This post contains spoilers for the first three episodes of Andor Season Two, which are now streaming on Disney+.
Many Andor fans weren’t happy to learn that Disney+ intended to release the show’s second and final season in weekly three-episode chunks, as if the streamer were eager to be done with this outlier entry in the Star Wars franchise as quickly as possible. But because of the way Tony Gilroy has structured each season as a quartet of three-hour arcs, the release schedule makes sense, giving viewers a chance to gobble up each segment of the larger story in one go, rather than spreading the whole thing out over many months(*).
(*) This has the side benefit of making the whole season eligible for Emmy consideration, where half of it would have fallen outside the eligibility window if each episode was released weekly.
Each subset of episodes has its own writer-director duo — these first three were written by Gilroy and directed by Ariel Kleiman — and is separated from the events of the next one by roughly a year. So rather than attempt to discuss individual episodes, we’re going to look at all three of this week’s installments — which take place four years before the events of both Rogue One and the original Star Wars film — at once. Because the stories are at this point fairly sprawling, we’re also going to break it down by subplot, starting with our title character:
It’s a mixed bag for the show’s chief protagonist. As was the case in Season One, his story gets off to a slow start. He spends a good chunk of these episodes sidelined on a mysterious planet — which is eventually revealed to be the fourth moon of Yavin, a.k.a. the Rebel base from Star Wars — mostly so that he can’t interfere with events in some of the other subplots, primarily the one with Bix.
But Cassian as a true believer in the rebellion is a vastly more interesting version of the character than the one we got for the majority of the first season. From the opening scene, where he convinces a fellow Rebel that she’s doing the right thing by risking her life so he can steal a fighter from an Imperial base, he is confident, determined, and unsentimental. His extended Refusal of the Call was among Season One’s least compelling arcs, but we know from Rogue One how effective Diego Luna is at playing this version of the character. This Cassian knows what he’s doing, and why, and doesn’t stop to question any of it, for good and for ill.
And if the Yavin material is blatant stalling, much of it is entertaining stalling, offering some welcome dark comedy to leaven some of the heavier material elsewhere. (The same is true of the Syril stuff in the third episode, which Cassian is largely absent from.) We’ve grown so accustomed to seeing how masterfully Luthen controls his various spy cells, it’s easy to forget that the bigger the rebellion grows, the harder it gets to maintain that level of order. In the swamps of Yavin, Cassian finds himself among a group who don’t even realize they’re on the same side as him, and who are so prone to infighting that they eventually split off into rival factions, each prepared to kill the other. It’s amusing stuff, as is the galactic slapstick of Cassian struggling to operate the ship in the opening sequence, when he’d been trained on a different kind. (Starting with The Mandalorian Season One finale, the Disney+ shows have done a good job of demonstrating just how scary a single ship can be, after fans had spent decades getting used to many of them doing battle at once.)
Still, despite the better overall writing for the character, Cassian spends much of this arc feeling besides the point.
Some of this arc’s most intriguing material happens here, and that’s even before the Imperial power couple of Dedra Meero and Syril Karn have to host Syril’s overbearing mother Eedy for an excruciating dinner. (Eedy: great Star Wars character or greatest Star Wars character? I lean towards greatest.)
Though Dedra has hit a wall in her pursuit of the spymaster we know to be Luthen, she’s still held in high esteem by Major Partagaz and other key members of the Imperial Security Bureau. So she gets a crucial assignment, handed down by none other than Rogue One villain Orson Krennic. Because we know that Krennic’s job in this era is building the Death Star, we can more easily see through his talk of achieving “energy independence” for the Empire, and the chilling justifications he and the representatives of the Ministry of Enlightenment offer for why they’ll be able to gouge-mine the planet of Ghorman for material we know is intended for the Death Star. When one of the Ministers asks, “Hasn’t there always been something slightly arrogant about the Ghor?” he is speaking for every instrument of fascism who has understood that the easiest route to getting to do whatever you want — no matter how horrible — is to invent a reason for people to blame your intended victims.
