Andor kicks off its final stretch with two mesmerizing scenes

But back to the lights. The first one we see is blinking in the back of Luthen’s gallery, indicating that the Galaxy’s Most Nervous Spy, ISB Supervisor Lonni Jung, is calling a meeting. (He’s rung “the big bell,” as Luthen puts it.) Lonni, it turns out, is done, having gone so far as to finally take a step that will blow his cover and get him outed as a spy, all without Luthen’s say so (and implicitly forcing his hand to let the man finally quit, like he’s been asking to do for years). To his credit, Supervisor Jung burnt himself trying to figure out if Dedra had finally tracked down his handler (she had), using a security key he’d stolen from her a full year ago to go digging around in her files. But then, well…he found the other thing.

The negotiation that ensues between Luthen and Lonni is some of the most tense TV Andor has thrown up in some time—even if it’s destined to be eclipsed less than five minutes later—as Stellan Skarsgård and Robert Emms face off for one final bout of “There has to be a limit, right?” Lonni, for his part, has never been a true believer, at least by Luthen’s standards, for reasons that touch on Bix’s decision to leave Cassian last episode: He’s committed the unpardonable sin of having things he cares about more than the Rebellion (a wife, a child, and his own life, primarily). Lonni’s desire to do good without turning his whole existence into a suicide mission creates the ugly back-and-forth in what will turn out to be his final chat with Luthen, as he tries to wheedle some measure of safety out of the old spy in exchange for the biggest and deadliest secret in the galaxy. And he does score a victory of sorts: Watch the reverence and reluctance with which Skarsgård’s character finally offers up the name “Yavin,” sharing a glimpse at his own private heaven, the safe and beautiful place he intends to die for, without ever getting to see. And now Lonni is lucky enough to die for it, too, even as he spills the truth of Orson Krennic’s “Energy Program,” including slipping the name of weapons designer Galen Erso to his master/murderer. Luthen called Lonni a hero once, proving something can be both a blatant manipulation and inarguably true. Now, he collects his reward for potentially saving the entire Rebel project through years of cunning and careful bravery: a blaster bolt through the heart. It’s a quicker death than Meero would have granted him, at least.

Which brings us swiftly to the undeniable highlight of the episode, the latest in Andor‘s second-season generosity when it comes to giving us scenes finally bringing the show’s cast together after so many years of disconnected existence. Seeing Dedra Meero standing outside Luthen’s gallery—and then attempting to toy with him, without ever grasping the shape of the man she’s cornered—is the exact material that I watch this TV show for. The play-acting between the two, the subtle maneuverings of personas, Denise Gough’s smirk-y little eye flick across his body when her character remarks that the stolen starpath unit she’s finally traced to his door is “a little damaged, perhaps, but I’d say it’s held its value.” Her rehearsed theatrics, meanwhile, are rebuffed with gentle irony. “And I’ve known you all along,” he drawls, at her frustration at having not seen him until now. “Hardly seems fair.” Because she’s Dedra, she thinks she’s found the deep hypocrisy of Axis’ secret identity: that he hoards the “peace and quiet” of Imperial rule for himself while exporting chaos to the outer reaches of the galaxy; she thinks the life of a foppish antiques dealer is his reward for his actions and not the self-mocking hair shirt he uses to conceal his furiously beating heart. And she fails, most of all, to grasp that Luthen Rael, for all his faults, his paranoia, his lethal and ugly impulses, would hesitate exactly zero seconds to die on behalf of that “whole galaxy out there waiting to disgust you.” She leaves him with a knife; he leaves her with his own blood and the greatest failure of her career.

It’s a hard act to follow, 15 minutes of some of the most taut television this show has ever produced—especially since it also serves as a fitting tribute to the magnetic work Skarsgård has done to elevate this show far beyond the petty theatrics and simple morality plays that so much of Star Wars runs on. Luthen Rael has been a mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind character, good on the page but hypnotic on the screen, lying so easily while letting his eyes tell awful truths. He’s good as ever in this final scene, calculating, mocking, building off Gough’s live-wire energy. It’s an amazing high note to go out on…which does make it slightly awkward that Skarsgård’s actually in the rest of the episode quite a bit, courtesy of those aforementioned flashbacks.

