Andor: Could Syril Handle The Dark Truth About Ghorman? Kyle Soller Hints At Tipping Point Ahead
Andor's Syril Karn may have just experienced "the greatest day of my life," as he put it, but the harsh reality about the Empire's actual plan for Ghorman threatens to come to light — which would in turn implode his relationship with rising ISB star Dedra Meero.
In the Disney+/Star Wars series' latest batch of Season 2 episodes, Syril set up shop at the Imperial Bureau of Standards' field office on Ghorman, purposely making himself a ripe prospect for those embedded with the Ghorman Front rebel network. Syril's plan — under Dedra's guidance and now with Major Partagaz's blessing –is to feed this upstart faction accurate intel on Imperial activity. That will lead the Ghorman Front to make a futile move against the Imperial forces milling about the planet.
What Syril does not know is that the grander, much darker plan orchestrated by Director Krennic is to embolden the Ghorman Front to a degree that they take bold action that paints them as volatile agitators and not the mild-mannered inhabitants of a textiles-based planet. Such a narrative will curry the Empire enough favor that when it begins aggressively extracting calcite from Ghorman, ultimately rendering the planet uninhabitable, the senate will look the other way.
As Partagaz reminded Dedra in the latest episode, "Syril must never know what this is all really about."
Very recently, Syril got a taste of "betrayal" from Dedra, portrayer Kyle Soller tells TVLine, when he learned that she had him followed on his visit home to Coruscant. "He's like, 'What the hell? Don't you trust me?'" the actor recaps. Let alone as any sort of asset, the message to Syril was, "I'm not even good enough in this relationship."
Since Syril and Dedra's relationship is, Soller says, "about power," "I'll keep proving myself and keep my nose to the grindstone" on Ghorman. But in the back half of this season, the actor teases a moment where "the veil gets lifted" to a degree that Syril will have to closely consider the differences between him and his partner.
Syril and Dedra "come from two very distinct, separate families" with regards to "what they're trying to achieve in the Empire," Soller posits. "Unfortunately, I think Syril has 'drunk the Kool-Aid,' and is a bit more naive in his perspective on what the Empire is trying to accomplish.
"Because he's gone up the bureaucracy side, and he's not on the ISB fast track, he's not privy" to the gnarlier details. And if he were to be? "It'd completely rock him," Soller suggests.
Scene parter Denise Gough says that Dedra, meanwhile, is privately kidding herself that the end will justify the information-withholding means.
"She thinks that once it's all done, she can figure it out, that he'll understand what I needed to do because I'm going to bring him loads of power," the actress explains. "She doesn't seem to realize that what is also [important to] him is a building of trust within a relationship. Because she's not capable of that."
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