[Welcome to Decoding TV’s coverage of Andor Season 2! For each of Andor’s four 3-episode drops, we’ve been running recaps by Dan Gvozden, plus a bonus podcast episode. If you’d like to support what we’re doing here, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. The review below contains spoilers for Season 2, Episodes 10-12 of Andor.]

Following up on the previous batch of episodes was always going to be an impossible task for showrunner Tony Gilroy and his team of creatives. Not only had the narrative of the entire season been building to the massacre on Ghorman and Mon Mothma’s point-of-no-return speech, but the spectacle of both events surely couldn’t be matched or repeated, if only for budgetary reasons. The reception to the episodes was just as monumental, with episodes eight and nine debuting in the top ten, highest-rated individual television episodes in IMDB’s history.

These three final episodes, directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios and written by Tom Bissell, act mainly as a means to emotionally conclude the stories of the lead characters that audiences have followed throughout Andor by exploring their motivations and challenging them to move on to the next stage of their personal rebellions. More than anything, this batch serves as a transition to the events of Rogue One, which, in the typical Star Wars style of telling stories backwards and out of order, recontextualizes the film as the true ending of Cassian Andor’s lifelong growth into the “messenger” that the galaxy called him to become.

Your mileage may vary depending on how much you hoped for the conclusion of Andor to be purely self-contained or to escalate events beyond what came before. Still, for many, these concluding episodes will evoke feelings of inevitability and the question, “Haven’t we seen this before?” This does not diminish their impact, stellar production, or entertainment value. These episodes begin with a heist/assassination mission in an Imperial hospital that de-emphasizes the series' richly explored focus on spycraft and instead uses the adventure to frame a series of revelatory flashbacks. The subsequent story is an escape-the-planet rescue mission that could have come directly from the script of Rogue One, if only for its focus on the unique partnership between Cassian and K2SO.

But it’s also important to note that the stakes of these missions decisively shift away from Andor’s focus on the birth of the Rebellion to their future mission to stop the Death Star, perfectly aligning with Cassian’s mission in Rogue One and successfully closing the gap in the timeline. It all feels so familiar, and Andor has always thrived on not feeling familiar. But perhaps that’s a reminder that the fight against fascism requires unending vigilance and that surrendering for even a second risks allowing further encroachment by illiberal forces (or a second Death Star).

Equally valid, in the case of any rebellion, it can be impossible to identify the inception point through which each victory arrives. Do we need to experience more stories about how the Rebellion received the plans to the Death Star? I don’t think so. However, the answer that Rogue One provided is further complicated here. The world of Star Wars feels richer for it, particularly due to the skill of this writers’ room, even if it cuts against the standalone nature of Andor.

But if Disney considers telling the story of the many Bothans who died to get the plans for the Second Death Star, it should trigger some serious red flags.

It’s only in the final half hour that Andor finally leverages its two seasons of detailed character study to deliver an understated emotional gut punch that reorients the entire series around Cassian Andor and properly defines his role in saving the galaxy and the personal value of his self-sacrificial mission, which only fulfills itself in the final moments of Rogue One, as he stands on the beach with Jyn Erso and embraces his fate. I’ll get into the details of the final image of this series later in the recap, but it reopens a long-standing conversation about the order in which Star Wars is best experienced. While this finale to Andor is touching on its own, it takes on an entirely different context in the wake of the events of Rogue One.

Each of the final moments with the main cast of Andor is equally understated, to the point of feeling anti-climactic. This isn’t an episode full of big speeches from impassioned characters, except for an audio recording of Karis Nemik’s (Alex Lawther) manifesto about the impossibility of their struggle. Even when called to speak up to defend Cassian in front of her fellow Rebel leaders, Mon Mothma sits in silence, only to later quietly approach Bail Organa on his behalf. Instead, each character silently grapples with how their actions over the past two seasons have shaped their destinies. The script, actors, and camera seem to break the fourth wall, looking both at the audience and into the future, as the weight of what’s to come hits us all at once.

A great deal of ink will be spilled to describe how Andor leveraged the history of modern fascist movements to create a timeless antiauthoritarian story that often feels like it is commenting directly on the events of the contemporary world. I’ll leave that to other excellent historians to outline the specific details of how Andor does this so well, but I felt it appropriate to acknowledge its boldness. In an era where major news outlets and opposition parties in the United States won’t dare even to utter the word “fascist,” Andor doesn’t just assert the need to punch Nazis; it underlines how essential it is to fight back against those who aid in the eradication of our shared human liberties, while also asserting the necessity for that fight to be one full of love, companionship, and a clear-eyed focus on what it means to be victorious.

The most anti-war film of all time, Come and See, wouldn’t allow its war-ravaged, shellshocked, suicidal, orphaned protagonist to imagine undoing the events of World War II by killing baby Hitler in his crib. I believe that when faced with the same decision, baby Sheev Palpatine wouldn’t be spared by the characters of Andor. I don’t want spend too much time praising Disney, whose stances against anti-democratic forces and in support of human rights seem to align only with their pocketbooks. However, the specificity and moral grayness of Andor’s depiction of the fight against fascism is genuinely surprising and represents the kind of bold, political, artistic scream needed to shock the conscience of America that we need in our most treasured pop culture franchises right now.

EPISODE 10: “Make It Stop”

One of the most frequent recurring visual motifs throughout this season of Andor is a flashing red light, which often opens each new episode with an air of mystery and suspense. The flashing red inherently signals that something is going wrong and elicits emotions best captured by the recurring Star Wars joke quote, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Any further significance connecting the flashing red lights of Luthen’s signal to Cassian, the electrified floors of the Narkina 5 Imperial Prison Complex, the comms device in the safehouse, or any of the other half-dozen or so appearances is currently beyond my comprehension.

Either way, this episode begins with another similar appearance of a flashing red light, this time in Kleya’s secret office at the back of Luthen’s shop for rare artifacts. They are being signaled by Supervisor Jung, their spy within the ISB, for a sudden and panicked meeting in a relatively public park on the upper levels of Coruscant. The two, sensing that something could be seriously wrong with the situation they are walking into, prepare for the worst and what it would mean to finally flee Coruscant. Luthen acknowledges the situation isn’t perfect, “I think we used up all the perfect,” and that they’ve genuinely lost all control over their engagements with the Empire that they once had. The Rebellion has grown too large for any certainty, and any engagement could be their last.

Jung walks quickly out of the ISB headquarters, past squads of stormtroopers, and nervously sits next to Luthen on a bench in a poolside plaza. He tells Luthen that Dedra Meero contacted a friend of his in Tactical the previous night to assist her in assembling a team on Coruscant. Jung believes her intent is to use that team to come after Luthen, but he was unable to obtain any additional information because he feels that he’s been “burned.” Jung claims, “I’ve figured it out. I know what we’re chasing,” but before he reveals anything more to Luthen, he demands that he get security for his family. Luthen lightly implies that he will provide for them, if only to get Jung to talk.

It turns out that Jung has had access to Dedra Meero’s private storage records for a year and didn’t tell Luthen out of fear that he’d force him to use it immediately. Instead, he waited until this moment to spend two hours digging through her files, knowing that it would likely expose him as a spy once he did so. He found a wealth of information valuable to the Rebellion, but none of it more critical than the revelation that the Emperor’s energy program is a lie, the rebellion on Ghorman was a front to cover up the mining of kalkite, the Imperial presence on the planet Jedha isn’t about partisans but rather the acquisition of kyber crystals, and that “Orson Krennic has been building a secret weapon for over a decade.” I don’t think I have to spell it out for anyone reading this, but he’s not talking about a moon, but a space station—the Death Star.

He asks Luthen where they might go to escape the Empire and relay what he found. When Luthen tells him, “Yavin,” it’s the first time we see him begin to acquiesce to the reality that the army of the Rebellion might now be the next stage of the frontier, despite having held out for as long as possible to continue operating his clandestine missions from the shadows. But his promise to Jung, a loyal and self-sacrificing member of the Rebellion, amounts to nothing more than comforting words to a man at the end of his usefulness. The show cuts away before their conversation ends, but when it returns to the plaza, we see a silhouette of Jung’s body, sitting alone on the bench. The truth is evident before any confirmation is revealed: Luthen has shot Jung in the heart. Luthen’s true motives for killing Jung are never clarified—whether they be purely utilitarian, driven by fear for the safety of the Rebellion, or an act of mercy—but his unexpected death, coupled with his pleading, reminds us of Luthen’s cutthroat tactics.

Together, Kleya and Luthen review the information they just learned from Jung, including the name “Galen Erso.” Luthen wants her to memorize it so she can flee Coruscant and inform the leaders on Yavin while he stays behind to destroy all evidence of their work. She protests but ultimately relents and leaves to arrange for her departure to Yavin. Luthen quickly returns to his shop and opens a canister of what appears to be molten metal. He pours the metal over his communication devices and the rings he and Kleya use to store information and codes. However, seconds later, before he can destroy all evidence of his work, the chime of his shop’s front door rings. He walks out to answer it, puts on a fake smile, and opens the door before we can see who it is.

It’s Dedra Meero, just as Jung warned. She feigns interest in the shop, “I’ve passed by here many times. I’ve always wanted to come in.” Neither drops their guise and Dedra’s true intentions, as a customer or otherwise, remain opaque. Their conversation, too, could be interpreted as one between a dealer and an interested buyer, or between two people trying to discover the other’s next move playfully. Dedra asks if all the pieces are authentic, and Luthen responds, “At the moment, only two pieces of questionable prominence are in the gallery. Any guesses?” I’ll give you two: Dedra and Luthen. When he shows her a crystalline ceremonial dagger, she again asks, “Is it real?” He coyly responds, “We still don’t know. The tension mounts.” No kidding, Luthen!

Then, Dedra reveals a strange case and suggests that she might have an item he would be interested in. She pulls out a “vintage Imperial starpath unit,” the same one that was instrumental in Luthen’s first meeting with Cassian back in Season 1 and was lost in a firefight with the Pre-Mor Enforcement team. Its appearance convinces Luthen that she’s no longer just appearing as a potential customer in his shop. Right on cue, Dedra cuts to the chase, revealing that she’s dreamt of this moment for years, “and here you were, all that time, hiding in the shelter of Imperial peace and quiet.” The two trade verbal spars, with Dedra labeling Luthen as an agent of chaos and Luthen pointing out how “confident and terrified” she is. The Rebellion has outgrown her grasp, and as disgusted as she might be with Luthen, he tells her that “there’s a whole galaxy out there waiting to disgust you.”

Dedra intends to bring him in and torture him until he reveals the Rebellion’s secrets, but she notices a fire at the rear of the shop. Luthen turns away as she screams at him to turn back around. He doesn’t, and slowly reveals the ceremonial dagger in his hand, now dripping with blood. He falls forward, knocking over an artifact, mortally wounded. She screams for a med team, as her mission will be an utter failure if he dies. The squad of Imperial troops waiting outside quickly rushes in, straps him onto a futuristic stretcher, and loads him into a transport as Kleya looks on.

The Imperials scan everything inside the shop, collect Luthen’s dagger, and discover his weapons and destroyed comms devices. News of Dedra’s raid on Luthen’s shop and Jung’s death reaches the ISB and Partagaz, who informs Supervisor Heert (Jacob Beswick), who leads the investigation into Axis and has been suspicious of Dedra’s activities. He immediately departs for the hospital, where they will attempt to revive Luthen.

Back at the safehouse, Kleya processes the attack on Luthen and considers what she must do to continue their mission. The remainder of the episode unfolds with her preparing and executing a plan to remove Luthen from life support in an Imperial hospital, preventing them from torturing him for the information he entrusted her to deliver to the Rebellion. Intercut throughout this narrative, the episode flashes back to reveal how Luthen and Kleya first met, formed a bond, and ultimately how she dedicated her life to aiding Luthen in his subversion of the Empire’s conquest of the galaxy.

Some twenty years (or more) ago, we join Luthen, a de-aged Stellan Skarsgård, in the belly of a transport ship, where he appears to be a sergeant in the Imperial army, shortly after the dissolution of the Republic. The ship is empty, save for him, and has landed on an unspecified planet. Outside the ship, we hear the screams of people suffering at the hands of blaster fire. Luthen appears to be in shock, as smoke and debris are launched through the open bay doors. He quietly pleads, “Please stop. Make it stop.”

One of the soldiers in his company returns to the ship and informs him that the Captain is looking for him. Luthen concocts an excuse, as the soldier reveals that they managed to clear out a basement of about fifty people. The soldier retrieves a high-powered weapon that resembles a flamethrower and turns Luthen’s radio back on, which he sharply notes had been switched off. Luthen is clearly attempting to distance himself from the actions of his teammates. Whether this is the first time he has participated in an order to massacre innocent people or not, this seems to be the pivotal moment that has awakened Luthen to the horrors of the Empire, just as Syril experienced before his death on Ghorman and Finn experienced in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Then Luthen hears a gasp from behind a storage grate on the ship. He quickly pulls it open, armed with a knife, and discovers a young girl whose clothing and hair suggest she’s a more primitive native to the planet he’s landed on. It’s a young Kleya. He tells her to be quiet as the ship's captain returns to retrieve Luthen so that they can begin their next attack on the native people. Luthen orders him off the ship, suggesting, “I’ll be right behind you,” and turns back to extend a warm hand to Kleya.

We rejoin Luthen and Kleya on another part of their travels together, seemingly a few months later. They’ve changed their names—“Kleya” and “Luthen” are revealed as false names—and they bounce off each other to barter with the more primitive locals. When a shopkeeper asks if Kleya is Luthen’s daughter, he hesitatingly says, “Yes.” As they walk away, Kleya asks Luthen if she’s meant to pose as his daughter now. “When it is useful,” he replies. “We’ll be whoever we have to; it won’t always be up to us. I’m Luthen now, you’re Kleya; everything else is up for grabs.”

The two continue bartering in a cliffside town overrun with Imperial stormtroopers. The previous night, an Imperial sniper was attacked, but a merchant tells Luthen and Kleya that “they keep finding people who did it.” The troopers drag a group of chained locals, including children, into the public square. Luthen tries to get Kleya to leave, knowing what’s about to happen. Instead, she approaches the men and children lined up for execution by firing squad. Everyone looks away as the stormtroopers kill the natives, but Kleya keeps her eyes fixed on the murders. She rejoins Luthen and begs him to start fighting back. He urges patience, which further infuriates her. However, he lays out his entire philosophy to her:

“We fight to win. That means we lose, and lose, and lose, and lose. Until we’re ready. All you know now is how much you hate. You bank that, you hide that, you keep it alive, until you know what to do with it. And when I tell you to move, you move.”

He pauses and shouts at her, “MOVE!”

We rejoin Luthen and Kleya several years later. They have cleaned up and are wearing expensive clothes, indicating their successful partnership and ability to assume roles within increasingly upper levels of this galactic society. They sit in a riverside restaurant overlooking a beautiful city and a bridge that resembles the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy. Their attention is focused on the fifty Imperial soldiers and transports that patrol the bridge. Luthen offers Kleya an opportunity to abort their mission, the success of which will mean they must flee this planet and leave their comfortable lives behind. He tells her, “You need to know you are making a choice. I lived most of my life without ever realizing that was a possibility.” It’s a version of the same speech he gave Cassian Andor at the end of Season 1, but he’s less assured of his role as a mentor and what it means to invite someone so young into a life that he only recently discovered at a much older age.

But Kleya is headstrong and agrees to continue with their mission. He hands her a device, a trigger for an explosive, and tells her to, as Emperor Palpatine famously instructed, “Do it.” He informs her that this time the trigger and explosive are real, suggesting that he’s tested her before with less lethal results. He instructs her to look directly at him as she pushes the button. The bomb goes off, everyone in the restaurant screams, and then he allows her to turn and look at the remains of the bridge, vehicles, and men. “We’ll be leaving now. We made our choice.” They flee the restaurant.

In the present, Kleya retrieves several hidden items belonging to her and Luthen from the safehouse apartment, then marches through Coruscant, past fully armed stormtrooper squads, and directly to the hospital where Luthen is being kept. Inside, Dedra stands outside the hospital room where Luthen is hooked up to a device that is keeping him alive and breathing – let’s call it a “beskar lung.” She’s impatient about how long it will take to gain access to Luthen, enough that she threatens a doctor to move all her critical patients as the ISB takes control of the floor.

