There’s a lot going on in the minute and 35 seconds of the Andor Season 2 trailer that dropped this week, with characters from the first season and new faces alike popping up, stormtroopers blasting away, explosions, spaceships, and onscreen accolades from critics, all set to the tune of Steve Earle’s folk-rock song “The Revolution Starts Now.” But the most exciting moment in the trailer is when Syril Karn’s mother shows up. She’s in just one shot for barely a second, but oh boy, is that henpecking, guilt-laying, banality-of-evil-inspiring mama back. And man, did I miss her.
In case you need a quick refresher on Mother Karn – her full name is Eedy Karn and she’s played by Kathryn Hunter – we first met her in “Aldhani,” the fourth episode of Season 1. After Syril (Kyle Soller) had washed out of his job doing security for the Preox-Morlana Corporation, he returned home to Coruscant, disgraced, to… move back in with his mom. Is his room in her basement? Has he ever touched a girl? Hard to say.
Next episode, as she’s pouring cereal and blue milk for him, Eedy says to her son, “Syril, you’re slouching. Is that how you’ve been presenting yourself to the world?” And then, “You might as well wear a sign that says, ‘I promise to disappoint you.’” Yeah, she’s one of those parents.
All in all, the relationship between the two continues this way every time we see her in Season 1 – it’s all very strained, awful even. Syril seems to have no affection for his mother, and really, Eedy seems to feel the same way. And there’s no need for promises, because Eedy is already disappointed in Syril. While working on Season 1, Soller and Hunter agreed upon a backstory on how their characters wound up in the emotionally-stunted place that they’re in, and it can be traced back to Syril’s father.
“We had kind of figured out the same thing, that he had left really early on, in a real acrimonious, horrible way,” Soller told SlashFilm in 2022. “That was a real launchpad for how Eedy then parents Syril, which is by being wronged. And her anger, and grief, and disappointment, and frustration of him leaving just got filtered into Syril. Growing up without a father is … that absence definitely drives Syril as much as the over-dominating maternal influence.”
The thing about Eedy, and Syril, is that they are just examples of the messed-up, damaged, but actually incredibly pedestrian family- and interpersonal-dynamics in the show that contribute on the ground level, and then up the chain, to the Empire being, well, the Empire. Syril wants nothing more than to serve and be recognized for that service, no matter if what he’s doing is truly right or wrong. Mon Mothma’s (Genevieve O’Reilly) husband Perrin (Alastair Mackenzie) is a carousing do-nothing who doesn’t mind hanging out with awful people as long as the champagne… uh, Chandrilan Squig is good. The Rebel Arvel Skeen (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and his sob story about his dead brother turns out to be a bunch of malarkey, as Arvel’s rebellion is actually him against everyone else, as he says, and all he really wants is the money he and Andor helped steal on Aldhani. And so on.
What Andor winds up being about is simply the story of how regular people can choose, if you’ll forgive the term, the light side or the dark side. And sometimes they don’t even know they’re making that choice. For every Arvel who doesn’t care about the bigger world, there’s an Eedy Karn. Surely Eedy (who is wonderfully realized in Kathryn Hunter’s performance in what is really just a handful of scenes throughout the first season) thinks she’s doing the best for her son, even as she helps to mold and warp him into his full form as the perfect Imperial lackey.
“I knew they’d recognize your promise,” she beams near the end of the season when she hears Syril’s gotten a promotion. He’s going places, you know.
