(a) First she gets a scene in which she's open and vulnerable with her feelings in a way we've never seen her be before (and that at times almost feels contradictory to how she was in S1), with no explanation or clarification of why and how she got to that point.

Syril, for example, gets to have big jumps in his character development because his is a straight path from A to B - you can deduce pretty much everything that happened in between from his state in the previous episode we saw him in and then the state he's in during the current episode. Cinta is not like that - we don't know enough to understand what happened to her, or why she changed, and now she's dead so we never will. So the big emotional scene feels like a way to make her death sadder instead of meaningful character development. Which feels cheap.

(b) The circumstances of her death also feel kind of contrived and rushed - there isn't a shootout or a big dangerous moment, there's one shot being fired and it randomly hits her, out of dozens of other people there, from a great distance. And then she's dead on the spot. She wasn't even killed by the Imps, she was killed by a random glitch in the plan. Brasso's death landed better because that WAS a big dangerous action scene with tension building up over a long period of time, so you can buy it that he died. Even Bix's rape feels more like a natural corollary of the Empire being the Empire - some of these authoritarian fascist fucks will obviously try to take advantage of their position to sexually assault people - Cinta's death just has too many stochastic elements to make it land naturally, especially when combined with point (a) that heightens the cheap one-two of giving a character an emotional scene and then killing them off ten minutes later.

(c) The denouement of the episode focuses more on the Gorman guy and his responsibility for Cinta's death and his feelings about all that than it does on Vel. In fact, it seems like Cinta's death is part of a larger point the writers are trying to make about inexperience and disorganization and refusal to follow orders in rebel groups - except this point would have worked way better, imho, if it was one of the guy's own friends who died. The fact that it's Cinta specifically feels like the least punchy choice if it's the guy or the rebels' incompetence leading to unnecessary deaths that we want to focus on (and so far we've only focused on that - perhaps this'll change in the following episodes and Vel will get more character development, but we don't know that from our current vantage point). Trying to do a two-in-one deal where we make this point and ALSO further Vel's character arc just lands wrong and makes everything underwhelming and unsatisfying.

FAYE MARSAY AS VEL SARTHA IN 'ANDOR' SEASON 2