Kleya enters the hospital with her hand wrapped in a bloody bandage. She navigates the hallways and into a locker room, where she uses a device to dig through several units until she finds a yellow nurse’s uniform to disguise herself. As she walks through the various wings of the building, filled with alien patients floating in bacta tanks, she peers through the entirely transparent walls across the courtyard. She watches Supervisor Heert take an elevator to the floor where Luthen rests, accompanied by an Imperial Marshall. Heert and his men confront Dedra about how she timed Luthen’s arrest with his day off. Despite her assertions regarding her successful outing of the Axis cell operating on Coruscant, they are there to arrest Dedra.

Meanwhile, Kleya steals a small alien patient in a wheelchair to use as cover for accessing the hospital's upper levels. She wheels the befuddled alien past several checkpoints before abandoning it to sneak up a flight of stairs in her socks, while it sings a song from below. As the only other person who knows Jung’s secret, she takes a greater risk with each step she takes closer to Luthen. An Imperial officer confronts her; she lies and ultimately shoots him as he approaches. After that, she’s on Luthen’s floor, and her goal is within reach, although it is behind the watchful eyes of many armored soldiers.

She pulls out a similar explosive device to the one she and Luthen used to destroy the bridge and triggers the explosion of an entire bay of transport ships at the base of the hospital. The stormtroopers and officers race to the elevators and stairs to respond to the attack as she walks past them, blasting a few on her way. Moments later, she enters Luthen’s room. It’s silent, but the eerie sounds of his assisted breathing, which played over the show’s title card, are as loud as those of Darth Vader. She looks down at the man who was not only her savior but also became a father to her, and without hesitating, reaches up, unscrews his attachment from the breathing device, and allows him to breathe one last time. Kleya gazes down at his face, tenderly kisses his forehead, and a single tear runs down her cheek. She leaves the room.

Luthen’s lifeless body lies prone on the table as troopers rush after Kleya, reminding us that he finally gave “everything” to the cause of the Rebellion.

EPISODE 11: “Who Else Knows?”

Allow me to start this episode recap with an apology for overlooking a key detail from the last batch of episodes that essentially sets up the return of a significant player in the final two episodes of Andor. Before the massacre of the Ghorman people, there was a sequence that detailed the Front’s assembly of weaponry to defend themselves against the Imperial troops. We see Vel searching through some blasters until she uncovers one with a blue handle and unique Pre-Mor insignia. She asks whose gun it is, and a man raises his hand. That man was unrecognizable to me, given his various hairstyles and minor role in Andor Season 1 and Rogue One. However, he’s none other than Ruescoot Melshi (Duncan Pow), whom Cassian met in the Narkina 5 prison and would go on to join him for his final mission to Scarif to secure the Death Star plans.

That gun, the AD-616K6KA, has undergone an extraordinary journey, one that roughly parallels Syril Karn’s. The weapon was originally Syril’s and was issued to him as part of his role in the Preox-Morlana security service. However, during the shootout involving Cassian, Luthen, Syril, and the other Pre-Mor troops, Cassian held Syril at blasterpoint and took his weapon. He then brought the blaster with him to Aldhani, which put him in trouble with his new rebel teammates, who became immediately suspicious of his allegiance to their cause. This is where Vel encountered the weapon for the first time. Amusingly, when Cassian talks to Arvel Skeen (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) about the original owner of the gun, he tells him, “Didn’t get a name.” That’s right. Not only does Cassian not know Syril’s name, but he also held Syril at blasterpoint with his back turned to him. So, when he asks Syril, “Who are you?” he’s genuinely asking. He’s never seen Syril’s face before.

In the aftermath of the Aldhani heist, Andor takes the money they stole and hides away on Niamos. He places the pistol alongside his weapon in a secret box stowed away in the ceiling above the shower in his hotel room. However, when he gets arrested and imprisoned, the stash remains hidden in the hotel room until he escapes and retrieves it. Cassian then gifts the blaster to his fellow prison comrade Melshi as a parting gift. This is how the pistol ends up with Melshi on Ghorman and is recognized by Vel. Where it goes from there, only time will tell. The ultimate poetic justice would have been if Carro Rylanz used Syril’s gun to kill him, but upon revisiting the scene, it’s clear that isn’t the case.

Either way, this has been a long way to say that Melshi has returned for this episode, alongside a few other Rogue One favorites, for a two-part rescue mission that highlights the specific joys of that film’s ensemble cast adventures. But first, we return to the hospital as the Imperials try to determine what happened to lead to Luthen’s death. The Medical Director Recklaw (Timothy Bentinck) is furious about the disturbance and violence at his hospital and the Empire’s lockdown of his facilities. Imperial Supervisor Heert threatens to arrest him if he further slows down their investigation and demands that he provide the hospital's security logs. With the security logs secured, Heert pressures a talkative comms officer to review their security footage, where they find an image of Kleya posing as a nurse.

Back at the ISB headquarters, Krennic looks through glass into an interrogation room where Dedra sits. We never see his eyes, as they remain cut off by the frame, but his grimace reveals his state of mind. He turns off the room’s surveillance, enters, and begins to berate Dedra with questions. He labels her a Rebel spy and pries for information about who she might have leaked details regarding the Death Star to. He tells her about Jung’s access to her CERT and how they discovered she had been scavenging information on Galen Erso, Eadu, Jedha, and two years' worth of background on the Death Star’s construction.

He menacingly places a finger on her head as he circles her. She admits that she is a scavenger but suggests that without her work, and despite the efforts of Krennic and his men, they would have never found Axis. It was one of Krennic’s men who tortured an informant to death after he pointed a finger at Luthen, ultimately leading to her discovery of his deception. Regardless, the error lies with Dedra because she confronted Luthen alone, allowing for mistakes, and his assistant Kleya is now on the run. In the end, Dedra essentially repeated Syril’s mistake, but on a larger scale, by taking on a personal mission alone. She allowed her form of justice, revenge, and vanity to cloud her judgment, compromise her mission, and land her in prison.

Kleya returns to the safehouse and uses a pipe to open the concrete wall, revealing several pieces of a communications device. She assembles it and uses it to transmit a sort of Morse code signal. Back on Yavin IV, the Rebellion has fully established its base, complete with a hangar full of X-Wing fighters and dozens of pilots, engineers, and soldiers. Wilmon returns from the hangar to find Dreena in his tent, upset about something she discovered hidden under his bed. It’s a comms device that’s been chattering.

We return to Cassian’s home on Yavin IV, where he plays a tabletop game with K2SO and Melshi. Like poker, they keep increasing their bets according to their confidence in their various pieces. K2SO becomes upset by the illogical actions of his friends, proving once again that he’s the anti-C3PO: “The chances of you making a bid of that scale are not statistically measurable.” He’s not quite the calculator of risk that C3PO was and can’t speak Bocce, but like C3PO, he also had his head messed with enough to change allegiances in this ongoing war. (Remember when C3PO’s head got put onto a battle droid’s body in Attack of the Clones and he tried to kill Jedi while spouting one-liners like “Oh, I’m quite beside myself”?)

The game quickly ends when Wilmon shows up to inform them of his findings. They swiftly decide to rescue Kleya from Coruscant, despite the possibility that it could be a trap and K2SO’s reminders that the rules prohibit such actions. Together, they register themselves to test pilot a U-Wing and blast off for Coruscant, breaking seventeen… no, eighteen orders in the process.

Meanwhile, on Coruscant, Supervisor Heert enters the ISB building and shows Partagaz a holographic image of Kleya. Krennic orders him to distribute the image as widely as possible, but if he isn’t successful in finding her, he will have his name added to the “ever-lengthening list of names in the ISB Death March.” Partagaz and Krennic acknowledge the tremendous pressure they are under to deliver for Emperor Palpatine. Krennic is leaving for Scarif to attempt to finish his delayed Death Star project and reduce any leaks about its existence to the wider galaxy. As he departs, Partagaz wishes, “Best of luck to us both.”

With his search for Kleya underway, Heert decides to visit Dedra in her prison cell. He informs her of Luthen’s death at the hands of Kleya. She tries to pin the mistake on Heert, who was “Jung’s best friend,” as he pressures her to tell him why Krennic’s project is so important. Regardless, he needs her help, as he assumes her knowledge of the Axis project could provide him with the guidance he needs to find Kleya. He’s right, of course, because she immediately remembers that in the old Axis files, they found a radio on Ferrix with old frequencies—precisely the ones that Bix used to communicate with Cassian from Ferrix—which could help them identify how Kleya hopes to communicate with the Rebellion. From there, Heert travels to Luthen’s shop and discovers that his data and contacts were destroyed, but that his radio survived.

Cassian, Melshi, and K2SO enter Coruscant’s orbit, with Melshi reflecting that he’s never been to the planet. K2SO proudly reminds them, “I’ve been to Coruscant, I was in a parade there once.” They then launch into the city, weaving through buildings like the mountains of Ghorman before landing outside the safehouse building. The Imperials, too, jump into action with two teams of elite soldiers flying to the building as Partagaz directs them from the ISB headquarters.

Cassian and Melshi leave K2SO with their U-Wing to keep the engine running and manage the comms. As they enter the building, the Imperials land and initiate a sector comms scramble, which prevents them from communicating with K2SO. Nevertheless, they ride the elevator to the floor where Cassian used to live. They exit the elevator, blasters drawn, as Cassian is hit with a wave of nostalgia and memories of his life with Bix. They quickly rush down the hallway and knock on the door to the safehouse, expecting to find Luthen. Instead, they find Kleya, who remarks, “It would be you, wouldn’t it?”

On the ground level, the Imperials use their comms device to transmit signals to Kleya’s communicator. The radio’s signals allow them to determine what floor she’s on, as one of their squads is led by an enormously tall, mustachioed Sergeant Gharial (Andrew Brooke). Meanwhile, Kleya tells Cassian all the details that Luthen asked her to relay to the Rebellion, as she does not want to travel with them to Yavin and is unaware of their impending discovery by the Empire. Cassian tries to convince Kleya to join them, admitting his past mistakes of running away and abandoning Luthen’s cause. While they argue, K2SO realizes that the comms have been shut down and uses his Imperial design to eliminate several of their remaining soldiers and pilots. However, the soldiers remain on Cassian and his team's heels after realizing they went to the wrong floor to find Kleya. The episode ends with them correcting their mistake and slowly inching their way down the hallway toward the outgunned team.

EPISODE 12: “Jedha, Kyber, Erso”

This episode begins right where the previous one left off, as Cassian convinces Kleya that traveling to Yavin won’t be the end of her journey but a way to keep Luthen alive. The Imperial troops make their way down the hallway and activate the lights at the ends of their rifles, with Supervisor Heert trailing behind them. Everyone is caught off guard as Melshi steps into the hallway and directly into their line of fire. He quickly runs and hides from their sight, which prompts the soldiers to call out a search warrant before throwing a stun detonator through the saferoom’s doorway. A shootout begins, but the detonator knocks Kleya out and partially blinds Cassian.

But it’s K2SO to the rescue! He grabs a rifle from a downed soldier, plows down the hallway, blasts the troopers, and picks up Heert to use as a shield, his body limply ragdolling as he throws Gharial against the wall with a deadening thud. “Cassian, I’ve cleared the path.” They race down the hallway, down the elevator, and out of the building, where Cassian takes a moment to look back at his former apartment, as if leaving his home, a part of himself, and Bix behind. They board the U-Wing with the injured Kleya and fly through Coruscant while avoiding other patrol ships. K2SO remarks, “I assume any doubts about my value have been erased.”

Meanwhile, on Yavin IV, a dressed-down Mon Mothma, General Draven, and Bail Organa – who must have escaped from Coruscant – speak to Saw Gerrera through a hologram to his hideout on Jedha. They are frustrated because he has been attacking Imperial transports, jeopardizing not only his men but also those on Yavin IV. However, Saw is deeply distrustful of them and has devolved into an even more unstable version of himself, perceiving conspiracies everywhere. He accuses them of having Rebellion infiltrators and spies in his ranks, which Mon quickly denies. “If only you could fight as well as you lie,” he reports, hesitating, with nothing more to say, as a moment of sadness, doubt, and terror crosses his face before he ends the call. Bail calls him insane, but Draven reminds him, “He’s not. We’ve been probing his team for over a year now.”

Just then, the Mon Calamarian Admiral Raddis (James Henri-Thomas) enters the hall to inform them that the missing U-Wing, the ship Cassian stole, is about to land. I had hoped we’d see how the Mon Cala and their advanced fleet of warships joined the Rebellion, but I’m sure that story will be told elsewhere. The Rebels scramble squads of soldiers to meet the ship when it lands, unsure of its cargo. X-Wings engage the U-Wing from the sky, as K2SO offers them a friendly wave from the cockpit. But when the ship's doors open, the tension is diffused, at least momentarily. Kleya is rushed off to the sick bay, and Draven dresses them down and orders K2SO to shut himself off.

He then escorts Cassian before the council, who demand to know why he broke their rules and jeopardized the Rebellion again. He admits that he did, in fact, rush off to save an old friend, Luthen, who is now dead. However, the result brought him to Kleya, who told him the full details of Luthen’s spy deep within the ISB and his knowledge of how the Emperor’s energy project is just a cover for a weapon that connects the mining on Ghorman, the Empire’s occupation of Jedha, and someone named Galen Erso. They don’t believe him, specifically because of his connection to Luthen, whom they deeply distrust.

Here, Cassian’s role as a “messenger,” as conveyed by the Force healer, and as someone who has acquired pain and meaning through various adventures throughout his life, comes into full view. He understands the good and bad of Luthen’s methods, but he is uniquely experienced enough, with relationships whose tendrils snake through every facet of the growing Rebellion, that his final act is as an expert witness to Luthen’s legacy. “I don’t know if what he told me was true or not, but it is insulting to hear him run down by people who have given a fraction of his sacrifice to his Rebellion,” he tells them. The last time that Cassian even spoke to Luthen was a year ago, “When he had [me] rescue Senator Mothma from the Senate,” he reminds the council. “Duly noted,” Bail adds, reminded that it was one of his hired men who tried to have her killed.

Mon Mothma sits silently through the conversation but speaks up when Bail orders Cassian confined to his quarters to allow him to visit Kleya in the infirmary. Draven escorts Cassian there, revealing that Cassian’s embedded spy in Saw’s camp, Tivik, has sent them urgent messages about Saw’s descent into madness. You’ll remember him as the man Cassian kills in cold blood at the beginning of Rogue One when they find themselves cornered by stormtroopers. Evidently, it was this action that prompted showrunner Tony Gilroy to begin questioning the character of Cassian Andor, particularly how he arrived at a place where he would kill his friend, which kicked off the development of the show. Cassian goes to Kleya’s side and admits that she didn’t receive the hero’s welcome he promised her.

Vel is summoned to Mon’s side and learns of Luthen’s death. Mon has an important task for Vel; she wants her to spy on Cassian to “help [her] believe him.” Cassian approaches Wilmon to inform him of Luthen’s death, to which he responds, “He made it worth it.” They embrace, mourning their friend who inspired them to rise against the Empire on Ferrix. Meanwhile, Draven receives a message from Kafrene from someone who won’t talk to anyone but Cassian. It’s Tivik, if you haven’t already figured it out.

On Mon’s orders, Vel meets up with Cassian for a drink and offers a toast to Luthen. “We can’t toast them all, can we?” Cassian asks. “Gorn, Nemik, Taramyn…” Vel somberly recalls. “Cinta,” Cassian adds, and Vel painfully winces before adding, “The Ghormans, Ferrix, your mother, the Danis.” They drink as the rain pours down around them in a blanket that quiets every sound but their conversation. Vel immediately admits that Mon sent her to determine if Luthen’s story is real. Cassian, assuming the role of a speaker for the dead, stands up for Luthen and his sacrifice and notes that Kleya wouldn’t lie about something like that.

Then, as Kleya removes the tubes attached to her arms in the infirmary, we hear a reading from Nemik’s manifesto:

“There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. Alone. Unsure. Dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this: freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies and battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort; it breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.”

