various capacities during World War II. We’ll pick up on this thread in a moment. Of course, even though much of the sci fi of the quote unquote Golden Age was written by Americans following their experience in the war, there was no shortage of British influence as well. We mostly skipped over the rather obvious Tolkien influences, opting for just a quick episode there discussing how those contributions to the fantasy genre as a whole found their way to 40k through the influence of Games Workshop’s fantasy series, the original Warhammer.

This is where the works of Michael Moorcock showed up as well, back in episode 10 when we looked at Stormbringer. The sword with a trapped demon within that inspired the whole mythology of daemon weapons within Warhammer. For me personally, the biggest revelations came from my first exposure to much of the British media that I had only rarely glimpsed growing up.

As a Canadian, we tended to get overlapping coverage of both British and U. S. culture, but it was very selective, and there was some stuff I really hadn’t seen at all. So whether it was Doctor Who, or Blake’s 7, or the various comic series included as part of 2000 AD, Discovering how those filtered into Warhammer 40, 000 was fascinating, and I’m glad I got to share those with you in the multiple episodes we did.

I’m also happy we brought in some outside experts for a look at the Gundam series with an interview with veteran modelers and fans of the franchise. Even the Gundam influence on Warhammer 40, 000 didn’t really start showing up until later in the 1990s with the release of the Tau Empire, but big stompy robots were there from the beginning.

But, uh, no exploration of sci fi influences would be complete without looking at the impact of Hollywood. Perennial franchises like Star Wars, Aliens, and Terminator all showed up in various ways, and I’m glad we got to those franchises eventually. But as we mentioned in those episodes, they are widely popular and well known, so I’m also happy we waited as long as we did before taking a look at them, as the little details of the earlier, smaller titles would have been eclipsed by the giants of the genre.

However, it is in the films that we can most easily see the differences in the sci fi ideologies that are represented within the series.

And what are the ideologies that we see? Well, as with most popular culture, what we see is a reflection of our own society. Which is why we see militarism, corporatism, hierarchies, and a focus on the commodities and trade in many of the stories. Some aspects of our society seem inescapable, what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism, where it is easier to imagine a far future than a coherent end to capitalism.

Which is why, even in the far future of the Dune universe, filled with religion and medievalism, we have a monopolistic corporation like CHOAM controlling the economy behind the scenes. But the underlying ideology and our relation to it can change over time, and while this might not be stated explicitly, we can see it in the changing visual representations of pop culture.

Within sci fi, cinema, and television, we can see certain eras that are most clearly identified by their aesthetic. We start in the 60s, the clean era, where shows like Star Trek, the original series, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 both draw in inspiration from the space programs of the time. The clean lines and shiny panels everywhere, with hardly a mote of dust to be seen.

A show like Space 1999 serves as a transition piece, as the space station becomes more worn down over time, reflecting the diminishing resources of the station, and the economic malaise and uncertainty of the time, bringing us the era of grit and grime. Exemplified by the late 70s pieces of sci fi like The Star Wars and Doctor Who.

And as the 70s drew to a close, that grit turned into grease and grime, to the greasy production of shows like Alien and Ice Pirates. With steam filling the atmosphere and hiding the sets, and condensation and grease liberally applied across the surfaces. The grit was still there, of course. The recently deceased director David Lynch’s adaptation of Dune and the frenetically paced post apocalyptic Road Warrior still had much dirt and dust, but the bright future of the 60s had definitely drifted over to the dark side.

So too in the fiction. While we noted that the foundational elements of 40k consisted of a blend of British American and occasionally Japanese or European sci fi and fantasy, there was a strong showing by American writers of sci fi that focused on the deep history in the dying earth, Asimov’s foundation, Smith’s instrumentality, Vance’s dying earth, and Herbert’s dune, if we were to lay them out roughly chronologically.

But this underlying ideology has connections to U. S. military policy. As noted by Chris Hables Gray, not only has science fiction predicted many of the recent changes in war, there is a strong argument that it has influenced them to some extent. Military science fiction and military policy coexist in the same discourse system to a surprising degree, and we have sci fi as policy.

