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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.

The WYCU

This has been on my mind for a little bit, ever since last summer when seeing Alien:Romulus in the theatre. Of course, that along with Deadpool and Wolverine led to our exploration of the Nostalgia curve. But following Romulus a discussion with a friend led to the discussion of the shared timelines of the Alien and Predator franchises, and the realization that I haven’t actually seen most of the Predator films, save for the first two, and still hadn’t gotten around to seeing the well-regarded Prey either.

I was due for re-watch, or watch in many cases.

So with learning today about Alien: Earth, a new TV series set in the Alien universe will be coming to streaming in the summer of 2025, I thought it was time to start that re-watch. However, that’s a lot of movies to get through before summer, and we’ve still got Andor season 2 and some other projects going on too.

(Yes, my media consumption occurs at a glacial pace; I get enough free time to get through maybe one or two movies a week.)

But…

What if we watched our way through the WYCU chronologically?

The WYCU is the Weyland-Yutani Cinematic Universe, of course, one of the key pieces of memetic connective tissue between the two (aside from the xenomorph skull inside the predator ship in Predator 2. It’s amazing how much inspiration comes from a little piece of throw-away set dressing.) Weyland Yutani, W-Y for short, is the interstellar megacorp behind much of the machinations of the Alien franchise, and they have their hand in the going on of the Predator-verse as well. Much like CHOAM from the Dune franchise, they’ve spread across the galaxy, and have their fingers (or talons?) in pretty much everything.

I think I’ve we’ve mentioned it in passing when talking about our EvilCorp series, a look at the MegaCorps that permeate the science fiction settings of the future, showing up in everything from present-day cyberpunk settings like Shadowrun to the aforementioned Dune 20000 years in the future.

(If I haven’t mentioned EvilCorp yet, then here’s where we started.)

But we digress: what about the WYCU chronologically? The list has been laid our by others (find a link), so we’re by no means the first, but the nice thing is with Alien: Earth set 2 years before the original 1979 Alien film, it means a chronological re-watch mostly involves the Predator franchise (and about an hour of Prometheus).

Sorry, by chronological I mean by within the continuity, not release order. This, this has some potential. There’s only 9 movies or so to “catch-up” to the continuity before Alien: Earth comes out in “summer 2025”. We can do this.

For fun, and future reference, here’s what the WCYU chronology looks like:

WCYU Chronology

Title	‘Verse	Year	Chrono Order
Prometheus *	A	2012	1
Prey	P	2022	2
Predator	P	1987	3
Predator 2	P	1990	4
Alien v Predator	X	2004	5
Alien v Predator 2: Requiem	X	2007	6
The Predator	P	2018	7
Predators	P	2010	8
Predator: Badlands***	P	2025	9
Prometheus **	A	2012	10
Alien: Covenant	A	2017	11
Alien: Earth	A	2025	12
Alien	A	1979	13
Alien: Romulus	A	2024	14
Aliens	A	1986	15
Alien³	A	1992	16
Alien: Resurrection	A	1997	17

*: the first bit of Prometheus, in the distant past
**: the rest of the movie, as it appears in the main timeline
***: there's also a rumored stealth Predator movie slated for 2025 that may come out before Badlands, but we probably won't see that until it's too late

The Worst Movie in the World

Where do bad ideas come from? Here’s one:

In the mid-90s this seemingly harmless film would make the rotation on cable channels often enough that I saw this on a handful of occasions. It appeared to be a relatively harmless confection, overly saccharine and sweet, a little bit corny, a fantasy idea of how the world works, a modern retelling of the Prince and the Pauper fairy tale.

In other words, the perfect concoction to deliver some toxic material.

In this case, the toxic material comes in a scene near the end of act 2, as the pauper “Dave” in the guise of the prince gets to work doing a line-by-line review of budget items.

Any resemblance to current events is purely coincidental.

What the movie suggested is that something as complex as the budget of a modern nation-state can be managed at this level, that that’s all it would take. A complete fantasy.

But this is the sort of meme that grows and spreads, and ends up becoming embedded in out culture. And toxic memes are very, very hard to dislodge once they get to that state.

Coming in May this year, we’re going to do a deep dive into where bad ideas come from, how they spread, and how they get embedded in the zeitgeist. We’ve got a few themes locked up for our Bad Ideas series already:

The Worst Movie in the World: Bad Movies
Is This a Joke to You?: Bad Comedy
Dank Memes
(and perhaps one or two surprises)

Why May? Well, we have a four episode block on cyberspace coming up next on the podcast, followed by an Andor Season 1 vibe recap which should wrap just in time for Season 2, at which point we’ll dig into this Bad Idea Theater.

Stay tuned!

Terminus Est

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

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

Dr Implausible’s Book Club

“Read a book!” This is more than just the catchphrase for Handy, the supervillian puppet and partner of the Human Ton in The Tick animated series (1994) (pictured to the right). Its also one of the more effective ways to spread knowledge. And while there may be an anxious pressure in the first month of 2025, that reading is a distraction or ineffective, there’s no time like the present.

While TikTok is seeing a nice resurgence in learning with the #HillmanUniversity and #TikTokUniversity programs, here we’ll just focus on going through some critical books, one at a time. This is a expanding and evergreen project so we’ve created a page for this project over in the pages section: Dr Implausible’s Book Club and we’re also mirroring the content over on the indie version of the blog here.

This one is focused on academic content, but there are a couple concurrent and overlapping genre-specific themes that we’ll dip in and out of too. We’ve introduced both of those on the podcast, in the early days, with the Cyberpunk 101 episode, and the Introduction to Appendix W (which we mentioned here way back in… 2021? Whoa). We sorta-kinda did the Appendix W as it’s own thing, and that may still continue, but we’ll try and keep everything contained here as well, in case you don’t feel like following three separate things. For those that only interested in a specific element, the companions will help narrow that focus.

We’ll start with Technology Matters: questions to live with by David E. Nye (2006). This was a text that was used as a supplementary reading for one of the classes I taught in the past, a “sociology and ethics for engineers” type of class in the STS vein. It’s approachable, and written for a non-technical audience, which makes it especially worthwhile. As Nye mentions in the preface, these are big questions, and such big questions defy simple answers (or at least ones that are easily testable), and as such we have to come at them with some empathy. Or at least, that’s my take.

We’ll start with the basics, and check back in over the next week or so, and then publish a full post (on at least one of the platforms). Trying hard not to overcommit at the outset though. Let’s see how it goes…