Who gets to survive the Revolution?
It’s the final, and maybe the most fundamental, question that Andor asks itself. We’ve moved beyond the moments of contemporary satire and political parallels at this point: If you haven’t internalized the sheer manipulative, choice-draining, insulting, vile, and, above all else, fragile horror of the Empire—every Empire—and their pathetic, grasping need for control, the point is presumably never going to land. And if you want to see how the Revolution is won, well, great news: There are whole movies for that. (You might like them! Laser swords are featured.)
But the question of who gets out of this thing alive, and who is allowed to do so, is still an open one. Luthen Rael didn’t, for instance: He convinced himself that the only way to win was to damn himself and then twisted his soul so thoroughly that everyone else was convinced to damn him, too. Syril Karn didn’t: Whatever tiny spark of rebellion blossomed in his heart in those final moments, he finally saw, with clear and open eyes, what the Empire really was. Saw Gerrera won’t, killed as much by his own desperate need to wage unfettered war as by any Imperial superweapon. And Kleya Marki? Well…that’s the question, isn’t it?
We open this slow, elegiac Andor finale on Kleya, and that feels like it’s by design. “What a bitter ending,” she remarks, holed up in Luthen’s old safe house on Coruscant, as she faces down Cassian and Melshi’s insistence that it’s time to vacate the Emperor’s backyard and get to a place where people actually think about living a day beyond the Empire’s death. “You need to see the place you helped build,” Cassian implores—right before things explode.
The action that follows is front-loaded, impactful, and surprisingly brief: It turns out that many problems in life can be solved by having an eight-foot-tall murder robot on your side. (The shot of K-2SO holding Supervisor Heert by his snapped neck, using him as a human shield, is chilling stuff. Being condemned to use the tools of your enemy to defeat them might sound grim in theory, but it actually looks pretty sick when put directly into practice.) The real fight will, instead, play out on Yavin, in the planning rooms where exiled senators bicker over quorums like the good-old days on Coruscant. And Luthen Rael is finally put on the trial that nobody was ever smart enough to subject him to in life. The people running the Rebel Alliance don’t like the sound of the news Cassian’s brought to them once he’s finally allowed to land back on Yavin, see: They don’t like how scary it is, or how imperfect it is, and especially not that it came from Luthen. It’s easier to tear the man down, attack his credibility, then live with the fact that he died doing what he always did: telling hard and ugly truths that people need to hear to stay alive.
His advocates in the room are those whose lives he’d saved (and occasionally, admittedly, threatened): Mon Mothma and Cassian Andor. Genevieve O’Reilly returns to the series after two episodes away with a new haircut and a deeper reserve of calm maturity: Mon’s always had steel in her spine, but seeing her try to take command of the room and push back on lazy characterizations of Luthen as a paranoid maniac is a gentle thrill. Cass is blunter, and even more ardent, delivering a eulogy, a defense, and an explanation of his mentor’s sins all at once: “When I say I know Luthen, I mean I know the good and the bad. I know what was wrong with him. I had a front-row seat on that… But none of that can take away what he did and how hard it was. I don’t know if what he was told was true or not. But it’s insulting to hear him run down by people who have given a fraction of his sacrifice to this Rebellion!”
Andor finds an unlikely final “villain” in Benjamin Bratt’s Bail Organa, who unknowingly parrots back parts of Luthen’s own most famous monologue as he tries to push him safely into a box, condemning “his paranoia, his secrecy, his inability to collaborate.” “The web of doubts that he created—it makes everything unbelievable.” Absent the light of gratitude, it’s the Rebel Alliance’s final word on the man who essentially founded it—at least for now.
What follows is a long night of various souls, as the orphans of Luthen Rael wander in the dark: Mon taps Vel to check in on Cassian, and Kleya roams out into the driving Yavin rain, clearly looking for a place to die. The conversation between Vel and Andor is the sad heart of the episode, as he suggests that there’s no way to toast to everyone they’ve lost along the road—which doesn’t stop either of them from trying. (Each does the other the favor of saying the names of heroes too hard to invoke: “Cinta” from him, “your mother” from her.) She reminds him that Bix is still out there, waiting for him when this is all over. It’d be dramatic irony, in a crueler show, but Andor makes it clear that Cassian wants to live, even if he’ll end up finding a cause too important not to die for a few days from now. Leaving his place, Vel sees the lost Kleya and brings her in out of the cold and rain. “I have friends everywhere,” Vel reminds her. It’s both a familiar code phrase and a reminder of what Yavin really is.