Surprisingly, it is Partagaz who listens to the words, as he acknowledges that the Empire won’t be able to contain the spread of the Rebellion. Captain Lagret requests that Partagaz leave the ISB chamber, but allows him a moment alone to collect his thoughts. In solitude, Partagaz sits at his desk and pulls out a blaster. From outside his chamber, we hear the gunshot of his suicide. The stormtroopers standing guard flinch, but Lagret remains still, indicating that not only was he expecting Partagaz’s suicide, but that he, too, has considered that possibility for himself.

Why was Partagaz listening to Nemik’s manifesto? We’ll never know for sure, but we have a few brief insights into his motivations. The moment that comes directly to mind is Partagaz’s scolding of Dedra when she treats her assignment within the ISB as anything more than a job. It could be that Partagaz always had sympathies for the Rebellion but felt that he would be safer within the confines of the Imperial system, just doing a job dispassionately. It could be that, sensing his death at the hands of the Empire due to a series of failed missions, he was finally willing to open his eyes to the enemy, whether seeking clarity for himself or simply wanting to engage with the foe that had defeated him. I’m sure that some will argue that perhaps even Partagaz was a high-level spy for Luthen, though this seems like a stretch.

Vel and Cassian conclude their conversation by discussing Bix. She urges Cassian not to wait too long to reconnect with her, a warning reflecting her regrets after Cinta’s death. Kleya wanders through the rainy camp to meet Vel at her home. She reveals that without Luthen and their mission, she no longer knows who she is. Yet, Vel offers her a moving sentiment: "I have friends everywhere. You’re here with friends.”

Melshi and K2SO are released from prison and return to Cassian’s home, accompanied by General Draven. He relays to Cassian that they received a message from Tivik on Kafrene. Cassian tells Draven that he trusts Tivik, but points out that it could be a brilliant trap. Still, this is enough to convince Draven, who goes to Mon and Bail with Cassian’s thoughts.

Then, in a surprising moment, we return to what appears to be a flashback to Kenari, where Cassian (then Kassa) encounters his lost sister Kerri. However, K2SO wakes Cassian from this dream, adding, “Waking up humans is always confusing. The man you do not like is here.” Bail has come to speak with Cassian, telling him that he changed his mind after speaking with Draven and that “If I die fighting the Empire, I want to go down swinging.” Cassian reflects that he and Luthen would have gotten along better than Bail knows. Bail prepares to leave Cassian’s home but adds, “May the Force be with you, Captain.”

Cassian then waters his plants, indicating that he intends to return from this mission; he’s not bailing on the Rebellion. He dons his outfit from Rogue One and walks to the Yavin base. In a montage, we visit the surviving cast of the show, sending them off on a final note: Melshi is leading a squad of Rebel soldiers, Wilmon eats with Dreena, Mon and Vel share a meal among their people in the mess hall, Perrin drinks his sorrows away in the back of a transport with another woman who is blacked out, and Kleya wakes up in her bed on Yavin. I had begun to worry that Dedra wouldn’t get a proper sendoff, but my fears were misplaced. The show finally returns to her; she’s not wearing her Imperial uniform, cries into her hands, and is revealed to be, as the camera pulls back, held captive in one of the Narkina 5 prisons, likely until the day she is electrified to death.

Cassian continues his walk toward the hangar when he encounters the Force healer, who gives him a knowing glance. Saw stands paralyzed in the window where he will meet his fate in Rogue One, while Krennic observes the final construction of the Death Star laser, which will later trigger his fate high above the surface of Scarif. Cassian boards the U-Wing, where K2SO waits, and tells him to “Get us out of here.” They speed directly into the beginning of Rogue One. Meanwhile, back on the farm planet of Mina-Rau, B2EMO plays with another droid as the camera rises over the wheat fields to reveal Bix.

But Bix is not alone. She holds Cassian’s baby in her hands as she looks towards the golden light streaming through the clouds. She tells the fussing child, “It’s okay,” and smiles. Then, the show cuts to black. Andor is over.

I cried.

As a father who fears the accelerated growth of global authoritarian forces—whose tactics and atrocities have run parallel to the stories in Andor—I can only hope to offer my three-year-old son a future born from the kinds of selfless actions demonstrated by so many of the characters across both seasons of this masterful show.

I could think of no more touching ending to Andor than the retroactive reveal that Cassian’s legacy lives on despite his impending death. For the entire duration of this show, the one thing we thought we knew was that despite Cassian’s sacrifices, his personal journey was one of tragedy and loss. We must assume that he knew nothing of his child’s existence, but the reality is that his life was spent fighting for a better world for his child. Cassian’s journey is recontextualized, and the show's title also takes on a different meaning. “Andor” is no longer one person but a familial lineage that will exist and thrive due to Cassian’s sacrifice. I hope and pray that the creatives at Disney choose never to revisit this story and instead allow the potential of the Andor family, the thing Cassian fought for, to remain infinite and to stand in for the sacrifice of every person who fought for justice in this galaxy and ours.

It’s hard to say if Bix knew she was pregnant when she chose to leave Cassian on Yavin IV, but I’m certain that if she did, it only hastened her decision to leave. If she was convinced that her presence was distracting Cassian from his role in the Rebellion, surely she must have known a child would mark the definitive end for him. Therefore, her sacrifice takes on additional meaning as well, for without Cassian’s involvement in the Rebellion, her child would have had to live a life under the oppressive Imperial regime. As Luthen pointed out, “We fight to win. That means we lose, and lose, and lose, and lose. Until we’re ready.” This is a win for Cassian Andor.

Stray observations:

• In the wake of this week’s episodes, I revisited Rogue One and was surprised to learn that one of Orson Krennic’s final lines, before being killed by his own Death Star’s laser, occurs when he first encounters Jyn Erso. He asks, “Who are you?” right before Cassian shoots him from offscreen, just as Carro Rylanz did to Syril Karn. As George Lucas once said, “Again, it’s like poetry, they rhyme.”

• I suspect many will leave this series asking for answers to the lingering questions and clarity on the many implications the show makes about the actions and motivations of its characters. The biggest of these is likely to be the fate of Cassian’s sister, Kerri. Showrunner Tony Gilroy has said in multiple interviews that it was always his intention for Cassian to never find Kerri and that it was a mystery that he felt better served the story and character by remaining unsolved. The loss of his sister can then explain why Cassian is so driven to save everyone he encounters, including Luthen and Kleya in these final episodes.
  
  I will admit that I’ve spent more than a reasonable amount of time entertaining my theory that there is a familial connection between Kleya and Cassian. When we first meet Kleya as a child, she’s hiding in Luthen’s ship on an unnamed planet we never see. This could very well be Kenari, especially since we know that the native population was wiped out in a series of mining accidents that poisoned the planet, leaving only Cassian’s tribe of children alive. One could argue that in this week’s flashback to Luthen’s time as a sergeant, we are witnessing the Republic/Empire’s eradication of the population of Kenari to reopen the planet for mining, just as they did on Ghorman. Additionally, both actresses who play Kerri and young Kleya look remarkably similar.
  
  However, the timeline doesn’t make sense for this to be true. When we meet Cassian and Kerri, we see that the mining disasters have already killed nearly all the people of Kenari. Then, Cassian is taken from his sister after he boards a downed Republic ship. So, it wouldn’t make sense for Kerri to hide and escape with Luthen while her people are being slaughtered, because they had already died before she was separated from Cassian. Therefore, if you see any articles claiming this to be true, send them a link here and tell them that someone already thought way too much about this.

• Also, no one entered my competition to rename Molotov cocktails for the Star Wars universe. So, I’m going with “Shambo Raavas,” named after one of the leaders of the Ministry of Enlightenment and the Socorran liquor raavas, which is a concentrated extract of zsajhira berries and water from Socorro's neighboring planet, Neftali. Try explaining that to your coworkers at a cocktail party!

Dan Gvozden is a film and comics critic who lives and works in Baltimore. If you enjoyed this review, check out his Spider-Man podcast, The Amazing Spider-Talk.

[Welcome to Decoding TV’s coverage of Andor Season 2! For each of Andor’s four 3-episode drops, you should expect a written recap by Dan Gvozden, plus a bonus podcast episode. If you’d like to support what we’re doing here, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. The review below contains spoilers for Season 2, Episodes 7-9 of Andor. It does not contain spoilers for any future episodes or previews.]

One of the great pleasures of a show like Andor is the incredible variety of genres, tones, and scenarios that each new storyline can deliver. One arc might be a prison escape, the next a heist, and another a relationship drama. The same appeal is true of Star Wars, at least in its original conception, for both its audience and creators. Even in A New Hope, the film starts at the tail-end of a battle, as a princess is taken prisoner, turns into a slapstick marooner adventure, then becomes a coming-of-age tale. It then delves into the conventional Arthurian legend, presents a shootout in a Western-style bar, features a prison escape, becomes a sci-fi-coded, World War II, aerial-fighter picture, and so much more. It moves from strength to strength and never feels incoherent.

So too has Andor moved from strength to strength, with the character drama, political intrigue, and love stories of the previous three episodes marking a high point for the series' thematic cohesion across its many branching stories. This batch of episodes isn’t quite as cohesive in how it tests its various characters; instead, it opts to bind them together in a series of thrilling set pieces – an assassination mission, a massacre, and an undercover political extraction mission – that strains characters’ allegiances and upends their understanding of their place in the galaxy. For some, that means finally realizing just how much they have been manipulated; for others, it means being forced to accept a greater destiny than they had in mind.

Tony Gilroy and his team also understand something that has eluded many of the Disney-led Star Wars creatives, namely J.J. Abrams and Dave Filoni: George Lucas’ Star Wars weren’t merely fantastical, pulp adventures in worlds that defied imagination, but stories with deep connections to real-world histories and mythologies. Lucas famously based his trilogies on his knowledge of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War and his prequel trilogy was largely, and mistakenly, interpreted as a criticism of George W. Bush’s presidency. Your mileage may vary depending on the output of the Disney Star Wars productions, but I’ve found that most of them are sporting what I call “Star Wars wallpaper.” Everything looks like Star Wars, no doubt due to Lucasfilm's wonderful production design concepts and the visual effects from Industrial Light and Magic. Yet, when things heat up, the wallpaper starts to sweat and peel, revealing that it was just a thin paper cover over generic white drywall.

On the contrary, these episodes carry forward the meticulous detail, enormous scale, and unexpected twists that writer Dan Gilroy brought to the Season 1 Aldhani heist arc he spearheaded, but also a story suffused with historical precedent and detail. Director Janus Metz made a name for himself in the international film community with his feature film debut, Armadillo, which won the Grand Prix of the Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week. The documentary film, depicting a group of Danish soldiers deployed to the front line in Afghanistan, immerses itself in the tedium of war, combat with the Taliban, hidden atrocities, and maddening tragedies. These three episodes of Andor depict a fictional genocide with as much honesty and unflinching realism as can be expected from anything with the name “Star Wars” on it, perhaps even surpassing what anyone could have imagined. 

The visual staging and management of the production are second to none, with a clarity amidst the chaos that puts the many war-oriented, modern prestige dramas like A Game of Thrones’ battle sequences to shame, no doubt thanks to Metz’s war documentarian background. Even when the mature subject matter, lack of Jedi, and muted colors may not reflect the more exaggerated serial style of the original Star Wars films, the presence of talented filmmakers working with rich material and a defined artistic approach is what truly makes them feel like the true heir to the Star Wars name.

EPISODE 7: “Messenger”

This trio of episodes begins with the familiar drumming sounds of Ferrix, as the show’s title fades in from the star-speckled reaches of space. Then, it’s off to the developing Rebel base on Yavin IV, featuring familiar X-Wing-filled hangars and a growing number of temporary homes lining the outskirts of the jungles around the iconic pyramids. These constructs blend into and embrace nature and directly contrast the sterile, colorless Imperial aesthetic. Overhead, air-traffic controllers signal spaceships in and out of the bustling base. It has taken nearly half a decade and two seasons, but the Rebellion has finally evolved from a decentralized group of cells into an organized army with recognizable insignia, uniforms, and protocol.

Cassian and Bix have built a home in the jungle. It’s a significant upgrade from their drab Coruscant apartment and features a swanky pad that would make for an excellent Airbnb if it weren’t for the man-eating doodar on Yavin IV. Bix is helping Cassian heal from a nasty blaster burn on the back of his shoulder when Wilmon returns from a secretive “repair” mission that Luthen sent him on. Despite Luthen’s appeals to Bix’s needs at the end of the previous arc, the two have been out of contact with him, leading to a growing divide in their opinions on the evolving tactics for expanding the Rebellion. Cassian views the next battlefront as one driven by his involvement in their military operations, rather than Luthen’s targeted, isolated missions.

But with some prodding, Wilmon opens up to Cassian and Bix about Luthen’s desires. He wants to recruit Cassian to travel to Ghorman to assassinate Dedra Meero, who has been observed overseeing the evolving Imperial presence on the planet. Cassian refuses the request and storms out to attend a meeting, so Wil shifts his plea for support to Bix.

Later, on their way to the center of town, Cassian and Bix spot a “force healer” (Josie Walker) from afar. Cassian reacts as one might when suddenly discovering that their girlfriend’s mother has tricked them into visiting her crystal healer/psychic, and they’ll have to play along for the next several hours. However, something unusual happens. From a distance, the force healer stops and turns towards Cassian as if a higher power (or tractor beam) is drawing her towards him. “Oh, great, here we go…” Cassian is clearly thinking. She seems to recognize him from somewhere and is aware of his blaster burn, but not in a way that suggests she’s the protege of John Edward and polled the audience beforehand. 

Instead, she places her hand on his shoulder to attempt to heal him and has a vision that allows her to see his “strength of spirit.” Cassian storms off, but the healer tells Bix that, for most people, she can feel the weight of the past that they carry. However, Cassian is gathering that pain and loss as he goes, with a purpose that might never become clear. “He’s a messenger,” she says, “There’s some place he needs to be. Maybe, you’re the place he needs to be.” We know that Cassian is bound to a greater destiny, one that will ultimately bring about the destruction of the Death Star, but this is the first indication that all of this might be in some way guided by The Force far earlier than Luke Skywalker’s last-minute involvement.

Back at their bungalow, Cassian observes that his burn has begun to heal, even if he doesn’t believe in a mystical energy field that controls his destiny, as Han Solo once put it. However, Bix is convinced, especially since she’s had dreams about Cassian’s role in the galaxy that align with what the healer told them. Is this a suggestion that Bix might be Force sensitive? Either way, Bix’s push for Cassian to take up Luthen’s mission is enough for him to return to the hangar with Wilmon to travel to Ghorman, but not without a reprimand from General Davits Draven (Alistair Petrie), who would eventually lead Operation Fracture to free Jyn and her father Galen Erso in Rogue One.

Meanwhile, things are heating up on Ghorman, as the Imperial propaganda network, HoloNet News, reports on escalating terrorist attacks in the locked-down city of Palmo. At the heart of the city, in a secret communications room, Dedra meets with Major Lio Partagaz (Anton Lesser), who tells her that they are no longer advancing her subversive plan to manipulate the Ghorman Front, but that the Empire will be sending a fleet to mine Ghorman in forty-eight hours and declaring Martial Domain in Palmo. She will now hand over the tactical details to Captain Kaido (Jonjo O’’Neill), a crisis specialist, to forcefully suppress the Ghorman people. Dedra lightly pushes back against Partagaz, reminding him that the insurgents have weapons and will be able to respond with force. He thinks nothing of it, reassuring her that the Empire knows how successful she has been in her work and that a promotion will come forthwith. It would be a mistake to assign any level of care on Dedra’s behalf; her hesitancy is undoubtedly not about the potential loss of life to the people of Ghorman or her Imperial colleagues, but about her reputation if something tragic occurred.

When Syril arrives on the planet, he immediately seeks out Dedra and informs her of a bombing at a nearby Naval Depot. She intends to keep Syril unaware of the Empire’s plans for the Ghormans and his role in their subjugation, so she reinforces that outside agitators conducted the bombing. He doesn’t believe her, as his growing doubts about his involvement in the escalating conflict come to a head. Either way, she tells him that he needs to return to his apartment and quickly pack his things to leave the planet. She says they will be rewarded when she returns with him to Coruscant. “For what?” he asks, “What have we accomplished?” In response, she wordlessly plants a passionate kiss on his mouth to silence him. Syril reacts as if this has never happened before, which immediately conjures images of the foreplay-free, passionless, efficient sex that undoubtedly occurred in their pitch-black Coruscant apartment during the previous arc.