Which I don’t hate, to be clear, even while finding them pretty unnecessary. Outside some basic plot details—he’s a former Imperial military sergeant; she was an escapee from a war zone who he ended up adopting when he deserted—they teach us less about the relationship between Luthen and his ward Kleya than you might expect. April V. Woods gives a decent performance as the younger Kleya, and Skarsgård is good as ever, despite looking oddly, uh, smooth. But what do we actually walk away from these extended digressions with? The knowledge that they both hate the Empire for its atrocities? That they share a bond, despite both carrying a dedication to the cause that makes cruelty a necessary evil? That Luthen Rael hates himself for things he will never stop doing (at least until now, of course)? Andor hasn’t screwed around with flashbacks since it was still vaguely interested in whatever happened to Cassian’s sister, way back at the start of season one. And that’s partly because it hasn’t needed to: The show is more than good enough at weaving information into both its dialogue and the subtle choices of its performers so just jumping backwards in time to toss it all up on the screen feels like an unnecessary inelegance. It leaves the flashback sequences feeling less like something vital to understanding Luthen’s story and more like someone said, “Well, we’re killing him off, and the hospital infiltration sequence is running short. Any ideas?”

Which is especially a shame in so far as that infiltration—which sees Kleya pull one last job on her father’s behalf, sneaking in to kill him before the ISB can “save” his life to torture him into betraying the Rebellion he spent his life building—is nearly as riveting as the scenes that kicked the episode off. I might have poked a little gentle fun at Elizabeth Dulau’s high-stakes screw-turning a few episodes back, but she’s just as good at the spy material as Luna is, letting us see Kleya run the numbers as she outmaneuvers the entire Imperial security apparatus to make her way to Luthen’s intensive-care room. (She picks up an unintentional assist from the ISB higher-ups along the way, who put Dedra under arrest for over-stepping her authority in her pursuit of Axis.) Explosive in both a literal and a figurative sense, this whole section is another reminder that, for all its lofty goals, Andor is also just an incredibly enjoyable spy show, with Alonso Ruizpalacios’ camera moving slickly through the sterile white halls of the hospital. (Here’s a small pleasures amidst larger ones: watching Dulau switch back and forth between “scared, confused nurse” and “stone-cold killer” in less than a second as she IDs exactly which Stormtroopers she needs to kill.) The tenderness with which she completes her mission is another mark against the need for the flashbacks: That kiss to his corpse’s brow conveys volumes about their relationship, even without the backstory dump.

And so, we embark fully into Andor‘s final stretch, with our hero nowhere to be seen, the Rebellion in uncertain waters, and the most important information in the universe kicking around in one lonely spy’s hunted head. But before we plunge into the future—and having dispensed with the past—let’s go back to those blinking lights one last time. Now situated in the medical equipment that was keeping him alive, they mark the endpoint of Luthen Rael’s life, the screen fading to black on his surprisingly peaceful-looking corpse. But maybe calling him dead and gone isn’t entirely accurate, either. After all, the Rebellion he nurtured, feeding it both his hatred and his bitter, guarded love, has flown away, never to be caged again. He will receive no parades, no mentions, no happy smiling Force ghost to reassure the audience that they shouldn’t feel too bad he’s gone. His life and his death end here, with no lingering legacy. Except for this: They’re going to fucking win. They’re going to grind the whole, awful machine of Palpatine’s Empire to a screeching halt, and the screaming will finally stop. The galaxy will, at least for a time, become a place that has no use for a man like Luthen Rael, even as it tries to forget that it never could have survived without him. It is, I think those who knew him would agree, the only legacy he’d want.

Stray observations

• • “I think we used up all the perfect.”
• • Emms can’t help but be over-shadowed a bit by Skarsgård, but Lonni’s sober horror at finding out what the “Energy Program” is comes through with fantastic clarity.
• • “So now we’re bargaining.”
• • “At the moment, only two pieces of questionable provenance in the gallery. Any guesses?” I imagine Dedra spent hours thinking up that “held its value” line, and Luthen blows it out of the water effortlessly and on the fly.
• • “What do Imperial crime scene technicians look like?” is another one of those questions it’s hard to imagine any other Star Wars series asking itself. (You could say the same of hospital nurses and lockers. I love how detailed this show can be.)
• • I don’t have subtitles on my screeners, but Luthen’s original name appears to have been Sgt. Lear—suggesting he pulled the ol’ Alucard trick to pick his new last name. The Rebellion’s master spy, everybody!
• • The show can be weirdly inconsistent about telling us planet names. I’d love to know where any of the flashbacks took place. (The café scene, which is the best of the bunch by a comfortable margin, looks a bit like Naboo.)
• • “Am I your daughter now?” “When it’s useful.” Quibbles aside, there are great moments in the flashbacks, undeniably.