First appearance: Episode 1. Scene: Morlana 1 brothel.
Of all the characters in the series Cassian is the one with possibly the single most profound character development in terms of how much they themselves change from first to last appearance. When we first meet Cassian he is what Tony Gilroy calls a ‘roach’: as far as he could possibly be from the hero he is by the time of Rogue One, where he is a multi-skilled agent who is ready to give everything for the cause. Instead, the man in this opening scene comes over as a scrappy and shady individual who can take care of himself in some ways but who has hints of a rich and troubled emotional life under a very cool and reserved surface appearance.
There’s a sense of mystery about Cassian in the opening shots as he moves through scenery that is visually reminiscent of something like Blade Runner. The red light district aesthetics, the rain, the grounded and realistically edgy dialogue with the hostess and two Pre-Mor guards in the brothel, the way the series very quickly reveals that this is indeed a brothel and that our protagonist is there looking for a girl from Kenari. The atmosphere is seedy beneath the expensive veneer and also a bit threatening.
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Very little is given away about Cassian by the dialogue, until his own revealing line: “I’m looking for my sister”. This is when he’s given no choice but to reveal the truth because the hostess is by then suspicious that he’s ‘trouble’ in some way, and she is protective of this girl - whoever she is - even though she’s apparently no longer working there. This reticence turns out to be very typical of Cassian. He’s emotionally reserved and generally only likes to reveal his feelings and the facts associated with them to those he’s close to, and not always then - as his coming scenes with Maarva, Bix and Brasso will show.
Already he’s giving the impression that he has a troubled past. Not just the fact that he’s looking for what is presumably a sister he has lost contact with in a brothel, but the fact that he seems to be only there at all because of a tip-off from a ‘friend’. We get the sense that he is in self-preservation mode in some ways but also that there’s an innate sadness in his story, if this is where he thinks his sister might be. That she’s a sex-worker who has to go with men like these two idiots who are already deciding that they want to be a problem for the physically unimposing stranger who they call “a little thing” and “Scrawno”.
Rather infamously, the series never presents a resolution to this search. Gilroy defends this by saying that the absence of his sister and the terrible guilt about leaving her behind that day feeds into all of Cassian’s later hatred of abandoning people. It’s a trait that carries right through to Rogue One where even the novelisation, written years before Andor, mentions his haunted aversion to leaving people behind.
Yet there’s not enough information in the scene to draw too many conclusions about Cassian’s character on a first watch. I remember that I did enjoy his defiant glare at the PreMor guards and the hint of flirting with the hostess with the ‘I don’t have a girlfriend’ line. Tiny little intriguing crumbs; but the scene in the brothel finishes with us having more questions than answers, much like the case for Cassian himself as, expressionless, he sets back out into the rain to head for his borrowed ship.
But coming back to the scene after seeing the whole journey is fascinating as you can now see the aspects of Cassian’s character that will help shape his journey. He will change a lot, but the changes are based on what we are already getting glimpses of here. His loyalty to his family, his dogged determination, his instinct for secrecy and self-preservation. At the moment it’s focused in a very self-centred way but as the circle of people and things he cares about expands outwards he will be ‘coming home to himself’ in the same way that he encourages the engineer Niya to do in his first scene of season 2.
I’m going to include what happens next though as it’s the ‘inciting incident’ for the whole plot. When the guards come from behind to shake him down, Cassian doesn’t exactly choose to fight - he’s kind of forced to. He’s given no choice, in a way, and yet he also DOES have that choice, and in the same paradoxical way his story will unfold over the series: he’s a reluctant hero, but if forced to use them he has fight-winning natural talents and learned skills and will absolutely follow events through to the best and most logical conclusion. As the second guard, begging for his life, finds out to his cost: Cassian is someone who would prefer not to kill but who absolutely will if he sees that as the only way. As Gilroy wryly puts it, he’s good at doing the math.
It’s undoubtedly a line through to Cassian’s first appearance in Rogue One, where he unhesitatingly kills a man who is on his own side… because there is no choice. But by that stage it’s no longer just about saving his own skin, but preserving information that will save countless others. He’s burning his decency for someone else’s future and is willing to burn his life for a sunrise he’ll never see. But at the moment, he just wants to escape arrest for a double murder. We will later find out that he’s already been imprisoned before. His absent sister is just one in a whole string of losses.
The very first shots of Cassian show him walking in to the Morlana 1 leisure district over a causeway. It’s visually striking but I think there’s some archetypal symbolism here too. A path across water is one often associated with change and transformation, crossing from one life to another. It’s both a liminal space and a rite of passage. Water makes frequent appearances throughout the series and film, particularly in rainfall - and this whole sequence also takes place in a storm. There’s a particularly ominous/portentous rumble of thunder when Kravas says “You killed him!” and Cassian reflects for a few seconds on the signifance of that. He’s crossed a bridge, as it were. He runs back across the causeway but just like his journey to the leisure district , it’s a path from which he cannot deviate and running back across does not erase everything that happened and what seems to be something like only 20 minutes. The choices that he made, those that were made for him, and all the choices in between.
His journey has begun, whether he likes it or not.
Cassian’s final scene: In the series, he’s walking again - but this time he’s not skulking, hood up in the rainy night. He’s walking upright, full of acceptance of his journey and full of purpose, nodding to the Force healer who so unsettled him the year before. He knows now that he is fighting for the right reason. In his very last scene of all - in Rogue One - he is of course dying for that same right reason: the hope of bringing about a better galaxy for all those he loves and even beyond. He’s gone from self-centred to the ultimate version of selfless. That opening walk into destiny ends here, but what an inspirational and moving journey it’s been.
TLDR: Cassian’s journey from self-centred thief to selfless hero begins on a rainy night on Morlana 1 and the clues to the steps he will take along that journey are already in place.
So Gilroy had yet to decide whether Cassian would find his sister or not, but in the 2019 “design manifesto” wanted him to be searching through 2 seasons at least (so 5 and 4 BBY). Further evidence in this section also that the “fear of being someone who leaves people behind” idea in R1 was a Gilroy script addition from the reshoots that he’s returning to.
Puts an interesting new slant on the ep 7 scene with Maarva when she tells Cassian to let it go because when that was filmed they still thought that he wouldn’t for at least another year. 
i could only get this far because i’m waiting on more pieces to arrive (this is a custom set), but they’re both eagerly awaiting their ride to be finished
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