Meanwhile, actually on Coruscant, Senator Mon Mothma and her assistant Erskin Semaj (Pierro Niel-Mee) ride in a spaceship to the Senate when their driver, Exmar Kloris (Lee Ross), unexpectedly asks about her parking and schedule for the week. As they walk away from the vehicle, the two express their suspicions that their driver is an Imperial operative who has clumsily revealed himself. When they eventually enter the Senate, the sounds of news reports about terrorism on Ghorman drown out all other conversation.

The former Senator from Ghorman, Dasi Oran, approaches Mon to appeal to her courage and bravery. He knows the Imperials are behind the bombings and is infuriated that so many of his colleagues have accepted the propaganda without any pushback. Mon tells him she’s doing what she can; it's just a sad petition for now. One wonders if a group of college students is standing outside with clipboards, asking if people have time to stop and talk about the people of Ghorman. Meanwhile, under the streets of Palmo, the members of the Ghorman Front argue over how to continue their movement against the Empire and whether peaceful resistance is still an option. Samm, the soldier whose blaster led to Cinta’s death, observes, “Look what they’ve done to us. They’ve poisoned us.”

Syril rushes out of his meeting with Dedra and updates Enza Rylanz that the ISB believes outside agitators are behind the recent activities on Ghorman for which the Front is being blamed. She has seen through his manipulations, even if he hasn’t, and slaps him across the face before storming off. I’ll admit this confused me when it happened, if only because Syril’s role on Ghorman and what he believes it to be was never successfully communicated. During the previous arc, I assumed that Syril could recognize the humanity in the Ghor, but that he was fully committed to baiting them for the Empire to use as an example. Whatever allegiance Syril shows here is consistent across this arc. Still, it is a prime example of how some of the many moving parts in a show like Andor can be hard to track, particularly with yearlong gaps in the timeline between each arc.

A series of dramatic arrivals on Ghorman sets the stage for an impending conflict. Sergeant Bloy (Tomi May) and his soldiers, revealed to be inexperienced trainees, arrive and establish themselves in the plaza for military exercises. Dedra watches afar and comments to Captain Kaito that they look like children. Meanwhile, Cassian and Wilmon recklessly navigate their spaceship through the webberies and mountains outside Palmo. 

Once they reach Palmo, they quickly plan how to communicate leading up to the assassination of Dedra and their exit strategy. A curfew has been imposed, so they swiftly get off the streets, agreeing to shoot Dedra through the glass windows of her room from the hotel across the street. This time, Cassian approaches the hotel receptionists under his latest identity, a journalist named Ronni Goojah. He doesn’t have an Imperial stamp, but the bellhop he met a year earlier recognizes him and waves him through. Upon entering his hotel room, not led by a bellhop this time, he quickly scopes out the area and peers through his windows, which are now barred. Still, he can see ISB officers inside their apartments, meaning he can potentially get an angle on Dedra. However, as he readies his sniper rifle and communicates with Wilmon, he hears familiar chatter over his comms; a squad of stormtroopers has positioned themselves directly above his room to oversee the plaza.

EPISODE 8: “Who are you?”

This second episode opens with a stunning aerial view of Palmo, with its plaza shining in the sunlight, as it rises above the city from atop a hill. This singular image makes an immediate impression that the scale of this story will outstrip anything that has come before on Andor. We rejoin Cassian in that same plaza, assembling his sniper rifle as Bloy trains his bumbling soldiers in the square. But suddenly, there’s movement, and an elite squad of stormtroopers and Imperial officers alike begin to erect a series of barricades throughout the plaza. Cassian activates his comms to Wilmon, waking him up in his bed next to Dreena (Ella Pellegrini). They must have shacked up between episode drops. Sorry, Beela. But at least we know that Wilmon has a thing for women with double “e”s in their names.

This escalation is all news to Dedra, who learns from Partagaz that Kaito ordered the erection of the barricade. She’s worried, too, that rumors of the Imperial mining ships’ arrival in the countryside of Ghorman have begun to swirl, but Partagaz isn’t concerned about it; the main story they need to continue pushing is Ghorman’s resistance to the “norms of the Empire.” And that story is coming through loud and clear, as we see Syril’s mother Eedy watching her television on Coruscant, where the Imperial news tells the story that the citizens of Palmo are breaking curfew and organizing a general strike against the Imperial presence. To that point, the Ghorman Front may not be as portrayed by Imperial propaganda, but they are preparing for the increased Imperial presence in Palmo and embracing the potential for violence by getting ready with their guns and Molotov cocktails. Leeza (Caroline Vanier) hands Samm a firearm, and the two exchange a knowing look as they hide their weapons under their jackets. The Imperials, too, begin a process of escalation by evacuating the Imperial employees adjacent to the plaza, including Syril, and opening the plaza to the public, who storm into the barricaded space to protest.

As the drums of conflict continue to escalate, Carro Rylanz watches from his silk shop on the plaza's edge and immediately senses that his people are being led into a trap. He begs his daughter Enza to stop the Ghorman Front’s plans, but she refuses, “We can’t be silent anymore.” He’s despondent, his daughter is leading his people to the slaughter, and before he runs off to stop the throngs of people entering the plaza, he warns her, “We’ll be silent when we’re dead!”

The crowd swells as protestors storm through the streets, waving flags and chanting. Members of the Front blend into the crowd, as do Wilmon and Syril. Carro stands in the middle of the road, pleading for them to go home, but no one will listen to him or even acknowledge the presence of their elected leader among them. Suddenly, Carro spots Syril in the crowd and realizes that he has been a mole this entire time, undermining the Front’s mission by posing as an Imperial defector. He pulls Syril into a doorway and berates him, despite his claims of having meant him no harm. Syril insists, “I was here to trap outside agitators [like Axis].” The fact that Syril believes Carro would accept his excuses further infuriates Carro, “What kind of a being are you?”

This is as good a place as any for us to revisit Syril’s arc over the past two seasons, as he has transformed from a corporate cop who fully believed in his mission to ensure justice and order on Ferrix to where he is now. At the outset of Andor’s story, it is Syril’s dedication to his job that led him to uncover the deaths of two of his comrades and to be drawn into this story. After he reports the deaths of these men, his boss asks him to cover them up as the result of a “regrettable misadventure” so that he can present a favorable report of their activities on the planet. As Syril doggedly pursues justice for his two deceased colleagues, both of whom were killed by Cassian Andor, his determination results in the failed arrest of Cassian, the further death of more Imperial officers, and his being bound, gagged, and fired.

He finds himself back on Coruscant, living in the city's lower levels with his controlling mother and working in the Fuel Purity department, thanks to his criminal uncle’s connections. At every step along the way, he had chosen to do his best within the parameters of what the Empire’s bureaucracy asked of him. And yet, instead of punishing those officers who chose to look the other way, the Empire fired Syril. In a typical story, this is where we’d start to see the seeds of rebellion stirred in Syril’s heart, leading him to turn on the Empire and embrace a more just system.

But instead, Syril chooses to obsess over revenge, pinning all of his problems onto the haunting image of Cassian Andor, a man he considers a dangerous, murderous threat to the Empire's “order.” He has a point: Cassian is no saint, having murdered one of the Pre-Mor officers in cold blood. Even within his job at Fuel Purity, Syril uses his limited power to trigger as many red flags about Andor as possible, drawing the attention of Dedra Meero as she attempts to hunt down the “Axis” group herself. When he finally meets her, he tells her:

"I thought I had ruined my life. I thought I was done. After meeting you and discovering you understood how dangerous Cassian Andor was just… Just being in your presence, I… I've realized that life is worth living, I realized that if nothing else, there was justice, and beauty in the galaxy and if I just kept going… Perhaps my deranged belief that there was something better fated for me in the future was a dream worth clinging to."

She threatens to arrest him for stalking her, which is fair considering that Syril’s obsession with justice and revenge has become inextricably linked to his love for her. This is the same woman who is now manipulating him, despite what may be the tiniest bit of genuine affection for him (more on this later), on Ghorman to get what she wants: not justice, but respect and glory within the Empire.

Back on the streets of Palmo, Syril throws Carro to the ground, truly unaware of his claims about the Empire’s desire to mine the planet, as his understanding of his role in enacting justice starts to crash down around him. As Cassian’s plans change, he hands the bellhop his hotel room key back and wishes him luck. The bellhop tells him, “Rebellions are built on hope.” Cassian casually says this line on Jedha in Rogue One after meeting Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones). She would later repeat it on Yavin IV at a meeting among the leaders of the Rebellion to passionately argue for a mission on Scarif. The line triggers a look between Mon Mothma and Bail Organa, suggesting they’ve heard it before, perhaps from Cassian.

As Andor and Syril enter the plaza, more Ghor join them, unifying behind a chant of “We are the Ghor. The galaxy is watching.” TIE-fighters race overhead, Imperial troopers ready their weapons, and Cassian spots Dedra observing the proceedings from her balcony overlooking the plaza. Syril takes it all in, seeing for the first time without the veil of manipulation over his eyes, and hears the HoloNet reporters lying about an insurrection instigated by the protestors. He runs to confront Dedra but is redirected into another room filled with powerful KX-series security droids, known for their lethality and ability to take down dozens of civilians at a time. One of the droids stares at Syril for a long time, as if suspecting he might be turning against the Imperial cause.

He flees the room, finds Dedra’s control room, and confronts her, “What have you done?” He wraps his hands around her throat, slowly choking her, “How long have you known about all this? There is an armada up there!” It’s a stunning moment that illustrates how deeply his love for Dedra is intertwined with his quest for justice and revenge, as seen through his belief in her support of that cause. She reveals to him that the Emperor’s genuine interest in Ghorman is not to use them to expose outside agitators like Axis, but to harvest kalkite from the planet. “We’re going home, Syril. We’re going home as heroes. This began long before we got here; they’ve been planning it for years. They’re doing this no matter what. We wanted to be together. You didn’t seem to mind the promotions!”

Dedra’s goal throughout their relationship was always to do whatever it took to ascend through the Empire’s hierarchical system, regardless of the cost to others. She justifies this by telling herself, despite her actual morals, that the wheels of the Empire have already been set in motion and that any small act of rebellion she might engage in along the way isn’t likely to make a difference. So, why not manipulate the system to benefit herself along the way?

Syril, for all his faults, at least thinks he’s being virtuous in his deception of the Ghormans. He may have been lying, but he didn’t realize the full extent of the damage he might cause, especially if it allowed him to fulfill his desires to stop Axis and help the Empire. And what's the harm if he got a few promotions along the way? Well, now he’s realizing just how much damage he’s caused, as he’s been working to facilitate the wholesale invasion of Ghorman by the Empire. He tersely says, “Good luck, Dedra,” quickly leaves the room, and embarks on a path to the plaza that could offer him redemption. Will he be big enough of a man to take it this time?

Captain Kaito orders all exits from the plaza closed, trapping the Ghormans inside as the armored stormtroopers close in from all sides. Wilmon tells Dreena to hide, while Kaito instructs his “green” soldiers to move through the crowd, relying on their inexperience and the crowd's anger and fear to provoke a conflict. A few Ghor men start to destroy the plaza’s stone floor with picks as they prepare to throw them at the Imperials. The members of the Ghorman Front begin distributing Molotov cocktails to the crowd while Lezine leads them in singing a Ghorman anthem. Many cry, tears streaming down their faces, knowing what’s about to happen, as others begin to hurl stones at the advancing troops.

On the balcony above, Dedra orders Syril to be found and brought back inside when Partagaz reaches out to her through her comms. There’s silence. She disconnects from the comms and tells her officers to “Proceed.” The snipers on the roofs fire upon the crowd, but not at the Ghormans. Their laser fire kills their own men amongst the Ghormans, which allows the stormtroopers, amidst the confusion, to open fire on the crowd as chaos ensues.

What follows is a massacre, as the members of the Front pull out their weapons and start hurling Molotovs, and the snipers retrain themselves on the civilians. These episodes’ director, Metz, delivers a master class on how to shoot crowds, block action, and control chaos, even as all hell breaks loose on the plaza of Palmo. Cassian kills a few of the approaching stormtroopers, but we watch the members of the Front fall to their deaths one at a time. Eventually, even the unstoppable KX-droids are released on the crowd. They throw the barriers to the side and unleash their full power on the fleeing Ghormans, including Enza, who is picked up and thrown across the plaza to hit the hard stone, killing her on impact.

Amid all the death, Syril stands in shock, observing everything in slow motion. The camera spins around him as he processes it all and confronts the actions of the Empire. Surely, his entire worldview is being reshaped in this moment as he realizes their desire was never “justice.” He not only suffered at their hands in the pursuit of justice, but his work also brought about the injustice playing out before him. The camera's movement and the slowed-down time allow Kyle Soller’s face to convey the depth of Syril's pain. And yet…

As Cassian lines up a rifle shot to finally assassinate Dedra, Syril spots him from afar, immediately recognizing him. Forget justice. Forget the Ghormans. Forget the Empire’s wholesale slaughter. Forget Dedra’s betrayal. Cassian Andor, the man who started all of this and whose actions destroyed Syril’s life and put him on this path, is standing right before him. This is all his fault. Revenge becomes Syril’s most primal instinct, and he jumps on Cassian, diverting his shot, inadvertently saving Dedra and launching a brutal fistfight between the two men. They throw things at each other, hurl their bodies against pillars, and Syril gains the upper hand until a rogue grenade splits them apart. Syril seizes Cassian’s gun and points it at him. He hesitates, soaking in the moment, when Cassian asks, “Who are you?”

Yes, even in his moment of triumph, he’s nothing more than a bit player in Cassian’s story, not even worth a place in his memory, despite spending years obsessing over Cassian’s capture and bending his whole life around it. Even here, he’s denied himself a redemptive arc, just as he did in Season 1, because he has allowed his feelings of victimization to overwhelm any interest he ever had in “justice.” Instead, he has wielded “justice” as a rationale for using his limited power over others. And the minute someone pushed back against that power, no matter the context, Syril was ready to throw everything he had at them, even if the body whose laws they were breaking was committing injustices that made them pale in comparison.

And thus, fittingly, this ends Syril’s story, as a well-aimed blaster bolt from Carro’s weapon strikes Syril directly in the head, and he collapses dead. Wilmon rushes to the scene while Cassian stares in disbelief at Syril’s body, a man he didn’t even know.

As Carro stays behind, lying in his shop to die, Cassian and Wil flee the city. Wil doesn’t want to leave Dreena behind, but Cassian forces him to continue as a KX droid sends bodies flying across the courtyard in its path towards them. The droid spots Cassian and chases him, cornering him against a wall. But at the last moment, an Imperial transport driven by Samm runs over the droid, splitting it in half against the wall, causing it to power down. Samm may have been the one who inadvertently caused Cinta’s death, but for a brief moment, he is allowed to become a hero.

Wil leaves to find Dreena and implores Cassian to “tell people what happened here, Cass,” as the two say goodbye with the words “stone and sky” to reference their lives on Ferrix. However, Cassian asks for one last favor. They load the KX droid into the back of the transport, and Cassian drives off through Palmo to escape the unfolding massacre as Palmo One, the voice of the Ghorman, comes through his radio. “This is murder. The Empire built this fire. They made this fire and led us to the slaughter. Now they expect us to die without knowing why. The conspiracy we’ve feared is real! It’s here today.” It’s the voice of Dreena, as she’s joined by Wilmon, broadcasting from the Front’s secret headquarters under the plaza. Cassian’s cries, in shock, his eyes fixed on the horizon as he guns his transport out of Palmo as TIE-fighters race overhead.

He’s not the only one in shock. Back in the secret comms room, Dedra begins to buckle under the weight of her actions and the realization that Syril was killed in the conflict. She tugs on her uniform, trying to straighten it out and regain her composure, committed to maintaining her performance as long as she can continue to amass power and control. Meanwhile, we join Syril’s mother, Eedy, who watches Imperial propaganda that mournfully reflects on the “heroes of the Empire” who lost their lives on Ghorman. She wears a mask of tragedy as her two friends comfort her. I suspect we’ll never revisit Eedy in the final arc of this season, but I don’t quite know what to make of this final moment with her. After berating and controlling Syril for so long, I wonder if her grief here is genuine or performative. However, I lean towards the former, given how much his death on Ghorman likely only reinforces her firmly held interest in keeping her precious, soft Syril out of danger.