Meanwhile, back on Coruscant, Major Leo Partagaz tenders his resignation as the head of the ISB in the most final terms possible. What does he hear, as he listens back to a recording of Karis Nemik’s manifesto, outlining the precarious throne of tyranny? A threat? Something to defy? Or simply the unapologetic truth that he’s spent his life trying to contain? Anton Lesser, who’s probably done more for this show as a supporting player than any other non-“regular” actor, gets one last scene of understated brilliance, loading the simple question “Just keeps spreading, doesn’t it?” with psychic tons of weight. As with so many scenes that have taken place in this show’s vision of Imperial bureaucracy, his final conversation with Supervisor Lagret is loaded with subtext. When he asks for “a moment to collect my thoughts,” neither man has any illusions about what it means.
Andor‘s final episode ends, probably unavoidably, with a montage. Cassian Andor waters his plants, before embarking on a mission that will end up verifying Luthen’s final tale. Melshi trains for the fight, while Wilmon and Dreena share a brief slice of domestic tranquility. Mon Mothma and Vel plan for the next day of the struggle, and Perrin Fertha drinks himself into a hedonistic haze, his son-in-law’s mother curled up against him. Saw Gerrera looks out at a universe of enemies, while Orson Krennic gazes lovingly at the demon machine that will eventually take his life. Dedra Meero…well, Dedra Meero meets the true face of the Empire at last. And Kleya Marki wakes up to a sunrise her father never got to see, a trace of a smile playing at the edges of her eyes. We end, almost, on Cassian and K, embarking on what neither yet know will be the start of their final quest. “Get us out of here” are the last words we hear him say, before the ship vanishes into the stars—one more exit plan from the galaxy’s master thief. And then there’s a moment of grace, amidst the wheat fields of Mina-Rau. We see B2EMO, symbol of innocence, free and allowed to play. And then, walking through that gorgeous pale expanse, there’s Bix Caleen, holding Cassian Andor’s child, safe and free in a galaxy apparently at peace.
It is, on the whole, a fine finale, a satisfying conclusion to the story that Tony Gilroy and his comrades have been telling with the second season of this show. It’s a bit sentimental, and maybe a touch too soft, for a series that could often feel bracingly harsh. But it’s executed with the usual dedication to excellence. Among other things, this series exits as it lives, as the best-acted production in Star Wars‘ history, from Diego Luna on down. The brilliance of the show’s performance has always been that its characters don’t just act like real and genuine people, but like the smartest and deepest expressions of that idea. Andor has always thrilled in beautiful language, but it’s been just as good at letting its players use silence. Those last shots of Denise Gough’s face, as Dedra finds herself in a hell very much of her own devising, are the stuff of gorgeously portrayed nightmares.
“Ah,” informed readers might think, “but here’s where he’s going to start moaning about structure again.” And you’re right: I am going to start moaning about structure again. Because, having now consumed all 12 episodes of Andor‘s second season, I cannot view it as anything but a compromised product. I credit Gilroy et. al for taking the assignment seriously: Each of the season’s three-episode blocks has been built around clear ideas and themes, telling self-contained stories that have at least a basic hook to them. (I might not have liked all those hooks—I’m looking at you, first-week extended digression in the land of the idiot revolutionaries—but they were all easy enough to parse.) The issues only start to really emerge in the aggregate: Running through a season’s worth of ideas in three episodes, and then jettisoning them as soon as the next time jump fires, has the paradoxical effect of only getting more jarring as the show gets better. (And I’d argue that it generally did, the back half of the season landing stronger than the front.) Building up so hugely to the Ghorman massacre, especially, only to have all those heady ideas get shoved aside so the show could end on more reflective notes, is an exercise in whiplash.
