[Editor’s note: The recap of episode two publishes April 23.]

“There is no manual, okay?”

Cassian Andor, spinning feverishly, throws this line out in a moment of panic amidst Andor‘s riveting season two premiere, as he tries (as usual) to talk a whole room full of guns into being pointed anywhere except the back of his own head. But while it’s meant in reference to the stolen Imperial fighter he heisted (after a few false starts) in the episode’s opening minutes, Cass’ declaration might as well be talking about the nascent Rebellion(s) itself: powerful, unfocused, and with no way to know what’ll happen the next time you pull this lever, or slam your hand down on that unlabeled button. We’re all just flying blind, as we return to the single best thing Star Wars has done in years—but we’re soaring, nevertheless.

Because, god, what a relief it is to fall back into this show’s rhythms, its performances, its endless fascination with the tiny tactile details of the Star Wars universe. (There’s a moment late in the episode, at a top-secret meeting of Imperial muckymucks plotting to suppress a planet they intend to “gouge mine” down to the atoms, when director Ariel Kleiman focuses the camera on the fussy little snack table some poor lackey has laid out for these bloodless psychopaths to nosh on. The “banality of evil” is a familiar phrase these days, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something mesmerizing about seeing it get expressed so pointedly through finger foods.) In the show’s first season, creator Tony Gilroy and his team made Star Wars feel real again, in part, by focusing on the sometimes literal nuts and bolts that hold this world together. That attention to the ways things work—spaceships, propaganda meetings, and even just the wars we wage within ourselves—is still in full evidence here. The tension and pressure that Gilroy and Kleiman build in this initial outing, as we cut between Cass falling into the hands of some unaffiliated Rebels with murderous intent, Mon Mothma navigating the less overtly deadly currents of her daughter’s wedding on Chandrilla, and Imperial agent Dedra Meero catching the eye of Ben Mendelsohn’s Director Krennic, works because we have so much real for it all to push against.

That most especially now includes Cassian Andor himself. Andor‘s first season sometimes struggled with the fact that its title character was often its least interesting, and interested, mover-and-shaker: Despite Diego Luna’s expressive and charismatic performance, it could be hard to zero in on a guy whose eye was permanently fixed on nothing more than the next escape route. A year later, we re-meet a Cass who’s surer in himself and his convictions—if still more comfortable working as a conman/scoundrel than a more traditional action hero. Luna’s still just as deft at tossing out Cassian’s faux-casual patter, whether he’s building up a nervous double agent (“You’re coming home to yourself”) or probing his captors for weak points. But he’s even better in the quiet seconds, whether that means flop-sweating his way forward, after his slick spy escape turns out to be more Austin Powers than James Bond, or running the math on where the psychological shortcomings in the “organization” that’s taken him captive are.

But one of the appeals of Andor has also always been that it’s more of an ensemble series than its title might let on, and it’s just as refreshing to be back in the orbit of Genevieve O’Reilly’s Mon Mothma and Denise Gough’s Meero as both navigate environments suffused with tensions both spoken and not. The Chandrilla sections of tonight’s premiere are probably its most overt, and least instantly necessary, bits of table setting—give or take the short check-ins we get with Joplin Sibtain’s Brasso and Adria Arjona’s nightmare-haunted Bix on a pastoral Imperial world—but watching O’Reilly flick between five different flavors of smile to match the needs of the moment has a trove of small delights. (That’s particularly true once she gets the not-especially-welcome news that flamboyant antiquities dealer/coldly lethal Rebel spymaster Luthen Rael will be attending her daughter’s nuptials. Stellan Skarsgård doesn’t get to do any wild scenery chewing tonight, but the mere presence of his voice cutting through the crowd, moments before Luthen swans into view, can’t help but turn the temperature up.)