And for Gray and others, this can be seen again and again. Gray notes how H. Bruce Franklin looks at how superweapons occupy space within the American collective imagination, that space we talked about back in episode 26, Silicon Dreams. There, we were introduced to the idea of the collective imaginary with respect to virtual reality and artificial intelligence, but we find it again here too in terms of superweapons and mechanized warfare, which even Thomas Edison was talking about as early as 1915.

While the earlier sci fi had militaristic themes, as those early authors like Heinlein drew on their military backgrounds, showing us vast navies, hierarchical organizations, authoritarian systems, and War Amongst the Stars, this shifted in the 70s and 80s with the rise of the subgenre of mil sci fi. We covered some of it, from the hover tanks of David Drake’s Hammer Slammers, to the eternal wars between Man and Kzin in Larry Niven’s known space universe, to the Janissaries universe of Jerry Pournelle.

Jerry Pournelle, who passed in 2017, was a former Korean war vet who worked in the aerospace industry and entered academia, earning degrees in psychology and political science. While we didn’t cover much of his work directly, save for our discussion of orbital bombardments in the episode on Satellite Warfare and the origins of the Exterminatus in Warhammer 40k, he did collaborate with a number of other authors we looked at and was a prolific writer in the field.

However, he may be more influential on the field for his academic writing rather than his sci fi. Specifically, 1970’s The Strategy of Technology, co authored with Stefan Possony, where they argued for the demonstration of technological superiority as part of a country’s doctrine. And this was seen in the American pursuit of stealth technology, and Reagan’s SDI program, the Strategic Defense Initiative, known as Star Wars.

It could be argued that these are all elements of what Mary Kaldor calls the Baroque Arsenal, and we can see that Baroque style seeping through in the arcane elements of A Forgotten Technology in Terminus Est, and Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, in Dune, and in Warhammer 40, 000 itself. I bring up Jerry Pournelle because his political views were embedded within his work, and he recognized and acknowledged this.

He self described as being, quote, somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan, but his conservatism tended more to the isolationist view, what is now described as paleoconservatism, that was opposed to the Roosevelt New Deal, and has been supplanted by neoconservatism in the US. And like, Many of his sci fi colleagues, he worked as a consultant, an advisor, or a futurist for various organizations during the Cold War.

And this is part of our rationale for ending. It leads us into why we’re wrapping up this chapter of The Appendix W. Or speedrunning to the end at least. Since we started this project the world has gotten darker and those dark elements of our entertainment are escaping the turbulence of the warp and manifesting in our reality.

Khornate imagery and iconography adopted by troops fighting on the front lines of the Russo Ukrainian war with sayings such as Blood for the Blood God being bandied about everywhere from internet commentary to the pro wrestling forums, the brutality of the Warhammer 40, 000 universe is seeping into our public discussion, stripped of the irony and satire attached to it in the in universe materials, where every text is issued by an unreliable narrator.

The audience still realizes that, right? That it’s satire? Sometimes I question this, as dank memes in support of certain public figures as the god emperor of mankind are posted in earnest on the internet, or if Posted with an ironic wink by the commenter, perhaps taken up and spread less ironically by the followers and algorithms that lift it up to virality.

Spreadable media of the most infectious kind. Papa Nurgle would be proud. 

And of course, there’s the cosplay, which has grown in recent years to become an industry unto itself, but has also seen growth in the fandom of the adversaries in the various sci fi universes that we enjoy. While many cosplay conventions have adopted explicit rules against historically fascist or racist imagery, They are much more lenient when it comes to allegorical representations, and as we’ve mentioned throughout this episode, and series, sci fi is rife with allegory.

Elements that were clearly presented as allegorical in the original fictions were shaded in with grey during the intervening years and have been embraced by the fandoms at different points. Elements of clear satire, Starship Troopers and Judge Dredd most specifically, were taken at face value. And so, The critique they presented on the police state or militarization of fascism gets subsumed by the larger sci fi trappings of the settings.

These fandoms have become groups unto themselves, with groups like the 501st, a now international troop of cosplayers that wear stormtrooper armor and march around conventions and other events. The group that represent the baddies in Star Wars, wearing armor and helmets designed to look like skeletons and skulls, were originally patterned off of the Americans in Vietnam.

The rebels of which Luke and Leia were a part of were the Viet Cong, according to an interview George Lucas gave with director James Cameron in 2018. And the 501st is not alone in groups of bad guys that find representation within the cosplay community. But the issue is that fashionable cosplay becomes fashionable dress rehearsal, and from there it seeps into everyday life.

