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This post contains spoilers for this week’s episodes of Andor, now streaming on Disney+.
The decision to compress what was once meant to be four seasons of Andor into one hasn’t been without its bumps, including in this week’s trio of episodes. Character arcs have felt rushed or underfed, particularly this week with Cassian and Bix. Lots of important events and growth have had to happen offscreen, like Syril learning to play spy with the Ghorman resistance. And at times, like the scene this week where the Force healer calls Cassian “a messenger,” the series becomes a bit too focused on heading towards the events of Rogue One, rather than considering its larger thematic concerns about how fascism rises and the moral costs of fighting it.
All that being said, these episodes —written by Dan Gilroy and directed by Janus Metz —are easily the high point of Season Two, and among the most potent sections of the entire series. They are dark, unsparing, and thrilling, asking and answering many of the show’s biggest and most powerful questions.
Where previous weeks this season spread their various stories out across all three episodes, this week we basically get a two-parter that brings the Ghorman arc to a climax, followed by an epilogue about the end of Mon Mothma’s time in the Imperial Senate. It’s a smart move to vary the structure based on the needs of the story, rather than stringing things out on Ghorman because there were three hours to play with.
We open after another time jump of roughly a year. A lot has happened. The Yavin base is up and running, and manned by some familiar faces like Alistair Petrie as General Draven. The Rebel Alliance has evolved from a spy ring largely managed by Luthen into something resembling the military operation that Luke Skywalker will join two years later. But change is hard, and there’s tension between the people running this more organized rebellion and Luthen, with Cassian and Bix caught in the middle. After working with Luthen and Kleya for more than three years, Cassian is burnt out, and looking at a return trip to Ghorman as his proverbial “one last job,” before he and Bix attempt to find a peaceful place to ride out the rest of their lives, whatever happens with the rebellion.
Again, too much of this depends on the audience filling in the emotional gaps between arcs. And Bix’s decision in the third episode to flee Yavin so that Cassian will stay to do the necessary work doesn’t feel particularly earned, based on what little the writers have given Adria Arjona to play beyond suffering.
But once Cassian arrives on Ghorman, everything’s on rails, as we head for the tragedy that’s been obviously coming since Krennic gave Dedra this assignment.
While some members of the resistance like Rylanz can tell that the Empire is setting them up for something bad(*), Syril has been successful in making the younger leadership feel overconfident. They walk right into the false flag operation that Dedra has set up, where it will look like the resistance attacked the Imperial forces, thus justifying every harsh action against the planet that will follow.
(*) For once, someone other than Admiral Akbar gets to say, “It’s a trap!”
The inevitability of what’s going to happen makes the sequence in the city square feel incredibly tense and harrowing, well before Dedra reluctantly gives the order for the Imperial sniper to open fire on the crowd. Rylanz and the others have already been blatantly modeled on the French resistance in World War II, and the scene where the gathered citizens sing the Ghorman anthem in defiance of this occupying force very much evokes the famous scene in Casablanca where all the French refugees sing “La Marseillaise” to drown out the Nazis at Rick’s Cafe. Only in this case, it’s a version of that scene where the Nazis are preparing to machine gun everyone in the bar.
The only misstep of the massacre sequence comes with Syril, and even that’s bookended by two fantastic moments. The first is when he realizes that there were never any outside agitators, and that his girlfriend has tricked him into doing something monstrous. The second is when he confronts Cassian and Cassian has no idea who he is —like if Javert had spent years chasing a completely oblivious Jean Valjean. In between, though, Syril’s discovery that Cassian is on the planet undercuts that moment of him realizing that he’s the villain, not the hero, because right in front of him is a man who sure looks like an outside agitator to him. (Never mind that Syril has been the agitator all along.) Kyle Soller is so good in the earlier moment of realization, and it’s a character moment that the series has been carefully building towards for nearly two seasons, and then it gets abandoned because all Syril can think about is killing his nemesis. And then he gets killed, rather than being forced to live with what he did to Ghorman.
Gilory, Metz, and company also make terrifying use of the KX security droids, whose use on the fleeing citizens seems particularly unfair and cruel on the part of the Imperial forces. Cassian lucks out when a transport crashes into the one that’s about to kill him, and lugs the deactivated machine with him to Yavin, where it gets reprogrammed into our snarky old friend K2SO, voiced once again by Alan Tudyk.
We never actually see what happens on Ghorman in the aftermath of Cassian’s escape. On one level, this feels like yet another casualty of compressing the story into one season. On the other, we already know most of what will occur, just based on what Krennic and his goons told Dedra and the ISB at the start of the season. Maybe the people of Ghorman will be rounded up into concentration camps on other worlds. Maybe they will be forced to stay on their planet and watch helplessly as the Empire gouge mines and eventually destroys everything. Atrocities will follow, and the scale is almost besides the point, given that the fruits of this labor will result in a weapon that will be used to destroy another planet in Alderaan.
But that’s two years in the future of these characters. For the moment, Bail Organa is alive and well, and there to assist Mon Mothma in her extremely public, defiant exit from the Senate, and from pretending to be anything but vehemently opposed to everything the Empire does and stands for.
There are two separate tension points in the week’s concluding hour: Will Mon be able to deliver her speech, and will Cassian be able to get her out alive? Because Mon and Cassian are both alive for the start of Rogue One (and Mon well after that), the latter question shouldn’t feel all that suspenseful. Nonetheless, it generates the proper amount of anxiety, in large part because Genevieve O’Reilly makes Mon’s fear so palpable. Though she has cut plenty of backroom deals to help fund Luthen’s work, she has never been part of an actual mission before, and has never had to witness people being gunned down in front of her, even in an attempt to keep her safe. Because she seems scared, it’s scary, even if intellectually we know they’ll both make it.
The hardcore Star Wars fans, meanwhile, also know that she actually makes the speech, and that it’s broadcast throughout the Empire. The events of this hour lead directly into a Rebels episode called “Secret Cargo,” where the crew of the Ghost watches the speech, and later helps assist Mon in the next phase of her trip to Yavin. But whether you’ve seen that episode or not, the sequence of seeing so many different people helping it happen, from Bail using parliamentary procedure to arrange for her to speak, to maintenance staff keeping the control room locked as long as possible, is inspiring.
And the speech itself is an impressive piece of rhetoric that, like a lot of this season, unfortunately feels too relevant to life in this galaxy at this time, particularly when Mon begins discussion of the unapologetic lies the Empire uses to get away with things like destroying Ghorman.
“The distance between what is said and what is true has become an abyss,” she declares. “Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us — when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.”
She even manages to address Palpatine by name as the monster who will come for them all, right before the Imperials are finally able to shut down the signal and send her on her escape route with Cassian.
We know what’s eventually coming for Palpatine —at least until he somehow returns —for Cassian, and for K2SO. The closer Andor gets to its end, the less surprise there can be. But for this tremendous cluster of episodes, the series needed no real surprise to tell its stories in spectacular, devastating fashion.
