Leave it to the second season of creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy’s superlative Andor series to turn a seemingly simple, straightforward political speech before the Galactic Senate into one of the tensest, most suspenseful hours of television in recent history. It’s also one of the most assured, uplifting episodes in arguably one of the best—if not the best—Star Wars-related film or series under the Disney banner since Star Wars: The Force Awakens opened theatrically ten years ago. The Force Awakens not only ushered in a new sequel trilogy but kicked off an entire cinematic universe on par with the popular MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe). Or at least that was the initial intention at the time. More often than not, the results have been mixed on both the big and small screens.
Arriving during the exhilarating back half of a flawlessly structured 12-episode, 4-arc second season, the Andor episode in question turns on the political machinations surrounding Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), a senior senator with secret ties to the nascent Rebel Alliance. As the Emperor manipulates what’s left of the Senate to rubber-stamp his plans for unitary control of the Empire, Mothma finds her status as a voice for pragmatic engagement and reform tenuous. Enemies, some pretending to be friends, are everywhere. With Senate rules ostensibly precluding Mothma from speaking to the assembled delegates in the chamber or the world outside via broadcast, she’s forced to decide whether to speak before the Galactic Senate. Not speaking means complicity in the Emperor’s stifling of dissent and any resistance to his rule. Speaking means possibly losing everything, including her life.
Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), of course, plays an instrumental role in the episode in question, essentially leading a one-man extraction unit at the behest of his longtime mentor and handler, Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård). Publicly, Rael moves through the upper echelons of the Empire’s elite as an antiquities dealer. Despite Andor’s name in the title, the first three-episode arc introduces several storylines, including but not limited to Cassian’s side quests and rescue missions with — and often apart from — his life partner, Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona). While Cassian embarks on a mission, Bix lives and works on an agrarian planet, Mina-Rua, in the Outer Rim. Social class-wise, Andor deftly contrasts Bix’s precarious predicament on Mina-Rua as a mechanic with Mothma’s life on her homeworld, Chandrila. It’s one filled with the material comforts, privilege, and status typical of someone born or marrying into generational wealth.
Another key storyline focuses on Rael and his chief assistant and surrogate daughter, Kleya Marki (Elizabeth Dulau), on the city-planet of Coruscant, a short stroll from the Empire’s most enthusiastic enforcers and defenders. In turn, their storyline contrasts with Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), a senior imperial administrator obsessed with career advancement, regardless of the cost, and her partner, Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), an equally ambitious middle manager for the Imperial Bureau of Standards.
Rael, something of a master manipulator, prioritizes growing the nascent resistance-turned-rebellion over the series four-year time period, using his contacts within the upper echelons of Coruscant’s ruling elite, including Mothma, his closest ally in power, and leveraging his past relationship with Cassian to send the latter on various missions to protect and expand a scattered resistance. In the first three-episode arc, the disorganized rebels number in the thousands at most. By the final moments of the last episodic arc, however, they’ve grown into an active, open rebellion, directly setting up the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and, of course, Star Wars: A New Hope.
While Rael works behind the scenes, Cassian works in front of them, repeatedly risking capture or worse. He initially steals a TIE fighter for a purpose the episode leaves unexplained, but it becomes even less important by the time the agrarian planet where Bix and the other Season One rebels live and work falls under an imperial audit. Filled with the not unexpected tension associated with attempting to evade discovery and capture, Gilroy, keenly aware of the precarious real-world politics of the moment, emphasizes the fact-and-fiction connection by explicitly identifying Bix and the others as undocumented, missing the all-important work visas that would save them from unjust treatment at the hands—and blasters—of the Emperor’s imperial troops.
As the second season effortlessly moves between storylines, character arcs, and years (designated BBY4-BBY1 for “Before the Battle of Yavin”), we know that Cassian and Bix’s relationship is doomed to end with the demise of one or both characters. But the fate of others new to the Andor series and absent in subsequent chapters gains poignancy with each step they take, each decision they make, bringing them closer to their often abrupt, sometimes dramatic, almost always tragic exits from the series. Many either sacrifice their lives to a cause greater than themselves, the fight against the Empire, or suffer the irrevocable loss of a lover, a friend, or a family member.
Even more sharply than its predecessor, Season 2 lays out the individual and collective stakes for the anti-imperial resisters-turned-rebels, most of whom, whether they fight or not, will be forgotten or relegated to a footnote in the decades-spanning Skywalker Saga. One generation almost destroys liberal democracy, the next one saves it, only for the pattern to repeat itself across decades. But it’s the stories of Cassian, Bix, Rael, Kleya, and so many others in the Rebellion, minor in the grand, overarching narrative of the Galactic Empire and its fall, whose individual stories Gilroy and his talented collaborators make the focus of the second and last season.
As the series ties up loose ends and prepares the characters and, by extension, the audience, for its conclusion, it’s the brief manifesto of a long-gone, but not forgotten, tertiary character, Karis Nemik (Alex Lawther), that echoes in the final moments. In an idealistic, if no less worthy, call to resist oppression and rebel against repression both inside the Star Wars universe and on the other side of the screen:
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.
The first three episodes of Andor Season 2 premiere on Tuesday, April 22, via Disney+. Subsequent episodes will be released in three-episode increments every Tuesday through May 13.