So too with Warhammer 40, 000. The grim darkness of the 41st millennium finds no shortage of representations of evil. From the grinding military machine of the Imperial Army, the Astra Militarum, with its Commissars and the World War I German inspired Death Korps of Krieg, To the transhuman space marines, the Adeptus Astartes draw an inspiration from the armored soldiers of Starship Troopers, the Forever War, and the Sardaukar of Dune.

We see this continue in the Judge Dredd inspired Adeptus Arbites, the space cops that police the regular population, and the Inquisitors that purge out heresy with the ferverance of the now expected Spanish Inquisition. Games Workshop has repeatedly stated that their work is satire, but how much weight do those statements carry, especially compared to the evidence of all the other material published for their universe?

In a statement made on their website in 2021, Games Workshop stated, “The Imperium of Man stands as a cautionary tale of what could happen should the very worst of humanity’s lust for power and extreme, unyielding xenophobia set in. Like so many aspects of Warhammer 40, 000, the Imperium of Man is satirical.

For clarity, satire is the use of humor, irony, or exaggeration, displaying people’s vices or a system of flaws for scorn, derision, and ridicule. Something doesn’t have to be wacky or laugh out loud funny to be satire. The derision is in the setting’s amplification of a tyrannical, genocidal regime turned up to eleven.

The Imperium is not an aspirational state outside of the in universe perspectives of those who are slaves to its systems. It’s a monstrous civilization, and its monstrousness is plain for all to see. That said, certain real world hate groups and adherents of historical ideologies better left in the past sometimes seek to claim intellectual properties for their own enjoyment, and to co opt them for their own agendas.”

This statement was issued as a response to someone wearing full Nazi regalia to a tournament in Spain in 2021. But it’s indicative of the larger issue, and I think we need to look forward for solutions. Games Workshop may disavow the use of their material by hate groups and claim that it is satire, but it’s not clear that some groups are getting it, or rather, that the preponderance of darkness within the universe provides cover for those who would use it for nefarious ends.

The issue is that you run the risk of being that kind of bar. Now, it’s not that I think that Warhammer 40k is irredeemable, it’s just that the Grim and Dark is just that, Grim and Dark, and that sometimes the best way to combat the dank memes is to know where they come from, to detoxify them. And I know some of the audience loves the dank, and think the dankness is their ally, but you merely adopted the dank.

I was born in it, molded by it, I didn’t see Mr. Rogers until I was already a man, and by then it was nothing to me but blinding. But I digress.

Warhammer 40, 000 Rogue Trader was originally published in 1987, and it collected its inspirations, wove them together, and wore them on its sleeve, adding more fabric to the quilt as time went on. Early editions became incorporated into the design such that the sources are forgotten, and this is what we are highlighting here, especially with the more obscure titles.

But eventually, 40k grew to be enough of an influence in its own right that it was influencing the culture that it had previously assimilated. In 2025, it’s something that needs to be stressed, that the media environment that 40k was released into was vastly different than the one that existed even 10 years later, as the 20th century drew to a close.

Some of the concurrent and subsequent influences of Warhammer 40, 000 can be seen in other media titles, titles like Aliens, which was released in 1986, or Star Trek The Next Generation, originally starting in 1987, and their subsequent introduction of the Borg as an antagonist in episodes like Q Who in May of 1989, and June and September Two Parter The Best of Both Worlds in 1990.

Big sci fi movies like Independence Day came out in 1996, Starship Trooper’s movie was released in 1997, the video game Starcraft came out in March 31st of 1998, and Terminator 2 was released in 1991, and the Star Wars prequels coming out in 1999, and all of these had subsequent influences on Warhammer 40, 000.

As we go forward with the Appendix W, and we will be going forward, we will be looking at the interplay that took place during the early 1990s, a fallow period in sci fi which allowed, or forced perhaps, 40, 000 to build on its own mythology and become the cultural icon and brand that it turned into. Why are we doing this?

Well, As I stated, partly it’s a speedrun in order to catch us up to the present as current events have forced the timeline along and we don’t want to be looking at stuff that’s so hopelessly dated that it has no impact or anything to say about what’s going on currently in our world. And from this point forward, episode 99, we’ll be looking both backwards and forwards at the various titles that influence and shape what’s going on.