The dinner, meanwhile, speaks to what an impressive job Gilroy did in creating Syril. Andor is a show about how fascism works — an unfortunately topical subject — and how it can be fought. And the key to the latter is to demonstrate that average schmucks like Syril can just as easily sign on to the cause as your true monsters like Krennic or Grand Moff Tarkin. So Syril has to feel plausibly ordinary and recognizable. He has ambition, and an overinflated sense of self-importance, but both those traits are driven by Eedy’s constant nagging and guilt-tripping. And the dinner sequence, in addition to being very funny, also does a good job of both humanizing Dedra and showing how ruthless she can be in all aspects of her life, from fomenting trouble on a planet the Empire wants to ruin, to shutting up her boyfriend’s troublesome mom. She has genuine affection for Syril, because even people who eagerly serve the goals of evil have family they like to come home to.
Speaking of timely material, Gilroy couldn’t have known just how current the material on the farming planet would feel at a time when masked agents of the American government are grabbing people off the street and exiling them to countries they didn’t even come from in the first place. So having the stormtroopers basically acting as ICE agents is depressingly on point. In this case, the undocumented immigrants happen to be genuinely working to overthrow the government, but that government is also deserving of overthrow — a point driven home when the lieutenant overseeing this detail decides he can use his authority as an excuse to rape Bix.
Adria Arjona, center, as Bix Lucasfilm Ltd
That said, it feels gratuitous to retraumatize her in this way — even if she’s able to fight back and kill her attacker — since she’s reintroduced as severely struggling with the aftermath of being tortured in Season One. It’s a tricky needle to thread sometimes, in finding ways to demonstrate all the ways the Empire is horrible without it playing as gleeful sadism on the show’s part. The fact that there are a bunch of other female characters dealing with other kinds of conflicts helps, but making Bix a perpetual victim, at least to this point in the series, is a disservice to her.
Still, she at least gets to save herself, rather than needing Cassian to swoop in too late to help her, and too late to keep Brasso alive. And Brasso performs one final act of heroism by acting like he’s not in league with Kellen, thus encouraging the Empire to spare Kellen and his family.
Your mileage will vary on how much you felt you needed to learn about Chandrilan wedding customs. There were definitely points for me where this arc began to feel like the final season of How I Met Your Mother, which made the terrible choice of setting itself entirely at a destination wedding that the series finale was set to promptly undo. At the same time, as with the dinner with Syril’s mother, there’s real value to reminding the audience that these people — even a figure of relative legend like Mon Mothma — exist in what is meant to be a recognizable world, even if it’s one with droids and hyperdrive and laser swords. So telling us more about Mon and Vel’s background, letting us see even more of her complicated family life with Perrin, learning more about arranged marriages among the Chandrilan upper classes, has value. Maybe not three episodes’ worth of value, but the wedding sequence also has the growing tension of a drunken, desperate Tay becoming such a threat that Luthen has to arrange to have him killed — much to the dismay of Mon, who still isn’t prepared to pay the full cost of this rebellion. After Luthen has set up Tay’s assassination — using Cinta, whom he has kept separated from Vel for quite some time, to Vel’s intense resentment — Mon’s only way to deal with it is to get hammered and begin dancing with reckless abandon at the reception(*). There will no doubt be many gifs and memes of Genevieve O’Reilly throwing her whole body into this (not unlike Carrie Coon and Michelle Monaghan earlier this year on White Lotus), but on a character level, it adds a lot for her to portray just how much this is spiritually costing the future leader of the rebellion. As Luthen puts it to her earlier in the third hour, “People fail. That’s our curse.” Mon Mothma wants to be perfect and good, but she is destined to fail because she is a person, and because the nature of the role she’s assuming makes unqualified success impossible.
(*) In a universe that has R2D2 and C-3PO — and even on a show that still has the adorably anxious B2EMO — I don’t think we can ask if the disco ball droid, like Syril’s mother, belongs at the top of the Star Wars pantheon. Nonetheless, it was a nice touch, particularly in the way that all the wedding’s younger guests were finally excited by a part of the event. It’s like being at bar mitzvah where the DJ gets around to playing modern music rather than appeasing the parents who are paying for the event.
All in all, there’s more challenging and/or thrilling material still to come. But this opening narrative salvo set the table for a lot of that, while very much capturing the tone of what made the first season special.