EPISODE 9: “Welcome to the Rebellion”

The final episode of this arc opens with the haunting choir of Ghor voices singing, as if from beyond the grave, that sent shivers up my spine. It’s raining on Coruscant, and inside the Imperial Senate Building Ambassador Oran is being arrested without a warrant or charges by Imperial stormtroopers, ostensibly for conspiring with the people of Ghorman to attack the Empire. The Senators are shocked to see their former colleague hauled away, but they don’t act as he shouts, “It’s my people today, and your’s tomorrow. Remember this day! Remember Ghorman!”

Mon Mothma and Senator Bail Organa share their disbelief at how quickly things have deteriorated within the esteemed body of the Senate. She revisits her plan to deliver a “Hail Mary” speech before the Senate, despite Bail’s skepticism about its feasibility and effectiveness. Still, he’s eager to support her, even if it puts him in the line of fire. Given that Grand Moff Tarkin selects his home planet of Alderaan as the first planet-sized target for the Death Star, I’m uncertain whether Bail fully understands the implications of his actions here. But, how could he?

Mon seems to have a sober understanding of the threat that the Emperor presents, though by the end of the episode, even she will be surprised by just how dangerous the world she’s entering can become. She asks Bail to arrange an exit plan for her when she finishes her speech and encourages him to join her. He refuses, feeling that he needs to remain to help stall the Empire’s progress because the base and army on Yavin IV aren’t prepared to stand up to the might of the Imperial Forces.

Cassian, meanwhile, has returned from Ghorman and is being instructed by Kleya on his next mission, where he will infiltrate the Senate as journalist Ronni Goojah from the Mid-Rim Network. She has given him a knife for protection, which might slip past the security system at the Senate, and new credentials to get through the check. Given the massacre he witnessed on Ghorman, Cassian informs Kleya that he intends this to be his final mission for Luthen. She is offended that he would say so and rightly calls him out for it. The last time he tried to walk away, he ended up on Naimos with a sex worker and was arrested and imprisoned in the Narkina 5 Imperial Prison Complex (not quite the vacation he was looking for).

“You were a witness to the Ghorman Massacre; you’d think there’d be no stopping you! The Senator you’ll be saving is about to risk everything putting a voice to the atrocity you just survived. Tell her you’re ‘done.’” Kleya scolds Cassian, but he just wants to have the ability to make his own decisions. “I thought that’s what we were fighting for,” she responds.

When Mon returns to her Senatorial office, she and her assistant Erskin scour the room for a listening device, which they quickly find under the bathroom sink and destroy. As soon as they do so, it triggers the ISB officer, Felzonis (Ragevan Vasan), who is actively monitoring it, to report the disruption to his superior, a temporary supervisor, Lagret (Michael Jenn), who can control all the spying and media signals throughout the building. Out of an abundance of caution, Mon decides to practice her speech on the poolside plaza of the building and out of earshot of anyone who might be listening. If this distinct set looks familiar, it’s because both Andor and Westworld were shot at the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain, outside the L'Hemisfèric building, which is meant to resemble a giant eye.

But out of earshot is still well within the reach of Luthen, who approaches Mon from afar and reveals that her assistant Erskin has been working for him all along. Sonuvabitch! And that’s not all; he’s learned from his Imperial spy, Jung, that Bail’s extraction team, which she relies on to get her to Yavin, has also been compromised by the Empire. She doesn’t trust Luthen, particularly after the revelation that even he has been spying on her for years, but he insists that she does. Mon reminds him of how often she thinks of her childhood friend Tay Kolma and how quickly Luthen determined that he was a risk and chose to eliminate him. When compared to the Empire, Luthen’s activities scare her even more. The Empire may be committing genocide, but there’s a pattern to their behavior, whereas the invisibility of Luthen’s hand makes him a less reliable and even more dangerous partner.

Even so, Luthen tells her that one of his men, whom he knows he can trust, will come to escort her out of the Senate and will be recognizable by uttering the phrase, “I have friends everywhere.” Upon returning to her office, Mon Mothma confronts Erskin about his betrayal and learns that he has been working for Luthen for two years, ever since the wedding on Chandrila. She immediately dismisses him and forces him to leave the room.

The next morning, when Cassian meets with Luthen and Kleya, he updates them on Wilmon’s desire to stay behind on Ghorman and presses Luthen on his decision not to return to Yavin with him and Mothma if their mission goes according to plan. Cassian worries that after Mothma’s extraction, Luthen will have a target on his back that he won’t be able to escape, and that it's time for him to join the larger, growing Rebellion that he helped spark into creation. Luthen, echoing the words of the Force healer, suggests that he knows wherever Cassian goes, he will find what he needs to continue the mission; without Luthen, he will be guided by fate, or something even higher, because even now, Cassian always appears when he needs him. In the meantime, he implies to Cassian that if Mothma is arrested, Cassian needs to take down as many Imperials and allies alike (including Mothma) as he can, lest they reveal the Rebellion’s secrets to the Empire.

And so, with his instructions to proceed, Cassian flashes his falsified press credentials and enters the Imperial Senate Building as Ronni Goojah, despite looking as though he just came from the scene of a massacre. Meanwhile, three members of Bail’s security team gather to formulate their plan for escorting Mothma out of the building. However, it remains unclear whether Luthen’s information about one of them being compromised is true. Separately, Mon meets with Bail, who reaffirms his plan to have his people escort her from the building, seemingly unaware that there might be a danger lurking within his team. As they depart, with Mon wishing that Bail take care of himself, he responds, “We do what we can. Tear the shit out of this place.”

Cassian watches over a screen that monitors the Senate chamber as a cat-like Senator calls for a list of the Empire’s lost “heroes” on Ghorman to be read. Erskin approaches Andor, repeating the “I have friends everywhere” code phrase, while Bail’s team gathers their blasters and reports to Supervisor Jung. We learn that the woman on the team is working for the ISB when she murders one of the other men. Jung still has to oversee the potential subversion of Mon Mothma’s escape, despite working for Luthen, if only to maintain his cover as a loyal servant of the Empire, but later tries to stop her. Look! This whole situation is really confusing, with everyone’s motivations and knowledge of who is working with whom further complicating things. I understand why Mothma is so distrustful of everyone.

On the “floor” of the Galactic Senate, with its signature floating pods, Bail is called to speak, where he evokes an article that allows a Senior Senator in an emergency to cede the floor to another Senator without approval. This permits Mon Mothma to speak, despite the protestations of her colleagues and the Imperial officers who quickly try to shut down the outgoing feed. As Cassian and the mole in Bail’s escort race to the door outside Mon’s office, she is met with dead silence as she takes the floor to deliver her impassioned speech.

I’ll say, given the history of transcendent monologues across all the episodes of Andor, Mon Mothma’s speech had a lot to live up to and mostly comes across as a relatively generic political speech without many specifics that might get the galaxy’s blood boiling, until she ends with a proclamation that couldn’t have triggered her evacuation more quickly. “What happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide,” she says, rising to the occasion, before finishing with, “The monster who will come for us all soon enough… is Emperor Palpatine.” Jung shuts down the feed, having held off for as long as possible. Many Senators object, but a few stand in silent solidarity with Mon, who is already gone and looking to get out of the building with zero haste.

Cassian waits outside Mon’s office, and as soon as the doors open, he rushes to her side, eager to escort her to safety. He tells her that he was on Ghorman and that “I have friends everywhere,” but she’s unwilling to trust him. Nevertheless, Cassian is insistent and invokes her cousin Vel’s name, asserting that he was the last survivor of Aldahni and that, “I know Luthan can be hard, but you have no choice but to come with me.” She’s sold.

They push through a crowd of reporters, eager to get a word from her after her speech, but the mole in Bail’s company pulls a gun on them and the crowd. However, Erskin thinks quickly and shouts, “She’s a Rebel spy!” Cassion guns her down and ushers Mon towards the doors while Erskin stays behind to hold up the third member of Bail’s team, Selko (Akshay Khanna), who swears he’s not ISB. As they rush through the building, Cassian tells Mon, “Welcome to the Rebellion.”

With the immaculately white interiors of the Imperial Senate Building reflecting everything around them, the ensuing chase involving a group of stormtroopers, Mon, and Cassian inevitably calls back to our heroes’ escape from Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back. Like that chase, Mon and Cassian's plans must be adjusted on the fly after the Empire begins to lock down the building and the loading dock. Instead, they make their way toward her private vehicle and a confrontation with her compromised driver, who has chosen to abandon the spaceship to seek out Mon. However, when they cross paths on an extended walkway high above Coruscant and in public view, Cassian feigns being an Imperial who has captured Mon, draws his blaster, and kills the man, urging Mon, despite her surprise, to continue toward her vehicle. Moments later, in her ship, they gun their way out of the Senate parking structure and deep into the heart of Coruscant.

They arrive at Cassian and Bix’s apartment, where Kleya and Erskin wait, having miraculously survived their flight from the Imperial Senate Building. In the back of the apartment are Wil and Dreena, who managed to escape from Ghorman, although Wil’s leg was severely injured in the process. Kleya reports that Luthen is safe and that an escort of Rebels from Yavin will be arriving shortly to retrieve Mon and Cassian, hoping that she will deliver another speech that can successfully rewrite her story as if she’s been working with them all along, without mentioning Luthen’s involvement. Mon is unsure how to thank Cassian for saving her life, but his advice is to “Make it worth it.”

As they arrive on Yavin, Wil is taken to a medic. General Draven, grateful for Cassian’s actions, acknowledges that he won’t log any of their comings and goings. He tells Mon that their Gold Squadron, a team of pilots who fly Y-wing fighters (alongside Hera Syndulla’s ship, The Ghost), will be taking her to deliver a speech broadcast across the galaxy (and you can watch it here from Star Wars: Rebels). And, lest you forget, Cassian tells Draven that he has a dead KX droid inside the transport that he thinks will be useful to the Rebellion (and of great levity for those of us who know K2SO from Rogue One).

I don’t usually comment on the moments from this show that call back to imagery from the original trilogy. Still, I’ll admit that as Cassian walks into Yavin IV’s hangars, where Rebel engineers prepare an X-Wing for battle, and as the music brings in the familiar horns from John Williams’ iconic score, I got chills, reader. Throughout this show, we’ve obviously witnessed the birth of the Rebellion. However, it wasn’t until this moment, with the Rebellion imagery that is so recognizable from those original films, that my brain finally registered that this long journey had finally arrived at the place and time promised from the very start. If anything, this moment was proof of the value of conservatively withholding familiar imagery and the power it can wield when appropriately revealed after a long journey apart. I hope the teams at Lucasfilm can take note, though I suspect this feeling will remain a rarity, despite Andor’s successes.

Cassian returns to his home on Yavin IV, looking for Bix. They smile when they see each other, but she is more reserved than we might expect. She listens silently as he tells her he is done working with the Rebellion and plans to inform Draven that he will leave with Bix to hide so they can be alone. He feels the only thing special about him is his luck, and that “I’ve overplayed my hand already.” But when he wakes in the morning, he finds her gone and a video message for him in place of a goodbye note.

Her solemn message explains why she left and that she believes she can’t be the reason why he abandons the Rebellion, knowing that “We have to win. We have to beat them. And I believe you have purpose in making that happen.” As Cassian races to the landing dock, her message continues, “I’m choosing for the both of us. I’m choosing the Rebellion.” Cassian is in agony; she has already left, and he’s now alone on the landing pad at the base of one of Yavin IV’s many temples. The wind blows through his hair as he looks out at a destiny he doesn’t want. The show reflects the inverse of Luke’s aspirational twin sunset on Tatooine, where he longed to embrace a greater destiny for himself. Instead, Cassian’s future holds nothing but tragedy for him, one we’ve already seen play out in Rogue One, as we hear Bix promise that “When it’s over, when it’s done, we will do everything we’ve missed. I will find you.”

From offscreen, Cassian is called to help power up the KX droid he brought in. The droid is strapped down, and the engineer explains that they swapped its cortex, allowing them to implement “impulse suppression,” the real secret to undoing the Empire’s control rather than reprogramming. (Note: This explains why K2SO can’t stop himself from being brutally honest throughout Rogue One, no matter the social situation.)

As the score rises, Andor grabs a weapon to prepare for the activation of the powerful KX droid. After a tense countdown, electricity races through the hulking droid, as if this episode suddenly transformed into a Frankenstein movie, and at the end of it, fan-favorite KS20 (Alan Tudyk) is born. He turns towards Cassian, who points his rifle directly at his head, “If I’ve offended you, I apologize. If not, I’d appreciate you pointing that elsewhere.” The Andor score kicks in, the episode cuts to black, and the increasingly painful wait for the show's final three episodes begins.

Stray observations:

• Remember Bloy’s trainee soldiers and how unprepared they were for the Ghor to attack them? These must be the reserves they recruited from for the stormtroopers for the remainder of the Skywalker saga. I don’t care how many times Obi-Wan points out how precise the blast points were on the Jawas’ sandcrawler, those guys couldn’t hit the broad side of a bantha.

  
  Oh! Slam! 1977 stormtroopers, slam! Take that, ya dumb fascists! Whatcha gonna do? Ya gonna cry? Huh!?

• So, throughout this review/recap, I referred to “Molotov cocktails” several times, which are Earth-coded in their naming. Let’s take to the comments here and devise a Star Wars name for them. I can’t promise that Disney will canonize our suggestions, but maybe we can get a laugh out of them.
  
  The name “Molotov cocktails” is a reference to a Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, who used radio propaganda to suggest that Soviet bombings of Finland were actually "airborne humanitarian food deliveries" for their "starving" neighbors. So, should Shambo (Fred Haig) and Osar (Tom Durant-Pritchard) from the Ministry of Enlightenment get the honors here?

Andor airs Tuesday nights at 9pm ET on Disney+. Look for recaps/reviews of the latest batches of episodes here later that evening. Dan Gvozden is a film and comics critic who lives and works in Baltimore. If you enjoyed this review, check out his Spider-Man podcast, The Amazing Spider-Talk.

[Welcome to Decoding TV’s coverage of Andor Season 2! For each of Andor’s four 3-episode drops, you should expect a written recap by Dan Gvozden, plus a bonus podcast episode. If you’d like to support what we’re doing here, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. The below review contains spoilers for Season 2, Episodes 4-6 of Andor. It does not contain spoilers for any future episodes or previews.]

At the conclusion of Andor, “One Way Out” (Season 1, Episode 10), the Imperial Supervisor and secret Rebel agent Lonni Jung (Robert Emms) presses Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) about what he sacrifices for the Rebellion. His response has become one of the most beloved monologues in the history of the Star Wars franchise:

Calm. Kindness. Kinship. Love. I've given up all chance at inner peace. I've made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there's only one conclusion, I'm damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they've set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. 

What is my sacrifice? I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else's future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I'll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? Everything!

It’s a haunting mission statement that essentially boils down to the Machiavellian adage “the ends justify the means.” Luthen knows what he must give of himself and what values he needs to sacrifice—specifically, the lives of Neo-Separatist Anto Kreegyr and his men—if it means the eventual restoration of the Republic, even if he will never see it in his lifetime. For the most part, the various stories across Andor explore different characters’ shades of Luthen’s grand sacrifice. Characters like Syril (Kyle Soller) and Dedra (Denise Gough) view their roles in the Empire as ones of gains at all costs, where the pain of others could facilitate their ascent through the ranks of power. Others, such as Brasso and Nemik, had their lives sacrificed for the cause of others; they became casualties in a war that was larger than their personal gains. Even Cassian’s adoptive mother, Maarva, in a message recorded before her death, lamented that she hadn’t fought earlier and harder against the Empire, even if it meant a premature death.

With all these examples of heroic sacrifice and villainous greed on display throughout the entire series, it's high praise to say that I believe Andor, Season 2, Episodes 4-6, showcases the absolute peak of the show's depictions of morality in action. It does so by intertwining its numerous narratives so tightly that it raises the tension to incredible heights, even without a bombastic third-act action sequence. Instead, it doubles down on its investments in the lives of its fully-formed characters. It challenges each with the question that Luthen presented in the previous season: “Can you actually give everything to the cause of the Rebellion, even if it means sacrificing your humanity?”