This will be shaped a little bit by whatever gives me joy in the moment, but I’ll do my best to announce in advance whatever it is I’m working on so that you, the listener, can follow along. I don’t know if many podcasts have tried something like this before, or if some have but have scrapped it because it’s a bad idea, but We’ll give it a shot, because it gives me a little bit of joy to do so, and that joy is critically important.

As you may have noted, since it’s been over ten months since we last published an Appendix W episode, I’ve been struggling a little bit with that joy, with that creativity, and this has taken place over the holidays and has been through into the new year as well with the seemingly unending flood of bad news.

As you can tell by the existence of this podcast, we managed to get things moving a bit, but the first step was turning off the fire hose and following through with some steps that you can do to make constructive actions to your own media and mental health. The second step was to keep creating. I mentioned my struggle in passing towards a friend, it was pointed towards an interview with Heather Cox Richardson that she had made with the National Press Club.

The relevant bit 57 minute mark in the clip and I’ll link to it in the show notes. The gist of her advice is to behave with joy as a means of resistance. Do the things that matter to you and that you can bring to the people around you, end quote. We can meet the moment and as scholars be honest and by doing the best scholarly work we can, we contribute back to humanity.

And the Appendix W and the podcast at large are both Scholarly works; it’s stuff I studied in grad school, and I want to continue bringing that knowledge and information back to a larger public. Even though contributing back to humanity seems like a lot to ask from a blog and media channel that mostly focuses on the intersection of sci fi and technology, it is 

what we’re doing. Maybe our project is a little bit wider in scope than we initially thought. But the big takeaway, at least for me, is that moment of reflection that I like what we’re doing here and I enjoy doing the podcast, the blog, the newsletter, and YouTube, which I hope to publish more on in 2025, and the various other bits that we have going on here.

So, after a brief period of stasis, we’ll get back to the things that bring us joy and find the joy in sharing them with you as well. So let’s pick up that long, finely honed blade of Terminus Est one last time. Though, not to wield, but to return to its scabbard and look toward the future.

Thank you for joining us on this special Appendix W episode of the ImplausiPod. We’ll return next episode with the start of our series on cyberspace and examine some of what is being built around us, what this is all about. After that, we’ll be looking at the first season of and or, and we may have just a few other surprises to throw your way.

In the meantime, I’m your host, Dr. Imp plausible. You can reach me at Doctor 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 Creative Commons 4.

0 share alike license. You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show, but it does grow from word of mouth of the community, so if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two. and pass it along. There’s also a buy me a coffee link on each show at Implausiapod.

com which will go to any hosting costs associated with the show. Over on the blog, we’ve started up a monthly newsletter. There will likely be some overlap with future podcast episodes, and newsletter subscribers can get a hint of what’s to come ahead of time, so consider signing up and I’ll leave a link in the show notes.

Until next time, take care and have fun.

Bibliography

Chris Hables Gray- “There Will Be War!”: Future War Fantasies and Militaristic Science Fiction in the 1980s. (n.d.). Retrieved September 3, 2023, from https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/64/gray.htm

Kaldor, M. (1981). The Baroque Arsenal. Hill & Wang Pub.

https://www.amc.com/blogs/george-lucas-reveals-how-star-wars-was-influenced-by-the-vietnam-war–1005548

https://fanexpohq.com/fanexpovancouver/costume-policy

https://www.warhammer-community.com/en-gb/articles/1Xpzeld6/the-imperium-is-driven-by-hate-warhammer-is-not

Heather Cox Richardson interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDX0hxyYcJw

Incipient Diaspora

(this was originally published as Implausipod Episode 42 on January 17th, 2025)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/16453686-e0042-incipient-diaspora

What happens when a change is on the horizon, one that is approaching that will force you to move but is outside your control? When a community knows it will be disrupted, it may be facing an Incipient Diaspora. For the US denizens of the TikTok app, facing a ban in that country on January 19, 2025, we can observe how they reacted and prepared, and what lessons can be learned from the ongoing situation.


