#skeen as ghost of the future AND haunting memorandum of what happens to the guys who actualy amke it out

[rotzaprachim]

ok so something insane about andor’s storytelling is the way it works in neat closed loops, and also as a crescendoing spiral in which everything is reconnected to each other. something i noticed just now? arvel skeen, three-episode side motherfucker who gets promptly shot down by the narrative and has a whole almost episode space between him and cassian getting sentenced to narkina 5. because, well, we’ve seen someone who’s already been sentenced to two rounds of imperial prison camps, the kind that leave tattoos burned into your skin. (and yes, this sequence also emphasizes that cassian has been through the quasi-imperial prison system already for three years as a young teenager which is.... horrifying to think about.) 

(horrifying things to think about but anyway: the shape of the krayt prison tattoo resembles the whole shape of narkina 5) 

now, we don’t know too much about arvel skeen, but i think the show probably implies that he’s a survivor of the large scale imperial adult sentencing system from BEFORE P.O.R.D. changes everything into class-a offences, meaning, from when there were at least a few people who made it out alive. and he’s haunted. he’s so fucked, as a person, but so fucking haunted, and ebon moss bachrach does an incredible job with this, with playing a man who is just broken beyond belief. 

like, what DOES nemik’s ideas man manifesto mean to this man whose seen some of the most oppressive action of the empire? not only that, but the narkina 5 episodes emphasize the specific ways the empire runs the prisons by pitting prisoners against each other - for flavour in their soylent green, essentially. the prisoners in cassian’s work gang and even kino loy end up actively resisting this division again and again, which is ultimately a massive aspect of how they can band together to carry out an uprising. But would everyone face that situation in the same way? Arvel Skeen suggests not, also suggests that even those prisoners “let go” are still kept mentally from home in a million ways from the trauma of their experiernces. someone pointed out that the final rallying cries of episode 10′s rebellion, we leave together or not at all, we all climb for the light function as a direct response to skeen telling cassian we all climb over each other. 

so no, i don’t think the show is providing apologism for skeen’s actions. but i do think it’s impossible to look at this character without a more sincere and radical empathy considering everything that we now know about the context which created him. skeen, like everyone else, was already a dead man walking when he came on screen, but a disturbing ghost of cassian’s future, and an example of this show’s writing structure of intricate rings that seem unrelated but ultimately reconnect for broader thematic purpose. skeen seems like an unrelated character who goes down after three fucking episodes, but he’s also part of the crew that’s going to both set fire another log of the rebellion’s kindling (even if he was in it for nothing but the money) AND cause the sentence he survived to be a death sentence for everyone else. and in his own way skeen never was alive for the narrative, but a walking spector and a memorandum to ask the question that even if when people could go home from the prisons, anyone ever actually did.