“Who are you?” is the question that haunts Syril Karn for his entire life. From the moment we met him, prim and proper security uniform modified to be just so, a sense of purpose in a vast and uncaring universe has been at the core of understanding what makes Syril tick. The journey that took him across the galaxy reached a climactic moment in Andor‘s penultimate arc this week, and raised that haunting question once more. But the answer is more complicated than mere villain in Andor‘s narrative, doubting or otherwise. Because even as the hero of his own story, the man we know Syril to be, until the very end, is shaped less by himself and more by the systems and structures that made a tool of him.
This doesn’t excuse Syril of being responsible for what he abets by the end of his story on Ghorman, of course. No matter how much he doubts by the time of the massacre unfolding around him what he’s helped bring about, he still made the choice to be an agent of Imperial interests, both willing soldier and dutiful boyfriend. In not getting the chance to see the light, but to instead face one last ignominy, being so thrown by the villain he built up in his head as Cassian Andor, staring at him blankly and asking that dreaded question—who are you—that he fails to either take the shot he’s waited years to take or notice the kill shot being lined up on himself is fitting punishment for those choices, after all. But the question is left as unanswered to us as it was to Cassian and Syril alike.
Who was Syril Karn? He was whoever anyone needed him to be. As long as it meant recognition, as long as it meant service, and in many ways, as long as it meant love.
As misguided as he might have been, one thing that is repeatedly shown to us throughout Syril’s arc is that he does at the very least try to do what he thinks is right. It’s presented to us as an almost comically annoying trait when we first meet him, but we’re introduced to Syril as a corporate security officer unwilling to sweep the death of two of his colleagues under the rug, in the name of doing things not just for justice, but by the book he was given. It comes up again and again in his journey, this desire to do the right thing being tied into and twisted by what is, ultimately, an similar desire that breeds subservience to authority, regardless of that authority’s scruples.
When we meet Syril’s mother Eedy in that brilliant, intoxicatingly characterful moment of her slapping him across the face before giving him a hug, we’re immediately told the kind of environment Syril grew up in. An absent father, and a mother similarly obsessed with status and hierarchy as he would come to be, created an environment primed for Syril to seek approval and validation outside of his family, regardless of the source. Perhaps, if Syril had been born 50 years earlier, that desire could’ve forged him into model citizen of the Galactic Republic—imperfect in its own ways, but still a structure that would’ve satiated his yearning for order in the chaos of the universe, a satisfaction with regulation and servitude, and moulded him a long a different line of thought. But instead, Syril came of age in the Republic’s twilight, and was an impressionable young adult at the exact moment an authoritarian regime like the Empire and its corporate system cousins needed exactly that.
That’s how you get the low-level security officer who surreptitiously modifies his uniform, in the hopes of recognition. It’s how you get the same officer willing to overcommit a dozen men to a murder investigation, in spit of pressure to do otherwise, forever changing the course of his life. It’s how, when that investigation blows up in his face, you get Syril simultaneously committing to a life of bureaucracy while also practically throwing himself into the arms of the ISB, a level of even higher authority. Young men like Syril—seeking order and the warmth of recognition, of a kind of love, in equal measure—are perfect for Star Wars‘ Imperial structure, because they make for willing sculptures, to be shaped into tools and into weapons as the structure so desires: the Empire runs on evil, but that evil is aided and abetted, and normalized across a galaxy, by a generation of Syrils Karn.
The blurred line between love and recognition in this structure becomes even further blurred in Andor‘s second season, as the unlikely, compellingly off-putting romance between Syril and Dedra flourishes alongside the latter’s use of him as an eager field agent. At last, Syril seemingly has everything he wants: getting to play the dutiful Imperial citizen helping out in any way he can, while also getting the literal love of that regime through loving Dedra. But as much as the Empire craves people like Syril to use up in its engines, it similarly craves pushing them further and further as its desire for power and control becomes more brazen with confidence. So when Dedra and the Empire alike push that need, that yearning in Syril, to the limit on Ghorman, there was no other way he could break than badly. His physical abuse of Dedra when he finds out how much she knew about the Empire’s plans for the Ghor is horrific, but it’s a response born out of the thing the Empire made Syril into, a violent response to the betrayal of his subservience—of his love of Dedra and his love of the structure she represents—that dictates itself through violence.
And it’s all that that sets the stage for his final act. Syril’s final encounter with Cassian is a fascinating foil to his first all those years ago on Ferrix, a question of identity at gunpoint. On Ferrix, it was Cassian aiming the gun, uncaring of who exactly it was that it was pointed at. He needed information that Syril had; whoever he was or turned out to be was inconsequential, and not even worth the blaster bolt Luthen growled at Cassian to put in him. Who Syril Karn was was not a question worth asking in that moment. Five years later, amid the chaos of the Ghorman massacre—a slaughter Syril abetted as he yearned to have an answer to that question, to have purpose—it’s only fitting that Cassian finally asks it. In doing so, Syril is broken one last time: the answer he thought he had built up over those years had just been ripped away from him, the love he thought he’d had as empty as the institution he had given his life to.
All that could be left, really, was the silence as the blaster bolt seared through his head. Used up and abandoned, in his final moments Syril Karn was nothing—another victim of the Empire on a day filled with them.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