It all leaves this season feeling exactly like what it was: four seasons’ worth of ideas scrunched down into one. The result is a run that maintains the high highs. And god, this is a show of exceptionally high highs (lunchtime with Eedy! Luthen and Cassian having it out! The firefight in the plaza! Dedra in the gallery!), all of which are deprived of a chance to build to something more cohesive. Season one, for all its occasionally episodic nature, felt like a steady ratcheting up of stakes and tension, finally hitting a massive, emotionally explosive release valve when the events in the prison, and then Ferrix, popped off. Season two doesn’t get that luxury; it’s all montage, in a way. (Again, it’s worth noting that the season’s best episode is the one that runs closest to real time.) Worse, by losing the viewer’s own sense of the passage of time as a tool—i.e., the simple act of watching a whole season of a show, ruminating on it for a year, and then coming back for another one—the show sabotages some of its deeper goals: Points about both Cassian, and the Rebellion, out-growing Luthen become much harder to parse when the calendar jumps forward so rapidly. Wanting to tell a story about that estrangement, while being forced to merely imply huge elements of the shift, is how words like “compromised” end up in the mix.
“But it could have been better in my head!” is, of course, the lament of the lazy critic, and I hope that’s not what it sounds like I’m doing here. My issue is that it could have been better in Gilroy‘s head. I can’t help but mourn his initial vision for the show, scuppered by real-world concerns instead of pure storytelling choices. The fact that what we got instead was still a victory is a testament to just how damn good the people making Andor are at this. With elevated dialogue and acting, this is a thrilling Star Wars show that takes ideas like fascism, rebellion, and revolution as serious talking points instead of window dressing for simple adventure stories. To grow up loving Star Wars is to eventually find that it never quite seemed to grow up with you, to realize that the children’s stories that thrilled you in your youth remain children’s stories when you return to them as an adult. And this can be fine, at times. (I’m not made of stone; I get my kicks out of The Mandalorian; I cried a little at “Chewie, we’re home.”) Getting a TV series that thinks seriously about what life living at the dawn of a fascist regime looks like, though? That imagines this galaxy I love as a place of real weight and texture, populated by real people—from the comfortably unthinking Imperial cogs of Coruscant to the oppressed farmers of Mira-Rau, and every point in between? That’s the kind of treasure I would happily have sat through five seasons of. I feel lucky enough that we ended up with two.
Stray observations
- • Our final opening-credits sequence is accompanied, for the first time this season, by Nicholas Brittell’s original Andor theme.
- • “Nothing’s ending,” Cassian fires back at Kleya’s “bitter ending” line.
- • You only get one Funny Robot Line per recap. This time, it’s “I plan to tell them I was kidnapped.”
- • Sharon Duncan-Brewster is magnificently irritating here as the denial-loving Senator Pamlo, who you might remember as the same person who suggests the Alliance completely disband when the Death Star is undeniably revealed in Rogue One.
- • A sweet moment between Wilmon and Cassian as Cass reveals that Luthen is dead was only slightly undercut when I thought back and realized that the two never actually had a single on-camera scene together.
- • “Will you drink to Luthen?” “Just this once.”
- • Cassian’s “I believe you would” when Vel says she’d kill anyone she heard claim to have been there for the Aldhani raid feels like both a nice nod to the fact that they’re the only two remaining survivors—and that Vel very much did have orders to kill Cass for basically exactly that.
- • We get one last glimpse of Cassian’s sister in his dreams. I genuinely wonder if the five-season Andor would have addressed her more fully, or whether the entire point of her existence is to remain as a missing piece Cassian could never solve.
- • Fine, one more Funny Robot Line: “The man you do not like is here.” (He means Bail, who gets a chance to soften a bit right before the end.)
- • “May the Force be with you, Captain.”
- • And that’s a wrap on The A.V. Club‘s coverage of Andor‘s final season. At the risk of miscalibrating my own enthusiasm, it’s been both a pleasure and an honor to tackle this season of TV. I can be a fair-weather Star War fan in my older years. But seeing a show swing this hard in this space has been one of the thrills of modern television, and getting to chat with you all about it has been a delight.