The push and pull of how each character wrestles with their answer to this question drives the drama of these episodes, as if each person’s soul hangs in the balance. We watch as Luthen pushes himself to extremes and becomes increasingly frustrated by Cassian’s inability to do the same by abandoning Bix (Adria Arjona) and stoking the fires on Ghorman, which may lead its people to a disastrous fate. Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) returns and offers a glimpse down the path Luthen may be headed if he continues to prioritize the Rebellion above all else, including the lives of his men. Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) struggles to work within the system as it crumbles around her and finds herself increasingly on a path to irrelevance and danger, as even her most vulnerable allies abandon her. Vel (Faye Marsay) and Cinda (Varada Sethu) are finally reunited and allowed to explore the traumas that a life of sacrifice has inflicted, before their hopes of any future together are dashed by an errant blaster bolt. Meanwhile, even when confronted directly with the human cost of his actions, we explore the depths of depravity that Syril Karn can sink to, despite being offered genuine warmth and inclusion by the Ghorman Front, which has otherwise been denied to him by Dedra Meero.

Episode 4: "Ever Been to Gorman?"

The three episodes begin on Coruscant, “One Year Later…” (BBY 3), with an air of mystery as an unfocused, blinking red light and control panel fade into view, reminiscent of those that operated the Death Star laser in the original Star Wars. Bix wakes up in bed next to Cassian, confirming their recoupling, but she hears muffled sounds and sees the shadowy shapes of people outside the windows of their darkened, untidy apartment. She pulls her blaster and enters the kitchen, where she sees Dr. Gorst (Joshua James), who tortured her with the dying cries of baby Dizonites in the first season, finishing his latest sound torture on a nameless man. But, before Bix can attack him, Cassian restrains her and wakes her from her recurring PTSD dream/hallucination. There’s an exhausted familiarity between these two and the unsolved desire to have some semblance of normalcy in their transient lives so that Bix can finally begin to heal her mind. But, alas, that’s not in the cards for the two Rebel agents.

Even when walking around the streets of Coruscant, Cassian keeps his hood up, fearful of prying eyes. Bix is eager to return to her life before joining Luthen’s Rebellion. She tells Cassian, “The mission is dinner.” He responds, “I think I can handle it.” Despite the terror of operating as Rebel agents at the heart of the Empire’s power, the show gives us a glimpse into their playful and caring relationship, contrasting with the cold and calculated dynamic between Dedra and Syril from previous episodes.

However, when they return to their apartment, a rotating safe house for Luthen’s agents, it’s revealed that both are recovering from a recent incident in which Cassian killed a young Imperial soldier who saw Bix’s face during a mission. For Cassian, the fact that they are at war justifies his actions, but Bix perceives it as him overprotecting her, feeling that his fear of losing her again is “warping things.” It’s here that we encounter Cassian's first challenge in maintaining his double life; his love for Bix has compromised his ability to prioritize the mission above all else.

The following sequence evokes a feeling of mystery as we, along with some unnamed men, trail Syril Karn while he wanders the capital city of Ghorman, Palmo. His apartment is filled with crafted spiders, and someone watches him from outside his window. Is this a guard or a spy? Syril leaves his apartment and sets a wire on his door to detect if someone might enter while he’s gone. Is he paranoid, or is there genuine danger surrounding him? During a video call with his mother, Eedy (Kathryn Hunter), he pushes back against her downplaying his role on Ghorman, where she echoes the propaganda about the planet introduced in previous episodes. Nevertheless, Syril feels that he’s been put in charge of something meaningful, which seems true considering that the Ghorman Front, led by Carro Rylanz (Richard Sammel), is monitoring his every step.

Production designer Luke Hull’s team beautifully constructs Ghorman to resemble an austere European plaza built from white stone, with small tables for conversing and drinking with colleagues, entertainers, monuments, protestors, and a language that seems vaguely French. Sure, the Empire might be coded as British, but we’ve never seen such a distinctly European flavor or language in this universe, where all humans speak English, known here as Basic. The choice immediately evokes visuals of the Nazi occupation of Paris, as the Imperials build their “definitely not an armory” in the middle of Palmo.

Syril gets drawn into the web of the Ghorman Front when one of their members, disguised as a salesman of the same spiders we saw in Syril’s apartment, sells him a spider with a secret message hidden inside that invites him to an underground meeting. He immediately rushes to his office and establishes a secret communique with Dedra, who remains on Coruscant, to inform her about the meeting, but asks that she keep Major Lio Partagaz (Anton Lesser) out of the loop for now. If we hadn’t already suspected it before, it’s clear now that Syril’s involvement in Ghorman isn’t just about moving up the chain of the Imperial ladder, but a development of the calculated plan between him and Dedra that was forming in the previous arc.

Dedra escalates that plan in a meeting of the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB), led by Partagaz. The primary focus of the meeting is for Partagaz to receive an update on the Axis network, their current name for Luthen’s burgeoning alliance, whose identity they remain unaware of, despite the numerous arrests made and the weapons seized. Present at the meeting is Supervisor Lonni Jung, Luthen’s mole within the ISB, who is eager to socialize with various other Supervisors to maintain their good graces and relay information to Luthen. From the meeting, he deduces that Dedra is secretly managing the Empire’s presence on Ghorman; however, when Luthen presses him for details, he cannot provide a reason why.

Meanwhile, Syril continues his operation as a double agent in a meeting with the Ghorman Front, where a Ghorman broker, complains about the Empire’s interruption of trade to the planet, as well as their nightly convoys that roll through the streets of Palmo, disrupting the peace. Enza Rylanz (Alaïs Lawson), the daughter of Elector Carro Rylanz, approaches Syril, guided by the spider salesman, and introduces him to her father. He hopes that Syril might help make their appeals to the ISB more effective, as he seeks to confirm that the Imperials are building an armory that casts a shadow over their memorial to the events of the Tarkin Massacre. It was during this massacre that Grand Moff Tarkin, the Death Star-wielding villain of Star Wars: A New Hope, landed his spaceship on five hundred peaceful Ghormans in the middle of the plaza. For a brief moment, Syril appears to be moved by these Ghormans’ resoluteness in the face of oppression, but that couldn’t be. Could it?

Meanwhile, Senator Mon Mothma isn’t finding the same empathy back on Coruscant. She’s been working on behalf of Ghorman Senator Dasi Oran (Raphael Roger Levy) to mitigate the Emperor’s rapid erosion of the rights of his people by corralling the votes of the other Senators who have supported her causes in the past. Yet, many are now backing away in fear of retribution and a growing nationalism that has turned the legislative process of the former Republic into a meaningless endeavor. Oran has no idea why the Ghormans have been singled out, and Mon pleads with her peers, “If we do not stand together, we will be crushed.” This quick montage of Mon’s political pleadings crafts a portrait of a galaxy-wide sea change that may be all too familiar to those experiencing the swift political realignment unfolding across America’s legislative bodies. The potent political propaganda against the Ghormans has made them a powerful target for the Empire’s plunder, and Mothma feels powerless to effect change. Later, before the Imperial Ball is ready to kick off, the senators gather in the Galactic Senate Chamber for the ceremonial presentations of unfinished CGI… I mean, swearing allegiance to the Galactic Empire. Mon’s discomfort is palpable as she watches, even her closest allies surrendering their power to the Emperor.

On the planet D’Qar, future headquarters of Senator Leia Organa’s Resistance against the First Order, Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), ally Two Tubes (Aidan Cook), and his terrorist group of Partisans guard their base, which is complete with two X-Wings and a transport ship. Saw approaches a worse-for-wear Wilmon (Muhannad Bhaier), who hides a rhydonium-extracting machine under a sheet. Saw hopes to use the complicated machine to extract the deadly gas for unknown purposes, but he has lost several untrained men during the process. He knows Wilmon has been successful, so he captures him with the promise that he will let him leave once he teaches a recruit named Pluti (Marc Riemann) how to complete the procedure unassisted. Forest Whitaker’s performance as Saw continues to escalate his madman energy, which would reach its peak before his death at the start of Rogue One. Wilmon remains a blank slate of a character, making it hard to judge any expectations we might have for him, but the danger that Saw presents to anyone in his proximity is enough to generate fear for Wil’s safety.

Back on Coruscant, a sleepless Bix watches out of their apartment window, where, through binoculars, she spots a flashing light signaling Cassian to meet with Luthen. A reluctant Cassian descends to meet Luthen and learns that he is being sent unarmed to Ghorman to assess the actions of Carro Rylanz, with whom Luthen has some history. The catch is that Cassian will be going alone. Luthen assures him that Bix will be fine, but Cassian’s anxiety prevents him from accepting the assignment. Back at their apartment, in the most tender depiction of love in a Star Wars film, they slowly dance, pressing their hands together and kissing to a slow, foreboding love ballad, as Cassian trusts Bix’s safety. He accepts Luthen’s offer, while Bix, weary from her traumatic nightmares, opens an eye-dropper and ingests a blue liquid. For a show whose former representation of drug use was as a sort of childish public service announcement about the dangers of “death sticks,” Andor continues to surprise with its mature subject matter.

Episode 5: "I Have Friends Everywhere"

In Luthen’s art shop, Kleya (Elizabeth Dulau) scans radio frequencies broadcast throughout the galaxy as she attempts to connect with a listening device they planted in Davo Sculdun’s (Richard Dillane) art collection, which is currently set to be displayed at the upcoming Imperial Ball that they hoped to spy on. When she finally connects, she overhears Sculdun informing Misko that he has discovered various pieces of his collection are forgeries. As it turns out, the dealer who sold him one of the forged pieces is dead, so they must vet every piece in the collection, including the one currently hosting Kleya’s listening device. Kleya’s relationship with Sculdun’s gallery assistant reveals that he doesn’t yet suspect any of the pieces he bought from Luthen. Still, she and an angry, overwhelmed Luthen know that if anyone finds the device, it will be traced back to their shop immediately and result in their deaths.

Cassian also engages in the art of spycraft by indulging in finer things when he assumes his new identity as a fashion designer traveling to Ghorman to inquire about their finely woven silk. Thus, he adopts the identity of Varian Skye—something a Star Wars Name Generator would create—and journeys to Palmo to seek out Carro. After settling into his hotel room with the help of a local bellhop, Tazi (Ewens Abid), he notices the Tarkin Massacre monument outside his window. He questions his cautious bellhop about his opinion on the memorial to the massacre being located in the center of town. The bellhop admits that he was present for the massacre at the age of twelve, and while they aren’t supposed to speak of it to guests, his father was killed saving him from Tarkin’s cruiser. “Haven’t gone very far, have I?” he points out. I wonder if Cassian sees anything familiar in the young man, given his familial loss and how it drove him to flee Ferrix into the arms of the Rebellion.

Eventually, Cassian meets with Enza Rylanz under the guise of setting up a meeting to discuss her father's silk business. He quickly assesses that the Ghorman Front is woefully unprepared for the challenges they face and is moving too quickly. “People die rushing. You have no idea who I am. You need to be more careful,” he tells her, to which she retorts, “It’s hard to be patient when your world is falling apart.” Still, the next day, he goes to “The House of Rylanz,” a silk shop that also operates as a front for Carro Rylanz’s political maneuvering. They’ve been communicating with Luthen through a code crystal-encrypted radio that a “lost” Rebel pilot delivered. Carro tells Cassian that they plan to use the knowledge they’ve gained from an Imperial informant, Syril, to disrupt the late-night caravans that ship weapons to the slowly assembling armory and reveal the truth of the construction to the people of Ghorman. He hopes Cassian and Luthen might provide them with an advisor possessing tactical expertise to carry out the mission, but Andor is dubious, noting that “feeding false information is what they do.”

Cassian’s dismissal of Carro’s plans is painful, but his points about their fledgling operations ring true. Just as Carro’s shop hosts a spider and web trapped in a glass sphere, so are the Ghorman people stuck in an inescapable prison of circumstance. Andor knows that stealing the weapons won’t be difficult, but for the Ghorman Front, there is no escape plan. They live at the crime scene, and the only attention the maneuver will attract is from the Empire. Carro asks, “Then what? Just let them do what they want?” But, for Cassian, it’s not that simple, and he tells him, “I’ve got more questions than recommendations.” It’s not a revolutionary answer, but one born of Cassian’s experiences on Ferrix and the damage that an unplanned revolt can inflict.

Carro’s actions are driven by his monitoring of Syril, who puts on an expert display of defiance against the ISB, throwing a fit and pointing fingers at his colleagues after they search his office, finding the implanted listening devices from the Ghorman Front. The Ghorman Front, meanwhile, believes they have the advantage over Syril after gaining access to his Imperial records, which detail his failures on Morlana One. For this reason, they suspect he’s eager to help them, prompting a meeting where they appeal to his loyalty to the Emperor, who they believe is unaware that the ISB is running a shadow government. This wrinkle in the Ghorman Front’s view of the political landscape conveys the complex tangle of conspiracies that the early Rebellion would have to navigate as their alliance formed. Even in BBY 3, the perception of Emperor Palpatine as a victim of attacks from a rogue Jedi Council—and potentially the ISB—underscores the power of propaganda, even among the Ghorman people, who have found themselves on the receiving end of the Empire’s latest smear campaign.

Syril “steals” files from his office and boards a ship back to Coruscant, where he returns to their shared apartment to a pained kiss on the cheek from Dedra. She reveals that she had him followed from the spaceport at Partagaz’s insistence. And then, in a sequence that I expect to be memed until the end of time, Syril is told that he can only stay with Dedra for an hour. For Syril, that means there is just enough time for them to have sexual intercourse. I doubt any device could register Dedra’s excitement on this or any of the many worlds of the Star Wars galaxy. She tells him to “turn out the lights,” an order that visibly turns Syril on, and lord… move over Jim and Pam, the chemistry (or lack thereof) these two have in just a look is enough to solidify their claim to television’s hottest couple. Too bad we can’t indulge in these vibes for any longer, because when Dedra says “turn out the lights,” she means to render the entire apartment in an impenetrable darkness where the disgust etched into her face won’t be visible.

But the embarrassment for Syril is just beginning! After a breakfast with his mother, where she decides to name one of his Ghorman craft spiders “Syril,” he meets with Partagaz and Dedra to discuss his work with the Ghormans. They convince Syril that their only goal is to bait the Ghormans as a prize for outside agitators, and he tells them that he will need to continue feeding the Front accurate information about the shipping routes and schedules. Partagaz congratulates Syril on a job well done, to which Syril says, out loud, “If I say this is the greatest day of my life, does it spoil everything?” Dedra sighs… yes, it does, Syril, you pathetic idiot… which comes out as “It’s good to see you happy.” Later, in a private meeting with Partagaz, he tells Dedra that she must ensure Syril never finds out their real plans. To be honest, this confused me, but perhaps these secret plans will be revealed in the next storyline.

While Cassian is away on Ghorman, Bix continues to sink deeper into her drug use to cope with the vivid nightmares that intrude upon her reality. So, when her doorbell rings, she grabs a blaster. But it’s just Luthen coming to check on her, or at least that’s what he claims. He reflects on his past, when he stayed in the same safe house as Cassian and her. Bix wishes they could stop hiding from the Empire, but Luthen reminds her that it only ends if they “bring them down or die trying.” While searching through the kitchen, Luthen discovers Bix’s drugs and chastises her for not taking care of her health. She suggests that Luthen came to the safe house to offer her something, but changed his mind. However, he denies her claim, clearly lying.

The next morning, Bix wakes to some version of “Good Morning Coruscant” on her television. This show, like “Good Morning America,” features two women drinking and lightly gassing each other up about shopping, fashion, and sometimes… dare they say it… politics! The women are excited about attending the Imperial Ball, which has quickly become the hottest ticket in town!

As fun as the Imperial Ball sounds, Wilmon has the opposite experience on D’Qar with Saw and his student Pluti, who simply cannot operate the rhydonium device correctly. The device is an excellent piece of Star Wars machinery, clicking and whirring in a way that beautifully combines low-tech gears with futuristic nonsense. Pluti approaches Saw and tells him he needs more time to learn how to operate the device or a way to simplify the process. When Saw suggests he intends to kill Wilmon, Pluti reasserts the need for Wilmon to remain part of the team. Saw agrees, for now, and tells him to see Two Tubes, who will provide codes to simplify the process.