A famous poet once wrote that the waiting is the hardest part. Sometimes the antici-pation, can be wonderful, sometimes it can be terrible. But as we wait, that sound of inevitability, that rush of air in the distance signaling the approach of the sublime, sometimes all we can do is our best to get through the storm.

As we start 2025, we can see multiple storms on the horizon, some closer than others, and communities are handling this differently. One of the worlds we’ve been looking at is deep within cyberspace, and for the netizens of TikTok, the citizens are facing the looming dissolution of their world. Everyone is making plans on what to do next as they pass through that singularity, leaving messages about how to find one another on the other side.

We talked about this a little bit back in June of last year in TikTok Tribulations, but the trouble with tribulations is that they don’t just go away. When faced with an incipient diaspora, what do you do? Is it about the waiting or is it about the recovery? We’ll talk about both in this episode of the Implausipod.

But before we begin, a brief note. After we had started recording this episode in late December 2024, the Eaton and Pacific Palisades wildfires have devastated communities in Los Angeles, California, destroying thousands of homes and displacing many thousands more. Our hearts go out to those affected, our thanks to the firefighters and others involved in the recovery, and we urge you to contribute to a charitable organization that can assist with helping the survivors.

This episode is about loss and displacement, but it is not a commentary on the specific events of the 2025 L. A. wildfires. Thank you. 

Welcome to the Implausipod,

a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. In the last weeks of 2024, it was clear that there was a change in the air. The tone of the content made by various posters on TikTok started to change. A lot of people started making posts about other places they could make content on, or for the more casual poster, where everyone was going.

There was more than a few lurkers asking where the party was going to be, it had some real Steve Buscemi with a skateboard saying hello fellow kids energy. It was the collective realization that, absent any acts of deus ex machina, by January 19th, TikTok would go away, with legislation in the United States poised to ban the company from operating within those borders.

Of course, TikTok has a global audience, so various Brits, Australians, Canadians, and people from other countries behaved as if they were unaffected, because largely they were, but the net impact of the American audience and participants realizing that things were about to change shifted the tone of the discourse on the app as a whole.

It became a moment of incipient diaspora. As an observer, I’d like to capture a snapshot of what that moment was like as it was going on. It began shortly before Christmas 2024, as I saw people with more time on their hands, with their kids off from school, or university students home for the holidays, starting to realize that the time left with the app was short.

That there was under a month left to go. Some forward thinking people were starting to make posts asking what was going to happen in the new year. As the holiday festivities wrapped up and those who had vacations slipped into that weird, liminal, timeless zone between Christmas and New Year’s, where everyone is sleepy from gorging on turkey dinner, leftover wine and cheese, and enjoying their holiday gifts.

The trend continued, with more people starting to ask questions, and by the time New Year’s would have rolled around, everybody realized that time was drawing short. People began posting lists of links of their other social medias, other places that they could be found on. This was not unusual in and of itself, as something that happened fairly regular with content creators that derived their income from posting in various places.

Would often try to drive traffic to places that they had monetized. Or were able to capitalize off the audience. For a lot of creators, places like YouTube and Instagram were much better suited for that. So that wasn’t that noteworthy, but by January 7th, this practice had spread to the smaller creators, too.

Those who hadn’t necessarily monetized their content, but wanted to remain in contact with the friends that they had made, and the communities that they had become a part of, while on the app. In early January, this still included places that were the most wide ranging and popular, places like Facebook, Instagram, and X or Twitter.

Though the last one wasn’t quite as prominent, as there was more mentions of Blue Sky, with the migration that had already begun there following the U. S. election in November 2024. However, this was soon to change, as by the end of that week, the U. S. Supreme Court would hear arguments requesting a state of the ban.

Politically minded posters and legal scholars noticed the upcoming case and started commenting on what they thought would happen, and this spread from there to all corners of the app. with many posters expressing concern about what the outcome might be. There was an additional group of commenters who put down their epidemiologist certificates they’d been using for the last few years, dusted off their internet law degree, and stepped outside of the Motel 6 they stayed at the previous night to offer their opinions about what was going on.

But perhaps I’m being too harsh. What I’m suggesting is that a lot of people were commenting on the outcome of the case, but many of them were adding noise rather than signal to the conversation. Regardless, by the day the case of TikTok versus Merrick Garland was going to be heard, January 10th, 2025, everybody’s attention was focused on it.

