Andor Episode 9 Delivered One of the Most Chilling Star Wars Scenes
Star Wars, starting from A New Hope, did not exactly shy away from dark and scary things, but it always left the worst, like cold-blooded torture, off-screen.
Andor is a darker, grittier take on the Star Wars universe, dedicated to its criminal underworld and roots of the Rebellion, so, well, it doesn't leave the worst off-screen. Episode 9 of Andor features one of the most chilling scenes in Star Wars to this date.
Earlier on the show Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona) gets caught and at the beginning of the episode Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) of the Imperial Security Bureau decides to interrogate her. At first that means simple psychological pressure and intimidation, laying out how much Dedra already knows, why is she so sure about Bix having information that she needs, and why Bix' position is hopeless.
But once Bix refuses to talk, things escalate quickly indeed, as Dedra and her "technical assistant", Doctor Gorst, gleefully go about torturing the information out of her.
And while the torture does not involve any sort of gory mutilation, the method which Dedra and Gorst use is probably even worse. You see, they happen to have in their hands an audio record of a massacre, inflicted by the Empire on a whole species of intelligent creature, who tried to interfere with building of an Imperial refueling outpost on their planet and were wiped out for it.
One part of said audio record, which, according to Gorst's speculations, involved children of the species, had strange properties, which inflicted horrible pain on the listeners, and eventually drove them into incoherent insanity.
Insofar as we can see, he is completely truthful at least about the "horrible pain" part, because within seconds after headphones are forced on her and the record starts playing, Bix Caleen is reduced to screaming agony.
What makes this even worse is that unlike any previous examples of torture in Star Wars, Bix, as far as we can tell for now, actually cracks under it, telling Dedra everything she knows, or at least enough to make Dedra believe that she told everything. Way to establish both how evil the Empire actually is, under its sterile gleaming surface, and how Andor is different from your usual Star Wars show.