However, Saw’s invitation is merely a ploy to isolate Wilmon and Pluti. When he questions Wil about Pluti’s preparedness, Wil plainly states that he believes he is ready. Wil’s decisiveness triggers something in Saw, prompting him to blast Pluti without hesitation. The entire squad turns to witness the aftermath of the murder, but Saw tells them that Pluti was a traitor who had been transmitting information to the Empire. He uses Two Tubes to plant a device on Pluti’s corpse as evidence of his treason. Wilmon is horrified, but Saw orders his men to evacuate the base before he can object.

Later, Saw and his men land on a planet rich in rhydonium and set up the machine for operation. While Wilmon begins the extraction process, Forest Whitaker delivers a deliriously mad monologue as Saw about his life as a child slave in the Onderon jungle. He describes how their clothes and minds would melt away after exposure to the rhydonium. “You could feel your skin coming alive.” It was the rhydonium; they had a leak, and all the others fled, but he didn't. When Wil’s extraction is successful, Saw puts his face directly into the gas, which shouldn’t be possible, but he screams that he understands it and calls it his sister! “You think I’m crazy. Yes, I am. Revolution is not for the sane.” The rhydonium is a test for Wilmon regarding his allegiance. Will he continue to work with Luthen, or is he ready to fight alongside Saw?

Wil removes his mask and breathes in the rhydo, choking it down as Saw shouts, “We’re the rhydo kid, ready to explode!” Wil screams while Saw yells into the night air, “Let it in, let it run wild!” It’s a chaotic scene of pure terror, showcasing Saw’s insanity and suicidal purpose in full effect. The only thing holding back the scene is our lack of knowledge about what led Wilmon to embrace Saw’s tactics. The show has devoted so little time to the character that we can’t properly judge his motives or the mindset leading him down such an extreme path. Just last season, Saw accused Luthen of hiding a spy within his radical group of fighters, which begs the question: Is Wilmon still working for Luthen as a mole inside Saw’s terrorist cell, with the rhydonium as the final test he needed to complete to erase any suspicion from Saw? Only time will tell.

Episode 6: "What a Festive Evening"

Luthen and Cassian meet at Port Steergard, just outside an Imperial Naval Base, carefully avoiding curious eyes. During their hyperspace jump to Coruscant, Cassian assesses that Luthen should not get involved with the Ghormans, whom he believes will be crushed by the Empire if they act. This angers and disappoints Luthen, who believes the act of rebellion has value, even if they are crushed. He accuses Cassian of thinking like a thief, not a leader. Here, we can see Luthen’s dogged mindset beginning to mirror Saw’s inhumane approach to rebellion. He’s willing to lose lives, no matter how doomed they may be, to send a signal to others who might rise in response. For Cassian, that’s a line he’s not willing to cross. Luthen dismisses Cassian’s participation, ready to let him go for good, and signals Kleya to find someone to replace him on Ghorman as their plans progress.

Cassian returns to his apartment to find it has been cleaned by Bix, who has transformed it into a home for them. They flirt over his new alternate persona, Varian Skye, during his admittedly unadventurous and potentially pointless journey to Ghorman. However, Cassian confesses that Luthen scared him the most. Bix discloses that Luthen visited her shortly after Cassian left for Ghorman. Cassian is furious that Luthen never mentioned the visit and suspects his intentions were anything but innocent, considering Luthen’s penchant for mind games and subversion.

So, Cassian confronts Luthen at his art shop, fully visible to anyone who might be watching. Luthen tries to usher Cassian away, but when unsuccessful, he chastises Cassian for his lack of creativity in assessing the potential of supporting the Ghorman Front. Regardless of the loss of life, “What’s most important is The Cause!” Luthen asserts. But Cassian won’t have it, and Luthen’s monologue echoes in his retort: “I give you everything.” Luthen, who must have practiced that monologue in the mirror, points out that Cassian’s anger and lack of control have him acting emotionally, not rationally, and that his care for Bix and her decaying state jeopardizes the cause. 

Cassian may be letting his emotions guide him, but here we see Luthen’s complete detachment from the needs of the humans he has commanded to join his cause. His mentorship of Cassian, as he seemingly shapes him to become his replacement, has led him to impose his abandonment of humanity on those around him, just as Saw did with Wilmon. His statement about Bix to Cassian might as well have been an ultimatum, yet Cassian doesn’t accept Luthen’s binary choice. It’s not Cassian’s responsibility to handle Bix alone; he joined the Rebellion to be part of something, not to be isolated, and he impresses upon Luthen that if he wants him to continue as his agent, he must help him solve this problem.

On Ghorman, Luthen’s replacements for Cassian, Vel and Cinta, meet for the first time in several years after both had told Luthen they would only take the assignment if the other were also on it. In an echo of Cassian and Bix’s relationship, Cinta reveals to Vel that she had an accident she wanted to hide from her, which meant that she had to rest up out of sight. It’s a tender scene, with many details that suggest the rekindling of a relationship, which means that, in classic Andor fashion, it will be doomed to fail.

Vel and Cinta rendezvous with the Ghorman Front to make plans to ambush the transport by laying electromagnetic pulses along their route, followed by a swift exit through the underground tunnels that spread throughout Palmo. The plan must move quickly, before their intelligence goes cold. Vel impresses upon them the necessity of agreeing to the tactics and prioritizing “following orders.” When has that ever gone wrong? But again, we see an extension of Luthen’s directive to sacrifice “everything,” including human emotion, to deliver for The Cause. But, even Vel and Cinta secretly have doubts, including their feelings about Luthen. “We’re worth more to him separately than together,” Cinta tells Vel, as they make love to the rising Andor theme.

We return to Bix’s apartment for a brief interlude, before this arc’s patented Andor Third Act Setpiece^TM, to discover that she’s finding the strength to resist her sleep-inducing drugs. But, only for just long enough to notice that the red light from Luthen is flashing again, signaling Cassian to another mission. This time, she insists that she will join him for the mission, and after Cassian’s confrontation with Luthen, he agrees.

The remainder of this story arc follows a cross-cutting Andor Third Act Setpiece^TM that sees Mon hobnobbing with the muckitymucks of the Imperial world, including Sculdun, Luthen, and even Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) as they approach the art gallery where Kleya and Luthen have hidden their listening device. To retrieve the device, Kleya recruits Supervisor Jung as a distracting physical barrier while she painstakingly tries to remove the device from an artifact covered in braille-like text. Complicating the entire endeavor is that Krennic and Sculdun are slowly inching their way closer to them, so Mon tries to distract Krennic by arguing with him over the nature of power in the Battle of Carmeen, which she claims was a systematic execution. As a prideful fascist, Krennic cannot agree.

Meanwhile, on Ghorman, the Front executes their sabotage of the weapons transports; the plan goes off without a hitch, and the team retrieves weapons from a downed vehicle, proving once and for all that the Empire was lying about not building an armory in Palmo. The sequence is a wonderfully constructed heist, featuring a dazzling shot that follows a weapons crate from the streets of Palmo down tight, streetside tunnels into the underground, where the Front’s exit vehicle awaits. However, problems arise as the people of Palmo notice the activity on their streets. One of the Ghormans we’ve seen at the Front’s meetings, Lezine (Thierry Godard) shows up to ask questions, which prompts a member of the Front, Thela (Stefan Crepon) to pull a blaster on him. In a tussle between the two men, a single shot is fired, and, wouldn’t you know it, the blaster bolt kills Cinta.

As the Ghormans flee and the ISB police arrive, Vel chastises the young soldier whose blaster led to Cinta’s death, “This is on you now. This is like skin. You are just a whining, simpering, foolish child. Don’t you dare cry.” Here, we see Vel is unable to fulfill the emotional detachment Luthen has asked of her, with her anger creating even further fractures in the alliance with the Ghormans. How this death and Luthen’s choice to withhold Cinta from Vel will ripple out into the future will be something to watch for throughout the remainder of the season.

As sad as Cinta’s death may be, the Ghormans were successful, and so too is Kleya as she and Luthen saunter away from the Imperial Ball with the listening device in hand. Luthen jokes to Kleya about her success, “You should have killed Krennic while we were up there.” It’s the most lighthearted that we’ve seen Luthen across this entire story arc, and it’s also a foreshadowing of what’s to come in the next scene.

We join Dr. Gorst on his journey home from the Imperial Ball, as he rides an elevator up to his offices. But when he steps off the elevator, Bix is there to confront him. She pulls a gun on him, straps him down into his sound torture device, all while his slice of cake sits on the control panel. She flees the room as he screams in agony, shoots an Imperial security guard in plain sight with Cassian, and walks away. They smile while Cassian pulls out a trigger device that blows up the building as they walk away.

In this final moment, we witness the redemption of not only Bix’s security but also of Luthen’s soul. By sending Cassian and Bix to assassinate Dr. Gorst, Luthen prioritizes the humanity of his soldiers, contrasting sharply with that of Saw Gerrera. He may have erred in how he treated Vel and Cinta, allowing them to reunite only moments before Cinta’s death. Cassian’s appeals to their companionship as part of the growing Rebellion did not go unheard. Thus, despite the horrors that many of the characters have faced throughout these episodes, we observe a glimpse of softer humanity as Luthen jokes with Kleya and the shared smile between Cassian and Bix injects hope that, on the other side of this war, there may be a possibility for light to find its way into even the darkest places.

Though in the shared bedroom of Syril and Dedra, I think hope won’t be enough for any light to find its way there.

Stray observations:

• Anyone who has seen Star Wars: Attack of the Clones will remember the bizarre inclusion of Dexter Jettster’s classic American diner, Dex’s Diner. When Obi-Wan begins investigating the mysterious assassin who fired a poison dart at Padmé Amidala, he turns to his knowledgeable, four-armed friend in the lower levels of Coruscant. There are many strange similarities between our universe and the Star Wars universe. Still, nothing can explain why the culturally specific aesthetic of a 1950s diner, with its ship-like interiors, booths, checkered floors, chrome counters, jukeboxes, and neon signs, appears on Coruscant, preserved perfectly from our world. But now, these episodes show us additional buildings with this aesthetic as Cassian explores the lower levels of Coruscant while acquiring his new persona. The building that Cassian enters seems to function as both a brothel and a spy facility, yet you can still see the remnants of what used to be a diner just beyond its repurposing. I’m not sure this resolves the issues with Dex’s Diner, but at least it’s no longer the only one of its kind to make us question everything we know about this galaxy, far, far away…

• Let’s keep these within the diner theme. In one of the more bizarre transitions out of a scene, as Cinta and Vel conclude their reunion on Ghorman, a voice from the background of the restaurant clearly says, “I’ll have what she’s having.” Did Rob Reiner direct this episode, and want to give a cameo to his mother? Is this the Star Wars version of Katz’s Delicatessen?

Andor airs Tuesday nights at 9pm ET on Disney+. Look for recaps/reviews of the latest batches of episodes here later that evening. Dan Gvozden is a film and comics critic who lives and works in Baltimore. If you enjoyed this review, check out his Spider-Man podcast, The Amazing Spider-Talk.

[Welcome to Decoding TV’s coverage of Andor Season 2! For each of Andor’s four 3-episode drops, you should expect a written recap by , plus a bonus podcast episode. If you’d like to support what we’re doing here, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. The below review contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 1-3 of Andor. It does not contain spoilers for any future episodes or previews.]

Andor’s ambitious first season of television, now nearly three years since its bombastic conclusion, remains the most daring creative venture launched during Disney’s tenure as the new owners and architects of the ongoing Star Wars stories. Following a series of creative changes during Andor’s troubled development, Disney decided to bring back writer/director Tony Gilroy to run the show after his miraculous reworking of the troubled Rogue One project, providing him with the creative freedom and financial backing to explore a more grounded Star Wars universe. The series not only delves into the early formation of the Rebellion that would steal the Death Star’s technical plans in Rogue One, leading to its destruction and the eventual defeat of the Galactic Empire, but also offers a nuanced exploration of radicalization. Through Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), we see how one event can trigger a domino effect that ultimately leads them to choose sides in a developing Galactic Civil War.

However, the show started with a severe handicap: it was a prequel story that followed a supporting character, Cassian Andor, from the previous spinoff prequel film, Rogue One. The series also featured few of the iconic visuals and mythology-building concepts that have come to define the various Star Wars trilogies: the Jedi are entirely absent, the hum of a lightsaber is a distant fantasy, the Rebellion is only in its nascent form, the concept of an X-Wing is yet to be born, and there’s no cute Baby Yoda equivalent to sell plush toys of (unless you like to cuddle up next to an art dealer that’s secretly facilitating terrorism across the galaxy). Its first teaser trailer had to rely on atmosphere alone, apart from the familiar face of Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), with the now-familiar drumbeats of Ferrix driving the pounding music alongside images of the Rebellion’s birth and the promise that we might “explore a new perspective from the Star Wars galaxy.”

It also arrived after the debuts of the mini-series The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi, which genuinely dampened the good vibes that the first two seasons of The Mandalorian reinstated in the Star Wars franchise following the calamity of The Rise of Skywalker. Additionally, the show adopted a structure in which every three episodes completed a mini-arc, essentially crafting its own series of smaller-scale Star Wars movies. It largely disregarded the traditional serialized format, where each episode concludes a small segment of a larger narrative. This approach required a greater investment from viewers, as patience was crucial; the first two slow-burn episodes of any arc would ultimately lead to a thrilling third act, elevated by the deliberate pace of the preceding episodes. For those who remained engaged, they quickly realized how satisfying the show could be. However, the limited data on the show’s audience has indicated that many never experienced the payoff, resulting in the smallest audience of any Disney+ Star Wars show.

With eight Emmy nominations and a growing audience discovering it since its debut, the second season of Andor is arguably the most hotly anticipated Star Wars show to release in 2025. Disney has wisely adapted its release strategy for the new season, embracing the show’s movie-like mini-arcs and releasing three episodes each week. This pace may challenge some viewers to keep up, but should ultimately enhance the viewing experience for many.

So, how are the first three episodes of season two of Andor? Well, if you enjoyed the show’s first season, I suspect you’ll be pleased with how everything starts here, as nearly all of the show’s strengths are front and center. However, in this humble reviewer’s opinion, it also maintains and amplifies some of the series’ weaknesses. The result is an opening arc that asks for the viewer’s patience, reestablishing all the players in this world, but it doesn’t quite crescendo to the heights of the four previous arcs from the first season.

The first batch of episodes follows four distinct, intercut plotlines, two of which ultimately collide in a race-against-the-clock finale that ends in tragedy. Each narrative’s genre, locations, and tone vary wildly, but never enough to fracture the sense that they are all part of one shared universe. This highlights the extraordinary diversity of the Star Wars universe and the skill of the writing, acting, and production teams that crafted each of these scenarios. The clarity of how these stories relate to one another, together with the formal structure of how they fit into the episodic format, is where this first arc falters, especially when compared to the clarity of the easily discernible arcs from the show’s first season: a harried planetary escape, a high-stakes heist, a deadly prison escape, and the frenzied revolt that sparked the Rebellion.

The show begins a year after the events of season one, now four years Before the Battle of Yavin (BBY 4), the daring space attack that saw Luke Skywalker deliver the killing blow to the Empire’s Death Star. We reunite with Cassian Andor, who wears an orange jumpsuit vaguely reminiscent of those worn by future Rebel pilots. However, he’s impersonating an Imperial test pilot at Sienar Test Facility 73, which further establishes the Empire’s penchant for designing their facilities to resemble their logo when viewed from above (after last season’s prison design). With the help of Nia, an Imperial defector, he’s there to steal a TIE-fighter for the burgeoning Rebellion. In the year since we last saw Andor, he’s grown into a leader among his group of revolutionaries, as he encourages Nia, “You’ve become more than your fear. Let that protect you.”