The high degree of uncertainty about what the outcome of that case might be led to two notable things happening. The first was that everybody started making contingency plans, posting about other apps that they were on, places that they could be found, or profiles that they had made, and the second was that they started taking a deeper look at why the ban was taking place at all.

The argument that the app was a national security risk drew some scrutiny, and a lot of people started looking at the lobbying efforts of TikTok’s biggest competitors. Again. Meta, or Facebook. Now, Meta, the company, and the practices that it engages in and the commodification of the audience is something we’ve commented on many times on this podcast before.

We discussed the audience commodity way back in Episode 8 in July of 2023, and we touched on it a little bit more in Episode 15, entitled Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and of course the TikTok Tribulations episode from June of last year. We’ve also commented on this in the blog and the newsletter, so let’s just say it’s an ongoing topic of discussion.

If you’d like to hear more about it, I’d encourage you to check out some of those past shows in the archives on implausopod. com. But back to the topic at hand. With TikTok users realizing that Meta and Mark Zuckerberg were one of the larger reasons that the ban was actually going forward, There was a collective pushback against moving to meta owned properties like Facebook, and Instagram especially, as they were seen as the more direct competitor to TikTok.

There was also a pushback against moving to X, as people saw Musk as equally complicit in the ban, due to his recent role with the US government. And this manifested in posters explicitly calling those platforms out and looking for direct alternatives to TikTok that weren’t owned by those companies.

This pushback was exacerbated by an announcement that Meta made on January 7th that they would no longer be using third party fact checkers, and an appearance by Mark Zuckerberg on the Joe Rogan podcast. Again, there’s a lot going on, and it’s all happening roughly contemporaneously. Following the initial arguments in front of the U.

S. Supreme Court, the users became much more active in finding alternative places. They began mobilizing, began contacting their various political representatives, and in their search for alternatives, they came up with an unlikely option. The app known as Zhenghongshu. Little Red Note, an app that was pitched as a Chinese version of TikTok, but was actually more akin to a Chinese version of Pinterest, an app that was actually Chinese state owned, operating in mainland China, and whose discourse took place largely in Mandarin.

Within two days, the TikTok userbase had collectively made this the most popular app in the App Store, and showed that they would rather learn a foreign language and deal with a directly foreign owned app than deal with a meta product again. The pettiness and spite of the American TikTok userbase apparently knows no bounds.

Much like Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek II Wrath of Khan stating, From hell’s heart, I stab at thee. For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee. The TikTok userbase were deciding to go out in epic fashion and take Meta down with them. And this brings us forward to now, January 17th, 2025, two days before the ban.

The diaspora is in full swing, and still nobody has an idea of what’s going on. It leads us to a question. Is the incipient diaspora about the waiting, or is it about the recovery?

While as of the morning of January 17th, the U. S. Supreme Court has still yet to make a statement on their decision, and both U. S. administrations, both outgoing and incoming, have somewhat punted on making a final determination, lending to much uncertainty even two days before the ban, there’s a lot that we can learn from the observations we’ve made about the reactions of the residents of TikTok.

The first observation speaks directly to that uncertainty. There’s a from the creator of the Princess Bride. Nobody knows anything. Now, William Goldman was referring to Hollywood, and that nobody can really tell when it comes to creatives pursuits, what is going to take off, what would be a hit and what wouldn’t.

But it applies in this situation as well, because January 19th is somewhat of a singularity. No one can tell for certain what’s going to happen after that point. In early to mid January, there were posters that were stating with absolute certainty and confidence about what would happen, but they had no special knowledge about what was going on.

In those times of uncertainty, the best approach is to put on one’s critical thinking hat. Because the truth is that nobody knows, and even the best can only make an informed decision based on past events and can’t say for certain what’s going to happen. However, in an era of uncertainty, there will be those courting clout and influence that seek to provide answers to a questioning audience, even where no answers exist.

In an era of uncertainty, all you can do is make backups, plan for contingencies, establish lines of communication, and try your best to ensure that you can see people on the other side. And that speaks to the second point, that there are identifiable actions that can be done. Even in an era of uncertainty.

The mantra of the three S’s, Save, Share, and Spread, goes a long way in ensuring that those challenges can be met. The first one is that you save your information. You save your peeps. You get a list of everyone you need to keep track of, everyone you need to contact, and that makes it easier to get in touch with them afterward.