Gough, meanwhile, continues to give what may be the single most interesting performance in a show that makes that competition an extremely crowded one. The sequences with her carefully watching Mendelsohn’s Krennic in his secret conference room in the Maltheen Divide are the most overtly satirical Andor lets itself get in this premiere, especially when the Rogue One villain invites the smooth-talking goons from “The Ministry Of Enlightenment” to talk about how they can “weaponize Galactic opinion” against the spider-loving people of Ghorman so that the Empire can frack their planet to death. These sequences, of Imperial functionaries sparring with each other over territory and logistics, are some of my favorite parts of Andor and feel of a piece with the show’s larger obsession with process and the tiny steps that make up massive acts of both great heroism and unimaginable evil. Andor is a show where the most dangerous moves happen in the head, not the hands, and watching Meero balance the bureaucrat’s automatic caution against her own ambition, and her almost instinctive understanding of the levers inside other people’s heads, is just as thrilling as any of the moments of gunfire that punctuate the hour. “You need a radical insurgency you can count on,” she offers up to a purring, almost foppish Krennic, tossing out one of those so-casually-clever lines that Gilroy fills his scripts with. As in the show’s first season, Gough balances the undeniable appeal of quiet competence against the loathsomeness of the ends it’s being deployed in service of. Krennic is not the only one intrigued by where Dedra’s headed next.

If this premiere has a flaw, then, it’s simply a mild one of pacing: We start with a brief burst of action before slamming on the breaks for the next thirty minutes, as the show does the necessary work of re-introducing us to its characters and their individual, disconnected settings. (It doesn’t help that, after that intro, the only genuinely new folks who get any focus are the rebels/bandits Cassian ends up captured by, who are pretty clearly meant to be little more than fodder.) Luna has talked in interviews about how each of this season’s three-episode blocks is arranged a bit like a movie, covering a single year of Cassian’s life. It’ll be interesting to see how each of these individual instances of rising action will fare when taken as singular episodes of TV, because it’s easy to imagine them getting bogged down in repeated instances of setup. For now, though, I can’t be bothered by any of this enough to care: Being back in a version of Star Wars where people act like this, talk like this, think like this, is simply too exciting to get slowed down with splitting hairs. The party’s kicking off, and the bolts are flying: I’m simply humming with excitement to see where Andor takes us next.

Stray observations

• • Welcome to The A.V. Club‘s episodic coverage of Andor season two! We’re dropping three recaps per week (on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays) to keep up with the release of show. If you’re curious about my personal Star Wars takes (and couldn’t already infer them from the above recap), suffice it to say I’m one of those kinds of nerds: a Last Jedi fan who grew up on the original movies and remains hopeful that the franchise can grow up, too—believing it’s at its best when it’s trying to think seriously about what its stories mean, instead of trying to over-awe with action and flying lightsabers, or numb viewers with the soothing balm of nostalgia.
• • Process-wise, although I’m writing these recaps via screeners, I won’t be watching new episodes until I’ve written up the previous one. So there’s no worry of spoiler contamination from future episodes here.
• • Rachelle Diedericks gives a fine performance as Niya, the mechanic who helps Cassian steal the fighter on Sienar. Her ashamed reveal that she had “fun” working at the test facility is a nice reinforcement of the show’s treatment of rank-and-file Imperials, who are often far less evil than they are blissfully unengaged.
• • The premiere reserves most of its more comedic moments for Mendelsohn, who revisits his Rogue One character in all his sneering, drolly threatening, irony-laden glory. (It does get some laughs at of just how bad, and how quickly, Cassian fucks up his escape attempt, though.)
• • A nice action beat: We don’t even see the plasma missile (or whatever) hit the Stormtrooper who’s attacking Cass with the rocket launcher—just his sudden, total absence, and the hole in the wall behind him.
• • Bix is still being haunted by her memories of being tortured by Dr. Gorst, with Joshua James appearing very briefly in her dream sequences.
• • “Oh, how effortlessly you lie.”
• • A nice touch: Brasso has a decorative plate of Maarva up in his home on Mina-Rau. (Which is absolutely gorgeous, by the way: My eyes have no good way of parsing how much is practically filmed here, and how much is being done in the fabled “Volume,” but all of the episode’s environment have nice heft to them.)
• • The guys who capture Cassian are revealed to be followers of Maya Pei, who was one of the rival Rebel leaders that Forest Whitaker’s Saw Gerrera denounced (calling them “Neo-Republicans”) in the show’s first season. (Also, the blond guy with the mustache is Tony Gilroy’s son Sam Gilroy, apparently.)
• • I’d love to get a behind-the-scenes feature on the making of that little edutainment movie for Ghorman spider silk.
• • “We love the spiders, oh, it’s an image we can build on.” Meanwhile, I love these slimy propaganda dudes; they’re walking a very narrow lane of absurdity that works within the general deadly silliness of the Imperial bureaucracy.
• • I’m left with one major question as we move on to the second episode: Where the hell is Syril Karn? I need my fascist, nerdy cereal fan, and soon.