Disney+ must have reached out to Tony Gilroy and his team about starting the season with a reason to stick around, because it’s not long before Andor launches into its first major action sequence of the season, which highlights the attributes that defined the adventure-heavy Star Wars feature films. He quickly exploits the Empire’s greatest flaw, their frankly piss-poor security at their weapons facilities, fries a droid, and has to overcome his lack of familiarity with the Imperial’s brand-new TIE-Avenger’s controls by torpedoing a hole into the side of the facility. His ship blasts out of the side of the hangar and dangles precariously over an icy ledge – “location, location, location” – before making a frantic escape from a group of pursuing TIE-fighters who are crushed in a subsequent thread-the-needle collapsing cave chase. It doesn’t get more Star Wars than this; all we needed was Andor shouting, “Never tell me the odds!”

Cassian quickly pilots the ship to an unnamed forest planet where he hopes to reunite with Porko, who may or may not be a relative of the famous X-Wing pilot “Red Six” Porkins. Either way, it quickly becomes clear that Porko shares Porkins’ fate; he was killed by an abandoned splinter group of Rebels who mistook him, and now Cassian, for an Imperial pilot. They take him prisoner, giving him a front-row view of their fracturing alliance as hunger and fear of a man-eating creature called a doodar, which comes for them at night. The divide between the men erupts into violence, with one group slowly turning the TIE-Avenger’s guns on the other group’s encampment. Amid the chaos, Cassian frees himself from his bindings, kills a few men, and escapes in the battle-damaged TIE. It is only as he flies over the horizon that it’s revealed that he was stranded on the moon Yavin IV, which would come to house the Rebel Alliance’s headquarters in Rogue One and Star Wars: A New Hope.

This story, which dominates the first two episodes of Cassian’s narrative, offers decent creature-feature thrills and some insight into the still-fractured alliance forming against the Empire. However, once Cassian crashes on Yavin IV, he feels like little more than a passive observer of the unfolding events, providing only limited commentary and escaping through no unique skill or character trait that we haven’t encountered before, except perhaps for his willingness to kill others in pursuit of the Rebellion’s goals and his survival. As a result, the exchanges between the splintering factions on the planet become repetitive and formulaic to the conventions of the genre.

Compared to Cassian’s role in facilitating and provoking the prison break from season one, where we saw Cassian first take on a leadership position against the Empire, this story feels like a regression for the character after a promising opening sequence. Not every storyline needs to be driven by our protagonist, but ideally, they should reveal something new about his character, or in this case, how he has changed since the last time we saw him. Even the reveal of Yavin IV seems like the kind of fan service this series has otherwise avoided, except for the revelation that the prisoners were key to the construction of the Death Star. Thankfully, Cassian has more exciting things to do by the episode’s conclusion, but we’ll return to that later.

While Cassian is held prisoner on Yavin IV, his fellow refugees from Ferrix pose as farmers and have established a temporary home in the galaxy’s Outer Rim on an agricultural planet called Mina-Rau. Cassian’s on-again, off-again lover Bix (Adria Arjona), close friend Brasso (Joplin Sibtain), droid B2EMO (Dave Chapman), the young Wilmon (Muhannad Bhaier), and newcomers Talia and Bila anxiously await his return, keeping their eyes on the horizon for Imperial troops, farming some sort of wheat into impossibly giant silos, and kindling romances despite wartime. When an Imperial starship appears overhead, they learn that the planet will be subjected to an audit, threatening their anonymity.

It isn’t long before a squad of Imperial officers and stormtroopers appears at their farm, rifling through their shop and homes. One officer, Zala, uses his position to belittle Bix’s life as a lowly farmer while also propositioning her to join him for dinner in the capital city of Rau. When she rejects his offer, it becomes clear that Zala isn’t accustomed to hearing “no,” and he will be back later to retaliate. It’s a simple scene, but it illustrates the small-scale abuses that the fascist rule of the Empire permits, separate from all the genocide, planetary destruction, and slave labor.

To avoid the audit, Brasso is offered an Emergency Work Order by a fellow farmer who has joined their Rebellion. They hastily pack to flee, but are too late; the Imperials arrive at their farm and give chase to Wilmon. Only then can Cassian get through to Bix on the TIE’s communicator and learn of their pending fate. He guns the TIE towards his friends – somehow without the aid of a hyperdrive – as the show indulges in the classic third-act Star Wars intercutting between multiple stories’ simultaneous climaxes.

I couldn’t help but wonder why this information wasn’t provided to Cassian earlier in the narrative, if only to give his imprisonment on Yavin IV the ticking-clock tension it desperately needed. The slightest plot restructuring would have recontextualized Cassian’s earlier adventures, allowing the show to explore his priorities regarding saving his fellow Rebels or friends from Ferrix. Instead, as Cassian dramatically dive-bombs his TIE to the surface of Mina-Rau, avoiding the watchful eye of an Imperial Star Destroyer, it’s as if he’s racing his way into the conclusion of a different movie, transformed into a living, hurtling deus ex machina.

Meanwhile, the Imperial officer Zala returns to confront Bix, this time threatening to imprison her and her family if she doesn’t comply with his sexual advances. Bix plays along just long enough to launch an attack on Zala, and the two engage in an unusually brutal fistfight for a Star Wars story. Bix eventually gains the upper hand and bashes Zala’s head in. Honestly, I was surprised, even in the context of this show, that Gilroy and his team were allowed not only to depict sexual assault but also to use the word “rape” in a Disney Star Wars series. Star Wars doesn’t have the cleanest track record for depicting the objectification of women in a way that allows the characters to retain their dignity, even if Princess Leia did strangle Jabba to death. However, this is also the series that famously tried to end its first season by having Andor’s mother posthumously shout, “Fuck the Empire!”

Brasso uses the confusion to save his friend and escape from the stormtroopers on a speeder. As he races across the wheat fields, Cassian shows up in his TIE and swiftly dispatches the remaining Imperials and their fleeing transport ship. However, it is too late, and the cost of the Rebellion’s actions is revealed when Brasso is caught in the volley of laser fire and falls to his death. As Cassian, Bix, and Wilmon flee in the TIE, he is tearfully forced to leave Brasso’s body behind. Yes, we’ve known that these characters’ futures will likely end in tragedy, particularly for Cassian. Nevertheless, Brasso’s death serves as a powerful emotional conclusion to this series of episodes. How it will change Cassian’s evolving role in the Galactic Civil War remains to be seen, especially considering that he’s already faced the deaths of his mother and the idealistic Karis Nemik at the hands of the Empire.

For the first arc of this season of Andor to provide so little insight into the changing relationships and ideologies of Cassian and his fellow Ferrix refugees is disappointing, particularly given the extended runtime of their adventures. The drama here is primarily situational, rather than the superior character-based struggles that emerged from the circumstances the first season put them in. The spectacle of Cassian returning to save his friends is thrilling and effectively elevates the scale of the story. Still, it lacks the same impact as Luthen and Cassian blasting their way off Ferrix, TIE-fighters racing through the Aldani fireworks, a late-night duel over the stolen Imperial financial reserves, Kino Loy’s (Andy Serkis) impassioned speech over the Imperial prison’s speakers, or Wilmon throwing a bomb into the crowded streets of Ferrix as a hologram of Cassian’s mother shouts, “Fight the Empire!”

After season one’s conclusion, many speculated about the fates of the villainous Imperial Supervisor Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) and the whimpering Syril Karn, particularly after a growing number of fans began shipping their union. We pick up with Dedra, without mentioning Syril, as she participates in a secret Imperial meeting alongside Major Partagaz (Anton Lesser). She has been removed from the “Axis” project to identify the Rebels she and Syril first encountered on Ferrix. Instead, she is now assigned to work under Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), who would eventually oversee the completion of the first Death Star in Rogue One, before it unleashed its planet-destroying laser directly at him. Together, at the Maltheen Divide, Krennic has gathered them to oversee the Galactic Energy Initiative on the planet Ghorman to provide the Emperor with stable, unlimited energy for his Empire (or perhaps for those thousands of Star Destroyers with Death Star lasers from Rise of Skywalker).

As it turns out, Ghorman’s main export of spider-like ghorlectopod-extracted silk isn’t the Empire’s primary interest on the planet; rather, it is the underground mineral kalkite, which they will need to coat the lenses of their various reactors. However, the project that Dedra and the fellow officers will be embarking on involves not mineral extraction, but pre-emptive forcible control over the Ghorman people, all 800,000 of whom would face eradication with the removal of the planet’s kalkite core. Several high-ranking officials – who resemble the Nazi Party’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels – detail how they plan to utilize propaganda to change public sentiment about the Ghorman people, comparing them to the very spiders they use to harvest their popular silk. Others suggest staging a fake natural disaster as a cover-up for their war crimes. If not for the precedent set by history and today’s worst political actors, I’m sure these men’s craven and nakedly evil statements might seem cartoonishly arch. Still, Krennic has brought Dedra along to utilize her uniquely twisted perspective, despite her recent history of disaster on Ferrix. She dismisses the use of propaganda, offering instead the unique idea of fomenting a rebellion on Ghorman that they can control for their purposes.

This suggestion showcases the evolution of Dedra’s character, as she clearly learned something from her first encounter with the burgeoning Rebellion. However, upon returning to Coruscant, she makes it plain to Major Partagaz that she has no interest in the Ghorman project and wishes to resume her work on “Axis.” Meanwhile, Syril has seemingly grown into his role at the Bureau of Standards, while also appearing more pathetic than ever, despite his slick new haircut. He lectures a new hire about the importance of his work, saying, “There’s a future here for those that dare.” But it’s all a front for the most shocking revelation of the episode: that he and Dedra are not only a couple and living together, but they are scheming a way to get back to working on “Axis.”

In the meantime, aside from listening to Mon Calamarian opera, they have a date to plan with Syril’s suffocating, dismissive mother, Eedy Karn (Kathryn Hunter). When the night arrives for Eedy to make her appearance, it immediately becomes a battle of wits between Dedra and Eedy to claim control over Syril. Eedy belittles her son, calling him soft, but she’s unaware of the depths to which Dedra’s hardened, sociopathic mind can descend. It’s here that we learn that Dedra was orphaned by her criminal parents at the age of three (eat your heart out, Rey) and raised in the Imperial Kinder-Block, which I’m sure is just as warm and welcoming as it sounds. It’s only when Syril leaves the room that Dedra drops any attempt at warmth with Eedy and lays down the law: if Eedy continues to antagonize Syril, she will withhold him from her life. Here, we get our first look into what makes Dedra and Syril’s relationship work; he craves a strong woman who can replace his mother, and she enjoys wielding control over him. It’s a clever bit of character writing, despite the minimal focus on this corner of the galaxy, that both enriches our knowledge of Dedra and Syril and delivers on the desires of fans without altering the characters.

I’ve saved the most frustrating and narratively rewarding section for last, as we join the Rebellion leaders Mon Mothma, Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård), Vel (Faye Marsay), Tay Kolma (Ben Miles), and Kleya (Elizabeth Dulau) at the Mothma Estate on Chandrila for the wedding of Mon’s daughter Leida to banker Davo Sculdun’s (Richard Dillane) son Stekan (Finley Glasgow). The cast of characters in this storyline is, frankly, dizzying and requires that one brush up on their handy Wookieepedia while they watch, particularly because so much of the time spent at the various parties that preempt the wedding ceremony revolves around conversations about actions that happened off-screen. It’s in this section of the story that the limitations of the Disney+ format are most visible, as the script struggles to keep the limited locations interesting (though the costumes and sets do dazzle), maintain the flow between so many different characters, and keep the various plots spinning just long enough to balance their inclusion across a three-hour story arc.

One of the two main plots of the wedding involves Luthen and his assistant Kleya trying to get updates on Cassian’s theft of a TIE-fighter, despite having no access to communications until the third episode. It may be uncharitable to say that their scenes together consist solely of Luthen asking for an update only to be told by Kleya that there isn’t one, but it never feels more engaging than that. Meanwhile, Mon Mothma learns that her daughter is having cold feet about the wedding, and Tay, whose money is helping to fuel the Rebellion, is having similar doubts about his future involvement. Mon learns that he has just gone through a rough divorce, is growing impatient about the return on his investment, and has been seen publicly intoxicated around members of the Galactic Senate who could end the Rebellion overnight if they discovered her involvement. Concurrently, Vel has been increasingly frustrated by her inability to communicate with her partner Cinta, who was sent on a secret mission by Luthen at the end of the previous season.

Eventually, however, all these plots come together in a brilliant final episode where Mon’s hesitation about handling Tay leads her to confront her daughter regarding her own arranged marriage, imploring her that “you do not have to go through with this.” Genevieve O’Reilly delivers a desperate emotional catharsis for the character, searching for any reason to back out of the path she has laid before herself. It is Leida who first resists her mother’s pleas, but Luthen pushes back the strongest against Mon’s resistance to getting her hands dirty. Mon knows that Luthen won’t hesitate to utilize violence to achieve the Rebellion’s needs and that they need Tay removed from the chessboard. The answer to their problems has become self-evident to her, no matter how hard she tries to resist it.

And so, in a bravura sequence that closes out the arc, Leida is wed to Stekan while Tay boards his ship back to Coruscant as Vel watches. It is then that she notices Cinta piloting his craft, no doubt ordered by Luthen to assassinate Tay before he can do further damage to the rise of the Rebellion. The show wisely avoids spelling out the details of Tay’s demise, instead allowing the audience to piece together the unspoken orders of Luthen. The narrative concludes with a sequence where Mon Mothma dances to composer Brandon Robert’s digital beats, a drink in hand, as she loses herself in the rhythm, keenly aware that she has sacrificed her moral high ground and been a party to murder to further her pursuits. For anyone familiar with director Bong Joon-ho's work, it’s a sequence that directly mirrors the final shots of his film Mother, including the bright sunlight that filters through the windows of the wedding hall and illuminates Mon in a sort of hellish light.

Altogether, this first arc of season two of Andor has high ambitions that aren’t always achieved. Not all its plotlines are treated equally, and many feel padded to provide exposition or fill the full runtime of a three-hour weekly drop. It’s still early on, with nine episodes to go. Still, my hope for future episodes is to learn more about the greater context of the Rebellion’s growth and operations, if only to give additional meaning to the artful, spycraft mechanics of the smaller players within the movement. Additionally, I’d like to see the stories of Mon Mothma, Luthen, and the survivors of Ferrix come together meaningfully, as their narrative distance from each other can make the episodes and their climaxes feel unrelated. In contrast, the best of Star Wars’ third act structures, including many from the first season, can show us how all the different pieces of a multifaceted war effort can come together to achieve some victory.

Stray observations:

• In the previous season, continual updates to the title theme by composer Nicholas Britell built - seemingly one instrument at a time - toward a cacophony, in parallel with the slow buildup of the Rebellion against the Empire. But here, season two’s new composer Brandon Roberts recrafts the motif so that each episode features a different flavor of instrumentation that hints at what each new story contributes to the unfolding narrative of Andor.

• I’m often amused when Star Wars introduces something that looks or operates similarly to its Earth counterpart. In these episodes, it is the farming of wheat, which I’m sure has some other name in this universe. However, it is curious that the decision was made that “eh, wheat is good enough, no need to change it.” But, “Rock, paper, scissors” wasn’t good enough to stay, so they replaced it with “Roski Rules,” which only furthers the popular fan theory that Star Wars is a universe without paper.

• Meanwhile, I found the wedding ceremony involving circles and headbands to be laughably weird until I started thinking about the customs of various Earth-based wedding ceremonies and realized, “Nope. That’s right on the money.”

• Remember when Ben Kenobi, upon seeing a TIE-fighter near the remains of Alderaan, tells Luke Skywalker: “No, it’s a short-range fighter. A fighter that size couldn’t get this deep into space on its own”? I guess he never heard of a TIE-Avenger, which I admittedly only learned about while writing this piece. Apparently, it’s the first of a series of TIEs built with fully functional hyperdrives and evolved into the TIE-Advanced series, which Darth Vader would pilot. But wait! That actually clears up another lingering plothole from 1977! If Darth Vader’s ship had a functioning hyperdrive, that's how he survived being stranded in space after the Death Star’s destruction. Thank god Disney didn’t create a whole movie just to explain that! Wait, was Andor greenlit just for this reveal? I don’t know what to believe anymore…

Andor airs Tuesday nights at 9pm ET on Disney+. Look for recaps/reviews of the latest batches of episodes here later the same evening. Dan Gvozden is a film and comics critic who lives and works in Baltimore. If you enjoyed this review, check out his Spider-Man podcast, The Amazing Spider-Talk.