You know who the real ones are, and you ensure that those are available. And this is good disaster prep in general. Have that documentation available, and have backup copies too. The second is that users need to share their info. Have that copy a list of places that they can be found and contact cards, and share that widely with the people that they want to be able to track them down.

It doesn’t have to be overly complicated, it just has to be a list of contacts on a card. For an older audience that may dimly remember the era before mobile phones, this is the list of places that people can track you down at. You know, if I’m not at the arcade, I’m at the rec center. If I’m not at the rec center, I’m at your mom’s house.

You know where to find me, right? And the third task is to spread that information. If you see a mutual acquaintance that has that contact card, you keep a copy and share it to other acquaintances so it’s more widely available. If there’s multiple copies of something around, then it’s more likely to survive and be able to be passed on.

Users are in the process of developing a network of resilience, and that’s what they need in order to manage the uncertainty that may be happening during this era. This is because the place that they’re looking to land might not even exist yet, or it might be just a app that’s in beta someplace, and not really readily available.

Users might not know where everybody’s going to be, but the idea is you create that network and you become that lighthouse that can guide the other users back to the community when you find one. And the third observation follows from that, and that is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. And when we’re talking about third spaces, both real and virtual.

virtual, sometimes it’s best to take something that exists and meets some of your needs than the perfect option that doesn’t exist or may never exist. You can’t let something not being your optimum choice deter you from using what’s available. When it comes to third spaces, both real and virtual, you need to look at what you’re trying to do.

Now, some of this builds on what Ray Oldenburg was talking about in The Great Good Place when he was originally discussing what third places are. When it comes to third spaces, you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and the good that you’re trying to do is to build community. When you’re trying to build community, you can use the tools that are available to you.

In the late summer of 2024, there was a discussion of third places that was taking place online, both in blogs and on TikTok and other sites, and there was a lot of headcanon or misconceptions about what third places are and what counts. There are statements like a third place can’t be a business, or can’t have people working there, and if there are, then it doesn’t count, and frankly, this is nonsense.

It might not be optimal, but it can still count as a third place. Remember, a third place is just someplace that isn’t work or home, but a place where you can relax and spend some time. Some of the original examples of things like third spaces were things like barbershops or bars or coffee shops or pool halls, and these are all businesses, but they still count.

So it doesn’t matter whether it’s a McDonald’s or a Rotten Ronnie’s, or a mcds or a raunchy, Rons or a Macas. Those can all count as third spaces. You can go there every morning, grab a cup of coffee, sit around with your friends or acquaintances or people from the community or even just people passing through, and that might be the best part as you’re exposed to news from elsewhere, and you can have a discussion.

This is how community is built. It might not be perfect because it’s corporate and policy changes might change how things are going. They take out the seats or the price of coffee changes or whatever. Or this could reshape the environment and not make it as conducive to having that community and discussion.

And this can happen with the change of ownership of smaller businesses as well, whether it’s a barbershop or a pool hall or whatever. But it is something that can be used while community is being built up. This is something we talked about in our earlier episode on recursive public. So if you want to go back and check that in the archives again, I encourage you to have a look.

But this is something that we need to get over, the idea that our virtual spaces have to be perfect from the get go and not recognizing that the previous ones that we had built up over time and acquired characteristics as the users interacted with them. So again, the rule is if you find a place that’s suitable, you work to build that up and you become a lighthouse to your community and bring them in with you.

You start where you are, you use what you have, and you Do what you can. And I’m not just saying this from my own experience as someone who spent 18 months doing field work at Third Spaces looking at how communities form and interact. I mean, I am that person, but I’m not just saying that. But the point being is that a community has to be built, and it takes the effort of the individuals involved in it to come together and build and shape that community into something that works for them.

And then the fourth big takeaway from the observations is that users can make informed decisions and that their choices do matter. This became most obvious as the tide started to shift against using meta and its related products like Instagram and Facebook as An alternative to TikTok. There’s a phrase that goes around that our audience may be aware of, that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

That in that system, someone somewhere is getting the short end of the stick. And while that’s true, there’s often an element or undercurrent of resignation, of engineered helplessness. Designed to get somebody asking, if every choice I make is wrong, if there is no ethical choice, then what does my choice matter?

But as I said earlier, that choice is critical because for users and for creators who are consumers of platforms, the choice of which platform to use really matters. On January 7th, when Meta announced that they’d no longer be using third party fact checkers, or an earlier announcement where they said that they’d be using AI agents within the stream so that your audience may no longer be an audience, one begins to wonder why even use those products at all.

A user or creator would have to ask themselves, does continuing to use this product legitimize those practices? This is a question that a number of users and creators started asking themselves when it came to X slash Twitter, and that led to the mass migration to Blue Sky as they finally realized that their presence, especially that of the journalists and academics, legitimized Twitter as a platform.

I say, finally, as it seemed like a patently obvious outcome with the change in ownership in 2022, and I’d be standing here like John McClane shouting out the window yelling, Welcome to the party, pal, but We all come to these things in our time. The point is, is once you make that realization, is you need to take action.

Long term, who’s to say that blue sky was the right choice, but right now it seems to be a safer choice, even though it might just be a big pot of honey that one day will become commodified once the resource has been sufficiently built out and another wave of migration will take place, but Such is the way of life on the internet.

The last comment we’ll make is the idea of the root causes of the ban. As we noted earlier, there was a lot of speculation about what those causes were, but most of it just boils down to two words, and those two words are market power. Market power is the ability of a firm to set the price of its good above the marginal cost.

And in this case, it’s helpful to remember what the product of a social media company is. They sell audiences to advertisers. This includes you, and me, and Everybody else and everything that’s done on those platforms, which is then packaged up and sold off to advertisers looking for those specific demographics.

In order to maintain that market power, you need to be able to manipulate either the supply or the demand. And for social media companies and other high tech firms, that works a little bit differently, because an innovation can come along and disrupt the market that they’ve gathered. For example, it doesn’t matter if you’re the best film camera company in the world, if everybody shifts to digital cameras and nobody’s taking pictures anymore.

So for firms that obtain that monopoly position that allows them to exert market power, they’ll often do a lot to retain that market power and maintain the ability to charge what they want. And I say monopoly, but it’s often usually only one or two firms within any given high tech segment. Think about Microsoft versus Apple on the desktop or.

Android versus iOS on your smartphones. Regardless of whether it’s a monopoly or a duopoly, they don’t want competition. It messes with their vibe. And their vibe is the ability to extract exorbitant profits. Now, I’m drawing this from Mordecai Kurz’s The Market Power of Technology, published in 2023.

Kurtz is a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford, and he’s been doing this for a long time. The book is pretty dense and technical, but it’s been written with an eye to a lay audience, and there’s sections of it that are very readable and include some real solutions as well. We reviewed it in a newsletter a few months back, and as I said, it was written in 2023, but what we’re seeing with the TikTok ban reads like a case study.

It’s like chapter and verse of the observations that Mordecai Kurz made in his book about market power and how it’s exerted in high tech firms. This is why something like TikTok, whose technologies presented a threat to the dominance that Meta had on its social media properties, was something that had to be dealt with from a lobbying perspective.

And I say technologies here because it’s an assemblage of technologies. It isn’t just the algorithm, which seems to draw a lot of the interest, but it’s also the app and the associated tools, the way it functions, the way it’s designed to allow users to create. All these things come together to provide a compelling alternative to met as products that are offered.

And it is in much the same way that all these observations come together to give us a picture of what happens during the incipient diaspora, the root causes as well as some of the effects that take place. As we asked earlier, when we look at an incipient diaspora, is it about the waiting or the recovery?

And in this case, What happens next?

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Implausipod. We’re happy to start 2025 with you, and we’ve got some new episodes coming out to you soon. We’ve been preparing them for a while, so I’ve been looking forward to sharing them with you. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod.

com, and as mentioned, you can also find the show archives and all our previous shows at 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 Creative Commons 4. 0 share alike license. No AI is used in the production of this show, though I think there’s a machine learning algorithm in the transcription software that I use.

As stated earlier, we do make allowances for accessibility. You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show. But it does grow from word of mouth of the community. So if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two, and pass it along.

There’s also a Buy Me A Coffee link on each show at implausipod. com, which will go to any hosting costs associated with the show. Until next time, take care, and have fun.